In 1894 Swami Vivekananda, the founder of ‘Hindu Universalism’Footnote 1 and the first guru to gain a substantial following in America, visited Green Acre, Maine. A photograph recording the occasion (see Figure 1) shows him sitting with his Indian turban among the respectable Americans who had gathered under the pine trees in search of spiritual enlightenment. To his left (the right from the viewer’s perspective) sits Sarah Farmer, the patroness and founder of the rural retreat, and the woman who had invited him. Six years later, however, she became a disciple of Abdu’l-Baha, and a devotee of the Baha’i. It might seem that the moment that the camera records is little more than a footnote to the mainstream history, in which waves of spiritual enthusiasms periodically wash over American religious sensibilities. However, the prominence of two such figures and philosophies representing differing forms of ‘Eastern wisdom’ suggests that something more important was afoot.
Figure 1. Swami Vivekananda with Sarah Farmer at Green Acre, Maine, 1894. Source: Maine Baha’i Archives, Eliot, ME.
The spiritual transformation underway at Green Acre was thus not just about ‘orientalism’ and its impact on the West, or about the emergence of comparative religion, or about popular science and its effects, though all of these were factors in the story.Footnote 2 Under Farmer’s auspices, spiritual seekers discussed ‘divine femininity’, engaged with men such as Vivekananda and Abdu’l-Baha to explore ‘Eastern’ religions, and began to criticize colonial hierarchies as they searched for spiritual reconciliation. These abstract discussions, which focused on gender, race, and empire, were productive in furthering new religious syntheses, but proved distorting, even tragic, for the individuals involved. Sarah Farmer’s ‘submission’ to what was called the ‘Persian Revelation’ was used against her, and she was incarcerated as a madwoman, while Vivekananda struggled against those who cast him as an African American, or accused him of seducing unsuspecting women with his ‘exotic’ practices.
In highlighting the role of gender, race, and imperialism, however, the argument does not mean to imply that spirituality was a mere epiphenomenon of larger historical developments. Rather, such issues loomed large because this spirituality increasingly drew on non-Christian ideas, in which gurus and disciples, non-duality, meditation, and celibacy were important aspects of spiritual transformation. They heralded the value of ‘Eastern wisdom’, an essentialist notion that contrasted spirituality with materialism, tolerance with intolerance, transcendence with instrumentalism. However, creeds such as Baha’i and Hindu Universalism destabilized the very categories of East and West, and their supporters, in casting such categories aside, sought to usher in a new age of religious universalism, while keeping intact the appealing vision of a monolithic ‘Eastern wisdom’ uncontaminated by Western corruptions.
Until now, historians have tended to separate the transnational and global dimensions represented by Hindu Universalism and Baha’i from the growing questioning of Christian religious orthodoxy and emerging anti-imperialism. Consequently, Green Acre and its metaphysical spirituality have been explored solely in their American context. Catherine Tumber recognizes the important gender dimension of Green Acre’s experimentation, but criticizes what she sees as its ‘American Gnosticism’ and its role in removing women from the public sphere and political activism, with its emphasis on ‘self’.Footnote 3 By contrast, Leigh Eric Schmidt views the movement that began with Transcendentalism and blossomed at Green Acre through the lens of American religious liberalism. He concludes that these spiritual innovations offset the intermittent intolerance of evangelical Protestantism, by welcoming more progressive social and political possibilities.Footnote 4 Catherine Albanese expertly traces metaphysical beliefs that stood either outside or on the margins of both denominational and evangelical Christianity to reveal the mystical and often unconventional aspects of American spirituality.Footnote 5
In turning to India, we find that historians have examined religious change even more intensely than their American counterparts. They have written extensively on the history of ‘Hindu Theism’ and the Brahmo Samaj under Roy Mohan Roy and his successors, Debendranath Tagore and Keshub Chunder Sen, and on Vivekananda’s guru, the great nineteenth-century mystic Ramakrishna Paramahansa.Footnote 6 They have also focused more on imperial and global themes, by examining the impact of both Christianity and Western science (especially evolutionary theory) on Hindu intellectuals;Footnote 7 and addressing how Bengalis refashioned Hinduism in the light of British social and political ideas, as well as German idealism.Footnote 8 However, their attention centres on Bengal, Vivekananda’s home, which saw the earliest and most elaborated reform movements during the Raj.Footnote 9
The impact of the ‘East’ on America has been less studied, although there have been valuable accounts of Vivekananda and his Western triumphs;Footnote 10 the importance of ‘orientalism’ on the American ‘transcendental’ tradition;Footnote 11 and work on the transmission and reinterpretation of yoga.Footnote 12 Specifically, the impact on Western thought and religious practice, and the consequent linkages back to the subcontinent and to imperialism, have yet to be systematically integrated.Footnote 13 Vivekananda’s Hindu Universalism was inseparable from the cultural nationalism that underlay it; his attempt to ‘missionize’ without conversion grew out of a simultaneous desire to propagate neo-Vedanta abroad and social engagement back in India. In comparison, Sarah Farmer at first offered a spiritual smorgasbord at Green Acre, but later pushed the universalism of Baha’i and desired to use Green Acre to win converts.
The World Parliament and Green Acre
Neither Vivekananda’s introduction of Hindu Universalism to America nor Sarah Farmer’s Green Acre experiment would have happened without the World Parliament of Religions. Held in conjunction with the quincentennial celebration of Columbus’s discovery of America, the Parliament sought to usher in the ‘American Century’. Alongside the gargantuan display of neoclassical architecture, newly built canals and a Ferris wheel, the organizers presented Protestant Modernism as central to America’s anticipated global hegemony.Footnote 14 The so-called Court of Honor, with its massive white concourses, included enormous displays of machinery and commercial products, and sought to encompass all the architectural heights of previous civilizations while celebrating the industrial exuberance of the American present. This display of material abundance and cultural distinction was decidedly secular and capitalist, privileging technological achievement.
The Parliament, in contrast, aimed to demonstrate American spiritual aspirations, the importance of ‘mind’ not ‘matter’, with a commitment to a largely Protestant spiritual reflection and a concerted attempt at some form of ecumenicism.Footnote 15 Technology and wealth were integral to this self-image of American prowess, but so was a vision of the republic as a New Jerusalem. The exposition was described both as a ‘heavenly city’ and as a ‘fancyland palace’, the juxtaposition of the divine (sacred) and the luxurious (profane) underpinning the tension inherent in its excess.Footnote 16
The organizers, Presbyterian clergymen like John Henry Barrows and the jurist Charles Bonney, sought to steer a difficult path between a belief in Western superiority and a commitment to the American exceptionalism that contrasted with European colonialism. They believed that this exceptionalism was grounded in the reform-oriented and ecumenical agenda which they promoted, a kind of practical Christianity that brought the kingdom of God to earth. Although they orchestrated the Parliament with care, they did not manage to keep total control of its deliberations.Footnote 17 However politely, Eastern representatives took the opportunity to criticize Western materialism and its brutality, thus linking spiritual concerns to the coercion of Christian mission that they despised, and they extended their critique to encompass the injustices of a world order based on imperialism.
Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Zoroastrian, and other ‘world’ delegates joined in the assault.Footnote 18 Chief among them was Vivekananda, who stood out in a scarlet robe and orange turban. The costume exemplified the different social and political worlds he now inhabited: the turban was a gift from Ajit Singh, the Raja of Khetri, a steadfast patron and admirer, who supported Vivekananda’s family while he travelled.Footnote 19 His female devotees in Massachusetts, who had never seen a ‘Hindoo’ before, helped fashion the robe, which, along with a more clerical-looking black coat that he wore on other occasions, became his sartorial trademark. Their help in creating his image was early evidence of his collaboration with women who would become his steadfast friends, devotees, and disciples. His self-presentation gave him the air of an oriental prince and was precisely the impression he sought to cultivate. Both spiritually refined and physically manly, he offered a broader programme of ‘man-making’ as part of the struggle to emancipate his compatriots from British oppression.Footnote 20 His very presence challenged the stereotype of the effeminate Bengali ‘babu’, who carried out the orders of the White rulers. Part of this campaign was the rejection of the high-caste vegetarian strictures of orthodox Hinduism to advocate meat-eating among his countrymen.
For the audience, Vivekananda was a revelation. Regal in bearing, with perfect English, he was intellectually sophisticated, witty, and assured. Coming from respectable Bhadralok circles (the prosperous, well-educated, generally upper-caste groups of Calcutta), he had read Kant, Mill, Hegel, and Spencer. He had encountered Ralph Waldo Emerson in India, not in New England, a reflection of the cosmopolitanism of his native city. The same was true of some alternative therapies, such as homeopathy, which were so Indianized that Hannemann was regarded as a mahatma by many Indians who followed his healing regimes.Footnote 21 Because his free-thinking father had prodded him to join the Freemasons, Vivekananda was also acquainted with their peculiar blend of esotericism, fraternal association, theism, and philanthropy. He even knew of Western purity campaigns through the Calcutta branch of the Band of Hope, a teetotal organization originally founded in Leeds that also opposed smoking. By the time he came to America, he was au fait with Western fashions and intellectual currents, and spoke to an audience that knew next to nothing about India.
It was primarily to continue the work of the World Parliament by furthering understanding between different religious traditions that Sarah Farmer created Green Acre.Footnote 22 She cut a very different figure from the unmissable Vivekananda. She often wore grey with a hint of lavender, very like a Quaker, and finished off the ensemble with a touch of white lace around her throat, a simple attire which admirers claimed set off the mobility and radiance of her plain face.Footnote 23 At first glance she and Vivekananda seemed like polar opposites, with the gendered dimension of their self-presentation suggesting the diversity and novelty of the connections being forged. Vivekananda was the dark Indian man in scarlet and orange, who was deliberately self-orientalizing and masculine, while Farmer was the pale New England lady, with the discreet, modest dress and vivid feminine personality. While Vivekananda drew on the intellectual and spiritual fervour of Calcutta, Farmer seemed to embody New England’s spiritual and intellectual wealth. She was the daughter of an inventor father and an abolitionist mother. Influenced by the Protestant blends that typified the region, she was raised with a strong Unitarian influence, which focused on Christian virtue and the ability to increase good in the world. The Unitarian strand emphasized ‘self-culture’ and the capacity for freedom to exercise conscience over scripture. ‘Culture’ in this sense also implied an organic dimension, the sowing of a seed which would germinate if not thwarted by spiritual dearth. There was, however, a tension with an equally strong emphasis on husbandry, on discipline, and on the idea of spiritual perfection so common to American religion.
Transcendentalism sprang from Unitarian soil with its emphasis on notions of self-divinization, ideas to which, once again, Vivekananda would appeal when he suggested that all was Brahman, or non-duality. Emerson had famously engaged with ‘metaphysical Asia’ after reading the Bhagavad Gita and an essay on the Vedas.Footnote 24 In his 1841 essay on what he called the Over-soul, he had expressed a non-Abrahamic vision of non-duality in which all souls – and hence all humanity – were united.Footnote 25 Farmer wanted to ‘sweeten the soul’, to enhance self-realizing tendencies associated both with men like Thoreau and with the many utopian transcendental educational projects.Footnote 26 She had already been dreaming of Green Acre, with its emphasis on ‘self-culture’ and enlightenment, when she went to the Columbia Exposition to help her father set up an exhibition of his inventions. Although he had never commercialized his projects, he was a true innovator, who had invented an incandescent light bulb and an electric trolley.Footnote 27 In a sense, the duo epitomized the tension between the Exposition and the Parliament: the practical (and potentially commercial) and the spiritual, linked in ways that remained unresolved, even problematic. Indeed, Moses Farmer’s reluctance to profit from his inventions was transmitted to his daughter, who also found it impossible to combine spirituality and financial acumen. The triumph they envisaged did not come about; he was already seriously ill when he arrived in Chicago, and died before the exhibition even opened.
For Farmer, this loss was catastrophic, not least because she had hoped that her father’s inventions would finance the educational project she had in mind. Grief-stricken, she was whisked away by friends before the Parliament even began. It was only later that she returned and met Vivekananda, the Sri Lankan ‘Buddhist modernist’ Dharmapala, and other representatives of Eastern religions, all of whom she invited to the opening of Green Acre. Such personal connections with American intellectuals, female truth-seekers, and Eastern religious figures were crucial to her enterprise.
Farmer envisaged Green Acre as a summer tent city in a forest of pines, with a place for lodging (Green Acre Inn, which she bought) and ‘Bittersweet’, her home, at the centre of the annual spiritual encampment. She was seconded by Sara Chapman Bull, another influential woman who was even wealthier and better connected than Farmer herself. Bull also had a summer residence in Green Acre, where she seems to have played a steadying role, moderating Farmer’s enthusiasms.Footnote 28 Bull too had experimented with unconventional spirituality, deserting her father’s Protestantism to engage first with spiritualism and then with Mohini Mohan Chatterji, a member of the Brahmo Samaj, the rationalist Hindu reform movement to which Vivekananda had also belonged in his youth. She went to lectures to hear Chatterji read the Christian Bible, and also began to peruse his translations of Hindu texts.Footnote 29 These encounters led her to move away from her occult preoccupations. She was the first, and most enduring, of Vivekananda’s women disciples, and was central to his entry into Harvard intellectual circles, where he met the likes of William James. For Vivekananda, Bull became his Dhira Mata, or Mother of Steady Wisdom, a financial supporter and adviser as he sought to build Vedanta in America. We will never know why Bull chose to follow Vivekananda, while Farmer chose Abdu’l-Baha, but their mutual regard for, and interest in, ‘Eastern wisdom’ affirms the importance of these new ‘oriental’ teachers for educating strong-minded American women.
