ABSTRACT
Lynn Thorndike, the pioneering historian of the occult sciences, came from a modest family with deep New England roots. His paternal ancestors had first settled in Salem, Massachusetts (ca. 1629), and later moved to Maine. His father, Edward Robert Thorndike, a Republican lawyer who became a Methodist minister, married Abbie Brewster Ladd, also from Maine (Jonçich, 11–12; National Cyclopedia, 51: 208). It was this “extraordinarily intelligent and capable person, of marked artistic ability, deeply religious and of shy, gentle manner but with a will of steel” (Woodworth, 209) who gave birth to Everett Lynn Thorndike on 24 July 1882 in Lynn, Massachusetts. Named for the towns of his father’s favorite pastorates, he later dropped the “Everett.” He and his two older brothers, Ashley Horace (1871–1933) and Edward Lee (1874–1949), were later joined by a sister, Mildred. Since the Methodists transferred their pastors frequently, the household moved often, thereby perhaps exacerbating the shyness of the three youngest children. Lynn in particular was “known in the family as one who prefers his own company and wants most to be left alone, who reads and plays chess and ‘is no trouble as he hates to be talked tO'” (Jonçich, 21). All four children made their mark in education, the daughter in the New York public schools, the sons on the faculty of Columbia University. Edward has been called the “father of American learning psychology”; Ashley was a leading scholar of Elizabethan literature and the benevolent dictator who ran the Columbia English department from 1906 until his death in 1933.
