Clothed With the Sun

What It's About

Clothed With the Sun collects the "illuminations" of Anna Kingsford — visionary and allegorical texts she reported receiving in trance and dream states — compiled and edited after her death by her close collaborator, Edward Maitland. The book presents itself as a channelled body of esoteric teaching on the soul's regeneration and its return to the divine, framed around the image of the "woman clothed with the sun" from the Book of Revelation.

Key Concepts

The work draws on esoteric Christianity, Gnosticism, and Hermetic symbolism, interpreting biblical and mythological imagery inwardly rather than literally. Central themes include the pre-existence and persistence of the soul, the process of spiritual illumination and purification, and a distinctly feminist theology in which a divine feminine principle (identified with the Gnostic "Sophia") holds a central place. The book sits within the wider late-Victorian occult revival that also produced Theosophy and, later, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

About the Author

Anna Kingsford (1846–1888) was an English physician, writer, and mystic. One of the first Englishwomen to qualify as a doctor, she trained in Paris and combined her medical career with committed anti-vivisection, vegetarian, and women's rights activism. She served as president of the Theosophical Society's London Lodge and later founded the Hermetic Society. Kingsford believed she received her spiritual insights directly through trance and dream visions, which she recorded throughout her short life; she died of tuberculosis at the age of 41.