Baron de Palm
Joseph Henry Louis Charles, Baron de Palm, Grand Cross Commander of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre and Knight of various other orders, was born at Augsburg, May 10, 1809, in an ancient baronial family of Bavaria. Late in life he emigrated to America, lived a number of years in the Western States.
He met Henry Steel Olcott in New York in December, 1875, bringing an introductory letter from the late Col. Bundy, editor of the Religio-Philosophical Journal.
On March 29, 1876, he was elected on the Council of the T.S. after the resignation of Rev. J. H. Wiggin.
On May 20, 1876, Baron de Palm dies at the Roosevelt Hospital, New York of nephritis, as a result of years of suffering from a complication of diseases of the lungs, kidneys, and other organs.
He had asked that no clergyman or priest should officiate at his funeral, but that Col. Olcott should perform the last offices in a fashion that would illustrate the Eastern notions of death and immortality. His body was cremated at the Masonic Temple, corner of 23rd St., and 6th Ave.
First Cremation in America
Col. Olcott writes in his diary:
The recent agitation of the subject of cremation in Great Britain and America, caused by the incineration of the body of the first Lady Dilke, the scientific experiments of Sir Henry Thompson (vide his published essay The Treatment of the Body of the Death, London, 1874), and the sensational article and pamphlets of Rev. H. R. Haweis upon the unspeakable horrors of the burial-grounds of London, led me to ask him how he would wish me to dispose of his remains. He asked for my opinion upon the relative superiority of the two modes of sepulture, concurred in my preference for cremation, expressed a horror of burial, some lady he had once known having been buried alive, and bade me do as I found most advisable.[1]
Online resources
Articles
- Up in Smoke: Theosophy and the Revival of Cremation at www.wunderkabinett.co.uk
- A Theosophical Funeral The New York Times, May 29, 1876.
- Cremation of Baron de Palm by H. S. Olcott
- The Cremation of Baron De Palm at The Bone Idol
- ↑ Henry Steel Olcott, Old Diary Leaves First Series (Adyar, Madras: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1974), 150-151.