Mary K. Neff

Mary K Neff in Auckland, NZ in 1937.Image from TSA Archives.

Mary Katherine Neff was an American Theosophist known as an educator, lecturer,and historian. She was born on September 7, 1877 in Akron, Ohio. After teaching in that city for a few years, she traveled extensively in India, learning to speak Hindi and Urdu, followed by eight years in Australia. She died in 1948.

Career as educator

In 1911, just before leaving for India for the first time.

During much of her life, Miss Neff was involved in education as a teacher and administrator, beginning in the public schools of Akron, Ohio.

Dr. Besant, having at this time [1913] organised a large number of schools and colleges under the Theosophical Educational Trust, Miss Neff, through her training as a teacher, found a new avenue for her abilities, first as head of the business department of the Boys' High School at Madanapelle; she then took charge of the Vasanta Ashrama, a boarding school for girls in Benares. A year later, the Municipality of Lucknow invited her to act as Principal of the Middle School for Girls in the Kashmiri Mohalla of that city, where she remained for five years, raising the school to the status of a High School and introducing many reforms.

In another account:

In India she acted as superintendent of a Girl's School at Benares, principal of the Municipal Middle School for Indian Girls at Lucknow, and it was under her leadership that the first Business Courses were offered to the Boys' High School at Madanapalle, Madreas. In Australia she was head teacher of King Arthur's School at Sydney.

Travels

In 1911 she received her first passport. Photographs from her collection show her journey to Nepal in October 1914. She visited Kapilavastu, the childhood home of Buddha, and the villages of Lahari Kudan and Ronagai..

Miss Neff's experiences in other continents provided useful topics for her lectures. A press release for her lecture tours provides this description of her travels:

Though born in our country, Mary K. Neff, Lecturer for The Theosophical Society in America, feels quite at home on both sides, or one might say all sides, of our earth. She has lived for fifteen years in India, for eight years as a resident of Australia, and during those twenty-three years hers has been an extraordinary career of service and adventure...

Carried from her flooded and falling house by a Mohammadan servant, Miss Neff aided government authorities in rescue work during the flood of the Gompti River in 1915. Safely established in a cell of the Prison Hospital, each day she ventured forth in a row boat, carrying a bicycle in order that she might take charge of a camp of some six thousand refugees who were marooned in a palace tomb of the Nawabs of Oudh. For a month she kept this strange assortment of human beings, goats, chickens and ducks, in a sanitary condition and saw to the supplying of food and water. She has knowledge of India life and Indian women such as is attained by few missionaries, having made herself conversant with two Indian languages, Hindu and Hindustani or Urdu. ...

As a Theosophist and a student of comparative religion, Miss Neff is perhaps the only woman to have visited the birth places of the founders of three great religions: The Christ at Bethlehem, Palestine, Shri Krishna at Brindaban, India, and the Lord Buddha in the Terai of Nepal in the Himalaya mountains.

As she and two other ladies, an Englishwoman and a Hindu girl, were making their way on elephants, from village to village in search of the modern Rumindei, near the site of the ancient garden-palace where the Lord Buddha was born, whole villages followed their caravan shouting, "Memsahab! Memsahab! - White women! White women!" - for the village folk had seen no white women previous to this visit.

• 

  Arriving at Lahari Kudan, October 1914.
• 

  On the crumbled wall at Kapilavastu, Nepal, October 1914.
• 

  On the crumbled wall at Kapilavastu, Nepal, October 1914.
• 

  Plain outside Kapilavastu, Nepal, October 1914.
• 

  Plain outside Kapilavastu, Nepal, October 1914.
• 

  In Manor Garden, Sydney, 1925.

Theosophical work

Flyer from a lecture tour. Image from TSA Archives.

ATTENTION: These are some notes from materials in the TSA Archives, to assist in writing this section.

• In 1908-1909, she served as Secretary of the Akron Lodge.
• In 1911 she received her first passport, planning travel to India.
• secretary to C. W. Leadbeater
• took charge of the archives at Adyar at request of CJ
• national lecturer in Australia and in the United States.
• National Lecturer in Australia, 1935-1937:
  • Adelaide Lodge, May 26 - July 18, 1935
  • Fremantle Lodge, July 23-August 6, 1935 or 1936
  • Launceston Lodge, Tasmania, September 19-29, 1935
  • Blavatsky Lodge, Sydney, March 8-29, 1936
  • Kuring-gai Lodge, Chatswood, May 7-28, 1936
  • Melbourne, November 1-29, 1936
  • Sydney, January 10-31, 1937
• Lectures in New Zealand
  • Hamilton, 1935 or 1936

Writings

• The “Brothers” of Madame Blavatsky. Adyar, Madras, India: Theosophical Publishing House, 1932.
• A Guide to Adyar (1934). Reissued by Theosophical Publishing House in Adyar, 1999, as Adyar: Historical Notes and Features up to 1934. Pamphlet with several coauthors, 54 pages.
• Personal Memoirs of H. P. Blavatsky (1937, 1967).
• How Theosophy Came to Australia and New Zealand (1943).
• The Mahatma Letters: Their Chronological Order (1940 pamphlet).
• Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett: Their Chronological Order (1940).

Numerous articles by and about Miss Neff may be located in the Union Index to Theosophical Periodicals using this search.

Later years

Mary K. Neff

Additional resources

"Neff, Mary K." in Theosopedia.