British physician who became an impassioned antivivisectionist and a spiritualist.
The daughter of a rich merchant, she was a talented and pretty child. At 20, her dad died and she became financially independent with an annual income of 7,000 pounds a year. High spirited and willful, fond of hunting and sports, she married a clergyman, William Kingsford in 1867. On 12/31/1867; they had one daughter. Though physically frail and often troubled by organic and Victorian ailments, Annie was not confined by a Victorian temperament in her husband and she was allowed freedom to pursue many interests. She converted to Catholicism and owned and operated a London journal (which soon went bankrupt).
With a lifelong proclivity for Causes, Anna was campaigning on behalf of married women’s property rights when she was given a spiritualist periodical. This led to a lifelong involvement in alternative religion. She and her husband shared an interest in the occult, he becoming a spiritualist minister. Leaving female suffrage and women’s rights, Anna’s passion turned to the animal and spiritual kingdoms and she devoted the rest of her life to religion and the anti-vivisection movement. She studied medicine in Paris to qualify as a doctor in 1880, with her dissertation “L’Alimentation Vegetale de Homme” later published
in England as “The Perfect Way In Diet” after she began her practice in London.
In 1882 she published “The Perfect Way,” or “The Finding of Christ,” which “made an enormous impression on contemporary London society and MacGregor Mathers, not usually one to praise another’s work, described it as “one of the most deeply occult works that has been written for centuries” and confirmed its compatibility with the Qabalah. Her pioneering work on the Qabalah and the Greek and Egyptian mysteries later played a major role in the Golden Dawn rituals.
In May 1882, Kingsford became president of the London Branch of the Theosophical society, a position that she willingly turned over to A.P. Sinnet the following year. She and Blavatsky were both strong women with a male following and bound to clash, and their descriptions of each other were scathing. She left the internal quarrels in the London Lodge in order to form her own Hermetic Society, founded on 4/09/1884.
Though she heard voices and saw visions of the ascended Masters, Anna insisted that she was a prophet, not a medium. She had risen above the vulgarities of spiritualism and clairvoyance to the divine grace of straight-knowledge.
Combining her interest in the occult and anti-vivisection, she declared on 11/12/1886, after their deaths, that she “had killed Paul Bert and Claude Bernard, as she would kill Louis Pasteur…” for their animal testing, with the strength of her will.” She organized a petition to the Pope to change Catholic doctrine about animals having no souls, but this was met with such a lack of Vatican sympathy that she became quite discouraged.
Kingsford’s death from consumption on February 22, 1988 did not give her enough time to adequately establish her own religion.
Link to Wikipedia biography