In February 1893 the feminist journal Shafts published two articles by Mrs. A. Phillips the second of which provided an esoteric reading of the crucifixion in which Phillips, making recourse to Sanskrit, argued that Christ's death on the cross symbolized the “perfect marriage union of the male and female” (qtd. in Dixon, Divine Feminine 163). Feminist theosophists such as Phillips believed Christianity's neglect of the Divine Feminine to have resulted in a masculinist ordering of religious authority and in the concomitant subordination of women. The editor of Shafts, Margaret Shurmer Sibthorpe, agreed; she added a note to Phillips's second article urging her readers to work towards the formulation of a gospel that would facilitate women's emancipation. In the same issue of Shafts, Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins was reviewed. The reviewer cited at length a passage from the novel's Proem characterizing the divine as the union of the male and female principles and concluded with a discussion of the “heavenly twins” of the novel's title. The Shafts reviewer, however, did not explore the significance of religious allusions in The Heavenly Twins, nor did she examine the relation between the dual-sexed divine of the Proem and the story of the heavenly twins, Angelica and Diavolo Hamilton-Wells. Subsequent Grand scholars have not, for the most part, taken up these questions. The possibility that the novel might constitute an attempt to reconfigure dominant discourses of religion and gender, of the kind Sibthorpe had called for and Phillips undertaken, is largely unconsidered. The New Woman as a “modern maiden” is instead assumed to emerge from a predominantly secular cultural context.Footnote ¹

Recent historical studies of alternative spirituality and fin-de-siècle feminism prompt a revisiting of the singularly secular origins of the literary New Woman. In her history of occultism and British modernity, Alex Owen disputes unitary notions of secularization by drawing attention to the fin-de-siècle mystical revival. Late Victorians, disillusioned by orthodox Christianity and by scientific materialism, turned increasingly to Medieval and Renaissance Christian mysticism, inspirational neo-Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism, and the occult. Owen charts the indebtedness of modernist literature, philosophy, psychology, and science to the new occult movement. Joy Dixon, in her study of theosophy and feminism, questions the historiographical alignment of modernity with the secular by noting the failure of historians to gender the process of secularization. The Evangelical alignment of middle-class women with spirituality in the early nineteenth century rendered religion a primary source of cultural authority for these women. Upon encountering religious doubt, many chose to rework, rather than to relinquish, religious belief. Feminist spiritualities emerged as late Victorians, seeking alternative, spiritually-based discourses of gender and sexuality, unearthed minority traditions within orthodox religion, and/or moved beyond orthodoxy altogether. Dixon represents feminist spirituality as a significant site of sexual politics at the turn of the century. If Owen and Dixon explore the role of alternative religion in the making of modernity, and in the making of feminism as a modern movement, they, along with historian Antoinette Burton, also draw attention to the imperial frame within which discourses of religion and modernity converged at the fin de siècle. In an era of increasing contestation of imperial rule, and amidst fears of “racial regression,” middle-class Victorian and Edwardian women leveraged feminist spiritualities by annexing fin-de-siècle aspirations for Anglo-Saxon racial superiority and British imperial supremacy.

In this paper I situate Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893) within the feminist strand of the fin-de-siècle mystical revival and in relation to the crisis of faith to which heterodox feminist spirituality was one response. Grand's novel shows the “crisis of gender and sexuality” to be a key factor in the “crisis of faith.”Footnote ² Taking the Contagious Diseases (CD) Acts and the sexual double standard they legitimated as the ideological context for her spiritual project,Footnote ³ Grand conducts a relentless enquiry into the complicity of orthodox Christianity in the masculinist libidinal economy of the latter nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴ Grand's response to the masculinism of orthodox Christianity is not the outright rejection of religious belief. Instead, the author of The Heavenly Twins turns to theosophy to reconfigure dominant discourses of spirituality, gender, and sexuality simultaneously; the New Women and New Men of The Heavenly Twins emerge from within a theosophically inflected feminist spirituality.Footnote ⁵ If Grand's novel articulates a modernist reworking of religion, its author mobilizes imperial Victorian discourses of class, race, and nation to authorize her spiritual project. In the course of this essay I examine how imperial grammars of difference were constituted and contested in theosophical teachings and position Grand's feminist spirituality in relation to these.Footnote ⁶

The Theosophical Society was founded by Russian émigré Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and American barrister Henry Olcott in New York in 1875; the British Theosophical Society was established in 1878. Theosophical teachings derived from communications ostensibly received by Helena Blavatsky via occult means from a Tibetan Brotherhood of spiritually advanced Masters or “Mahatmas”; the teachings comprised an esoteric reading of Buddhism. However, like other iterations of fin-de-siècle mysticism, theosophy was decidedly eclectic; Blavatsky's writings reveal the western influences of Spiritualism, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, medieval Cabala and alchemy, Hellenistic Hermeticism and Gnosticism, Greek Neoplatonism, and Christianity. Blavatsky's recourse to a diversity of religious traditions served her larger purpose, outlined in The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy (1888), of reconciling science and religion by positing their common origin in an “ancient wisdom” believed to be evident in all religious expression, to varying degrees, from the earliest times. The doctrine of the One Life was central to theosophical articulations of the “ancient wisdom”; it described the unity of matter and spirit, a universal soul or cosmic mind that pervaded both, and the evolution of all life forms through a series of incarnations towards Consciousness, or union with the Absolute: “We believe in a Universal Divine Principle, the root of ALL, from which all proceeds, and within which all shall be absorbed at the end of the great cycle of Being” (Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy 63). Theosophists juxtaposed their monistic, impersonal, and immanent Absolute, who operated in the universe through apprehensible laws, with Christianity's dualistic, anthropomorphic, and transcendent God, who appeared to operate in the universe through personal predilection. The rationalism of Blavatsky's discourse shaped theosophical practice; its purpose was to unveil the laws that governed hidden spiritual realms.Footnote ⁷

A wide range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminists joined the Theosophical Society.Footnote ⁸ They were drawn by Helena Blavatsky's spiritually-based alternative to dominant discourses of gender and by her critique of masculinist Christianity. In The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky represented the Divine Principle as sexless (or dual-sexed), but manifest on the material plane in sexual polarity, amongst other dualities. Subverting both the trajectory and the telos of Victorian readings of Darwinian evolution, Blavatsky suggested that humans had, in their earliest and highest stage of evolution, been androgynous and non-material, or spiritual, in form. The original Adam, a spiritual androgyne, had been created in the image of the double-sexed Elohim. The Genesis account of the separation of Eve from Adam, read esoterically, provided an account of the “downward” spiral of humanity into both materiality and sexual duality. For Blavatsky evolutionary progress entailed humanity's movement back towards androgyny, a concomitant falling away of the material (or the regaining of a spiritual form), and ultimately union with the divine. Drawing on the hermetic doctrine of correspondences (encapsulated in the saying “as above, so below”) and the Egyptian myth of the Divine Hermaphrodite, Blavatsky argued that the individual's attainment of gender balance and the representation of both sexes in the socio-political order were crucial to the inauguration of the New Age. The neglect of the Divine Feminine in Christianity was deemed deleterious to humanity's development; Blavatsky considered Christianity a recent and degenerate iteration of the ancient wisdom.

