About Wisdom's Goldenrod

1943 – Anthony Damiani meets Paul Brunton in New York and begins a lifelong relationship with him, eventually becoming his primary student in the 1960s.

1950s – Anthony and Ella May Damiani host Kenneth Hurst while he gets established in the publishing business. Paul Brunton visits often with them during his visits to America.

1963 – Anthony Damiani moves his family from NYC to Valois, New York, to deepen his studies and open a spiritual bookstore.

1967 – Steve Damiani, with his father, Anthony Damiani, opens The American Brahman Bookstore in Ithaca, New York. 

1968 – Anthony Damiani begins classes at the American Brahman Bookstore; over 100 students gather there and start meeting at his home on Sundays. The classes focus on Paul Brunton, Plotinus, Jung, Vedanta, and Astrology.

1969 – Students of Paul Brunton from Columbus, Ohio, meet Anthony Damiani at his home for the first time.

1970 – The students of Anthony Damiani (now about 200 strong) offer to build a center in which classes and meditations can be held. This is accomplished over the next two years, and Wisdom’s Goldenrod comes into existence. Individual students begin visiting Paul Brunton in Europe around this time. Anthony travels to Columbus, Ohio, to meet with students studying PB. Thereafter Anthony visits Columbus several times a year to give talks and meet with students.

1977 – At Anthony Damiani’s request, PB agrees to visit the United States for a last time. The purpose of this visit was to meet the Ohio PB study group (long affiliated with Wisdom’s Goldenrod), meet all of Anthony’s students at Wisdom’s Goldenrod, and consider the possibility of spending his final years in or near Wisdom’s Goldenrod.

1977/1978 – The Library at Wisdom’s Goldenrod is built under the guidance of Andrew Holmes. Center members pitch in time and money to complete the project.

1978 – PB decides not to relocate to Wisdom’s Goldenrod but does accept Anthony Damiani’s offer to have his students assist PB in his day-to-day activities. The first assistant, Ed McKeown, is dispatched at once. He is followed by Robert Geyer, then Timothy and Devon Cottrell Smith, Micha-El (Dr. Alan Berkowitz), and finally Paul Cash. Many others visit and assist for short periods of time—as do PB’s European students, notably Anna Bornstein, his Swedish translator. (It should be noted that there were many other visitors, students, and helpers who spent time with PB that prefer to remain anonymous, or otherwise don’t figure in the history of Wisdom’s Goldenrod; the few individuals mentioned here are merely representative of a lifetime filled with such assistants and associates.)

1979 – Sidney Piburn, who traveled to Dharamsala, India, to meet the Dalai Lama, invites him to come to the United States. The Dalai Lama tours the United States for the first time and also visits the Wisdom’s Goldenrod Center for Philosophic Studies and dedicates the newly built library.

1980 – During Timothy and Devon Smith’s visit, PB begins arranging his notes for posthumous publication. As this project progresses, various students at Wisdom’s Goldenrod begin to assist in this massive task.

1981 – Kenneth Hurst is made the literary inheritor. Paul Cash and Timothy Smith are made co-editors to oversee organizing the material for publication. The whole of the Wisdom’s Goldenrod community, under the guidance of Anthony Damiani, engages in the task of keyboarding PB’s notes from the so-called Idea Series of unpublished notebooks and classifying them using the new category system devised by PB. These become the basis for the published set The Notebooks of Paul Brunton.

1981/1984 – Anthony Damiani and Kenneth Hurst agree to begin publishing PB’s works; a “sampler volume” is planned; this becomes Perspectives, which introduces key points from all twenty-eight topics in PB’s notebooks. Robert Larson, the Swedish publisher of PB’s works, establishes an American branch of his business; Paul Cash is engaged to run this business. Robert Larson provides a substantial financial base to fund the project of creating Larson Publications and to cover the material expenses of entering some 50,000 pages of handwritten notes into a computer database (managed by Vic Mansfield).

1984 – Larson Publications publishes Perspectives in July. Work continues of publishing the Notebook Series. Anthony Damiani dies in October, days after his final visit with His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

1984/Present – Classes continue at Wisdom’s Goldenrod, led by students. Topics include PB, including classes on his books The Quest of the Overself, The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga, The Wisdom of the Overself, and his Notebooks; Plotinus; the draft of Astronoesis; astrology; Buddhism; and the Divine Feminine. There are also seasonal mini-conferences on selected topics, with two or three presentations per day over the course of three days.

1986 – Kenneth Hurst, Robert Larson, and the community of Wisdom’s Goldenrod join together to form the nonprofit Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation. Kenneth signs over the copyrights to the posthumous material; Robert Larson contributes Larson Publications and additional financial support; and the Wisdom’s Goldenrod community of Anthony Damiani’s students contribute many hours of sweat equity. By now the publication of the Notebooks series is in full swing, with several volumes coming out each year.

1988 – The publication of The Notebooks of Paul Brunton is completed; it takes sixteen full volumes to house the paras from all twenty-eight of PB’s original categories. A full set is presented to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and to His Holiness Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswathi Mahaswamigal, the 68th Shankaracharya, whom PB first describes in A Search in Secret India.

1995 – Three titles of Anthony Damiani’s writings were developed by students at Wisdom’s Goldenrod and published by PBPF/Larson: Looking into Mind, Living Wisdom, and Standing in Your Own Way. Then the first “small” book of PB’s writings, an abridgment of specific sections of the Notebooks of Paul Brunton focusing on specific issues, was developed. The title is self-explanatory: Meditations for People in Charge: A Handbook for Men and Women Whose Decisions Affect the World. In February of the following year, the PBPF website was launched, and the second small book, Meditations for People in Crisis, was published.

2000 – In the fall of 2000, Astronoesis: Philosophy’s Empirical Context, Astrology’s Transcendental Ground is published by Larson Publications. This is Anthony Damiani’s magnum opus, which was left only partially completed when he died in 1984. The work of completing the ms., which involved completing some chapters using essays written by Anthony Damiani and adding supplementary notes and essays, was led by Avery Solomon.

2007 – Larson Publications (owner and operator, Paul R. Cash), which had been part of the Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation, becomes an independent entity. A new edition of A Search in Secret Egypt, edited by Timothy J. Smith and Kira Lallas, is published. The editors also conduct a series of workshops titled “Paul Brunton and The Myth of Osiris” (available on DVD) that provide a provocative exploration of A Search in Secret Egypt with a focus on the Osiris myth as a symbol of the ego’s true death and the awakening of the soul.

2023 – A small team begins formulating the goals for a digital repository of all of Anthony Damiani’s written materials—notes, papers, book drafts, and diagrams—as well as the audio of classes taught at Wisdom’s Goldenrod during his lifetime and transcripts made from the audio of classes. The team selects Jim Verhagen of Cyrus Co. to be the software developer for the site, and the board of Wisdom’s Goldenrod approves the proposal to create the AD Archival Website in May 2023.

2023/2026 – IT and Michael Wakoff, working with Jim Verhagen, create a digital library of Anthony Damiani’s archival material. The archive has three components: (1) written documents, which include class transcripts, student notes, papers, drafts of chapters from Astronoesis, annotated précis and abridgments of books and articles by other authors, (2) class series, which are collections of classes on the same topic that span a limited period of time, and (3) mandala-diagrams from his sketchbooks.