Tributes to De Robigné Mortimer Bennett

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott, Boris de Zirkoff · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 13 pages

Thirteen pages of tributes by Blavatsky, Colonel Olcott and Boris de Zirkoff, from the general bibliography in the Collected Writings volume IV, pages 625 to 633. He is the author of The Travelling Truthseeker, which Blavatsky reviewed in a separate file earlier in this section — *and his life before he ever met a theosophist is the most remarkable in this batch*.

De Robigné Mortimer Bennett, American freethinker, writer, editor and lecturer, was born at Springfield, New York, on 23 December 1818, two months prematurely. He had about four years of schooling at Cooperstown, then worked in a printing office and at wool-carding, though he would have preferred to study medicine. At fifteen he joined the New London Shaker community; some ten years later he rose to head its medical department, and at twenty-seven became the community's physician — so he got his medicine after all, by another road. He then fell in love with a Shakeress, Mary Wicks, and since the Shakers were celibate he left the community to marry her. What followed was ordinary commercial life: a term as a drug clerk in St Louis, then business on his own account, in which he made considerable money; in 1850 he took the road as a salesman and collector, manufactured proprietary medicines in Cincinnati, and became quite wealthy before losing heavily. The freethinking career for which he is remembered — the journal, the lectures, the prosecution, and finally the voyage around the world to investigate the state of religion — came after all of that. The Society's founders held him, as the file's subtitle has it, in high esteem, and Blavatsky's own tribute is the warmer for being written about a man who was neither a theosophist nor much interested in becoming one.

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