The founding of the Theosophical Society took place against the backdrop of British imperialism in India and the dissemination of ethnologies by colonial administrators and missionaries. The appointment of Friedrich Max Müller as the first chair of philology at Oxford in 1868 marked a growing interest in eastern mysticism. In the late 1870s the initial volumes of Müller's Sacred Books of the East were published, the first translation into English of the major religious texts of Asia, and in the late 1890s the early volumes of his Sacred Books of the Buddhists appeared. Theosophy was deeply implicated in the production of knowledge about “the East.” Blavatsky represented India as spiritually enlightened in opposition to a materialist West, thus reinscribing an orientalist (in Edward Said's sense of the word) East/West divide. Colonial power relations informed theosophy's religious syncretism; by characterizing their endeavor as the recovery of hidden wisdom within Buddhism and Hinduism, middle-class English theosophists positioned themselves as arbiters of the “true meaning” of these traditions. Furthermore, although theosophists replaced Anglo-Saxons with Indians at the pinnacle of their evolutionary pyramid (the latter had had, as G. R. S. Mead observed, the benefit of “thousands of years . . . of religious discipline and soul-culture” [qtd. in Dixon, Divine Feminine 131]), Anglo-Saxons were nevertheless positioned directly below Indians, and sometimes seen to be second only to ancient Aryan-Indians, in an evolutionary scheme that otherwise followed the contours of Social Darwinism.Footnote ⁹ The effects of theosophy's syncreticism were unstable, however. Blavatsky's privileging of Buddhism and Hinduism over Christianity undermined a key assumption of Britain's “civilizing mission.” Annie Besant's involvement in the Indian nationalist struggle and her eventual election as president of the Indian National Congress in 1917, as well as Henry Olcott's participation in the independence movement in Ceylon, constituted the most subversive outcomes of theosophical thought for its British and American adherents.

Sarah Grand's engagement with religion is evident from the first pages of The Heavenly Twins. The novel commences with a line of music from Mendelssohn's Elijah: “He, watching over Israel, slumbers not, nor sleeps” (xxxix). In the Mendelssohn oratorio these words of comfort, taken from Psalm 121, are delivered by angels to the prophet Elijah after he has denounced the faithlessness of the Baal-worshiping Israelites, been sought by an apostate King Ahab, and fled into the desert. Grand's indebtedness to theosophy is almost immediately apparent as she situates the Mendelssohn refrain within a sexual equality feminist paradigm. Using a four-part evolutionary schema, the narrator of the Proem catalogues the responses of the inhabitants of the city of Morningquest (the setting for much of Grand's novel) to the Elijah refrain, which is said to ring out from the city's cathedral. Those for whom the cathedral's chime typifies “a God essentially masculine, and like a man” are characterized as “simple-minded folk” (xli). More advanced iterations of masculinist Christianity occupy the higher rungs of Grand's evolutionary ladder. At its apex are those amongst whom “the supremacy of the great masculine idea was at last being seriously threatened” (xliii). The spiritual vanguard of Morningquest understand “Elohim” to be “mistranslated in the book of Genesis as ‘He’”; they believe the term to signify instead “the union to which all nature testifies, the male and female principles which together created the universe” (xliii).

Grand's indebtedness to theosophy is evident not only in her representation of a dual-sexed divine but also in her recourse to immanentist notions of the divine in her description of the spiritual awakening of Morningquest's religious elite. The latter have heard a “new voice of extraordinary sweetness . . . not his, the voice of man; but theirs, the collective voice of humanity” (xliii). Like theosophists, these inhabitants of Morningquest recognize as a spiritual necessity the importance of having both sexes represented in the socio-political order: “the infinite father and mother, without whom, in perfect accord and exact equality, the best government of nations has always been crippled and abortive” (xliii).

In positing the dual-sexed Divine Principle as the best reading of the divine of the Elijah refrain, Grand, in characteristically theosophical fashion, repositions Jewish and Christian teachings within a broader sexual-equality spirituality. She implies that the veneration of the male divine by the majority of Morningquest's inhabitants constitutes a form of apostasy comparable to that of ancient Israel as it abandoned Yahweh for foreign gods, and presents nineteenth-century feminists as the “Elijahs,” or prophets, of their day. Grand's use of the Elijah framework in The Heavenly Twins may well have been intended as a rejoinder to John Keble's 1833 Assize Sermon, which marked the start of the Tractarian movement and which was published under the title “National Apostasy.” (Keble drew on a similar biblical narrative (1 Samuel 12) to suggest that England, in eschewing its Catholic heritage, had turned from God to pagan worship.) Anglo-Catholicism is the central focus of Grand's criticism of Christianity in the main narrative of The Heavenly Twins and, as I suggest below, the latter has much in common with Helena Blavatsky's impugning of Christianity. The Elijah refrain is reiterated throughout Grand's narrative, and serves both as an ongoing indictment of masculinist Christianity and as a source of comfort for the minority who contest it.

The evolutionary trajectory adopted by Grand in the Proem of The Heavenly Twins was central to feminist theosophy. The publication of Darwin's Descent of Man and E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture in 1871 saw a shift in English attitudes to religion; science and technology were rendered the “hallmarks of cultural superiority,” religion deemed “primitive,” and Britain's “civilizing mission” similarly reconfigured (Dixon, Divine Feminine 19). This shift was gendered; masculinity was aligned with modernity, rationality, and progress, and femininity with the pre-modern, superstition, and atavism. By positioning Darwinian evolution as a small component of a much larger process of spiritual development (while also attempting to reconcile science and religion), Blavatsky reinstated the cultural authority of both spirituality and of women. Grand's Blavatskian re-visioning of Darwinian evolution is rendered explicit in her use of a quotation from Darwin as the epigraph to Book II of the novel, “A Maltese Miscellany”: “The great leading idea is quite new to me, viz., that during the late ages the mind will have been modified more than the body: yet I had not got as far as to see with you, that the struggle between the races of man depended entirely on intellectual and moral qualities” (171). The above quotation also exemplifies the racial and imperial frame within which theosophical discourses of spiritual evolution were formulated, to which I shall return later in this essay.

