Charles Lazenby

Born: 23 April 1878 in Brussels, in southwestern Ontario, Canada.

Died:   2 December 1928 in the Georgian Bay region of Ontario.

Charles Lazenby was a Canadian Theosophical lecturer and author of The Work of the Masters and frequent contributor to the English Theosophical journal, The Path. On 31 July 1917 he gave a lecture on Magic at the Vancouver Labor Temple where he remarked that Crowley was "the personification of evil." Charles Stansfeld Jones happened to be in the audience and reported it to Crowley. They later included Lazenby's remarks in a faux letter to the editor which Crowley published along with a reply in the October 1917 issue of The International. [The letter and response is shown below]

He was born on 23 April 1878, in Brussels, a small village in southwestern Ontario, Canada. His mother, Eleanor, was the daughter of a Primitive Methodist minister, Thomas Adams; his father, Charles Lazenby, was a newly ordained Methodist minister. The child never knew his father, who drowned trying to rescue a child from a river, only six weeks after his wedding.

Shortly after his birth, mother and child moved to Guelph, where she went to work to support them. They stayed with the Ryans, a carpenter and his wife. After three years, Eleanor Lazenby died, leaving her son to be raised by the Ryans; and by her brother and his wife in Toronto, who later harboured him for the holidays. The Ryans were a poor old couple. All the food they had was tea, bread, apples from a neighbor, grain from the miller, and one pint of milk a day. The boy did the chores around the house and ran errands for the old man.

The boy Charles was known to his Guelph schoolmates as Pat Ryan. School itself was no trouble. A big influence at this time was a master, Mr. Dobbie, who taught English rigorously. Every child was made to read aloud "as though they meant it." Each syllable was gone over and enunciated carefully before the sense was drilled into them. The brilliant lecturer of later life must have owed a lot to this early training.

Holidays in Toronto with the Adams family were looked forward to. His Aunt Jeannette was of the Boston Lamb family, and brought the custom of the French "salon" to her home in Toronto. To it came the local intelligentsia, as well as traveling luminaries. His uncle Edward was a noted homeopathic doctor. He made his rounds in a gig drawn by a horse called Starlight, and sometimes the boy was allowed to drive. There were three girl cousins, and the strong young Charles did the chores in the sonless household. Life with the Adams was, however, intellectually stimulating. From when he was seven, his aunt read aloud and discussed Plato's Dialogues with him. Interest was aroused in the latest scientific discoveries, and he was even taken to the Toronto Theosophical Society, which had opened its doors in 1891.

Back in Guelph, he became converted, at 13, to the Methodist faith. On the next holiday, his uncle found him agonizing over the prospect that the kind Adams were bound for hell! "Before you judge, it is well to know something of what you are judging," his kind uncle advised, and handed him a copy of Tom Paine. The next year he caught typhoid fever, and the Ryans, despairing of him, sent to Toronto for his uncle who found him in a coma. After his recovery, Charles found his interests had changed from "penny dreadfuls" to history, literature, and even comparative religion.

He moved from Guelph to Toronto, where he went to high school. He was fond of acrobatics, and, while practicing a flying somersault, broke his coccyx and struggled to the Adams' home, where he remained on his back for four years. To complicate the situation, he broke out in abscesses all over his body, which his uncle was unable to diagnose or cure.

Dr. Adams would not give him any painkillers: "If you get well, you'll not be a drug addict!" Nor was he put in braces: "If you are going to die, you shall not die in a cage," he told his nephew. Eventually, a fellow-homeopath from Chicago asked Adams if the boy had ever taken Mercury. It turned out that old Mr. Ryan had needed it, and young Charles, when fetching the pink pills for him, tasting and liking them, ate them like candy. Now Mercury is accumulative, and the chemical had remained in his system latent until jogged into activity by the shock of his fall. Armed with this knowledge, the uncle prescribed the antidote, and the abscesses cleared up. But there still remained the spinal problem, which painfully and only gradually healed, and he had to learn to walk again.

For the four years he was thus an invalid, his school friends had formed a "circle" who visited for fun and discussions. By twenty-one, he had recovered, and there was a celebration. Asked what he wanted to do most, he confessed it was to go to university. Uncle Edward raised funds for the first year, and he enrolled at the University of Toronto in 1901. He quickly made up for the lost years. Proceeding to his B.A., his rise was meteoric. By his second year he was lecturing to first-year students. Professor of Psychology A. Kirschmann encouraged him, and employed him as an assistant after he had graduated. Outside the classroom, he and his friends founded two clubs, the Heretics and the Iconoclasts. Evidently, students who joined these clubs were not of orthodox persuasions! Some of their papers were published in Varsity, the University of Toronto magazine, where is also to be found a number of poems and articles signed Charles Lazenby, or, frequently, just C.L.

