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who had grown up on hellfire Christianity or within the cold formality of Anglican faiths, and for whom faraway places like India or Tibet could seem as magical as never-never land, Spalding’s books came as a liberating uplift. They passed among the hands of thousands of people who had heard little of Theosophy or the other mystical and occult sources upon which Spalding drew, and to whom they arrived with the impact of a new testament.

Invisible College

Spalding was vastly more readable, and more likely to be read, than the voluminous literature to emerge from Theosophy or the metaphysical writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. His works were the result of two underground channels that converged and burst to the surface in America: The first was the Theosophical notion of hidden adepts sent to aid humanity, and the second was a modern mythos that Christ had spent his “lost years”—roughly from the ages of thirteen to thirty—as a Far Eastern initiate of wisdom.

The idea of hidden masters had long circulated in the modern West. The Rosicrucian manuscripts of the early seventeenth century told of an “invisible college” behind the scenes of ordinary life. In 1842, a popular novel titled Zanoni, by the British nobleman Edward Bulwer-Lytton, ignited the occult imagination with tales of immortal superinitiates walking the earth. Possibly taking inspiration from Zanoni, Madame Blavatsky later wrote that she made her very first contact with an Indian Master at the international exhibition at Hyde Park’s Crystal Palace in 1851; he was said to have been a hugely tall man who arrived with the royal Nepal delegation. World’s fairs seemed to be a magical bridge for bringing the influence of the East across the oceans. The 1893 world’s fair in Chicago featured the first World Parliament of Religions, which attracted religious leaders from around the globe, including a large number of robed swamis, yogis, and gurus who heightened the perception that there were, indeed, mysterious teachers of whom the West knew little.

One of the most beguiling and charismatic visitors who reached America through the Chicago World’s Fair was Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu teacher who remained in America for two years, teaching and traveling around the nation. At once friendly and exotic-looking in his turban and robes, Vivekananda—a serious purveyor of Hindu ideas—seemed to enjoy his contact with the refreshingly unpretentious, caste-free Americans. He discussed reincarnation with cowboys, chided Americans for their materialism, and teased Spiritualists for showing more interest in conjuring up “creepy things” than the higher goal of self-knowledge. In good humor, the swami repeated the story of a husband–wife team of spirit mediums with whom he shared a kitchen at a New York rooming house. The couple performed a stage show together and would often get into domestic spats. Vivekananda recalled that after one of their arguments the wife turned to the Eastern master and complained: “Is it fair of him to treat me like this, when I make all the ghosts?”

If wise men had always existed in the ancient cultures of India and Tibet, some Western observers began to wonder—with greater or lesser levels of discrimination—whether the wisest man in history had traversed east from Nazareth during his long stretch of “silent years” in Scripture. The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, a “rediscovered” Tibetan narrative published in 1894 by Russian journalist–impresario Nicolas Notovitch, had done much to popularize this notion, as had the 1908 Aquarian Gospel of Ohio’s Levi H. Dowling. In the early twentieth century, Theosophy’s Annie Besant went further, describing “The Master Jesus” as an immortal adept living “mostly in the mountains of Lebanon.” (This was ascertained, presumably, through clairvoyant perception or a higher-dimensional visit. Besant rarely claimed such abilities herself, but they were frequent methods of her closest deputy, Charles Webster Leadbeater.)

Spalding’s point of view, however, reached a wider public than had any of his predecessors’. He possessed what