The representation in the Proem of Christian notions of the divine as rudimentary is matched in the main narrative by a thoroughgoing exposé of orthodox Christianity as it is practiced on the material plane. Grand was an ardent supporter of Josephine Butler and her campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts and, like other social purity feminists, sought to sustain and to broaden the campaign's focus after the repeal of the Acts in 1886.Footnote ¹⁰ The CD Acts and their legitimation of the sexual double standard thus comprise the context of Grand's exploration of the material effects of orthodox Christianity. In the interlocking plots of the main narrative of her novel Grand charts the attempts of three female protagonists – Edith Beale, Evadne Frayling, and Angelica Hamilton-Wells – to negotiate the sexual double standard and the masculinist libidinal economy of which it was a part. In each case Grand delineates the role of orthodox Christian discourse in the structuring of her characters’ gender and sexual subjectivity.

Grand's novel has been read as a social purity (and more recently, a eugenic) treatise on sexual selection, in which the clear-headed rationalism of Angelica Hamilton-Wells is shown to trump the religiously inflected sensuality of Edith Beale and Evadne Frayling. In this essay I argue that The Heavenly Twins constitutes a more ambitious project on Grand's part, one which disrupts the rational/sensual and religious/secular dichotomies that underpin scholarly readings of the novel and contests the parameters of contemporary representations of social purity feminism. Both religiously inflected sensuality and passionless sexual selection are shown to be products of a masculinist libidinal economy in The Heavenly Twins as, with “The Tenor and the Boy − An Interlude,” Grand envisions as part of her modernist spiritual project the conditions within which an alternative economy of desire might be inaugurated.

In a scene that is central to the novel, the syphilitic Edith Beale summons to her deathbed those who “represent the arrangement of society which has made it possible for me and my child to be sacrificed in this way” (300; bk. 3, ch. 8), namely, Bishop Beale, Sir Mosley Menteith, and Dr. Galbraith. Grand's choice of wording in the above quotation anticipates the work of contemporary French feminists Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous, and these scholars’ re-reading of the work of Jacques Lacan may serve best to elucidate Grand's critique of orthodox Christianity. Bishop Beale, Sir Mosley Menteith, and Dr. Galbraith embody the “law of the father” in one of its nineteenth-century iterations: the religious, military and medical professions’ support of the CD Acts. Bishop Beale, as Edith's father and a priest, exemplifies most trenchantly the replication of the Oedipal authority of the father in the institutions of the Symbolic. His authority is shown to reside in his collusion with the military and the medical professions in perpetuating dominant discourses of gender that align masculinity with sexual privilege and femininity with sexual ignorance; Bishop Beale turns a blind eye to the profligacy of his daughter's suitor, the military officer Sir Mosley Menteith, and his willed ignorance is replicated in the reluctance of Dr. Galbraith to divulge to Edith the cause of her illness. The subsequent death of Edith may be read as a nineteenth-century iteration of the “matricide” or the sacrifice of women upon which the law of the father is predicated.

Grand's critique of the role of orthodox religious discourses of gender is rendered explicit in an exchange between Mrs. Frayling and Lady Hamilton-Wells with regard to the raising of their daughters. Mrs. Frayling, epitomizing Bishop Beale's position, avers of her daughter Evadne, “She is really devout, and beautifully reverential in her manner both in church and to us, her parents . . . perfectly innocent, and I am indeed thankful to think that at eighteen she knows nothing of the world and its wickedness, and is therefore eminently qualified to make somebody an excellent wife” (39; bk. 1, ch. 8). Lady Hamilton-Wells resists the conventional alignment of femininity, spirituality, and sexual ignorance: “My experience is that what you call ‘beautiful innocence,’ and what I consider dangerous ignorance, is not a safe state in which to begin the battle of life. In the matter of marriage especially an ignorant girl may be fatally deceived” (41; bk. 1, ch. 8).

Angelica Hamilton-Wells identifies Edith Beale's betrayal by the Church as “deeds of darkness that are done . . . in the name of the Lord” (420; bk. 4, ch. 13). She observes that Morningquest is “curiously named if you consider how little quest there is for morning here, for the new day which would bring the light of truth after the darkness of error” (378; bk. 4, ch. 4). Angelica's characterization of Morningquest as benighted evokes Grand's Elijah framework, and the author's equating of masculinist Victorian Christianity with the apostasy of the ancient Israelites. Grand thus shows the regressive gender ideology of the Church to have significant consequences for both the libidinal economy and for wider society. Grand's feminist re-reading of the Mendelssohn oratorio is also apparent in Lord Dawne's response to the syphilitic Edith, which echoes Elijah's despair (articulated in the piece “It is enough, O Lord” in the Mendelssohn oratorio): “How long, O Lord, how long? We are powerless; we accomplish so little; the great sum of suffering never seems lessened, do what we will!” (312; bk. 3, ch. 10). Lord Dawne's response to Ideala on the question of whether the twins are “one of us” parallels Yahweh's instructions to Elijah in the desert: “make no move, but wait in patience ‘Until the day break, and the shadows flee away’” (268; bk. 3, ch. 3). It is the heavenly twins who emerge as harbingers of the dawn in Grand's novel.

Grand's critique of orthodox Christianity is not confined to the Church's perpetuation of dominant discourses of gender; it also entails an examination of the role of religion in the structuring of the sexual subjectivity of her female protagonists. Here Grand turns to her second female protagonist, Evadne Frayling, and, drawing on the anti-Ritualist discourse that had emerged in response to the Oxford Movement earlier in the century, derides the sensuality of Evadne's High Church religious practice.Footnote ¹¹ Evadne Frayling has, from the start of the novel, evidenced a steady rationality. She has not only provided herself with an education but has also eschewed the romanticism of the English novel for dispassionate sexual selection. Evadne's rationality is, however, sabotaged in an Anglican church service. The “scents and sounds of nature . . . a delicious accompaniment which filled the interval between what she knew of this world and what she dreamt of the next,” awaken her sensuality (46; bk. 1, ch. 9). The divine becomes the object of Evadne's sensuality, “she sank upon her knees, and lifted up her heart to express the joy of it in one ecstatic note: ‘O blessed Lord!’” (46; bk. 1, ch. 9).

Grand's depiction of Evadne's religious sensualism prompts a re-examination of the relation of religion to the sexual subjectivity of Victorian women; it suggests a revisiting of representations of the devout but passionless middle-class Victorian woman, not only with regard to Catholicism and Anglo-Catholic spirituality but also in relation to other nineteenth-century religious traditions that privileged religious feeling. For Grand, however, the sensual effects of religious devotion are singularly negative. Evadne's spirituality leaves no room for intellectual engagement: “it was . . . something to be felt, essentially, not known as anything but a pleasurable and elevating sensation” (223; bk. 2, ch. 12). Evadne's response to Colonel Colquhoun, whom she first sees in a church service, is structured by her religious devotion: “Her heart bounded – her face flushed . . . she thrilled through the rest of the service to the consciousness that there, not many yards away, her future husband sat and sighed for her” (53; bk. 1, ch. 11). The mind-numbing effects of religious devotion deter Evadne from enquiring into Colquhoun's past; she, like Edith Beale, marries a syphilitic military officer.Footnote ¹² Unlike Edith, however, Evadne learns of her husband's past on the day she marries him and avoids contracting syphilis by refusing to have sexual relations with him.

