Between 1900 and 1922, Theosophist and meteorologist Clement Lindley Wragge gave countless magic lantern lectures, with titles like: “A Voyage through the Universe” (1902), “The Majesty of Creation” (1906), “The Grandeur of the Universe” (1912), and “The Endless Universe and Eternal Life” (1918–22). The images collected below were recovered from a trove of 350 lantern slides stored in wooden boxes, which were used by Wragge in various lecture series and are now held in the collections of the Auckland War Memorial Museum. Without extant transcripts for many of these presentations, we are left to imagine his transitions based solely on the images: eclipses and solar flares give way to flocks of sheep and esoteric wisdom; sunsets fade into saturnine moonscapes; a chicken lays an egg and, shortly after, a subsequent slide asks: “Who am I? Who are you?”

Born in Stourbridge, Worcestershire, Clement Lindley Wragge (1852–1922) was orphaned at an early age: his mother passed away from complications of childbirth; his father fell off a horse and died from the resultant injuries. Raised for a time by his grandmother, who taught him the basics of cosmology and meteorology, Wragge initially studied law at Lincoln’s Inn before receiving a minor inheritance, which allowed him to decamp for North Africa and the Levant. In 1874, he toured Egypt, Palestine, and Jerusalem, where he chatted with a group of Mormons who encouraged him to visit Utah. And he did so the following year, sailing first to India and then Australia and finally to San Francisco and Salt Lake City. There, he met the prophet and governor Brigham Young, before heading home, surrendering his stake in the law, and casting his eyes to the sky.

During 1881, Wragge assisted the Scottish Meteorological Society in their plans to establish a weather station on Ben Nevis, and began to earn a reputation — which would later result in being nicknamed The Weather Prophet — through his daily assent of the highest mountain in the British Isles, winning the Society’s gold medal in 1882. Two years later, Wragge and his wife and scientific collaborator, Leonora Edith Florence d’Eresby Thornton — whom he had met during yet another trip to Australia in 1876 — decided to return to Oceania for good, setting sail in 1884 with their dog, Renzo, and a supposedly hot-headed cat in tow. In Australia and New Zealand, Wragge devoted himself to rain and wind. He founded the Royal Meteorological Society of Australasia as well as a slew of weather stations (on Mount Lofty near Adelaide; close to the summit of Tasmania’s Mount Wellington; on Mount Kosciuszko in New South Wales), published Wragge’s Australasian Almanac and Weather Guide for Land and Sea between 1898 and 1903, and was appointed as government meteorologist for Queensland in 1887.

His most famous exploit, however, was a failure. Having purchased a battery of Steiger Vortex canons, which had been invented to prevent hail from forming over vineyards in Europe, Wragge installed six in Charleville, Queensland, and proclaimed that he would end the drought of 1902. His solution? Fire these cannon-like devices at clouds and watch as the acoustic shockwaves produced by their gas explosions resulted in rain. While the first firing was met with a bit of drizzle, the second barrage produced no precipitation and two of the cannons exploded. When later interviewed about the flop, Wragge blamed his civilian assistants: “the people of Charleville did not carry out the experiment properly”, he said. “They only fired ten shots, whereas they should have continued firing for ten minutes, at the rate of two shots a minute from each gun.”

In later life, Wragge became increasingly attuned to the mystical climate of the inner world. He “believed in the underlying connection between knowledge and divinity or science and spirituality”, writes Shaun Higgins, pictorial curator at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. In 1908, during a tour of India, he met Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who founded the Ahmadiyya messianic movement in Islam, and together they conversed about the harmony of science and religion. In the early 1920s, Arthur Conan Doyle visited Wragge in New Zealand while writing The Wanderings of a Spiritualist and left convinced that Wragge was “the most remarkable personality in Auckland — dreamer, mystic, and yet very practical adviser on all matters of ocean and air.”

Wragge’s lecture style was grandiose, a rhetorical squall, a twister that gathered ideas from every discipline his mind roamed over. An observer of a 1902 lecture by Wragge described the meteorologist as embodying the very weather systems under his observation: “His voice comes in gusts, and dies away in murmurs; it occasionally travels with the speed of a small tornado”. The lecture prospectus for the Wragge Institute and Gardens, which opened at Birkenhead, Auckland, in 1916, offers a glimpse of the encyclopedic ambitions harbored by this Englishman, who sought to harmonize the farthest reaches of space with the inner depths of the soul: “astronomy, geography, travel, meteorology, natural history, radium, etc. besides lectures on Oriental and Indian philosophy, studies in the psychic and occult realms, practical gardening, and evolution of the beautiful and other subjects”.

While the primary aim of his lectures was to make astronomical and meteorological discoveries accessible to the public, Wragge increasingly used his magic lantern slides to communicate Theosophical learning. During a 1908 lecture, for instance, Wragge describes scientific observation as a form of prayer: “Instead of going to church, I prefer to go out into the mighty universe and ask God for wisdom. Can we not pray in the open, in the forests, and by the rivers! (showing a picture of the Manawatu River.) Why can’t I pray in the Manawatu River?” According to Higgins, Wragge conceived of astronomy as “the universal religion, referring to its capacity to lift the mind beyond the finite. He certainly used this capacity in his lectures, persuading the audience to accept that they were insignificant in the scale of the universe.”

But this insignificance was meant to comfort. Themes from Wragge’s later lectures would be more at home in the realms of poetry and religion than textbooks on astronomy: the persistence of life after death, the survival of the soul. In these lectures, slides of “Atlantic ooze”, pictured at 2,500 fathoms, and the cratered surface of the Moon are ordered cheek by jowl with meditations on the infinitude of human consciousness:

Below you will find a selection of slides from across Wragge’s lecturing career. Slides marked “G” are from “The Grandeur of the Universe” (1912) lecture, while images marked “U” are from “The Endless Universe and Eternal Life” (1918–22), which recycled slides from previous lectures. Other slides are marked “O”, presumably for use in observatories, and “R”, a designation that the image concerns radium, an element that Wragge believed contained “the radio-active spark of God”.