Theos-Talk Archives (May 2005 Message tt00552)

Received this from a friend, I thought it was fascinating and well worth the read.
Cass

Baum, Burroughs, and the Theosophy Connection 
by David A. Adams

This brief article is in response to Dale R. Broadhurst's recent 
series of exhibits John Carter and the Sword of Theosophy - Revisited 
published on the internet by Bill Hillman at ERBzin-e. I believe that 
many of the questions raised in his interesting pages may be answered 
at least in part by a reference to Edgar Rice Burroughs' connection 
with L. Frank Baum of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz fame. 

Baum was a practicing theosophist and a close friend of Edgar Rice 
Burroughs -- at least close enough to recommend him in 1917 to 
membership in the Uplifters, a club of California businessman founded 
by Baum in 1914. It had been the practice of the Burroughs family to 
winter in California, usually starting in September, from at least 
the year 1913. Ed most likely met Baum during one of these extended 
periods* because by 1917 he felt that he knew him well enough to 
recommend his membership in the Uplifters, even though the Burroughs 
did not move to Tarzana until January 1919. That Ed was already a 
long-time a fan of the Oz series is proven from his early Minidoka, 
which includes a nod to Baum in the introduction as well as in the 
whimsical contents of this children's story. 

Perhaps the most thorough documentation of Baum's connection with 
theosophy was given in David B. Parker's "Oz: L. Frank Baum's 
Theosophical Utopia," a paper delivered at the Kennesaw Academic 
forum, April 1996. In his study, Parker presents a brief history of 
the various critical treatments of Oz over the years and cites Baum's 
friendly theosophical musings as the editor of the Aberdeen (South 
Dakota) Saturday Pioneer newspaper in 1890-91. An article by John 
Algeo, titled "A Notable Theosophist: L. Frank Baum" was published in 
the journal of the Theosophical Society in America announcing Baum 
and his wife's admission into the membership of the Chicago branch of 
the Theosophical Society on September 4, 1892. 

Robert R. Barrett notes that the manuscript of Minidoka was written 
during the 1901-1904 period when Burroughs and his wife were involved 
with his brother's gold mining enterprise in Idaho. Barrett 
writes, "Burroughs may well have been inspired by L. Frank Baum's 
introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900); why else would he 
have subtitled this story "An Historical Fairy Tale?" (Burroughs, 8). 

Actually, Baum's introduction to the Wizard of Oz means to contrast 
his own "modernized fairy tale" with the older "historical" fairy 
tale. He gives examples of the later as Grimm and Anderson and goes 
on to write: 

"Yet the old-time fairy tale, having serves for generations, may now 
be classed as "historical" in the children's library; for the time 
has come for a series of newer "wonder tales" in which the 
stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all 
the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to 
paint a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education includes 
morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its 
wonder-tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incidents. 

Having this thought in mind, the story of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz 
was written solely to pleasure children of today. It aspires to being 
a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained 
and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out." (Baum, 5). 

Thus, it's not exactly certain what Burroughs meant by "historical" 
unless he intended that he was writing in that older form which Baum 
clearly rejects in his introduction. Even more confusing is the fact 
that Baum does indeed include a host of dwarf-like characters and 
blood-curdling incidents in his Oz series, in fact, his pantheon of 
strange peoples and monsters is very similar to those later created 
by Burroughs. About the only "modern" elements one may find in Baum 
is the fact that his fantasies refer to American sites as does 
Burroughs in his Minidoka as well as in many later adventures on 
strange worlds. 

One need not go so far afield as the confusing tomes of Madame 
Blavatsky to find a theosophical connection in the writing of 
Burroughs -- even though a perusal of the chapter titles of her works 
alone read like the themes of ERB stories. The wide-read Burroughs no 
doubt was familiar with her work since it was so popular in his early 
years, but, true to his nature, if he was influenced by her writing 
at all, it would have been to reverse her fanciful findings rather 
than be directly inspired by them. No one would ever suggest that his 
general disinterest in any kind of organized religion would be 
followed by his being taken by the mumbo jumbo of such a strange cult 
as the theosophists. 