Grand's focus on sexual selection and on venereal disease in The Heavenly Twins has led to scholarly investigations into the author's relation to eugenics, such as that recently undertaken by Angelique Richardson.Footnote ¹³ Sarah Grand's fictional work exemplifies an undeniable appropriation of eugenic discourse, most clearly in her two short stories, “Eugenia: A Modern Maiden and a Man Amazed” and “Boomellen,” both part of the collection Our Manifold Nature (published in 1894, a year after The Heavenly Twins), and in Grand's final two novels, Adnam's Orchard (1912) and The Winged Victory (1916). An engagement with eugenics is apparent in The Heavenly Twins, not only in the author's exploration of sexual selection (or rational reproduction) but also in the narrator's commendation of Evadne's reading of the works of Francis Galton, in a quotation from Darwin that cites the work of Galton approvingly, and in Evadne's description of her syphilitic husband Colonel Colquhoun (“He for one should never have been born. With his ancestry, he must have come into the world foredoomed to a life of dissipation and disease” [662; bk. 6, ch. 18]).

Grand's recourse to eugenics in The Heavenly Twins is, nevertheless, partial; it is qualified by an interest in the environmental effects of religious discourse on the gender and sexual subjectivity of her female characters. The relation of heredity to religious sensualism is differently gendered in Grand's novel. The religious practice of Grand's degenerate male characters, such as Colonel Colquhoun and the Duke of Morningquest, is shown to be primarily the result of hereditary degeneration. With regard to Edith Beale and Evadne Frayling, however, Grand focuses on the environmental consequences of Anglo-Catholic and Catholic religious practice. This allows the author of The Heavenly Twins to delineate the deleterious effects on women of orthodox religious discourse, to chart an emancipatory alternative, and to position women as the hope of the human race regardless of their lineage. Grand's differently gendered mobilization of eugenics is evident when Angelica reflects on her relationship with the Tenor:

Angelica's conclusion that her own fate may be the result of choice rather than heredity shows Grand's primary allegiance in this novel to lie with social purity feminism rather than eugenics. Eugenic discourse is mobilized primarily to counter masculine sexual privilege; it is evoked in relation to upper-class, military men (working-class women, seduced women, and prostitutes are treated sympathetically by Grand, who indicts her middle-class protagonists for the “purity” that compels them to turn away from the former) and focuses singularly on the putatively hereditary effects of syphilis and sexual dissipation.Footnote ¹⁴ Ultimately, as I argue below, Grand's espousal of rational reproduction is itself partial, and subject to a more ambitious sexual/spiritual project in which both sensuality and rationality are refused as products of a masculinist economy of desire, and an alternative economy of desire explored.

If a masculinist libidinal economy represents the outworking on the material plane of the rudimentary belief of some of Morningquest's inhabitants in a male deity, the effects of the more advanced belief in a dual-sexed Divine Principle, extolled in the Proem, are far from evident in the novel's main narrative. The spiritual vanguard of Morningquest is largely invisible. An oblique reference is made to a “circle . . . [that] could keep counsel among themselves” (515; bk. 5, ch. 5). Elsewhere, Ideala, Lady Claudia, and Lord Dawne (protagonists in Ideala, the novel that preceded The Heavenly Twins in Grand's trilogy) are identified, by an adversary, as part of “the New Order” or “a sort of feminine vehmgericht” that objects to “the interference of the Church, as being a distinctly masculine organization, in the regulation of their lives” (489–90; bk. 5, ch. 2). The invisibility of the spiritual elite of Morningquest is in keeping with the secrecy of late nineteenth-century esoteric spirituality. It is also in accord with Grand's feminist appropriation of the Elijah narrative; the spirituality of the cognoscenti of Morningquest represents a marginalized belief system in a city characterized by “the darkness of error” (378; bk. 4, ch. 4).

It is the heavenly twins, Angelica and Diavolo Hamilton-Wells, who emerge as purveyors of light and harbingers of change in Grand's novel. The term “the heavenly twins” is first given to Angelica and Diavolo during childhood; Dr. Galbraith adopts it to denote, in an affectionate and ironic manner, the twins’ persistent mischief-making (42; bk. 1, ch. 8). That this appellation has greater significance is signaled by the novel's title and by the citing, on the title page of the novel, of Angelica/the Boy's reframing of the term:

Although Angelica refuses the astrological resonances of the term “the heavenly twins,” Grand draws on the mythology of the Zodiac to frame the emergence of Angelica and Diavolo as the New Woman and New Man of her novel. The twins exemplify the personalities of those born under the planet Gemini; they are witty, communicative, and clever, but also capable of superficiality and malevolence. For theosophists the Zodiac had implications far beyond individual personalities, however; it was a pictorial version of Hindu cosmogony representing “the spiritual and physical evolution of human races, of ages, and of divisions of time” (Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled 2: 460). In Graeco-Roman myth Gemini, the two stars named after the twin brothers Castor and Pollux, symbolized mortality and immortality; Castor was mortal, the son of Leda and the mortal Tyndareus, and Pollux immortal, the son of Leda and Zeus. Pollux was known for sharing his immortality with Castor. For Blavatsky, Gemini or the heavenly twins, understood esoterically, denoted the upward evolution of humanity from the material to the spiritual plane.Footnote ¹⁵ This transition, the acquisition of immortality, entailed sex/gender transformation; humanity evolved towards the spiritual androgyne – the original Adam.

In his 1906 text, The Cult of the Heavenly Twins, Oxford Biblical scholar J. Rendel Harris observed that Castor and Pollux had antecedents in two other sets of “children of the sky” (24), Phospur and Hesper, the Morning and Evening star of Graeco-Roman astronomy, and the Ashvins, or twin horsemen, of the Hindu Rigveda (key figures in the development of the Zodiac in that literature).Footnote ¹⁶ Both sets of “heavenly twins” were understood to be forerunners of the early morning light whose function was to drive away the darkness of the night. Castor and Pollux were themselves widely associated with night and day; Blavatsky, for example, argued that, as a result of Pollux's sharing of his immortality with Castor, the “twin brothers live alternately, one during the day, and the other during the night” (The Secret Doctrine 123). Harris noted further that Castor and Pollux were known in ancient Roman culture as guarantors of public faith, compelling truth-telling in legal transactions and avenging perjury (1).