Farmer’s vision for Green Acre was inclusive. In a pamphlet of 1898, she described its far-reaching aspirations, which ranged from scientific farming and self-sufficiency to investigating the ‘purest ideals’ of religious systems around the globe.Footnote 30 She was in step with philosophical perennialism, or the view that world religions shared metaphysical truths, a universalism that had infused both Transcendentalism and Unitarianism, and was now being reshaped by Theosophy. Theosophy, founded by the Russian medium Helen Blavatsky, sought to combine science and religion, embraced evolutionary doctrines, and endorsed notions of spiritual evolution, karma, and non-duality.Footnote 31 When Blavatsky moved to India in 1876, she championed the ‘brotherhood of man’ and was welcomed for undermining colonial hierarchies by emphasizing spiritual universalism. At her headquarters in Adyar, however, she created a ‘great white brotherhood [with] little dark helpers’, Indian disciples, whose inferior status plagued Theosophy for generations.Footnote 32 Still, Buddhist Modernists like Dharmapala adored her, and were attracted by Theosophy’s fraternal aspirations.Footnote 33 Vivekananda, however, privately judged Theosophy as an ‘Indian grafting of American Spiritualism – with only a few Sanskrit words taking the place of spiritualistic jargon’.Footnote 34 He thought it was nonsense, with whatever truth Theosophy contained being of Indian origin.
Vivekananda was thus ready to condemn universalism that he considered wrong-headed. Farmer, by contrast, was less critical, but catalysed all kinds of discussions. She demonstrated her commitment not only by inviting Vivekananda and Dharmapala, but also by summoning Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois, providing a platform for both Eastern gurus and African American intellectuals. She may have sensed some relationship between imperialism and the history of American slavery, or at least perceived herself as following in the abolitionist tradition of her mother, Hannah Shipleigh, although the loss of her papers means that we will never know if this was the case. From the outset, Green Acre also continued the Parliament of Religion’s work through the Monsalvat School of Comparative Religion, managed by Lewis G. Janes, the head of the Brooklyn Ethical Society and another of Vivekananda’s allies.Footnote 35 The school taught the main tenets of all religions and questioned Christian dogmatism. For the people at Green Acre who championed this approach, comparative religion was above all about education and understanding, not about conversion to other faiths.
Green Acre was distinctive in encompassing these elements of intellectual debate and marrying them to the arts, domestic science, and literature, taking on the feel of an avant-garde intellectual hothouse linked to spiritual searching and practical engagement. The encampment distinguished itself by its aura of spirituality and quest for world peace, combined with the conviction that the process of exchange would secure this goal. In many ways Green Acre could be likened to a Chautauqua, or the popular adult education communities of the 1880s, in its emphasis on moral improvement, but its concerns were not limited to academic teaching or conventional reform.Footnote 36 Hence, all kinds of spiritual healers, Christian Scientists, and experts in mind-cure and other therapies also found a ready welcome.
The psychologist and philosopher William James, who spoke at the summer encampment, described the spiritual wave it embodied in his Varieties of religious experience (1902):
An … optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative and a practical side … it has taken up into itself a number of contributory elements, and it must now be reckoned with as a genuine religious power. … One of the doctrinal sources of Mind-cure is the four Gospels; another is Emersonianism or New England transcendentalism; another is … idealism; another is Spiritism, with its messages of ‘law’ and ‘progress’ and ‘development’; another the optimistic popular science evolutionism …; and, finally, Hinduism ….Footnote 37
This summary was apt, especially its mention of the power of ‘optimism’, in which the tenets of New Thought and harmonial religion underscored the possibility of positive transformation rather than damnation. Many of the Protestants at Green Acre were in revolt against the legacies of Calvinism, especially the emphasis on sin, predestination, and the inevitability of suffering. Women in particular distanced themselves from the alienating gender hierarchies of orthodox Protestantism, seeking salvation instead in union, solace, and comfort. Sometimes they found the answer in more unconventional Christian denominations, such as Swedenborgianism,Footnote 38 which focused on the relationship between microcosm (individual/nature) and macrocosm (mind/spirit). There was a mystical bent to its holism, a rejection of a preoccupation with transgression and repentance in favour of harmony. Sin was often regarded as nothing more than ignorance and error, to be overcome by restoring the balance between the universal and the particular. In the mid nineteenth century, Andrew Jackson Davis had pioneered a popular variant that blended its spirituality with popular science and mesmeric healing,Footnote 39 currents that women fed into radical feminism, social utopianism, and spiritualism.Footnote 40 For example, in February 1894, a few months before Vivekananda’s visit to Green Acre, a Detroit newspaper proclaimed that it was clear, after hearing Vivekananda, that Swedenborg was nothing more than a ‘European successor of an early Hindoo priest’.Footnote 41
Such observations suggest how many Americans, and Vivekananda in turn, sought to explore the overlapping possibilities of their metaphysical systems. Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science, the fastest growing denomination in America, provided another case for comparison. She too rejected a vision of a fire and brimstone patriarch.Footnote 42 After decades of ill-health and spiritual malaise, she had embraced the Divine Mind behind Christ’s healing powers, proclaiming that the human mind was diseased, riven by immorality and error. She argued that confined mentalities blocked entry to the kingdom of God in the present, and insisted that suffering was nothing more than ‘waking dream-shadows’.Footnote 43 She added that the impression of egos inhabiting separate bodies was an illusion and dissolved in a greater reality that was Spirit.
Vivekananda called Christian Scientists ‘Vedantins’, but qualified his view by saying that ‘they had picked up a few doctrines of the Advaita and grafted them upon the Bible’.Footnote 44 His characterization was perspicacious: Mary Baker Eddy’s deepest inspiration was indeed biblical, despite a distant familiarity with Vedantin ideas and Eastern thought. Nonetheless, Vivekananda recognized ‘waking dream-shadows’ as maya (worldly illusion) and gathered numerous female friends who had experimented with Christian Science or remained Christian Scientists.Footnote 45 Many of Eddy’s contemporaries at Green Acre adapted her vision to the ‘mind-cure’ movement, facilitating healing by relying on the positive rapport between magnetizer and subject or hypnotizer and patient, rather than Divine Spirit. Depending on the point of view, such links could positively enhance spiritual healing or result in unscrupulous domination, especially if the operator was male and the subject female.
