Art, travel and esoteric circles
Rawson was born in Chester, Vermont; the Smithsonian American Art Museum dates his life to 1829–1902. He worked as a painter, engraver and illustrator, exhibiting at the National Academy of Design and the Brooklyn Art Association. His interests extended to travel and religious history. Harper’s published his account of the pictured rocks of Lake Superior in 1867, while other work addressed the landscapes, beliefs and antiquities of the Middle East.
He associated with early Theosophists and with Masonic organisations, including the Mystic Shrine. His accounts of Eastern brotherhoods helped give those circles an elaborate historical and symbolic setting. Later research in the Shrine’s records has distinguished his documented work as a translator and historian from broader claims about its origins. The records place his formal admission in 1878, after the organisation’s establishment. He died in New York in 1902.
Drawing from the antique
The held fourth edition of The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries was published by J. W. Bouton in New York in 1891. Its title page separates the contributors: Thomas Taylor wrote the dissertation, Alexander Wilder supplied editorial material, and Rawson provided eighty-five illustrations. The closing list describes them as drawings from the antique and identifies sources for many of the images.
The subjects include Bacchic processions, priestesses, vessels, musical instruments and scenes involving Demeter and Proserpina. In the opening plate of Bacchic ceremonies, outlines and folds of drapery make the figures legible while preserving the arrangement of the source compositions. The drawings allow readers to compare objects and gestures with the book’s interpretations of myth and ritual. They are adaptations of earlier art rather than eyewitness records of secret ceremonies. Rawson’s contribution thus belongs to the nineteenth-century effort to recover and interpret classical religion through a combination of texts and images.
