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The following is an excerpt from the National Post's review of Gillian McCann'sVanguard of the New Age.
It was just a friendly question, from one academic to another. “Why would you want to do research on a bunch of Rosedale matrons dabbling in exotica?” a colleague asked Gillian McCann, assistant professor in the Religions and Cultures Department of Nipissing University.
The reader can hear the author sigh. “This perception of Theosophy as marginal, eccentric, and associated with women has resulted in its being largely ignored,” she writes in the introduction to her historyVanguard of the New Age: The Toronto Theosophical Society, 1891 – 1945.
The hero of this story is one Albert Ernest Stafford Smythe, a Toronto newspaper journalist who became a theosophist after a chance encounter with an American adherent named William Quan Judge. At one point in reading the book I was startled to realize that Smythe’s son, and fellow theosophist, was none other than Conn Smythe, principal owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs in its glory years, builder of Maple Leaf Gardens and author of the memoir If You Can’t Beat ’Em in the Alley. So much for Rosedale matrons. That this iconic member of the hockey establishment at its most primal could also believe in the Secret Doctrine of Madame Helena Blavatsky, dictated by the Twelve Masters — immortal beings living in Tibet — surely meant that here was more than a bunch of cranks sitting around a Ouija board.
To learn more about Vanguard of the New Age, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
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