Anna Kingsford on the Speaking Tube

 

The rich and beautiful Anna Kingsford was famous in the Victorian era as an animal welfare campaigner, anti-vivisectionist, captivating "platform lady" and founder of a Hermetic society that was a precursor of the Golden Dawn. She was also a prolific dreamer who kept a dream journal. Though many of her papers are lost, 24 of her dream reports are preserved in a little book titled Dreams and Dream-Stories. 

In a dream recorded in Paris in 1880, Anna meets an art student in Rome. A voice speaks to her through something she describes as a "telephonic tube" and instructs her to question the young man closely because he is "an interesting type of spiritual pathology". The voice through the tube reveals that the once brilliant artist has lost his skill because he is no longer there. When he died from malaria at twenty, his grieving father took over his body - and is still in there, without the previous owner's artistic abilities. 

In 1883, Anna accepted the presidency of the British Theosophical Society, which she promptly renamed the London Lodge of the T.S. She declared from the platform that its purpose was "to unveil Isis; to restore the Mysteries."

Madame de Steiger recalled that gathering and wrote that Anna's hair "was dressed in the fashion of that time, which poetically inclined authors describe as an 'aureole of gold' - though it required hairpins to keep up the aureole form:"

Drawing: "Anna Kingsford on the Speaking Tube" by Robert Moss from the series Eminent Victorian Ghost Sers and Dream Travelers