De Zirkoff on Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden

Boris de Zirkoff · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 8 pages

Eight pages, de Zirkoff's note on Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden from the biographical notes to volume VII of the Collected Writings, pages 375 to 377. *His life before theosophy was an unusual preparation for it*, and the file gives that first.

Hübbe-Schleiden was a German scholar, writer and theosophist, born at Hamburg on 20 October 1846 and died at Göttingen on 17 May 1916. He studied jurisprudence and political economy, took the degree of juris utriusque doctor — doctor of both laws, civil and canon — and practised for a time as an attorney. During the war of 1870 and 1871 he was attaché to the German Consulate General in London. Soon afterwards, greatly interested in geographical exploration and in German colonial politics, he devoted himself to far-reaching travels, mainly in West Africa, where he founded his own commercial house in the Gabon colony. He was a great protagonist of German colonial ambitions and wrote several works on the subject, which the file lists with their dates: Ethiopien: Studien über Westafrika of 1879, Überseeische Politik in two parts of 1881 to 1883, Deutsche Kolonisation of 1881, and Kolonisationspolitik und Kolonisationstechnik of 1882. The theosophical part of his life followed, and he is remembered in the movement chiefly as the founder and editor of Sphinx, the German journal in which a good deal of early theosophical writing appeared in translation. His name turns up throughout the German correspondence of the 1880s.

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