Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 January 1913 — SETHLI has come to Life [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

SETHLI has come to Life

7 ETHI I, son of Rameses I of Egypt, father of Raineses tk e Great, and uwl /f founder of the ~ 1/ nineteenth dynasty, WaUkT;.has come to life again and is living in a dilapidated old houseboat on the Thames, near Staines, England. He comes to London every week and expounds the mysteries of Hindoo occultism to a large audience. At his feet, drinking in every word of his somewhat unintelligible lectures, sit titled women, and a small sprinkling of titled men, representative of that intellectual society of England which is ever ready to lend an attentive ear to the new, the weird, or the mysterious. Sethi I, in his reincarnated state, is thoroughly modern. He calls himself plain Frederick Thurston. For ten years he has lived alone in the Thames houseboat, delving deep into the secrets of the Hindoos. And all the while he had looked forward to the time when he can return to Egypt, not in the guise of his former incarceration, but as the founder of a psychic city on the Alexandrian coast. “To this city,” he said to the writer, “people could come from all parts of the world for mental and physical invigoration. People would live the simple life —simple food, early to bed and early to rise, simple speech, dancing and singing. There would be daily lessons, lectures in mystical and occult subjects, and everything would tend to develop the psychic qualities in the inhabitants and the visitors.** But if Thurston cannot found this city at the moment he is losing no time in carrying on the work which it would do. He believes that the afternoons are wasted by the English Intellectuals. The mornings are given over to sleep, the evenings to entertainment and pleasure; it is only in the afternoons that kindred souls can be gathered from the far ends of the great city and the higher planes of intellectualism be developed,, believes Thurston. And he has entered upon that work of development. In a little room In Regent street, not 50 paces from Piccadilly Circus, Thurston sits one afternoon a week and answers the eager questions of the men and women who thirst for the knowledge of the Hindoo philosophers.

The new Sethi I is a remarkablelooking man. Just above the average height, he has an enormous head crowned with an immense dome of a forehead. Across his temples and the shining expanse of his half-bald head run great protruding veins. But the strangest thing about this most extraordinary man is his uncanny facial resemblance to the Egyptian ruler of whom he claims to be a reincarnation. Compare his profile with that of the mummy of Sethi I and it is difficult to put your finger on a point of difference. There is the same sweep of the full forehead, the same long nose, the same repressive lips and, allowing for the sinking of the chin with age, the same formation of the lower jaw The resemblance of the ears and the back of the head is even more exact.

The process of reincarnation, while reproducing the outward form of the original, has played an odd trick in other respects. It has put the soul of this famous Egyptian ruler in the body of a Thames-side recluse, who

far from believing and practicing the the original, is deep in the of the Hindofis; who is steeped in, practices and preaches the beliefs of a secret cult of- Indians — the adepts of the Goathan temple hidden away In the soaring Himalayas, 16,000 feet above the level of the sea. where no white man has even penetrated. This religion is neither Buddhism, Theosophy, nor New Thought, but a strange mixture of all three. Its greatest vogue was reached forty centuries ago when the shrine of the Gosalnthan, nestling in the snow of the Himalayas, the highest temple in the world, was known and revered throughout the length and breadth of India. The adepts of this religion, almost unknown to the scientists of the present day, have developed to an extraordinary extent the study of the mind in the spirit realm, which is just beginning to take a firm hold upon the imaginations of thinking people all over the world. In the system of these Hindoo scholars there is a marked distinction between what is known as metempsychosis, or a mere passing of the soul, and reincarnation, meaning the passing of the soul through flesh, as in the case of Thurston and the soul of Sethi I. Gosalnthan is the chapel royal of the fabulously rich Maharajah of Napal, a seml-lndependent Indian ruler who is in treaty alliance with England. He, however, pays nu tribute to the British, but every five years sent offerings of fruit and flowers to the emperor of China up to the time of that ruler’s abdication. Although Thurston has never penetrated the sacred precincts of this Himalayan temple, he probably knows more about it than any other white man. For some years he acted as tutor and coach to a number of Indian princes at Eton and from them he gathered many of the secrets of the strange cult. But, quite aside from that, he has traveled in the east, studying the wisdom which was of so much earlier perfection than our own. He climbed many of the

Himalayan peaks, talked with Hindoos of all degrees, many of whom had never seen a white man before, and made his way in disguise into the wilds of Thibet Thurston is really a poet of rare power and at Cambridge he captured the chancellor’s gold medal, following in the footsteps of Tennyson and Byron. “At that time,” he said to me, “I intended to devote my life to poetry. But later I decided that it was more important to live poetry than to write it. I have been living it ever since. I live the year around on my houseboat on the Thames. I am up every morning at six o’clock and take a plunge in the river no matter what the temperature. Then I am ready for a couple of hours’ exercise. This takes the form chiefly of dancing. Breakfast out of the way, I am ready for a morning of study and meditation, for the knowledge of the mystics is inexhaustible and can never be wholly mastered.” Meanwhile the peculiar form of mysticism which Thurston ladles out to thirsty souls once a week in the room in Regefit street is spreading rapidly among the upper class of English society. A full list of th"& 700 men and women who have already fallen under his spell would include most of the intelectttal aristocracy. But while Thurston takes an extraordinary Interest in the progress of all these disciples, his star pupil lives at Staines, not far from his houseboat. She is none other than Cora Urquhart Potter, the famous American actress. Mrs. Brown Potter has become so saturated with the Hindoo lore that she is now recognizer as an expert, and recently gave a lecture on the subject at the Ritz hotel. She first became interested in the subject during a tour in India and searched long but vainly there for a guide to the secrets which are so jealously guarded by the natives. It was not until she returned to Eng1,- d and accidentally met Thurston that her greatest wish was satisfied. In the Staines recluse she found the mentor sbe had so long sought