Both Sarah Farmer as devotee and Vivekananda as guru would become protagonists in these highly charged debates infused with race and gender. After the World Parliament, Vivekananda was implicitly criticized for wrongly entrancing the women who heard him. On 30 November 1894, the Indian Mirror announced, ‘In going in and coming out of the building, he was daily beset by hundreds of women who almost fought with each other for a chance to get near him, and shake his hand.’ In 1897, a Christian missionary tract contended that it was not the ‘sublime philosophy of the Vedanta’ that had attracted the women, but Vivekananda’s knowledge of their ‘weaknesses’, to which he ‘skilfully adapted himself’.Footnote 46
In Vivekananda’s case, such accusations of manipulation were ironic because he privately derided the mind-cure experiments that he witnessed at Green Acre. For example, he mocked Henry Wood, an important figure in New Thought, as a ‘mental healer of metaphysico-chemico-physico-religious whatnot!’ and made fun of ‘the Editor… of the Universal Truth… [who] is conducting religious services and holding classes to heal all manner of diseases, and very soon I expect them to be giving eyes to the blind, and the like!’Footnote 47 To Mary Hale, one of his Chicago confidantes, he wrote, ‘There you will find … table turnings, palmists, astrologers, etc., etc. You will get all the “cures” and all the “isms” presided over by Miss Farmer.’Footnote 48 He made a larger point about the deficient spirituality he observed. Their vision of God, in his view, was extremely, limited. For the attendees, ‘God is either a terror or a healing power, vibration and so forth’.Footnote 49 He objected both to fire and brimstone Protestantism and to the vogue for spiritualism, Christian Science, and mesmerism, but he did so with his characteristic wit and penetration.
Another of Vivekananda’s talents, however, was to observe the spiritual climate and healing practices of these Westerners, and to re-orientate them in such a way as to provide a bridge to what he saw as more sophisticated neo-Vedantic ideas. His teaching at Green Acre shows that the germ of Raja yoga (1896), the first English manual of its kind on meditation, was largely inspired by the sessions he held under the pines. His Green Acre notes reveal how he sought to explain the centrality of a loving God and the importance of concentration. He explained that ‘Meditation is a sort of prayer and prayer is meditation.’ He insisted that the guru was nothing more than the higher self, thus asserting that domination (especially of women) had no role in spiritual guidance. Indeed, in Raja yoga he would criticize mind-cure specialists and Christian Scientists for intervening in the individual’s process of ‘self-realization’ and potentially corrupting it. He remarked at Green Acre that understanding yoga entailed realizing that ‘our present consciousness is only a little bit of an infinite sea of mind’ that should not constrain us. He elaborated: ‘The word Yoga is the root of which our word yoke is a derivation — meaning “to join” — and Yoga means “joining ourselves with God” — joining me with my real Self.’Footnote 50
When Raja yoga appeared, Vivekananda stated that ‘one exists as many’, that ‘there is no difference between the sun and you’, ‘between the table and me’, counter-intuitive assertions which exemplified the radical non-duality at the heart of his preaching.Footnote 51 He offered meditation, or concentration, to arrive at ‘superconsciousness’ (samadhi) and reveal the transcendent non-duality he prized. He also emphasized experientialism, rather than scriptural exegesis, as the certain way towards spiritual advancement.Footnote 52 In this focus, at least, he was right in step with both William James and especially the women devotees at Green Acre.
Vivekananda always believed that Vedanta had long harmonized science and religion, and so he readily used the metaphors of popular science familiar to his audience to heighten its appeal. He argued that ‘the realisation of divinity through control of the mind’ was a bodily practice with both a ‘science’ and a spirituality superior to the other experimental religions/therapies on offer. At Green Acre, he referred to the ‘medulla oblongata’ and the ‘spinal cord’, showing his engagement with the body and neurological research, and he later extended such ideas in his published work, describing the prana in a way that recalled mesmeric fluid and the healing made possible by ‘magnetic force’. In describing dhyana meditation, he used the vocabulary of electrical connection: ‘When the mind has been trained to remain fixed on a certain internal or external location, there comes to it the power of flowing in an unbroken current … towards that point.’Footnote 53 Metaphors of light, refraction, and vibration pervaded the text: ‘the powers of the mind are like rays of light dissipated; when they are concentrated, they illumine. This is our only means of knowledge … this requires a great deal of practice.’Footnote 54 There was even mention of akasha or ‘ether’, with its Theosophical, spiritualist, and scientific associations.
Vivekananda never abandoned the essence of neo-Vedanta itself and continually insisted that these physical techniques and transformations had to be at the service of spiritual goals. He thus juxtaposed the transcendence of ‘Eastern wisdom’ and practice against the instrumentalism and materialism of the Western preoccupation with results and physical healing. Such rhetoric was part of his anti-imperialism, a way of contrasting Eastern enlightenment with Western coercion. Thus he compared missionary practice in India with his own attempts to bring spiritual illumination with no desire for conversion: ‘I want you to keep your own belief: I want to make the Methodist a better Methodist; the Presbyterian a better Presbyterian; the Unitarian a better Unitarian.’Footnote 55 He frequently made reference to Christ and his passion, and above all to the Sermon on the Mount, which South Asians (both Buddhists and Hindus) applauded as reflecting the compassionate morality that they themselves endorsed. He willingly engaged with the Bible and with Christianity, without according them any superiority over Hinduism. He wanted to introduce the spiritual wisdom of an ancient religion and culture without insisting that Westerners lose their own.
Vivekananda’s Hindu Universalism went further, however, to combine anti-imperialism with the ‘divine feminine’. Although he offered the highly intellectual vision of the formless as the highest universal principle or Brahman while at Greenacre, he also worshipped Kali, the black mother goddess of time and destruction. For Western critics, Kali epitomized the ‘savage’, ‘heathenish’, and ‘idolatrous’ qualities of polytheistic India by sporting a necklace of skulls and severed hands on her girdle, and dancing on the body of her husband, Shiva. What image, asked Christian missionaries, could represent more vicious and violent tendencies than Kali? For Vivekananda, however, Kali was Shakti, or the ultimate feminine power that underpinned the universe’s energy. She represented the endless cycle of reincarnation, and the indivisibility of creation and death, of darkness and light, that underlay his non-duality.