Like their heavenly counterparts, Angelica and Diavolo are represented as harbingers of the morning in a benighted Morningquest.Footnote ¹⁷ A campaign of truth-telling that is directed at the Church comprises their attempt to expel the darkness of Morningquest; the twins expose the avarice and self-serving ambition of the clergy (268; bk. 3, ch. 3), the sectarianism evident in Protestant-Catholic animosity (153; bk. 1, ch. 20), the Church's manipulative and misconceived readings of the actions of God in history (145; bk. 1, ch. 20), and inconsistencies in the Christian scriptures (131; bk. 1, ch. 19) and tradition (145; bk. 1, ch. 20). The twins’ criticism of Christianity follows the contours of that of Helena Blavatsky. In the second volume of Isis Unveiled Blavatsky derided the increasing “materialism, worldliness and hypocrisy” of Christians (ix), Christian sectarianism (“warring sects” each of which claimed to be based on “divine revelation, and . . . to have the keys of the celestial gates” [2]), the intellectual limits of Christian theology (the “insatiable desire” of the “early architects of Christian theology . . . to extend the dominion of blind faith” [26]), contradictions in the biblical text (the “blunders of the Old Testament are as nothing to those of the gospels” [133]), and the coercive means – from the Inquisition to the Salem Witch Trials – through which the Church had secured adherence to its teachings. Like Grand, Blavatsky made Catholicism her primary target: “we cast our gauntlet at the dogmatic theologians who would enslave both history and science, and especially the Vatican [with its] . . . despotic pretensions” (Isis Unveiled 2: x).Footnote ¹⁸ In echoing Blavatsky's impugning of Christianity as the “chief opponent of free thought” (Isis Unveiled 2: x), the twins represent the paradoxical alignment of spirituality with rationalism evidenced in theosophy as a modernist reworking of religious belief.

Just as Castor and Pollux functioned as guarantors of the public faith in ancient Rome, Angelica and Diavolo attempt to restore “good faith” to the city of Morningquest. Diavolo refuses misogynist readings of the Fall and the animosity between the sexes they sustain. In response to his grandfather's contention that it was a woman who was responsible for the Fall, Diavolo argues, “it's just as likely as not that it was Adam whom the devil first put up to a thing or two, and Eve got it out of him . . . and then they both came a cropper together, and it was a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other” (261; bk. 3, ch. 3). Echoing religious feminists of the nineteenth century, Diavolo attributes a leading role to women in the salvation of men, “But there is no doubt about the redemption. It was a woman who managed that little affair . . . in the matter of who have done most good in the world, women come out a long chalk ahead of us” (261; bk. 3, ch. 3). Like the Ashvins of the Rigveda, Angelica and Diavolo thus embody the intertwined forces of destruction and salvation, as is suggested by the referents of their names, “angel” and “devil.” Grand's positioning of both referents under the rubric “the heavenly twins” reveals a skeptical approach to conventional Christian categories of good and evil; it echoes the theosophical mimicking of Christian notions of heaven and hell evident, for example, in the title of the theosophical journal, Lucifer.

While Angelica and Diavolo's truth-telling constitutes an attempt to dispel the darkness of Morningquest, it is their dissident sexual identity that most overtly renders the twins harbingers of Morningquest's New Dawn. Theosophist Charles Lazenby summarized Blavatsky's theory of sexed evolution in the following way: “It seems reasonable that at every seventh incarnation we change from one sex over into the other. We have six lives [which are] masculine and on the seventh one our consciousness as individuals in the great world-drama takes on the colouring of the feminine, and in the following six lives we come forth feminine, to again in the seventh take over the colouring of the masculine” (qtd. in Dixon, “Sexology and the Occult” 422). Sexed reincarnation, in allowing the soul or Higher Self to occupy both male and female bodies, facilitated the soul's evolution towards androgyny. Absolute maleness and femaleness were, in Blavatsky's scheme, possible only at the mid-point of the cycle of sexed evolution. Between these points, humans were in the process of becoming male or female; they experienced disjunctions between physical sex and sex/gender subjectivity. Addressing the latter possibility, G. R. S. Mead, editor of the Vâhan, noted: “we frequently have, so to say, men in women's bodies, and women in men's bodies” (qtd. in Dixon, “Sexology and the Occult” 421). Those on the cusp of the change of sex balanced both maleness and femaleness as well as masculinity and femininity. Named “Uranians,” their androgyny was believed to signal the transition of humanity towards its original, spiritual form, the increasing proximity of the material realm to the spiritual, and the coming of the New Age.

Angelica and Diavolo Hamilton-Wells exemplify the sex/gender hybridity characteristic of those in the process of sexed evolution. To her tutor, Mr. Ellis, Angelica asserts: “Diavolo and I find that we were mixed somehow wrong, and I got his mind and he got mine . . . the fact of the matter is that I am Diavolo and he is me” (124; bk. 1, ch. 19). Physiological changes accompany the twins’ exchange of psyches; Angelica is “the elder, taller, stronger . . . of the two” (7; bk. 1, ch. 2). Read within the theosophical framework established in the novel's Proem, the twins’ sex/gender hybridity points to the increasing conformity of humanity with a dual-sexed divine. Like theosophy's Uranians, Angelica and Diavolo are forerunners of the New Age; they are “signs of the times” (383; bk. 4, ch. 5), as Angelica later insists.

Grand's deployment of the theosophical notion of sexed evolution complicates the essentialist/social constructionist binary that has been referenced in scholarly discussions of Grand's feminism. It also disrupts theories of sex/gender that attribute a primacy (and fixity) to physical sex and a secondary (more fluid) position to gender. In Blavatsky's writings biological bodies were not fixed but evolved; they were the ephemeral products of the soul's journey towards androgyny. While theosophical theories of sexed reincarnation were sometimes mobilized to entrench sexual difference, Blavatsky's non-essentialist metaphysics of sex provided theosophists with a powerful counter to the sexual dimorphism of orthodox Christianity.

Read within Grand's theosophical framework, the twins’ cross-dressing at the wedding of Evadne Frayling and Colonel Colquhoun points not only to the performativity of gender but also to Blavatsky's theory of sexed evolution. By exchanging clothes the twins signal their sense of disjunction with dimorphic categories of sex. A shocked Mrs. Frayling objects to the twins’ exchange of clothing: “It is unnatural! It will bring bad luck” (61; bk. 1, ch. 12). It is not the twins’ contestation of dominant discourses of sex that dooms Evadne's marriage, however, but rather Colquhoun's sexual profligacy and the Church's sanctioning of it. For Grand, though, the twins cross-dressing points beyond the Victorian Church's perpetuation of the sexual double standard to the greater problem of the dimorphic system of sex and sexuality that underpins it. As Charles Lazenby noted, the conception of “two sexes, the male and the female, quite distinct and quite clearly defined,” might serve a material age, but “for the occultist the problem is much deeper and more difficult” (qtd. in Dixon, “Sexology and the Occult” [423]).

