1 Alice and Laurence Oliphants’ Divine Androgyne and “The Woman Question” [Postprint] Accepted for publications in Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2015) Julie Chajes The Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought Ben-Gurion University of the Negev P.O.B 653, Beer-Sheva 84105 Israel Email: juliechajes@gmail.com <please insert the following acknowledgement after the author contact information above> Thanks to Joy Dixon, Naomi Hetherington, Jean-Pierre Brach, and Leslie Price for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The publication of this paper was made possible through an Israel Science Foundation grant, number 774/10. Abstract This paper offers an historical and cultural analysis of two treatises of heterodox spirituality: Sympneumata (1885) and Scientific Religion (1888), and a novel, Massolam (1886). The main author was the celebrated Victorian diplomat Laurence Oliphant (1829- 1888). Drawing on the teachings of the American “prophet” Thomas Lake Harris (1823- 1906), Laurence Oliphant and his wife, Alice Le Strange (1846-1886), taught that everyone has a spiritual and physical complement of the opposite gender that can be encountered internally through spiritual practice. Humanity must abandon sexual intercourse in favour of individual communion with this counterpart, in order to return to its prelapsarian androgynous nature. Despite antecedents in earlier esoteric currents, the Oliphants’ androgyne was a Victorian androgyne. It was intimately entwined with the pressing social, cultural, intellectual, political and religious needs of a secularizing world in which the roles and rights of Woman were central—and contested—issues. It can be read as an answer to the nineteenth century “problem of sex” and the “Woman Question,” and it was both conservative and transgressive. Introduction This paper offers historical and cultural contextualization for teachings on sexuality and androgyny as presented in two treatises of heterodox spirituality: Sympneumata (1885) and Scientific Religion (1888), and a novel, Massolam (1886). The