If Vivekananda avoided mention of Kali in the early days, he was alive to the notion of the ‘divine feminine’ that circulated at Green Acre. Within Theosophy, Blavatsky’s vision of the soul as sexless attracted feminists, who offered their own version of the ‘divine feminine’, while women, especially those involved in mind-cure and spiritualism, were seen as possessing a special capacity for what Joy Dixon calls ‘spiritual enfranchisement’.Footnote 56 At Green Acre, Farmer’s admirers called her ‘Motherheart’, an epithet that linked the ‘Divine Self’ to the ‘divine feminine’. The kind of reverence that Sarah Farmer inspired can be seen from a description written by a Mrs Morrison:
On the mirror of my soul was reflected, Green Acre, Miss Farmer, the last of her race. The sun with its glory no longer was on me. The flowers with their perfume were carried from sight, and the walls of the room were falling before me, replaced by Miss Farmer transfigured with light. On a knoll by the river she was standing alone, with the white flag of Peace, and garments all sheer. With Love, Faith, was beckoning e’er beckoning on. The few slowly spanning the distance between. Soon the moss grew longer, she was leading them then. And many the flags that were waving in air, e’er constantly increasing with women with men, bringing their children with Love’s tenderest care.
… Then Miss Farmer and flag was [sic] lost to my sight. And I mingled my tears with the tears hundreds shed; but wiping my eyes, I saw with delight she was leading them still with the host o’erhead. And I saw “ten thousand times ten thousand”, in the host above, and the host below. Reaching from Green Acre to every land, and the good there from, even you shall know.Footnote 57
Here Farmer was transfigured by celestial light, leading a righteous, loving multitude from Green Acre to ‘every land’ with her message of universal peace. She was the spiritual nurturer of an entire community and, in the hopes of Mrs Morrison, of the world. Sarah Farmer’s humanity was particularly treasured, and she was famous for her exquisite tact and taste, having an almost uncanny ability to remember everyone’s name and personal details. Mothering, however, was a mission done in surrogacy, as she turned down offers of marriage several times. She seems to have adopted two boys but gave them up to a cousin because of the demands that Green Acre imposed.
Indeed, the linkage of surrogate mothering and chastity was part of the spiritual world that both Vivekananda and Farmer inhabited. Vivekananda was the disciple of the Bengali mystic Ramakrishna, an illiterate Brahman famed as a paramahamsa, or holy fool, and one whose ecstatic visions blended unorthodox Tantra with other more conventional Hindu beliefs.Footnote 58 Ramakrishna famously warned his Bengali disciples to eschew ‘women and gold’, both worldly temptations that would deter them from the true spiritual path.Footnote 59 Indeed, his sometimes disgusted statements about women’s bodies and sexuality more generally have been cited as evidence of unbridled misogyny. And yet, his relationship to femininity was much more complex than such conclusions allow. He was raised by village women and was their confidante; in his mystical trances, he embodied the mother of Rama, and, like many Vaishnava aspirants, became Radha, the love-crazed gopika of Krishna. He spent days in women’s clothing, and delighted in acting like a child, ‘playing in the lap of Kali’, and surrendering himself utterly to her will.Footnote 60
Although married, Ramakrishna remained celibate, living only intermittently with his much younger wife, Sarada Devi. If he was an ‘avatara’, or man-god come down to earth, he designated Sarada as his divine consort, a role which she humbly accepted. Hindu mythology is replete with such pairings, but Sarada Devi, like her Green Acre counterpart, Sarah Farmer, was destined to become a surrogate mother, and to remain a symbol of virgin purity. She was the Holy Mother, revered for her lack of ego, her resilience, and what observers called her ‘common sense’. Illiterate, poor, and in her youth mocked as the wife of a madman (in the early days Ramakrishna was considered insane), she took on a more important role after his death in 1884, above all in feeding, mothering, and counselling his disciples, and in encouraging and helping poor women like herself.Footnote 61 Although she criticized those who erred, she was esteemed for loving all her ‘children’ equally. For Vivekananda in particular she was vital as a special manifestation of Shakti, in the guise of Saraswati (the goddess of wisdom).Footnote 62 Sarada was a mystic and saint in her own right, and with time her authority became unquestioned among the disciples. Vivekananda asked her leave before travelling to America; and, when his foreign female disciples arrived in India, she broke Brahman rules of purity by eating with them, and hence supported Vivekananda in his campaign against what he saw as the paralysing ‘don’t touchism’ of orthodox Hinduism. Sara Bull arranged for Sarada Devi to be photographed so that she could worship her in America, and these images are now revered around the world.Footnote 63 Sarada became as important to Vivekananda’s Western female disciples as she was to the emerging Ramakrishnan Mission that he established in India after 1897.
When Vivekananda met Sarah Farmer, therefore, he was no stranger to saintly, spiritual women whose motherhood was founded in virginal purity, with all the contradictions that the repression of earthly sexuality entailed. Except for Sarada, Vivekananda’s spiritual associates had been the small coterie of men, the gurubbais or fellow monks, who had witnessed Ramakrishna’s mystical trances, and whom he now sought to lead and discipline. Female connection was limited to his close relatives, his beloved mother and sisters, who, remarkably for a Hindu household of the time, were educated at the first English girls’ school in Calcutta.Footnote 64 Vivekananda grew up in a world where women were intelligent but hidden from view, betrothed at an early age, and obliged to live under the tutelage of their husbands’ mothers.
He was perhaps remarkable in not losing his balance when he encountered the women at Green Acre, who were so different from the Indian women he knew. At first, they astonished him, and he mused repeatedly about their education, intelligence, and propriety, as well as their virtuous eagerness to engage in worldly affairs. He was both enchanted and discomfited by this new world, but also grateful for the women’s interest in and celebration of him.Footnote 65 If he was dismissive of the spirituality at Green Acre, he was impressed by the honesty, courage, and sexual virtue that reigned there, especially since men and women lived together in the tent city without any hint of impropriety. When, in the following year, he set about gathering disciples, he acknowledged women’s readiness, and began their spiritual education at a quieter retreat in Thousand Islands in upstate New York. This work could be fraught, involving the adjustment of the guru–disciple relationship to include women devotees, and hence new and ambiguous gender hierarchies.
In these relationships, there was a problematic dynamic of mutual dependence and freedom on both sides that revealed the complicating effects of imperial hierarchies, race, and gender. In America in particular, Vivekananda felt the sting of race prejudice. In Baltimore, small hotels would not ‘take in a black man’, and he had to go to a larger one, ‘because’, in his own words, ‘they knew the difference between a negro and a foreigner’.Footnote 66 He was keen to retain his autonomy and independence, but needed financial help for his projects, and had to depend on female supporters like Sarah Bull. Similarly, his women devotees and disciples record the harshness of his scolding, the fear that he might withdraw his love, and the longing to be near him.Footnote 67 Both sides struggled with the power of ‘personal’ love (Vivekananda admitted to being hurt by disciples) and the need for egoless ‘detachment’ to achieve spiritual transformation.Footnote 68 Later on, there was also the unexpected difficulty of finding Western men willing to take direction from a ‘brown’ man of a ‘subject’ race.
