Edward Douglas Fawcett
BiographyEdward Douglas Fawcett (April 11, 1866–April 14, 1960) was an English mountaineer, philosopher, and novelist. He was born in Hove, Sussex, the elder son of Edward Fawcett, an equerry to the Prince of Wales (King Edward VII), and the older brother of explorer Percy Fawcett. He was educated at Newton Abbot College in Devon and was a Queen’s Scholar at Westminster School from 1880.
Fawcett converted to Buddhism, having taken the pansil (the lay follower vow to the Five Precepts) while with Henry Steel Olcott in Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) in January 1890. He was an associate of Russian occultist Helena Blavatsky, leading theoretician of the esoteric religious movement Theosophy, and assisted her in her writing and in compiling quotations from scientific works for The Secret Doctrine. He joined the editorial staff of The Theosophist, the monthly journal of the Theosophical Society, and wrote correspondence for the magazine Lucifer.
Fawcett married his cousin M. B. V. Jackson in 1896 and they lived principally in Switzerland for many years, where he devoted his life to mountaineering and philosophy. During this time his philosophy centered around the idea that imagination was the fundamental reality of the universe. Fawcett and his wife became the first people to ascend the Mer de Glace by automobile in 1909. He returned to England and in 1947 married his second wife, Vera Dick-Cunyngham, widow of George Dick-Cunyngham. He died in London.
Bibliography
The Power Behind the Universe (1891)
The Riddle of the Universe (1893)
Hartmann the Anarchist; or, The Doom of the Great City (science fiction, 1893)
Swallowed by an Earthquake (science fiction, 1894)
The Secret Life of the Desert (science fiction, 1895)
The Individual and Reality (1909)
The World as Imagination (1916)
The Case for Reincarnation (1919)
Divine Imagining (1921)
The Zermatt Dialogues (1931)
From Heston to the High Alps: A Chat About Joy-Flying (1936)
Oberland Dialogues (1939)
Other links
Cool Wisdom Books
Wikipedia