In “The Tenor and the Boy – An Interlude” Grand explores an alternative economy of desire founded on the theosophically inflected rejection of dimorphic models of sex.Footnote ¹⁹ The story of the Tenor and the Boy is situated within Grand's delineation of Angelica and Diavolo's maturation process, and more specifically within the context of Grand's interest in the effects of dominant discourses of religion, gender, and sexuality on her characters. Just as for theosophists the inauguration of the New Age was not inevitable but required an active engagement in initiatives for social change,Footnote ²⁰ so in The Heavenly Twins the emergence of the New Woman and New Man is shown to require a struggle with regressive forces of religion, gender, and sexuality. Dominant discourses of gender and sexuality encroach upon the twins as they reach adolescence; Diavolo is sent to Sandhurst and plans are made for Angelica to be “brought out” into society and ultimately to marry. Angelica, following the path of rational selection delineated by a young Evadne Frayling, proposes to Mr. Kilroy, the man she deems most likely to facilitate her autonomy. Angelica's proposal comprises the third of Grand's female protagonists’ attempts to traverse the sexual double standard and the masculinist libidinal economy of which it is a part. It does not, however, receive Grand's unmitigated support.

With her transition into adulthood and her subsequent marriage, Angelica faces the loss both of her childhood gender identity and of her brother. The two losses are related, for in his acceptance of Angelica's dissident sex/gender identity, and in his participation in the project of androgyny, Diavolo has provided a mirror to Angelica's sex/gender subjectivity that has been unavailable in the dominant discourses of the Symbolic. He has played the role of the Levinasian other, anterior to Angelica's self and upon whom her existence has depended – he has been “all in all” (492; bk. 5, ch. 2) to her. Angelica perceives Diavolo's departure and his “don't-care-and-can't-be-bothered” (455; bk. 4, ch. 15) attitude as “putting an end to everything” (321; bk. 3, ch. 11). Unable to participate as a passive witness in her feminization, Angelica takes up the mode of resistance of her childhood; she enacts her disjunctive sex/gender subjectivity by cross-dressing: “I assumed his [Diavolo's] manner and habits . . . [and] imitated him in everything, tried to think his thoughts and looked at myself from his point of view; in fact my difficulty was to remember that I was not him” (452; bk. 4, ch. 15). Angelica's evening trips to Morningquest in the guise of Diavolo evoke Blavatsky's reading of the myth of Castor and Pollux; Diavolo and Angelica appear to share Diavolo's life, one occupying its daytime hours, the other its evenings.

“The Boy,” as Angelica is known in this section of the narrative, meets the tenor of Morningquest Cathedral, designated simply as “the Tenor,” during his nighttime trips to the city. In his/her nascent relationship with the Tenor, the Boy/Angelica rejects not only dominant discourses of femininity but also dimorphic models of sex. He/she refuses to be called a boy, and insists instead on the designation, “bright particular spirit” (393; bk. 4, ch. 7). The Boy's desire to be designated a spirit reflects the premium placed on the spirit or soul within theosophical theories of evolution. Theosophist Fritz Kunz, rehearsing some years after Blavatsky's death her teachings on gender and the New Age, wrote:

In accordance with theosophical constructions of androgyny, the Boy rejects the Tenor's notion that his genius for violin playing resembles the “sexless thing” of Shelley's “The Witch of Atlas,” arguing that genius comprises the attributes of “both minds, masculine and feminine” (403; bk. 4, ch. 8).

The Boy/Angelica's refusal of sexual dimorphism is accompanied by his/her derision of the masculinist libidinal economy it underpins. When the Tenor first meets the Boy he is infatuated with Angelica, whom he has only seen from afar and whom, in accordance with dominant religious notions of femininity, he construes as “his ideal of purity, his goddess of truth, his angel of pity” (446; bk. 4, ch. 15). The Boy/Angelica scorns this construction of the erotic: “You go and fall in love with a girl you have never spoken to in your life, you endow her gratuitously with all the virtues you admire without asking if she cares to possess them” (459; bk. 4, ch. 15), and perceives the problem to lie in the training of men: “you are all of you educated deliberately to think of women chiefly as the opposite sex” (458; bk. 4, ch. 15). He/she insists that Angelica is actually worldly-wise, irreligious, and even “depraved” (383; bk. 4, ch. 5). Gradually the Tenor's interest moves from Angelica to the Boy. It is to the Boy that the Tenor's mind turns on seeing Angelica in the cathedral “after he had learnt that she was the Boy's sister, he felt that a new interest had been added to her attractions . . . [She] reminded him of her brother” (384; bk. 4, ch. 6). The narrator's contention that in the Boy the Tenor had found “something which he knew he needed but could not name” (382; bk. 4, ch. 5), resembles late nineteenth-century articulations of homosexuality as the “love that dare not speak its name.” Read within Grand's theosophical critique of sexual binaries, however, it is because it evades categorization that the Tenor and the Boy's desire cannot be named. The Tenor's willingness to engage in a liaison beyond the parameters of the dominant economy of desire and the dimorphic discourses of sex/gender that sustain it renders him, like the heavenly twins, a harbinger of the day; he is, as Angelica observes, “Son of the Morning” (412; bk. 4, ch. 10).

Angelica's relationship with the Tenor constitutes not only a vehicle for Grand's criticism of the libidinal economy of late nineteenth-century Britain and the discourses of gender that underpin it but it also comprises Grand's attempt to forge an alternative erotic economy. Scholars have drawn attention to the sensuality of some of Grand's fiction, noting that it seems uncharacteristic of a social purity feminist. Ann Heilmann observes with regard to Ideala, the first of the novels in Grand's trilogy: “What is noteworthy in this text about a social purity activist by a social purity writer is the space given to the exploration of the heroine's sexual desire” (Narrative Cross-Dressing 50).Footnote ²¹ Heilmann argues that the contemporary conflation of social purity feminism with sexual Puritanism is reductive; the third of the novels in Grand's trilogy, The Beth Book, shows Grand centrally engaged in the development of a feminist erotic. Beth Maclure rejects Alfred Pounce and resists implication in a masculinist libidinal economy in favor of autoeroticism. “The Tenor and the Boy – An Interlude” comprises a similar project on Grand's part. It constitutes an effort to re-contextualize women's sensuality beyond dominant discourses of gender and is founded on a rejection of religiously structured sensuality and of the disavowal of desire inherent in the practice of sexual selection. Angelica's turn to the Tenor, which takes place after her proposal to Kilroy, shows up the deficiencies of rational selection. As Angelica later remarks to the Tenor, “when I first knew you all my loving consciousness was dormant . . . you re-aroused that feeling” (452–53; bk. 4, ch. 15).

