Life and career
Old was born in Handsworth, where his father, George, worked as a haberdasher. By 1890 he was living at 19 Avenue Road in London. The house served as both Blavatsky’s home and the European headquarters of the Theosophical Society. Annie Besant was among its residents. Old lectured at lodges in London and Birmingham and became general secretary of the British section.
In 1893 Old took on the posts of treasurer and recording secretary at Adyar in India. His position later brought him into a dispute over letters attributed to the spiritual teachers the Society called the Masters. Old supplied papers to the journalist F. Edmund Garrett. When Garrett published his account in the Westminster Gazette in 1894, former colleagues publicly condemned Old’s part in it. The episode placed a man who had belonged to Blavatsky’s inner circle at odds with some of her closest associates.
Work and ideas
Old earned his living from astrology in several ways. He edited periodicals, contributed to the press and prepared astrological reports for private clients. Kim Farnell’s study of his career identifies at least sixty books. His subscription pamphlets had a far smaller audience than his printed manuals. Some were prepared for an individual subscriber, who agreed not to reproduce them.
In Cosmic Symbolism (1912), Old asked what a musical note, a planet and a number could have in common. He believed that recurring proportions tied them together. He assigned numbers to planets and examined the notion that each planet had a corresponding sound. The Kabala of Numbers applied related methods to names and dates. He also published as Walter Gorn Old. That is the name on The Book of the Simple Way, his English translation of Laozi with commentary.
