Medicine and a publishing partnership
Research by the historian K. Paul Johnson identifies Wagner as an Ohio-born physician who lived from 1850 to 1919. Johnson records a medical degree from Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1871 and his subsequent return to Ohio to marry Belle Ewing. The Wagners spent much of their married life in the western United States and became involved in the leadership and publishing work of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.
The surviving publications document their partnership more directly than they explain every part of their private lives. Belle’s Within the Temple of Isis, issued in 1899, is dedicated to her husband, Henry Wagner, M.D., and carries his copyright. Details of his childhood, medical practice and the circumstances of his death remain less securely established in the sources consulted here.
The books issued from Denver
The Astro-Philosophical Publishing Company issued The Duality of Truth in Denver in 1899, the date on the held title page. Its full title identifies the subject as the occult forces of nature considered through Hermetic philosophy. Wagner published under his own name with the medical designation M.D.; the work itself is an exposition of spiritual and cosmological beliefs rather than a medical textbook.
The same publishing circle circulated Thomas H. Burgoyne’s The Light of Egypt. The second volume’s preface thanks Henry Wagner for helping bring Burgoyne’s writings into print and names Belle as a spiritual successor. It also presents additions as communications from Burgoyne after death. These statements record the circle’s account of authority and transmission; they do not independently establish the claimed supernatural source.
