D. N. Dunlop
Daniel Nicol Dunlop was a Scottish entrepreneur and Theosophist who later joined Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophical Society.
Early life and education
Professional career
Dunlop was founder of the World Energy Conferences, which started in Wembley, London in 1924.[1] The idea was to bring together scientists, engineers, politicians, and others to consider how energy could be best used within the context of the new internationalism following World War I. An executive committee had 23 members, each representing the electrical industry of a country. Germany was included. They considered such issues as interconnectivity, pricing, duties, regulations, and technical issues.[2] The conferences have continued for over 90 years.
Theosophical Society involvement
Clara Codd wrote of her experience meeting him in the library of the Theosophical Society in England:
Another famous person who often came in was Mr. Daniel Dunlop, the organizer of a world-wide Federation of Electrical Engineers. He was Irish to the core, and had once been part of the famous Theosophical Group in Dublin which had numbered among its adherents W. B. Yeats and George Russell (AE). An ardent devotee of William Q. Judge and the youngest of his forty-seven disciples, Mr. Dunlop had followed Judge when the latter broke away from the main Society and founded in America what was known as the Point Loma Theosophical Society now resident at Covina, California. He could not get along with Judge's successor, Mrs. Katherine Tingley, so he returned to our Society, though later he left us again to join the Anthroposophical Society under the leadership of Rudolf Steiner. That is quite a common practice in the Theosophical Society; so any attracted by the thought, drift in and out. A small proportion can never leave it again; for them it is life and eternity."[3]
Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy
Daniel Nicol Dunlop met Rudolf Steiner in person in 1922. It was the Dutch manager Joseph van Leer who brought them together. They sat at the table together - Rudolf Steiner who spoke no English and Daniel N. Dunlop who spoke no German. Joseph van Leer stepped in as translator but what he didn't see was that Rudolf Steiner took the hand of Daniel Dunlop and held it, under the table, during the whole of the conversation. In 1934, during one of his famous summer schools, Dunlop shared the memory of this with his friend Walter Johannes Stein. He made an even more interesting statement, that Rudolf Steiner on this occasion said to him, 'We are brothers.' Eleanor Merry, also an active member of the early British Anthroposophical Society, worked intensively with Dunlop for the last 14 years of his life during which time he told her that Rudolf Steiner gave him an insight into a former life of his where he, Dunlop, had been a member of the innermost circle of the Order of the Knights Templar.[4]
Notes
- ↑ Gil McHattie, The Knights Templar: Influences from the Past and Impulses for the Future (London: Temple Lodge Publishing, 2011), 190.
- ↑ Vincent Lagendijk, Electrifying Europe: The Power of Europe in the Construction of Electricity Networks (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 59-60.
- ↑ Clara Codd, So Rich a Life (Pretoria: Institute for Theosophical Publicity, 1956), 96.
- ↑ Gil McHattie, The Knights Templar: Influences from the Past and Impulses for the Future (London: Temple Lodge Publishing, 2011), 190.