• DOI:10.1086/649525
• Corpus ID: 161606445

Miracle Publics: Theosophy, Christianity, and the Coulomb Affair*

@article{Scott2009MiraclePT,
  title={Miracle Publics: Theosophy, Christianity, and the Coulomb Affair*},
  author={J. Barton Scott},
  journal={History of Religions},
  year={2009},
  volume={49},
  pages={172 - 196}
}

• J. Scott
• Published 1 November 2009
• Art
• History of Religions

With an eye to recent scholarship that theorizes the contemporary relations of religion, publicity, and secularity, this essay returns to an earlier moment in the unfolding of global modernity: the colonial and occult late nineteenth century. It analyzes documents from the Coulomb Affair of 1884– 85 in order to ask how various participants in that scandal conceived of the public sphere and its purchase upon the truthful, the divine, and the real—a complex of concerns distilled by the Theosophical slogan, “There is no religion higher than truth.” In particular, I ask how Theosophists and Christian missionaries negotiated the ethic of openness so characteristic of the affair and, arguably, of modern publics more broadly. As recent scholarship has affirmed, public spheres, rather than being natural or inevitable, emerge as imagined and idiosyncratic fields, wherein