Like many another student, he worked his way through college by jobs taken during the holidays. One summer Charles was hired by the railways, who needed able-bodied men to put out the fires started by sparks from the steam engines. So he grew to know men who worked under tough conditions, whose beards would run with blood from the blackflies in the swamps and backwoods where they mostly worked.

On four occasions he worked at the Collins Centre, in Gowanda, N.Y. He sought it to complement his psychology studies, and fitted into the warden's life so well that he was put on his own floor after only a month's training. This was another study that carried him through the years, widening so that when he went to Zurich twenty years later to the Jungian School of Psychoanalysis, Dr. Baines his instructor said Pulch had taught him more than the other way around.

On another occasion, he worked at Elbert Hubbard's Roycroft in East Aurora, Connecticut. There, in Hubbard's famous "School of Ideals" he practiced pottery, book-binding and publishing. It was Hubbard, incidentally, who bestowed a nickname on him. He said Lazenby was the ugliest man in all Roycroft, and called him Pulchritude. Hence Pulch, and it was Pulch that he liked to be called.

The Roycroft enterprise was famous, and many came to visit the workshops. Among these was a beautiful American actress, Czara Aries Johnson. She was an important influence on Pulch, as she immediately recognized his potential as an orator, and told him he was wasting his voice if he did not use it. She challenged him: had he no message to give? Thus was his future as a lecturer broached. (There was a precedent in the family: an ancestor, another Charles Lazenby, was said to have spoken to "an acre of people" at the sack of Nottingham Castle by the Chartists in the early 19th century.) Their talks also focused on the power and purity of sex. Johnson confirmed what he himself had long since concluded, that sex is a natural phenomenon, not sinful and base. His philosophy of sex, expressed in several articles in later years, was exemplified in his joyous, pure and principled life. He was "ahead of his time" in this, as well as in other aspects of spiritual living.

His early exposure to Theosophy began a life-long association. Once, when still a young lad, he wandered into the reading room at the Toronto Theosophical Society, and asked four elderly men he met there to explain questions prompted by his reading of Tom Paine. They told him he must read and search for the answers, and put into his hands that great book, The Secret Doctrine. In its depths he found material for thirty years of lecturing. His interest in Theosophy did not lessen while in University, where he also included it among his many extracurricular activities, but he did not formally join the Society until 1904.

After graduating, he worked his way across the Atlantic on several occasions. In 1908 he took a working passage on an Italian ship to the Mediterranean. In Malta, he obtained a visa to enter Egypt. There, he visited the pyramids, spent a night in the King's Chamber—even read aloud Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's The Voice of the Silence to the Sphinx! But he was flat broke, and with but little to eat or drink, it was a time of great hardship.

Here is an anecdote which shows the type of man he was. Undeterred with his hard lot, he set about working his way back to England, but could get nothing. Finally, he boarded an Orient liner just about to sail, and before he could find the Mate, the gangways were withdrawn and the great ship left the quay. Technically, he was a stowaway, and was immediately put to work, which he did cheerfully, and quickly made friends among the crew.  During the passage, one of the passengers went berserk and became dangerous. No one could manage him. Pulch volunteered to look after him, explaining his familiarity with that sort of responsibility. The man went for him with a jack-knife, but was subdued after a tussle with the strong young Canadian. There was no further trouble, but for the rest of the voyage Pulch had a soft job looking after him. When he got off in England the Captain thanked Pulch and said anytime he wanted to travel he would find him a job on his ship. Laughed one of the crew, "Well, this is the first time I have ever heard of a stowaway being asked to come again!"

     From then until the end of his life, he was a constant traveler, seldom staying in any one place for long. In 1909 and for the following three years, he taught at a Theosophical Summer School in England, and began an association with D.N. Dunlop, the well-known Irish Theosophist. He was an indefatigable lecturer: the 1912 appointment book read like a gazeteer of England and Scotland, and he also spoke in Holland and France.

In 1912, he married Margaret Clark, a member from Scotland, whom he had first met at one of the summer schools. Together, they travelled the lecture circuit. They usually stayed one or two nights in most places, but in some of the larger cities he would give a series of talks nightly for two or three weeks. In the summer of 1913 the couple crossed the Atlantic. After camping in Ontario with friends, they moved to Detroit and continued their Theosophical activities there and especially in Wilmington, Delaware. These were happy days for the couple, and in 1914 was born a daughter. She was dedicated by her father to the service of humanity, and was named Petrovna, after Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.