Green Acre, however, provided Vivekananda with spiritual openness and human possibility, with Sarah Farmer exemplifying this broadmindedness. These qualities also left her enterprise increasingly unmoored. She took everyone’s point of view seriously and insisted on a level of acceptance which some thought excessive. She was famous for saying, ‘Never despise any rung of the ladder by which another is rising’, a remark meant to express the Green Acre spirit of absolute receptivity.Footnote 69 This trait was matched by an unrealistic generosity. Farmer refused to charge fees, not wanting to commercialize the spirituality on offer. She personally underwrote the expenses of the speakers and their families, and was depleted both financially and emotionally when the yearly events came to an end. Her idealism later exasperated her collaborator Dr Janes, from the Monsalvat School.Footnote 70 Moreover, there was a simmering conflict between his intellectual and academic focus on comparative religion at the school and Farmer’s interest in mysticism and spiritual healing.Footnote 71 The tensions came to a head after her conversion to Baha’i, but even before that she paid dearly for her otherworldliness. Her correspondence is peppered with tales of money troubles. She was apparently so charming in her explanations that her creditors delayed their demands; however, when their own businesses and families were at stake, they became more exigent. Ultimately, she was besieged by lawsuits.Footnote 72
Sarah Farmer and Baha’i
Farmer’s difficulties became so great that in 1900 she took a sabbatical, and was ushered away on a world trip by her friend, Maria P. Wilson. The story of this voyage suggests the nature of the milieu she inhabited. On the ship sailing from New York to the Mediterranean, they met Josephine C. Locke, a pioneer in the kindergarten movement and an innovator in child art education. She was accompanied by her friend Elizabeth Knudson, and these two women possessed a secret book, which they tucked away when Farmer and Wilson approached. The volume was entitled Hidden words, and the author was a certain Baha’u’llah.Footnote 73 The title itself would have been sufficient to intrigue Farmer, fascinated as she was by the esoteric and occult.
This small book was her entry, to the little known world of Baha’i, and to the story of Mirza Husayn-‘Ali Nuri, a follower of Ali Muhammad Shirazi, or the ‘Bab’, a young Persian merchant who called for moral, social, and spiritual regeneration. Bab means the ‘gate’, and he saw himself as the pathway to spiritual renewal in Persia where, in 1844, economic distress and the pressures of colonial interference launched the Bab into a messianic career as the returning Twelfth Imam. Prophet, ascetic, and even miracle worker, he announced that humanity was on the threshold of a new manifestation of God, and linked his spiritual insights to a call for change.Footnote 74 He fought against the Islamic restriction on moneylending, the prerogatives of orthodox clergy, and feudalism, and hence against many forms of social privilege. Government clerks and remote villagers responded, with unexpected rebellions breaking out among furtive communities of believers between 1848 and 1852. In the end the ‘new prophet’ was executed, but his followers still threatened the regime when they attempted to assassinate the shah.Footnote 75 Rather than repressing the movement, the persecution consolidated it, with one wing under the aristocrat Mirza Husayn-‘Ali Nuri, or Baha’u’llah, developing into the modern Baha’i movement. Forced into migration and exile in cities across the Ottoman empire, Bab and his family ultimately landed in the penal colony of Acre in Palestine, where he was confined to the citadel barracks, living in harrowing conditions among murderers and political exiles.
It is not clear how much of this history Sarah Farmer knew or understood when she, Locke, and Knudson went in search of Bha’u’llah’s son, Abdu’l-Baha (Abbas Effendi) in 1900. The Baha’i system of belief was both familiar and novel, filled with themes that she knew from the universalism of the World Parliament and from ‘Eastern wisdom’. For example, the Baha’i mixed the Abrahamic teaching of God’s creation with a partial rejection of the belief that it ‘appear[ed] out of nothing’.Footnote 76 God was separate from creation, but creation was eternal and never ending. Crucial to Baha’i were the Manifestations, men who were not incarnations of the divine but who served God’s spiritual purpose. The Manifestations included men like Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, and the Bab himself, to whom Abdu’l-Baha would later add Buddha and Krishna.
Thus, a central tenet of Babism was that there was no single revelation but a process of progressive revelation that mirrored creation itself. Here again was the kind of evolutionary (albeit non-Darwinian) vision of intrinsic, organic development.Footnote 77 Perhaps such ideas resonated with Farmer’s Unitarianism, containing as they did a similar vision of inherent unfolding. Abdu’l-Baha wrote: ‘The Divine Manifestations are so many different mirrors because they have a special individuality, but that which is reflected in the mirrors is the same sun.’Footnote 78 He argued that all religions had the same source, and thus contained the same universal truths. This notion underscored other Baha’i emphases on human equality (hence the rejection of a priesthood or a scholarly elite), and the harmonization of science and religion. Farmer had long championed this list of ideals, together with a mission to pursue world peace.
There is no first-hand account of Sarah Farmer’s encounter with Abdu’l-Baha. Margaret R. Ford’s unpublished memoir records that Farmer was overwhelmed when she met him, and wrote only: ‘heart too full for speech – received by our Lord’.Footnote 79 This way of speaking hints both at Abdu’l-Baha’s charisma and at Farmer’s susceptibility; early converts in America did not fully grasp the concept of the Manifestations of God, with some believing that Abdu’l-Baha was himself an incarnation and hence a new Christ.Footnote 80 We do not know if Sarah Farmer saw him in this way, but she certainly viewed him as possessing occult powers: she recorded that she had written down some questions, lost the paper, then realized he already knew what she wanted to ask. She only stayed with him for four days, but left a convert. She returned to America keen to establish Baha’i as the leading belief system at Green Acre, as she had now found a creed that seemed to unite many of her diverse interests.
She had also found a master, and the ‘tablets’ or letters that Abdu’l-Baha wrote her show how he viewed her discipleship. They were formal, archaic in style, and written in Persian, with the gender dimensions clearly staked out. He treated her as the handmaiden of God, whose conversion would engender spiritual greatness: ‘know in the reality of assurance that every true woman is attracted by the fragrances of holiness in the most glorious age’ and that she ‘will surpass even the most developed men of previous centuries’.Footnote 81 This promise of a specifically feminine role for Farmer within the Baha’i movement would certainly have appealed to her as the ‘Motherheart’. We do not have her letters, but Abdu’l-Baha’s replies suggest that he encouraged her when she encountered opposition at Green Acre: ‘Gird up thy loin, strengthen thy back, be not discouraged or grieved if people are pouring the arrows of scorn and blame thee.’Footnote 82 He was pleased when she seemed to dispense with spiritual frivolities, and made indirect reference to New Thought: ‘thou has dispensed with the telepathic wires of the world’ in favour of the Spirit.Footnote 83 He even wrote ‘a clear and efficient answer’ to another devotee, ‘out of love of thee and of her’, when he sought to heal a dispute.Footnote 84 When Farmer’s house, Bittersweet, burned down in 1904, he understood her dismay, but urged her to remain detached from material things. These letters possessed some of a guru’s assurances, but little of the discipline, nor were they like intimate spiritual direction or penances urged by Catholic priests. They suggest instead an almost scriptural tone of uplift.
