A remarkable and rare manuscript collection – in excess of 150,000 words – of impressive breadth and depth from the Golden Age of British occultism, carefully compiled over several decades by a London-based chemist and druggist, Hezekiah Venman (d. 1899). Venman was an associate of the Society for Psychical Research, a contributor to their journal, and, as the personal exchange of material shows, clearly well-connected to some of the leading figures of the movement: Alfred Russel Wallace, St. George Lane Fox-Pitt, Dr Abraham Wallace, Annie Besant, and Lord Adare.
These volumes comprise an assemblage of material from many sources – personal experience, unpublished accounts, extracts from other authors, his own translations from French esoteric books and journals, and records of meetings all planned, as stated in a holograph note, as the basis for “Venman’s Occult Encyclopaedia”. One volume includes an extraordinary section concerning W. B. Yeats’s muse, Maud Gonne (with a small portrait excised from a society magazine) and titled “Phantasms of the Dead – The Egyptian Priestess by H. Venman from a Private Source”. (Item sold)
