How Like an Angel Came I Down: Conversations with Children on the Gospels

Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888) was born to an illiterate flax farmer in Wolcott, Connecticut. Profoundly influenced by John Bunyan's book Pilgrim's Progress, he left home at seventeen to become a peddler in Virginia and the Carolinas. After five years, he returned to Connecticut, determined to become an educator. Attracted to Pestalozzi's innovative child-centered educational ideas, he began a long and varied career as a teacher. Bronson Alcott was singular among the Transcendentalists in boldly embodying his ideals. In his schools he introduced art, music, nature study, field trips, and physical education into the curriculum, while banishing corporal punishment. He encouraged children to ask questions and taught through dialogue and example. When Ralph Waldo Emerson met Alcott in Boston in the late 1830s, he was so impressed with his intellect and innovative ideas that he convinced Alcott to move to Concord and join his circle of friends. Alcott outlived his closest transcendentalist friends, dying on March 4, 1888, just two days before his famous daughter Louisa succumbed to the effects of mercury poisoning. The Concord School of Philosophy closed in July of that year after holding a memorial service honoring Alcott. Alice O. Howell was born in Cambridge, Mass., in 1922. From an early age, she lived abroad in hotels and boarding schools, never more than three months in one place. By eighteen, she had lived in or traveled to thirty-seven countries and undertaken a lifelong study of comparative religion and mythology. She graduated from the Buser Institut in Switzerland before returning with her parents to the U.S. During World War II, she studied under the astrologer Marc Edmund Jones as his youngest student. She got married, had four children, and taught English and history in private schools on Long Island for eighteen years, progressing to the university level. Howell continued to study Jungian depth psychology and astrology for thirty years. At the advice of the Jungian analyst Dr. Edward F. Edinger, she attempted to prove astrology a useful diagnostic aid in the practice of Jungian psychology and devoted her time to patients sent by psychiatrists and analysts. Howell taught at the Jung Foundation in New York City and later at the C.G. Jung institutes in Chicago and L.A. and became an international lecturer. She is the primary pioneer in linking psychology and astrology. Encouraged by her second husband, Walter Andersen, she has written seven books, including Jungian Symbolism in Astrology (1987); The Dove in the Stone (1988); and The Web in the Sea (1933); as well as three books for SteinerBooks and Lindisfarne Books: How Like an Angel Came I Down (1991); The Beejum Book (2002); Lara's First Christmas (2004); and From the Archives of the Heart (2010). Now widowed and a great-grandmother, Alice O. Howell lives in the Massachusetts Berkshires and continues her practice and moderates an online Jungian group.