Nonetheless, Abdu’l-Baha pressed Farmer by disapproving of what he saw as the narrow discussions of Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism that had made Green Acre famous. Baha’i was different and unique, and Green Acre should belong to it alone, purified of ‘the mouldered, two-thousand-years-old superstitions of the heedless, ignorant peoples, whether of Asia or Europe’.Footnote 85 At first glance, such statements utterly destabilized categories of East and West. However, the reality was more complicated. For those at Green Acre – and there were many – who opposed the imposition of a new orthodoxy, Abdu’l-Baha was still seen as an Eastern master, the head of an Islamic heresy. Westerners caricatured this world as despotic and hedonistic, where men had harems and mistreated women. Reports of early factional fighting within the Babist movement involving poisoning and murder strengthened the worst stereotypes.Footnote 86
The attempt to establish the ‘Persian Revelation’ as a defining creed at Green Acre was also rejected by the liberal associates of the Monsalvat School, who preached religious reconciliation.Footnote 87 These people had little interest in what might have seemed to them like Baha’i’s theological mishmash. Letters to Mrs Bull are increasingly critical, with one Greenacreite, Rena Haskell, clearly outraged by Farmer’s ‘high handed doings’ at Green Acre in 1901 after her return from Palestine. Farmer would no longer allow Dr Janes to hold a meeting in the shade because he had refused the ‘Revelation’, which meant that his audience had to stand in the boiling sun.Footnote 88
Farmer, so dedicated to harmony, had now caused friction at her beloved Green Acre. Her new loyalty upset those who saw it as a kind of subjection to foreign male influence, which went against the tenor of her whole endeavour. Was spiritual freedom merely the right to choose one’s authority, and then to accept the discipline it asserted without further discussion? When, in the words of Leigh Eric Schmidt, did freedom become self-surrender?Footnote 89 These questions raised fears of an over-weening male outsider imposing himself on a goodhearted but overly idealistic woman. Farmer’s embrace of Baha’i also posed the question of whether a universalistic unfolding was possible. Did the blurring of boundaries between religious teachings empty traditions of substance and strength? And yet, it was her spiritual teacher Abdu’l-Baha who asserted that it was not Baha’i that lacked coherence, but the psychic experimentation and healing that had characterized Green Acre. Like Vivekananda, who had mocked the excess of New Thought, Abdu’l-Baha wanted to contain Farmer’s ‘spiritual receptivity’, to impose constraint on a potentially wayward female disciple:
He explained that real religion was not composed of psychic experiences or man-made ritual and superstitions, that to encourage the study of these things would not lead to unity and peace, … not an eclectic Faith but rather a fresh outpouring of the knowledge of the will of God as spoken through the pure channel of a Prophet was the only power that could transform human hearts.Footnote 90
This vision of Green Acre thus alienated not only those who resisted the ‘Persian Revelation’ but also those dedicated to the more experimental aspects of New Thought practice.
Vivekananda and Farmer compared
Vivekananda and Sarah Farmer at first glance seemed to have much in common. They were attached to a universalism that was integral to religious reform, they were opposed to sectarianism, and they were receptive to a broader notion of ‘spiritual becoming’ for individuals. They both focused on the ‘divine feminine’ (though Vivekananda at first did so discreetly while abroad) and were affected by trends that sought a more unified vision of science and religion. But this list of similarities conceals important differences, which helps explain why their paths diverged.
Vivekananda tempered his enthusiasm for America with greater experience of its racism, exploitation, and rampant materialism. The earliest letters record his delight in steam heating and the availability of ice, but he was too spiritually focused to be overwhelmed by material convenience and technology. His time in America was a very mixed experience. He made steadfast friends and disciples – such as Sara Bull – and had ready second homes across the country with women like Josephine Macleod and her sister Betty Legget.Footnote 91 It is important to realize that, of these stalwart devotees, Sarah Bull was the only one involved with Green Acre.
Soon after, however, Vivekananda realized that life in America would be challenging, even dispiriting, and that he would be easily exploited by the lecture agents, who robbed him and diminished his spiritual stature: it was for this reason that he later often taught for no fee at all. He even had harsh words for his beloved Sarah Bull when, in 1895, he defied her wish that he confine his lessons to the ‘right people’ and taught instead in cheap lodgings in New York. For all that he loved and admired his female disciples, he really wanted to attract men of the world; despite the spiritual power of women in America, he realized that men had the social power needed to further his cause, in the way that the masculine Ramakrishnan Mission he founded did in India.Footnote 92 Several men in America were attracted to his teaching, but his most promising disciple, Leon Landsberg or Swami Kripananda, was unsteady and easily hurt, his fears of anti-Semitism leading him to feel excluded.Footnote 93 Despite Landsberg’s intellectual acuity and polyglot abilities, their relationship foundered. Vivekananda’s relationship with an English devotee, T. M. Sturdy, was also at times tense, and rarely did he find men eager to be as active as the women.Footnote 94 In the end, Vivekananda changed course by bringing in brother monks from India, many of whom succeeded by pleasing devotees through their ‘authenticity’, especially in California.Footnote 95
Others, such as Sister Christine, or Christina Greenstidel, abandoned a teaching career in Detroit to come to Calcutta and assist the British disciple Margaret Noble (Sister Nivedita) at the school for girls that the latter had founded.Footnote 96 When Vivekananda died in 1902, Nivedita left the Ramakrishnan Mission to devote herself to politics, infusing Vivekananda’s ideas into her ‘aggressive Hinduism’ to counter British imperialism.Footnote 97 Vivekananda depended upon her audacity to introduce Kali to the British in Calcutta, on the grounds that a Western woman would explain the goddess’s violence and power without accusations of idolatry and paganism.Footnote 98 Kali, as a symbol of an aggrieved and outraged mother, would become central to the political theology of early Indian nationalism.Footnote 99
Vivekananda’s vision of Hindu Universalism sought to lift up the Indian masses at home, launch ‘karma yoga’, and underpin a cultural nationalism that opposed imperialism and Christianity. His legacy today remains immense: he is regarded as an influence both for contemporary Hindutva and for a tolerant, inclusive ‘Hindu modernism’. Although it would take time, he was effective in these ventures. There are 201 Ramakrishnan missions and Vedanta centres around the world, and almost 750 educational institutions, while famous Indian political activists on both left and right continue to cite him as an inspiration. At moments, he worried that the rise of ‘organization’ had undermined Ramakrishna’s mysticism, but he did not try to stop its march.Footnote 100