Water is a central trope for the erotic in both Ideala and in The Beth Book. Eroticized drowning marks the culmination of the relationship between a married woman and a monk in two of the poems written by the eponymous protagonist of Ideala. In The Beth Book the sea is the site not only of Beth's sexual awakening but also of the culmination of her relationship with Alfred Pounce: “The steady gentle heave of the sea . . . rose round them once more, up, up, over Beth's head. They clung to each other . . . staggering and fighting for their foothold. Then it sank back from them, then slowly came again . . . with a sobbing sound as if in its great heart it shrank from the cruel deed it was doing – rose and fell, rose and fell again” (242). The autoeroticism that Beth finally embraces has an ocean setting also, one in which the spiritual significance of Beth's sexual choice becomes apparent: “The water lapped up and up and up the rocks, rising with a sobbing sound . . . caus[ing] her to draw in her breath involuntarily, and inhale long, deep draughts with delight . . . . Before she had been many minutes prone upon the farthest rock, the vision and the dream were upon her. That other self of hers unfurled it wings, and floated off, reveling in an ecstasy of gentle motion” (257).

The trysts between the Boy and the Tenor take place in the Romantic landscape of a moonlit river. Decadence is eschewed by the Boy: “don't let us desecrate a night like this with any idea that lowers us to the level of a beastly French novel reeking with sensuality” (423; bk. 4, ch. 13). If French naturalism is dismissed, however, passion is not; music-making becomes the vehicle for the Tenor and the Boy's articulation of desire. The Boy asserts that he will make the Tenor quiver with “these delicate fingers of mine,” and is said to “make music that steeped the Tenor's whole being in bliss” (403; bk. 4, ch. 8). The Tenor, in turn, sings songs that leave the Boy “speechless with pleasure” (439; bk. 4, ch. 14).

As with Beth's scenes of autoerotic pleasure, water accrues a spiritual significance in The Heavenly Twins. The Tenor is central to this spiritual paradigm. He hears the chime of Morningquest Cathedral as a boy on the barge on the river, is increasingly identified with the chime (the chime is said to sound “like the voice of a tenor” [xxxix]), and is ultimately represented as a Christ figure: “if ever a man's soul was purified on earth, his was; and if ever a man deserved to see heaven, he did. Humanly speaking there was no stain on him; in thought, word, and deed he was immaculate” [440; bk. 4, ch. 14]). The river is the site not only of the Tenor and the Boy's eroticism but also of the spiritual longing that is a part of the Tenor's sexual desire. When, after raucous flirtation with the Tenor, the Boy falls into the water and the Tenor rescues him, the Tenor articulates both sexual and spiritual desire: “he clasped the lad in his arms and pressed his cheek to his in a burst of grief and tenderness not to be controlled . . . and it seemed as if in that close embrace, his whole being had expressed itself in love and prayer” (445; bk. 4, ch. 15). The Boy's near-drowning in the river precipitates his jouissance also; embraced by the Tenor, his limbs “quiver through their clumsy wrappings,” and the Tenor hears him sigh (445; bk. 4, ch. 15).

The rescuing of the Boy from the river leads to the Tenor's contracting pneumonia and ultimately to his death. The sensual associations that have accrued to water in Grand's text provide an alternative vantage point from which to read this “Christ's” death. Like Christ, the Tenor experiences an unquenchable thirst in his dying hours. It is the Boy, however, for whom the Tenor longs in his last hours, “‘If even the Boy had been left me!’ he thought, and it was the one distinct regret he formulated” (501; bk. 5, ch. 4). The Tenor's “thirst” points to the inability of the symbolic order to accommodate his dissident sexual desire (the Tenor dies at dawn, “when the Boy was wont to leave him” [510; bk. 5, ch. 4]). Angelica's later denial of her desire for the Tenor similarly exemplifies the difficulty of incorporating dissident gender and sexual desires within the symbolic order; despite her flirtation with the Tenor, she assures her husband that she was never attracted to the Tenor (549; bk. 5, ch. 8). Confronting an unbearably split sexual subjectivity, Angelica seeks out a watery oblivion; she attempts to jump off a bridge into the river, but is deterred by Lady Fulda. Phallocentric discourse closes in as Angelica begins to see herself as a “bad wife” (543; bk. 5, ch. 8), describes herself as “grateful for the blessing of a good man's [Kilroy's] love” (551; bk. 5, ch. 8), and embraces a life of duty, determined to “live for others” (493; bk. 5, ch. 2). The radical potential of the moment of jouissance is thus defused; as harbinger of the New Age, Angelica is largely limited to writing progressive speeches to enhance her husband's political career.

A second reading of the Tenor's death is rendered possible by the shifting narratorial point of view in this section of Grand's text. Grand, who in the Proem has described the multiple ways in which the chime is heard thus revealing her understanding of the multivalence of symbolic systems, offers an alternative ending for those who are unable to “hear” her novel's first ending. The alternative ending gives precedence to the voice of Lady Fulda. The Christ-like Tenor is deemed by Lady Fulda to offer Angelica a redemption that entails the possibility of love for (or at least compassion towards) her husband, Kilroy. Within this reading of the novel, Angelica is represented as reconciling her confinement to the domestic sphere with her desire for meaningful work by writing her husband's political speeches. In this version of the novel's denouement, the story of the Tenor and the Boy takes the character of an apophatic gesture on Grand's part in which Grand, as Ann Heilmann has observed of Ideala, eroticizes her female protagonists and then canonizes them for the sacrifice of eroticism to the larger feminist political project (Narrative Cross-Dressing 52).

While Grand shows the discourses of a masculinist representational order to prevail, her novel itself comprises an intervention in late nineteenth-century discourses of gender, sexuality, and religion. It restates the comfort offered to a despairing Elijah for a late nineteenth-century feminist audience by describing a divine who witnesses the heresy of masculinist Christianity and by promising eventual change: “He, watching over Israel, slumbers not, nor sleeps.” Grand's message of comfort is, however, framed within late nineteenth-century aspirations for Anglo-Saxon racial superiority and Britain's imperial supremacy.

Sexual difference feminist spirituality – far more prevalent than sexual equality spirituality during this era – comprises the primary object of contemporary scholarly enquiry into the imperial frame of nineteenth-century feminist spirituality. Antoinette Burton has drawn attention to middle-class Victorian women's implication in British imperialism, in particular their positioning of themselves both as spiritually/morally superior to men and as regenerators of the Anglo-Saxon race and purifiers of the British empire in their efforts to secure access to higher education, entry into the professions, and ultimately suffrage. Frances Swiney's The Awakening of Women, or Women's Part in Evolution (1899) and The Cosmic Procession; or, the Feminine Principle in Evolution (1906) offer the most trenchant examples.

