The Christ of the Red Planet
KIRK, Eleanor
New York: The Publishers' Printing Company. 1901.
Description:
First edition. 175x120mm. pp. xviii, 138. Original red cloth, lettered in gilt to upper cover. Some marking and soiling to boards, rubbing to edges and slight fraying to head and foot of spine. Internally very good and overall a nice copy of a book which is rare in commerce, no copies appearing in the auction records.
Eleanor Kirk (1831-1908) was an extraordinary woman who wrote curious books. Married three times, she was a tireless campaigner for the rights of women both in the private sphere where (following her own experience) she supported women who left abusive relationships, and in the public sphere where she was a devoted suffragist. But as well as seeking to improve the lives of women in the here and now - she advocated a form of non-licentious free love as an antidote to what she saw as "prostitution in so-called married life" - she was a devoted advocate of the spirit life and notions of immortality. Her religious ideas were a strange brew of mainstream Christianity, astrology and New Thought syncretism. Towards the end of her life, Kirk became convinced of the truth of her encounters with the extra-terrestrial and The Christ of the Red Planet is an account of her astral travels to Mars. The epigraph to the book quotes St Paul:"Whether in the body, or out of the body, I knew not" and a cloud of unknowing appears to hang over this bizarre work. But then, as Kirk herself makes clear, it hangs over her own mind too: "To see and yet not to see; to know and not to be able to explain, either to myself or others; to be constantly possessed by a consciousness of distant phenomena without fact or data, is not a very comfortable mental state for one aiming to be logical, and desiring above all things to be honest and the reverse of imaginative. But this has been my condition ever since I can remember".
Description:
First edition. 175x120mm. pp. xviii, 138. Original red cloth, lettered in gilt to upper cover. Some marking and soiling to boards, rubbing to edges and slight fraying to head and foot of spine. Internally very good and overall a nice copy of a book which is rare in commerce, no copies appearing in the auction records.
Eleanor Kirk (1831-1908) was an extraordinary woman who wrote curious books. Married three times, she was a tireless campaigner for the rights of women both in the private sphere where (following her own experience) she supported women who left abusive relationships, and in the public sphere where she was a devoted suffragist. But as well as seeking to improve the lives of women in the here and now - she advocated a form of non-licentious free love as an antidote to what she saw as "prostitution in so-called married life" - she was a devoted advocate of the spirit life and notions of immortality. Her religious ideas were a strange brew of mainstream Christianity, astrology and New Thought syncretism. Towards the end of her life, Kirk became convinced of the truth of her encounters with the extra-terrestrial and The Christ of the Red Planet is an account of her astral travels to Mars. The epigraph to the book quotes St Paul:"Whether in the body, or out of the body, I knew not" and a cloud of unknowing appears to hang over this bizarre work. But then, as Kirk herself makes clear, it hangs over her own mind too: "To see and yet not to see; to know and not to be able to explain, either to myself or others; to be constantly possessed by a consciousness of distant phenomena without fact or data, is not a very comfortable mental state for one aiming to be logical, and desiring above all things to be honest and the reverse of imaginative. But this has been my condition ever since I can remember".