Author Description

Clothed With The Sun (Being the Book of the Illuminations of Anna Kingsford), by British theosophist, doctor, anti-vivisectionist, vegetarian and feminist Anna Bonus Kingsford & edited by Edward Maitland, was originally published in 1889. Clothed With The Sun is based around Kingsford's channelled visions, which were both waking and lucid dreams, in which she drew esoteric knowledge from angelic beings, travelled in time and had deep visions of a vast cosmos that she deemed to be alive at every scale of creation. These 'illuminations', as she called them, were exhausting and sometimes terrifying. Her close collaborator Edward Maitland worked with Kingsford to record her illuminations in this book, which was published after her death. Much of the channelled and revealed literature of the 19th Century is surreal fantasy, invented pseudo-histories, or pure free-association. By contrast, Anna Kingsford's illuminations are consistent, coherent, and display a deep understanding of occult traditions. Her theology could be described as Gnostic Christian Polytheist. She had a radical feminist viewpoint which seems fresh even today, one in which a Goddess figure, the 'Sophia' of the Essenes, Gnostics and early Christians has a central role.