Oracle

by Claude Bragdon

Oracle was written by American architect, theosophist, writer, artist, and stage designer, Claude Fayette Bragdon, with the aid of his second wife Eugenie Bragdon, and originally published in 1921. The work is a compilation in the form of a diary of the insights or "communications from the other world" Eugenie Bragdon received via means of automatic writing from her guardian spirit of supernatural goodness and wisdom. Eugenie refused to use the insights received from the spirit for mundane or trivial matters, instead Eugenie asked the oracle for knowledge that would transcend human understanding and ken. Claude believed that they were comparable to Delphic "prophecy, wisdom, and rapture".

71 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1921

About the author

Claude Fayette Bragdon was an American architect, writer, and stage designer based in Rochester, New York, up to World War I, then in New York City.

The designer of Rochester’s New York Central Railroad terminal (1909–13) and Chamber of Commerce (1915–17), as well as many other public buildings and private residences, Bragdon enjoyed a national reputation as an architect working in the progressive tradition associated with Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Along with members of the Prairie School and other regional movements, these architects developed new approaches to the planning, design, and ornamentation of buildings that embraced industrial techniques and building types while reaffirming democratic traditions threatened by the rise of urban mass society. In numerous essays and books, Bragdon argued that only an “organic architecture” based on nature could foster democratic community in industrial capitalist society.