Excerpts From A Biography Of Robert Duncan

Essay, Research Paper

Lisa Jarnot

from Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus

"At dawn in Oakland in the cold of the year I was

born, January 7th, with the sun before rising or just below the horizon in the false dawn

and Saturn in his own house, in Capricorn. But that is according to the old astrological

convention. Actually, the sun has advanced; the winter solstice has progresst to the sign

of Sagittarius. I was born in the head of the archer."

–Robert Duncan, "A Sequence of Poems for H.D.’s

Birthday"

Robert Duncan knew the story of his adoption. Before his birth, his

step-parents had become involved in a theosophical group in the Bay Area, a hermetic

brotherhood modelled after late-nineteen-century occult groups such as London’s Hermetic

Order of the Golden Dawn and Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society of New York and

India. The Symmeses had discovered Robert Duncan, or more accurately, he had been sent to

them. By the reckoning of their religion, his astrological chart indicated that he

had, in a past life, lived on the mythological continent of Atlantis as one of its great

innovators. He was of the ancient generation that had turned their knowledge to ill-means

and subsequently destroyed their own world. Born under the sign of Capricorn, with the

moon in the sign of Pisces, his ascendant sign was in Sagittarius, and the presence of

Gemini in his sixth house suggested that he had acted as a messenger in a previous

incarnation.[19] According to hermetic doctrine, his mother Marguerite Duncan’s role had

been simply that of a "vehicle" of his birth. She was an agent of his

reincarnation and she had died so that he might be handed over to his rightful parents.

The preparation for the child’s arrival began some time before 1919. For the Symmeses the

terms of the adoption were threefold. The baby would be born at the time and place

appointed by the astrologers, the natural mother would die shortly thereafter, and

the child would be of Anglo-Saxon protestant descent. [20]

In Celtic tradition, August 1 marks the Lammas Tide, a

celebration of the first harvest of the autumn. It was a date that fascinated Robert

Duncan, and a date that appeared in more than one of his poems.[21] It had been on August

1, 1919 that Fayetta Philip told her sister Minnehaha Symmes of the conversation that had

transpired in the Philip & Philip pharmacy on that day. The following day the Symmeses

made arrangements to see the Duncan child for the first time, and on August 4,

six-month-old Edward Howe Duncan was placed in the custody of Minnehaha and Edwin Symmes

through an arrangement with Edward Duncan, Sr. and the Native Sons and Daughters Central

Committee on Homeless Children of San Francisco. Minnehaha and Edwin took the baby home to

their apartment in Oakland, at 914 Taylor Avenue and he was soon renamed Robert Edward

Symmes, apparently after a friend of his stepfather.[22] Seven months later, on March 10,

1920, the Superior Court of the State of California named the Symmeses the child’s legal

parents. During October, 1920, they adopted a baby girl and named her Barbara Eleanor

Symmes. She had been born in Oakland almost exactly a year after Robert, on the

evening of January 6, 1920. A reading of her astrological chart also played into her

adoption. She was to introduce "good karma" into the household; she was to be

her brother Robert’s better half.

The Symmeses, aside from their interests in the occult,

were in many ways a typical middle-class couple, conservative in their political views,

and seriously invested in projecting an image of the all-American family. Both Edwin

and Minnehaha would be remembered as upstanding California citizens–he, as a prominent

public works architect and she as a busy socialite who served on committees, chaired

community council meetings, and volunteered her time to a range of organizations, from the

Children’s Home Society of California to the Kern County Council of Campfire Girls.[23]

Writing of his stepfather’s family, the Symmeses, in The

HD Book, Robert Duncan reported that they "had moved West.first into Ohio at the

beginning of the nineteenth century, and then on, at the frontier or beyond the frontier

of America, into California."[24] Symmes, and its variation Semmes are Anglo-Saxon

names; several members of the clan descended upon the American colonies from England

during the mid-1600s. Duncan’s tale of the family’s trek through Ohio seems fairly

accurate. The migration of one branch of the Symmeses began in St. George’s, Maryland

during the mid-seventeenth century, continued into Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Short Creek,

West Virginia; and finally into Ohio. There were a large number of Symmeses in East

Liverpool, Ohio as of the early 1800s. Those who settled in that part of the country were

potters and farmers,

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