Alice and Laurence Oliphan's Divine Androgyne and "The Woman Question"

• Published in: Journal of the American Academy of Religion Vol. 84; no. 2; pp. 498 - 529
• Main Author: Chajes, Julie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Academy of Religion, Oxford University Press 01.06.2016
• ISSN: 0002-7189; 1477-4585

This article offers a historical and cultural analysis of two treatises of heterodox spirituality: Sympneumata (1885) and Scientific Religion (1888), and a novel, Massolam (1886). The main author was the celebrated Victorian diplomat Laurence Oliphant (1829-1888). Drawing on the teachings of the American "prophet" Thomas Lake Harris (1823-1906), Laurence Oliphant and his wife, Alice Le Strange (1846-1886), taught that everyone has a spiritual and physical complement of the opposite gender that can be encountered internally through spiritual practice. Humanity must abandon sexual intercourse in favor of individual communion with this counterpart, in order to return to its prelapsarian androgynous nature. Despite antecedents in earlier esoteric currents, the Oliphants' androgyne was a Victorian androgyne. It was intimately entwined with the pressing social, cultural, intellectual, political, and religious needs of a secularizing world in which the roles and rights of Woman were central—and contested—issues. It can be read as an answer to the nineteenth-century "problem of sex" and the "Woman Question," and it was both conservative and transgressive.