However, friend Baum was an ardent theosophist, and no doubt bent 
Ed's ear with many of these flights of fancy and outlandish theories 
about the origins of mankind and the ancient history of the world. He 
also must have explained to him how theosophy was embedded in his own 
Oz series, which I imagine Ed would have found highly amusing but 
hardly a model to follow in his own work. Most of ERB's mystical 
flights tend to be tongue-in-cheek -- increasingly so in his later 
work, especially in the Venus series. A careful reading of his entire 
oeuvre demonstrates only a thin scaffolding of mystery and 
mystification before he cuts to the chase of love and adventure. His 
infrequent long digressions into explanations of mythic origins of a 
certain race or world are never meant to be taken seriously as the 
tenets of a theosophical system but are merely structures to weave a 
entertaining yarn. 

It's fun to speculate on ERB's influences because there are so many. 
Yet, the man himself was a great inventor with one of the most 
fertile minds in imaginative literature. Burroughs is more than a 
synthesis of his wide reading. He himself is the magician of his 
realm, pulling peoples, creatures, and entire worlds out of his hat 
before our amazed eyes. He did this for over forty years, traveling 
through the normal three periods of artistic creation: Early Works 
(influenced by others, yet marked by the originality of his personal 
style); a Middle Period of maturity in which he refined his 
particular characteristics and wrote his masterpieces; and Late Works 
in which he moved away from his easy success to try his hand at new 
ideas and invented new worlds to conquer. 

Having written all this -- the usual disavowal of any overwhelming 
influence on The Master -- let me say that Baum was a charming man 
who was genuinely interested in writing children's literature. 
Burroughs was without question charmed by both the man and by his 
writing and would have felt honored to be his friend. I would guess 
that Ed was fascinated with Baum's success in publishing and probably 
picked his mind more about practical matters of selling and expanding 
his writing empire rather than getting into serious theosophical 
discussions. Yet everything seemed to rub off on Burroughs; he was 
able to take in a great amount of information and turn it over in his 
imagination to come up with new twists that have delighted readers 
for nearly a hundred years. 

Ed's personal relationship with Baum was probably friendly but not 
profound. As early as 1917, the very year that Burroughs came into 
the Uplifters, Baum was already seriously ill with a series of 
operations to follow, and he became bedridden for the rest of his 
life. Baum died on May 6, 1919, and the funeral was held at Forest 
Lawn Memorial Park in nearby Glendale. Ed was writing Under the Red 
Star at the time, an anticommunist satire set in the distant future 
of America. The views presented in this piece are overtly patriotic, 
which was typical of his Republican politics, but also graphically 
Christian, which is definitely atypical of his writing. There is even 
a sympathetic mention of a figure of Jesus Christ on the cross carved 
on ivory from an elephant tusk! It's not theosophy, but it does show 
that Burroughs was still experimenting with personal philosophy in 
his writing, which quickly returned to a more typical satirical view 
of religion in general. 

There is, to be sure, a definite Baum-Burroughs connection but with 
only the most tenuous link to theosophy. The difficulty with 
Burroughs, which does provide us with an intriguing series of 
questions, is related to his fecundity of creation. He wrote so very 
much and did have syncretic inclinations -- even linking his own 
multiple series at times -- yet the problem of coming up with a 
logical system to explain all the details of his many inventive 
worlds must always be met with, to quote Winston Churchill, "a riddle 
wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." His only partly systematic 
worlds have rambling mixtures of fact and fantasy like theosophical 
meanderings, yet these tangles are related to the flashes of his 
inventive imagination rather than some template of an secret, 
philosophical complex. He was willing to throw out something new and 
speculative rather than confining himself to a hard logic that tied 
up every loose string of conception. Thus we wonder about the 
intriguing, undisclosed details, such as the use or non-use of 
telepathy on Barsoom, the hatching of a combination of Martian and 
human eggs, the exact taxonomy of plant men -- among a host of other 
conundrums. 

