The Singer and the Mystic: Love, Music, and Magick in 1910’s New York
“Ratan Devi, has created a vogue for Indian songs which she executes with utter naturalness and a most convincing charm. Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats and Sir Rabinranath Tagore have acclaimed her as the Isis revealer of the soul of India. If India be the tongue of Asia, surely Ratan Devi is the tongue of India! Her success in New York has been serpent-swift.”
- A 1916 Vanity Fair review of the musician Ratan Devī. Authored by Aleister Crowley, occultist, philosopher, artist, and sex magician.
In the 1910’s a white vocalist from Sheffield helped transform the musical landscape of the West in a whirlwind career involving colonialism, Indian art, sex magick, espionage, detective fiction, and a love triangle with one of the most infamous men on the planet. This is a glimpse into the turbulent life of the singer of Indian folk music, Ratan Devī, the brown-face stage name of Alice Ethel Richardson.
Life and Love in Colonial India:
In 1913 a newly wed couple arrived in Kashmir. The husband was Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, a celebrated art theorist and historian of Indian handicrafts, destined to become a canonical metaphysician and philosopher of Indian art. His wife Alice Ethel Richardson was born in 1889 in Sheffield. Alice was an English folk singer, taught…