In comparison to Vivekananda, Sarah Farmer was endowed with both financial and cultural capital. She was well connected and irrepressible and, even though a woman, able to go to the Exposition and gain easy access to Eastern ‘stars’ like Vivekananda and Dharmapala. How many women would have been able to envisage and sustain a project like Green Acre? Her trip to Acre in Palestine with her companions showed that same ability to break through obstacles in search of spiritual discovery. But her conversion to Baha’i was her undoing. The constant strain of fighting with erstwhile friends and collaborators, given her commitment to harmony, was a psychic catastrophe, and she increasingly withdrew from former contacts. For those who had accepted the Baha’i faith, she was a visionary; for those who wished to further inquiry into religious traditions with no conversion, she had become seriously unhinged. The stereotypes of feminine emotional weakness were advanced to explain her ‘susceptibility’ to Abdu’l-Baha and to Baha’i’s spiritual errors. This receptivity, which had previously been one of her gifts, was now held against her. Her exhaustion intensified with the effects of old and newer physical injuries. Intermittently, she had voluntarily gone for rest cures in private hospitals, but in 1910 she was taken on a ride to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and placed in a sanatorium with a guardian appointed to make decisions for her. She was put away for five years, and ultimately became almost bedridden. Much of this story is still obscure, but it betrays more than a hint of tragedy.Footnote 101
During this period, Farmer’s one joy was the arrival in 1912 of Abdu’l-Baha for his important American tour.Footnote 102 Like Vivekananda, Abdu’l-Baha made his way West, and especially to America, but, unlike Vivekananda, he travelled in search of converts, who would accept the ‘Persian Revelation’ as the true religion. Followers flocked to see the great man, and Farmer’s project was taken up by others, most notably by Phoebe Hearst, philanthropist, feminist, and suffragist, and the mother of William Randolph Hearst, the media magnate. Her large donations were essential in making the movement important in elite circles in America. In 1913, Green Acre officially became the headquarters of the new religion, but Sarah Farmer took no part in these events. She was still committed, and it was only in 1916, when she was ‘rescued’ by her friends, that she returned to Maine. She died soon after.Footnote 103
For those who thought Farmer ‘mad’, her new-found faith was symptomatic of a dangerous manipulation by an Eastern spiritual leader who had somehow tricked or mesmerized her. This was the very suspicion also levelled against Vivekananda and his influence, though when it became a public scandal he was already dead. These fears were explicitly addressed when Sara Bull died in early 1911, leaving a large portion of her vast fortune to the Ramakrishna Mission in India. Her daughter, Olea, complained that her mother had been ‘hypnotized’ by the Hindus, and that she had been dispossessed of her rightful inheritance.Footnote 104 She won her case in court, but died on the day of settlement. Still, Olea’s argument about the danger of Hindu swamis had been heeded, as was the more general point that Bull had been a ‘bad mother’, unwilling to care for her only child, and susceptible to the blandishments of the gurus.Footnote 105
Farmer’s critics felt that she too had surrendered her freedom to a charismatic figure. At first glance, this was surprising, given Baha’i’s apparent emphasis on the equality of men and women. Indeed, six of the original nineteen disciples in the West were women. Because the faith rejected a privileged male clergy, women were important in the movement from the outset, and played key roles in cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.Footnote 106 Moreover, the growing emphasis on ‘world unity and social harmony’ and on ‘equality of the sexes … full civil rights for all people; [and] education for all’ provided universal teachings entirely in step with the progressive view of women in the movement.Footnote 107 For those who engaged in metaphysical reflection and comparative religion, New Thought experimentation, and spiritual motherhood, Baha’i was an appealing, all-encompassing creed, its emphasis on continuous revelation paralleling the process of ‘spiritual becoming’ to which they had dedicated their lives. Nevertheless, we should be wary of labelling Baha’i as a ‘feminist’ theology. Its structures remained patriarchal: the Universal House of Justice, the supreme institution of the faith, was all male. Male spiritual leaders like Abdu’l-Baha called Sarah Farmer a ‘handmaiden’, a status that, once again, reinforced a vision of her feminine subordination.
Conclusion
The life stories of Vivekananda and Farmer dramatically reveal the complicating realities of race, gender, and imperialism in the global spiritual transformations of the fin de siècle, in which an essentialist view of ‘Eastern wisdom’ played a key role. Their global outlook enabled them to question ‘old religions’ in new, idealistic ways. Farmer left what she saw as the rigid, patriarchal, and sect-ridden world of American Protestantism for adventures in psychic experimentation and ultimately the theological synthesis of Baha’i. Baha’i itself was a revolt against the spiritual orthodoxies and elite privileges of Shi‘a Islam, and its global flowering was an expression of religious and political philosophies that seemed liberating and harmonious, especially for women. Her opponents, however, saw Farmer’s ‘surrender’ to Abdu’l-Baha’s directorship and developing orthodoxy as a betrayal, despite the way in which Baha’i claimed to embrace all religions.
Vivekananda, too, was a reformer in religion, and created his neo-Vedantic synthesis partially by leaving a purely Indian context. He had imbibed what he saw as the Westernizing reformism of the Brahmo Samaj, defended meat-eating, and condemned the ‘don’t touchism’ of orthodox Hinduism, instead crafting a vision that appealed to Westerners through yoga and meditation. His formulation was not without new forms of hierarchy, as the discipleship of Western women and charismatic Asian figures suggests. Moreover, Vivekananda’s message was more double-edged than his followers in the West appreciated. His universalism was explicitly anti-imperial and rested on an assertion of the superiority of Hinduism as a mother-creed able to embrace, and even subsume, all others. He retained a strong cultural nationalism, sometimes with an aggressive insistence that became central to the anti-colonial struggle. He never forgot that his neo-Vedanta was a Hindu universalism. The sharper edge of his thought was more readily expressed in India, when Nivedita openly elaborated on its aggressive dimensions. But, unlike Farmer, he never sought converts in America, hoping merely to teach a respect for different paths to the supernatural – a key dimension of Ramakrishna’s thought, and a core aspect of Vivekananda’s anti-imperialism. People who meditate are rarely aware of the political struggles which once underpinned their practices, or the imperialist context from which they developed.
Ruth Harris is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls’ College and Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. She has written extensively on science, religion, and gender, especially in French history. She is currently finishing a book entitled Guru to the world: Vivekananda, India and the West.
