Klaas-Jan BAKKER - AMORC

time to learn so much about grasses while being
immersed in the duties of a general. He replied
that he was only a general in his spare time.
In the visitors’ book you read of gratitude for
being inspired by the life of simplicity led by such
a famous man. Smuts abhorred any ostentation.
He only accepted a Field Marshall’s baton when it
He was inspired by the life of simplicity,
abhorring any ostentation.
was presented to him by King George VI during
the royal visit to South Africa in 1947. In 1931 he
became the first foreign President of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science and
in 1948 he was elected Chancellor of Cambridge
University, becoming the first foreigner to hold
that position. He remained Chancellor until his
death.
The Whitman Connection
While a student at Cambridge in the 1890’s
he befriended a number of Quakers. After the
Anglo-Boer War, Emily Hobbhouse introduced
him to another Quaker, Mary Clark, later Gillett.
From 1919 until his death in 1950 he kept an
almost weekly correspondence with her and it
is in these letters that we discover the mystical
In 1926 Smuts wrote Holism and Evolution in which he extended
the Darwinian concept of organic evolution to the development of
greater organised entities, including that of human activities.
When living on his farm, Doornkloof near Pretoria, he would, before
sunrise every morning, climb up the hill on his farm to commune
with the divine. When in Cape Town, he would regularly ascend
Table Mountain on foot for that same private communion.
Smuts. As a student he wrote Human Whitman:
A study in the evolution of human personality,
which was only published in 1972. He wrote to
Mary Clark about the influence of Whitman:
“Whitman did a great service to me in making me
appreciate the Natural man and freeing me from
much theological or conventional preconceptions
due to my early pious upbringing. It was a sort of
liberation, as St Paul was liberated from the Law
and its damnations by his Damascus vision.
“Sin ceased to dominate my view of life, and this
was a great release as I was inclined to be severely
puritanical in all things. A great release and a
useful service.”
During the Anglo-Boer War he kept a copy of
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass with him, given to him
by his future wife, Issy Krige. The other books
in his saddlebag were Kant’s Kritik der reinen
Vernunft, the New Testament in Greek, Encomium
Moriae of Desiderius Erasmus and Anabasis Kyron
by Xenophon. Indeed unusual reading matter for
a general fighting a guerrilla war. By coincidence,
Xenophon’s description of the flight of the Greeks
before the pursuing Persians mirrors Smuts’s
epic trek with his commandos across the Cape
Colony.
In Richard M. Bucke’s book, Cosmic
Consciousness, we learn about an enlightenment
experienced by Whitman. The poems of Whitman,
The Rosicrucian Beacon -- December 2007