Marie Louise "Mary" Karadja (née Smith; 12 March 1868 – 7 September 1943) was a Swedish writer, spiritual medium and aristocrat, a central figure in Western esotericism during the Belle Époque. Born in Stockholm to the business magnate Lars Olsson Smith, she married prince Jean Karadja Pasha, an Ottoman diplomat, with whom she had a son, the Romanian diplomat and scholar Constantin Karadja. She lived in various European countries, and published works in several languages—beginning with aphorisms in French. Her involvement with Kardecist spiritism dates to 1899, and was prompted by the deaths of an infant son and of her husband the prince. Under the influence of spiritism, Theosophy and neo-gnosticism, the princess produced spirit drawings and writings that she stated were inspired and dictated to her spiritually. She was a literary celebrity in her native country for a while, and corresponded with August Strindberg; she was also heavily criticized for her claims by investigators such as Henry Morselli and Joseph McCabe, and was a regular target of Birger Sjöberg's satirical articles.
In the 1910s, Karadja had become explicit in her criticism of Christianity, favoring the unification of faiths into one world religion; she outlined her interpretation of religious mysteries in various texts, including her 1912 play about Solomon, drawing in themes from Rosicrucianism and the Freemasonry, as well as from the Kabbalah. The princess was rebuked by Roman Catholic integralists such as Henri Delassus, who regarded her and her views as components of a destructive plot against Catholicism. Her religious convictions blended with her charity work, as with the White Cross Union that she helped found. During World War I, she helped as a philanthropist, fleeing her home in Belgium once that country had been taken by the Germans.
Switching to Nazi and generally antisemitic views during the interwar period, Karadja financed various organisations that held those views, and founded the Christian Aryan Protection League. During the 1930s, when she was living mostly in Switzerland and networking with its National Front, she became noted for defending The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an authentic document; she also supported a prototype of the Madagascar Plan, calling for the mass deportation of European Jews. Her own fortune greatly reduced by the Great Depression, Karadja endorsed monetary reform as proposed by Arthur Kitson. Her far-right convictions were at the center of public controversy in Switzerland, resulting in her being singled out as an agent of influence on behalf of Nazi Germany. They had also caused a rift with her sister, Lucie Lagerbielke, who supported far-left causes. The princess died at the height of World War II, just as her son Constantin had come to oppose Nazism and had begun rescuing Jews from the Holocaust.
Of mixed Swedish and English descent, Marie Louise Smith was born on 12 March 1868 in Stockholm. Her parents were Mary Louise Collin and wholesale merchant Lars Olsson Smith; she was their fourth and youngest child. Her mother was born as an illegitimate child to a fishwife but was later adopted by the royal Swedish court dentist. Meanwhile, her father was involved in the social reform movement and had made his fortune selling alcoholic beverages. Later in life, he also served in the first chamber of the Swedish parliament. She and her older sister Lucie were first educated at home by a governess, before being sent to finishing schools in France, Italy and Switzerland. Beginning from the age of nine, she spent the majority of her time abroad; she was in Geneva from 1877 to 1884.
During one of her return visits to Stockholm, she met Prince Jean Karadja Pasha, the Ottoman envoy to The Hague and Stockholm. At the age of nineteen, she married the significantly older Karadja in 1887 in two ceremonies: an Eastern Orthodox ceremony at a Russian church, and a Protestant ceremony at her parents' house. Through her marriage, she received the title of princess, also converting to Orthodoxy. Columnist Frederick William Wile reported in September 1898 that: "The young ladies in Stockholm have all heard their mothers tell how [the Pasha] fell desperately in love with a Swedish girl [...], married her and left for The Hague, where they lived in happiness and peace."
Together, Mary and Jean had three children, born in The Hague between 1888 and 1892; however, one, Constantin Jean Etienne, died in infancy in December 1889. Her second-born, baptized Constantin Jean Lars, was one-month old at the time—he grew up to become a Romanian-language historian and diplomat of the Romanian Kingdom. Her daughter Despina was born in 1892.