At times, Burroughs sounds like a theosophist, and thus gives rise to 
speculation. I believe that the link with Baum is a valid one, but 
not the only one which may have led him into the thickets of 
theosophy. It is certain that Burroughs was not stuck in there, no 
matter what sticky goo may have rubbed off from either Baum or 
Blavatsky. Ed was too protean for that. He created systems of his 
own, and theosophy had to wait in line for his subconscious to 
process and decant a portion of its brew according to his need in his 
next novel. Again, I must say, that it seems that nothing ever came 
out of Ed's imagination from his reading or conversations with others 
that was not set on its head, topsy-turvy, to be given a Burroughsian 
twist into not Oz but Otz. Heaven is hell for travelers down the 
river Iss. Dante is conjured as often as Blavatsky, but the mixture 
is always pure Burroughs. 

Burroughs' inventive output over his 40 years as an author is 
remarkable enough with his 80 plus novels and stories, yet the vast 
(there is no other word for it) number of his characters, creatures, 
and worlds have given rise to entire dictionaries just to keep track 
of the enormous wealth of names and places, most of which are 
extremely inventive, employing the use of a host of languages from 
both East and West. These titles, names, locations, etc. are as 
extensive as the Hindu pantheon of gods, and are so suggestive of a 
familiarity with nearly every world religion, that speculation easily 
arises about some sort of theosophical link, yet every indication 
from his biographers tells us that Ed was not a deep thinker, just an 
amazing storyteller and word crafter who found the name or title that 
sounded right for each man, woman, or denizen of his worlds. It was 
not so much the matter of a philosophical system as having an 
exceptionally good ear for the precise sound and effect of words. 

Of course, that does not mean that one could not easily construct a 
theosophical system out of ERB's writings. They are certainly complex 
enough in the multitude of details, and most of his characters can 
bear the weight of archetypal assimilation. In fact, his most famous 
character, Tarzan, has become a symbol for the wild man of nature 
known around the entire world. The main problem with constructing 
such a pantheon is not diversity but depth, for, like Baum, Burroughs 
is considered to be a writer of literature for children or 
adolescents, so his work today is considered as examples of dated and 
blushingly romantic sword and sorcery or proto-science fiction. 

Like Baum, Burroughs still has his adepts -- his fans -- or I would 
not be writing this article. His writing is still engaging to me, and 
part of the fun is playing with the great wealth of possibilities 
contained in his fantastic characters and images from many worlds 
beyond this familiar one. 

* Taliaferro indicates the winter of 1916 for this meeting 
. 

Bibliography
Baum, L. Frank, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Harper/Collins, 1987 

Burroughs, Edgar Rice, Minidoka, 937th Earl of One Mile Series M, 
Dark Horse Comics, Inc., 1998 

Taliaferro, John, Tarzan Forever: The Life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, 
Creator of Tarzan, Scribner, 1999. 


Internet Resources 



Dale R. Broadhurst's Sword of Theosophy Series
Part I: John Carter: Sword of Theosophy Revisited 
Part II: Lupoff of Mars: The Quest for Gullivar Jones Carter 
Part III: ERB: Search for Ultimate Answers 

>From the Broadhurst Library: A Source for ERB?
William Scott-Elliot's The Story of Atlantis The Lost Lemuria ~ 
Part 1 
William Scott-Elliot's The Story of Atlantis The Lost Lemuria ~ 
Part 2 

Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Nkima Chattering from the Shoulder Articles by David Adams 
Religious Themes in the Novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs by Robert 
B. Zeuschner 
ERB & LFB: THE WIZARDS OF CALIFORNIA by David Adams 
Minidoka: ERB C.H.A.S.E.R. Encyclopedia 
Edgar Rice Burroughs Bio Timeline by Bill Hillman 


L. Frank Baum and Oz
E-Text Editions of Books by L. Frank Baum 
Jim's Wizard of Oz Criticims Page 
Oz: L. Frank Baum's Theosophical Utopia by David B. Parker 
A Faculty Colloquium Speech given at Kennesaw State 
University, 1996. 
Eric's Wonderful Wizard of Oz Website 
Jim's Ozzy Links Page 
Nate Barlow's Wonderful Wizard of Oz FAQ List 
Piglet Press Tour Guide to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz 
Wendy's Wonderful Wizard of Oz Complete Directory 
"The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism," by Henry M. 
Littlefield 
The Spirituality of Oz 
The Rise and Fall of Oz as a "Parable on Populism" by David B. 
Parker 
Oz Reference Library 
Wizard of Allegory




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