     The family traveled all over the U.S.A., always lecturing for Theosophical groups. In 1917 they went north to Victoria and Vancouver, then settled for a time at Salmon Arm, B.C. Everywhere there were lectures and classes - but some restful periods. 1919 saw them crossing to England and Scotland, renewing friendships and making contact with new audiences the length and breadth of the island. Next year, it was to continental Europe, where in Zurich, as mentioned, Pulch studied with one of Carl Jung's colleagues.

Back in America they criss-crossed the continent, coast to coast and from Canada to Florida, lecturing, conducting summer schools - always active for Theosophy. In 1923 they took ship for Australia. There, Pulch undertook a demanding series of lectures in Sydney, with shorter tours to Melbourne and Brisbane. He became ill with what was diagnosed as ptomaine poisoning, but struggled on, and was present when T.H. Martyn and others founded the Independent Theosophical Society.

They came back to America and Canada in 1925, always lecturing, always traveling. The child, Petrovna, had been at school in Sydney, Australia; Las Cruces, New Mexico; and Austin, Texas; and now they went to St. Thomas, Ontario, where she went to boarding school. For the summers of 1926, '27 and '28 the family camped in the Georgian Bay region of Ontario, where friends joined them from time to time. Among these were the Garside family, who lived in St. Thomas, and it was while Pulch and Margaret were visiting there that Pulch died suddenly from an ulcer, December 2, 1928. Margaret survived him only until 1933.

The Editor of the "International."

Sir :—

In answer to the question, "Can you tell us anything of the Great White Brotherhood, known as the A∴A∴. Mr. Chas. Lazenby, of the Theosophical Society, made the following remarks after his public lecture on Magic, at the Vancouver Labor Temple, July 31, 1917. E. V.

"The A∴A∴ is an Occult order having a definite purpose, and was started by a man of immense power (The Master Therion, Ed.), perhaps the greatest living. The place of this great Being in the Occult Hierarchy is a profound mystery, and he and his mission are causing a great amount of speculation at the present time.

"Judged by any ordinary standard, he is absolutely and entirely evil, he has broken his occult vows and all codes of morality, openly stating that he has done so and will continue to do so. He may have a very great purpose in view.

"No living person perhaps has had such an influence on occult thought, and wrought so much change therein. He has knowingly taken upon himself a tremendous Karma, but what will be the ultimate result it is impossible to judge. To all appearance, as I remarked, he is the personification of evil."

Later, during private conversation, Mr. Lazenby continued: "He is a very wonderful being; an ordinary man like myself has no possible means of judging what his ultimate motive is.

Looked at from known standards he is evil, but from a distance, in perspective, one may imagine that he is taking this great Karma for some definite end, he may be the Savior of the World.

In any case 300 years from now be will be looked upon as one of the greatest of the World's geniuses, I should not care to have any part in his work myself. You have this to remember, however, that you are connected with a genuine Occult order, not a pseudo-occult one such as Heindel's and others which are worthless."

What has the Master Therion to say about this?

C. S. J.

Mr. Lazenby has so long and so laudably labored upon the production of canned soup that he has neglected that of the wine of lacchus. But I think he only needs to be shown. It is something to be hailed as a possible Savior of the World by one's avowed and bitter enemies. Nunc dimittis ! Anyhow, to be called the "Personification of Evil" is not exactly a precise charge. If I wished to attack Mr. Lazenby, I should define my accusation. I should say that, under Alpine conditions, the Lentil Soup Squares dissolve too slowly.

I believe that H. P. Blavatsky was a great adept. I judge her by her highest, "The Voice of the Silence," not by any mistakes that she may have made in other matters. I consider that her work has been treacherously ruined by Mrs. Besant [Annie Besant], the street corner atheist, socialist, and advocate of abortion. Of this offense she was actually convicted. Mrs. Besant's whole object seems to have been to prevent disciples from making those bold experiments which open the gates of the higher planes. I do not believe that any man or woman can come to ultimate harm by a passionate will to seek truth. They may go insane. They may be slain. They may be damned. These are only ordeals which do them good. If they can stick it out, they will get through. Mrs. Besant wants to be like conscience, to make cowards of us all. In my first initiation I was told, "Fear is failure. Be thou therefore without fear, for in the heart of the coward virtue abideth not. Thou hast known me; pass thou on." To prevent men from confronting the unknown, to side track them with petty drivel about minor ethics, to deck them out with the stolen regalia of orders of whose secrets they are profoundly ignorant: these are the works of the Brothers of the Left Hand Path ; and of these I believe Mrs. Besant to be the greatest now alive.

THERION, 9º=2^o A∴A∴