Also in 1892, Karadja published her first written piece Étincelles, a collection of English and French aphorisms. Literary historian Christophe Premat suggests that, with her linguistic and stylistic choices, she may have been trying to "become part of a French literary aphoristic tradition and to play a mediating role in literary circles", but also that the aphorisms may be seen as her earliest experiments in automatic writing. Premat argues that their total number, 333, already evidences Karadja's esoteric interests, as a likely reference to the names of God. The same author sees them as modeled on the Book of Job, and equally so on writings by Jean de La Bruyère and François de La Rochefoucauld; they were overall anti-romantic, or anti-lyrical, in evidencing "human folly". Chroniclers at The Bookman viewed Étincelles as mainly humorous, "an amusing little volume of aphorisms. They are not all original nor all witty [...]. The object of the keenest satire is the amateur player of the piano, who is again and again the butt of the epigrams [sic]."
For the next fifteen years, Karadja wrote poetry and plays that were performed on stage in Sweden and abroad. Prince Jean died of a "cerebral congestion" in 1894, after which Karadja and her children split their time living in Copenhagen, London, and their castle in Bovigny, Belgium. As Premat notes: "She already had a large fortune before even meeting her husband, which allowed her to live comfortably when she became a widow in 1894 with two children to support." For a while in the mid-1890s, she was in Stockholm, attending Birger Mörner's salon alongside Verner von Heidenstam, Selma Lagerlöf and Hjalmar Söderberg. She continued to move between her various properties, accompanied by her servant "Marie R."; in early 1896, she accused the latter of having stolen family items worth 100,000 Belgian francs, and her account was backed by the Belgian prosecutors called in to investigate. Late that year, Karadja was considering a move to Scania, where she wished to purchase Osbyholm Castle. Also then, she was celebrated by the writers at Idun for her taste in visual arts.
The death of her infant son and her husband ignited Karadja's interest in spirituality, and she initially integrated with a local tradition that led back to Emanuel Swedenborg. In April 1899 in Stockholm, she attended her first séance. Afterwards, she went to London where she attended séances that had been advertised in newspapers. During the first of these London séances, medium Albert Vout Peters channelled her late husband and Fredrika Bremer, who spoke to her in Swedish. She claimed that the prince had "conveyed a long message, the contents of which no one other than [he] could know." She also reported that the protofeminist Bremer had ordered her to "'Help the Swedish woman!', something Mary Karadja then thought she would do through her spiritual activities." From then, Karadja became increasingly interested in spiritualism and soon claimed to be a medium herself. She then invited Vout Peters and other mediums to Stockholm; a debate ensued when psychologist Axel Herrlin exposed several of them as frauds, pushing Karadja into a defensive position.
Karadja's fascination with spiritualism and mediumship influenced much of her writing; she also produced spirit drawings, especially portraits (done "in a dark room, in which various people recognized long-dead figures"). She claimed that much of her literary output was dictated to her by spiritual beings: "[She] continued to write hundreds of verses, 'even very good verses'—without even once having to tweak the words in their order." Such pieces include a poem, Mot ljuset ("Into the Light"), which she claimed appeared to her while praying at the graves of her husband and son in Bovigny, on the feast of Sânziene in 1899; "[w]hether the ghost that now appears is identical with The Pasha, the reader is not told." As she puts it: "I was told to provide myself there with paper and writing materials. [...] What followed was not written automatically but through inspiration." An autobiography of someone who had experienced all of life's pleasures, and was left despondent, Mot ljuset reportedly sold over 4,000 copies within weeks of its publication—an unusually high number for Sweden in 1900. As Söderberg reports, the publication made her "[o]ur country's most popular author". He believed that the popularity was well deserved, but not to the point of making one believe that her lyrics were of supernatural origin.