Editing and translating religious texts
George Robert Stow Mead worked closely with H. P. Blavatsky, handling correspondence and assisting with her publications. After her death he continued editing within the Theosophical Society while publishing studies of Plotinus, Orpheus and early religious traditions. His translation of Pistis Sophia made a substantial Gnostic text available to English readers.
Mead left the Theosophical Society in 1909 and founded the Quest Society. Its journal, The Quest, provided a forum for the religious and philosophical inquiries that occupied him for the next two decades. The change gave him an independent setting for work that had always combined historical research with an interest in the spiritual lives of the people behind the texts.
Reading the fragments
Fragments of a Faith Forgotten first appeared in 1900. Mead reconstructs Gnostic teachings from surviving texts and from accounts written by their opponents. A reader repeatedly encounters the problem of hearing one tradition through another’s criticism. Lumitheca holds the 1906 second edition. Quests Old and New, published in 1913, broadens the field to include Chinese mystical thought, Buddhist psychology and modern philosophers. The collection shows Mead carrying questions about knowledge and religious experience between ancient sources and contemporary debate.
