Publisher's Synopsis
Published serially in the Los Angeles Times in 1905, Kumbum, the Tibetan Lama presents itself as a lost work by David Patterson Hatch (1846-1912), the California attorney, judge and occultist who was a member, or perhaps the leader, of a group of California occultists known by their use of an envelope-shaped sigil: a group the members of which included the jurist William Atwood Cheney (1846-1925) and Annie Elizabeth Skinner Cheney (1847-1915). Traditionally, David Patterson Hatch has been accorded the sole authorship of all occult texts published under the pseudonym Paul Karishka, but this fanciful and meandering occult novella calls that attribution into question, and foregrounds the role that Annie Elizabeth Cheney played in the construction of the group's occult works, fictional and otherwise.
This edition of Kumbum, the Thibetan Lama is based on the first and only edition of the work, and is edited and annotated by John Buescher and Marc Demarest, of the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals (IAPSOP).
