Marie Musaeus Higgins

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Marie Musaeus Higgins , also Musaeus-Higgins , b. Mussaeus , called Sudu Amma (born May 19, 1855 in Neustadt in Mecklenburg ; † July 10, 1926 in Colombo , Sri Lanka ) was a German-American theosophist , educator and founder of the Musaeus College in Colombo.

Life

Marie Mussaeus came from a Mecklenburg family of lawyers and pastors and was the daughter of the judge Theodor Mussaeus . She grew up in Wismar, and at the beginning of the 1880s she followed her brother Friedrich (born September 27, 1850, † January 3, 1890) to the United States . She found work as a translator for the United States Postal Service in Washington, DC Here she met the engineer Anthony Higgins and married him. Like Higgins, Marie became an avid supporter of Madame Blavatsky . They founded the Blavatsky Theosophical Society in Washington, the first Theosophical Society outside of New York City . On January 11, 1891, Anthony Higgins died after a long illness at the age of 54.

Following a call from the Ceylonese entrepreneur and patron Peter de Abrew (1862-1940) in the theosophical magazine The Path , who was looking for a director for a Buddhist girls' school, and with the support of Henry Steel Olcott , Marie Higgins traveled via Bremen in 1891 with the Reichspostdampfer Prussen of the North German Lloyd to Colombo, where she arrived on November 15th. In December 1891 she was able to take part in the 16th annual meeting of the Theosophical Society in Adyar . In 1893 she took over as the founding director of Musaeus College , a school for girls that she ran until her death. For the first time, the school gave Sinhala girls the opportunity to attend a higher education in English in a Buddhist atmosphere.

In 1904 she visited Germany to take part in a theosophical conference in Berlin and to see her hometown Wismar again.

Works

  • Stories from the History of Ceylon. Colombo 1910
German: Legends and stories from India and Ceylon for young and old. Authorized translation into German by I. Barell. 2 volumes, Basel: Schweiz-Verlag-Druckerei G. Böhm 1912/13
  • Jātaka māla: or, A Garland of Birth Stories. Colombo 1914
  • The Ramayana: A Historical Play of Jambudwipa and Lanka. Colombo 1924
  • Leela's Dreams: A Fairy Story for Children. Colombo 1925

literature

  • Buddhadasa Kirthisinge: Marie Musaeus Higgins: American Mother of Ceylon's Buddhist Womanhood. In: The Mahabodhi Journal 76: 11-12 (November-December 1968), pp. 327-332

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ So after Buddhadasa Kirthisinge (Lit.), p 327; Even if Wismar is almost always mentioned as the place of birth , Neustadt is more plausible because in 1855 it was the place of work of the father and the place of residence of the family
  2. ↑ The Path 5 (1891), p. 360 ( digitized version )
  3. ↑ The Path 5 (1891), p. 355
  4. ↑ The Path 6 (1892), p. 364
  5. ^ Douglas Allen: Religion and Political Conflict in South Asia: India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. (Contributions to the study of religion 34) Greenwood Publishing Group 1992 ISBN 9780313273094 , p. 170
  6. ↑ Report in Neue Metaphysische Rundschau: Monthly for philosophical, psychological and occult research in science, art and religion 11 (1904), p. 232
personal data
SURNAME Higgins, Marie Musaeus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sudu Amma; Mussaeus, Marie (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American theosophist, educator and founder of the Musaeus College in Colombo
DATE OF BIRTH May 19, 1855
PLACE OF BIRTH Neustadt in Mecklenburg
DATE OF DEATH July 10, 1926
Place of death Colombo , Sri Lanka