Swiney took up theosophy's criticism of the neglect of the Divine Feminine in orthodox Christianity and theosophy's immanentism to posit a feminine divine who was evident in women's creative or child-bearing capacity. She appropriated Blavatsky's theory of spiritual evolution to argue that the soul evolved through the lower male or material embodiments to more advanced female/maternal or spiritual forms. Articulations of racial and imperial superiority pervaded Swiney's feminist spirituality. Drawing on social purity feminism and eugenics, she charged English mothers with the physical and spiritual regeneration of the Anglo-Saxon race, situated western women at the apex of an evolutionary trajectory, and castigated Hindu women for their putatively degenerate influence on Indian culture.Footnote ²² Although Grand adopts a sexual equality framework for the feminist spirituality of her novel, a sexual difference strand is evident within it. And, like Frances Swiney, it is with the language of sexual difference that Grand makes most consistent reference to racial discourse in The Heavenly Twins.

The sexual difference strand in Grand's spirituality is exemplified in Diavolo's belief that it is women who will redeem the world and also in Ideala's contention that the “true spirit of God” is “in us women. We have preserved it, and handed it down from one generation to another of our own sex unsullied” (267; bk. 3, ch. 3). To Father Ricardo, Ideala avers, “already I – that is to say Woman – am a power in the land, while you – that is to say Priest – retain ever less and less even of the semblance of power” (267; bk. 3, ch. 3). The sexual difference element in Grand's spirituality was not uncharacteristic of feminist theosophy and sexual equality Christian esotericism. Believing masculinity to have exercised dominance historically, these feminists sought to right the balance by sacralizing femininity and advocating the representation of the feminine in religious practice and in the socio-political order. Thus Anna Kingsford, who had at one time been a member of the Theosophical Society, and who endorsed notions of a dual-sexed Divine,Footnote ²³ nevertheless joined a long line of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century female prophetesses, including Shaker Ann Lee and Methodist Joanna Southcott, in heralding the arrival of a female messiah who would inaugurate the New Age.

Unlike Swiney's feminist spirituality, Grand's sexual difference theology does not, for the most part, entail direct reference to the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race or the supremacy of the British Empire. Instead, Grand adopts a universalist point of departure, in which it is assumed that the issues that preoccupy English women are key to the progress of the human race and that it is middle-class English women who will lead all of humanity forward. Mrs. Malcomson, a feminist character depicted sympathetically by Grand, articulates this universalist approach: “he [man] has held the best half of the conscience of the race in abeyance until now, and so checked the general progress” (180; bk. 2, ch. 2). The fictional Mr. Price, a feminist American speaking for the United States as well as Britain, suggests in similarly grandiose terms that “all this unrest and rebellion against the old established abuses amongst women is simply an effort of nature to improve the race” (219; bk. 2, ch. 10). These threads of sexual difference feminism converge within an explicitly theological frame in Angelica's dream of the spheres, in which she observes that the clergy have “brought the world up out of the dark ages of physical force,” but that women are currently “the soul and spirit, the directing intelligence” (295; bk. 3, ch. 8) of the nation.

Grand's mobilizing of the discourse of nation is given an explicitly imperial frame with her use of Malta as one of the settings for her narrative. Here, as Iveta Jusova notes, Grand's impugning of the decadent behavior of the British serves not only to justify her social purity feminism but also to validate British imperialism. Grand's leveraging of imperial discourse betrays a desire to purify rather than to eradicate empire and supports Antoinette Burton's contention that late Victorian and Edwardian feminists’ approach to empire had this as its goal (7).

While the sexual difference strand of Grand's spirituality shares with Frances Swiney's the assumption of the spiritual/moral superiority of women, the racial supremacy of the English, and the legitimacy of British imperialism, it also undercuts imperial discourses of race and nation. This is evident in Grand's criticism of Christianity, a key element of Britain's “civilizing mission.” It is also apparent in Ideala's religious syncretism. Ideala asserts, in a characteristically theosophical manner, that the great moral truths have been “perceived since the beginning of thought . . . known to Buddha, reflected by Plato, preached by Christ” (265; bk. 3, ch. 3), and suggests that the ideal of goodness is present in all religions and cultures, “Buddhist, Christian or Jewish” (264; bk. 3, ch. 3). Ideala commends religious traditions that “overthrow the pride of professors who maintain that their own code of religious ethics must be the right one because it produces the best specimens of humanity” (264; bk. 3, ch. 3).

Beyond occasional references however, Buddhism is not mentioned in Grand's novel. While mobilizing the rational/irrational, scientific/non-scientific binaries through which theosophists construed the superiority of their belief system to Christianity, Grand nevertheless erases the Buddhist and Hindu traditions so clearly acknowledged by theosophists. Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his postcolonial study of historiography, identifies as characteristic of modernist political projects the reduction of the heterogeneity of the present through the annulment of elements that are considered anachronistic. Grand's selective annulment of the “anachronistic” effects of ancient Buddhist and Hindu teachings echoes the processes of cultural appropriation that characterized British imperialism. The Heavenly Twins exemplifies the erasure that accompanied the appropriation of the cultures of colonized nations; it represents one set of terms within which Hindu and Buddhist teachings came to occupy the Victorian present.

In her chapter on the new occultism and fin-de-siècle sexual politics, Alex Owen notes that late nineteenth-century feminists found themselves limited by a language of moral superiority and motherhood that, together with the popular press's impugning of the New Woman as degenerate, prevented feminists from exploring new gender and sexual identities. New occultism offered Victorian women subject positions beyond the dominant association of women with domestic spirituality, while retaining a vision of spiritual and social regeneration. Helena Blavatsky's writings afforded Grand a modernist reworking of dominant religious discourse which, while reinstating the spiritual basis of women's cultural authority, annexed the discourse of rationality to religion and aligned femininity with rationality. Angelica and Diavolo, as New Woman and New Man, emerge within Grand's modernist spiritual project; their sex/gender dissidence is authorized by theosophy's double-sexed divine, and by Blavatskian notions of sex/gender transformation as an integral component of spiritual evolution.

If Blavatsky's teaching was taken up by Victorian feminists because it reinstated women's cultural authority by rejecting Darwinian theory for a theory of spiritual evolution, Grand's spiritual project nevertheless reinscribes the antagonisms and social divisions of Social Darwinism. In citing, as the framework of her feminist spirituality, Darwin's apparent concession to the proponents of moral evolution, “I had not got as far as to see with you, that the struggle between the races of man depended entirely on intellectual and moral qualities” (171; bk. 2), Grand hitches her sexual equality spirituality to the racial and imperial imperatives of the late nineteenth-century British empire. Spiritual evolution, and the transformation of both sex/gender and society that accompanied it, would procure the ascendancy of the Anglo-Saxon race and the regeneration of the British Empire. Grand's spiritual project thus attests to the paradoxical emergence of innovative late nineteenth-century ideologies of gender and sexuality within racially inflected imperialist frameworks. The New Women and New Men of The Heavenly Twins − Angelica and Diavolo, the Tenor, Ideala, Lord Dawne, and Lady Claudia − represent not only the place of esoteric spirituality in the making of British modernity but also the primary role of empire in the making of fin-de-siècle spirituality.