Early Life
He was born as Walter Yeeling Wentz in Trenton, New Jersey in 1878. As a teenager he read Madame Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine and became interested in the teachings of Theosophy.
He received both his B.A. and M.A. from Stanford University, where he studied with William James and William Butler Yeats. He then studied Celtic mythology and folklore at Jesus College, Oxford (1907); there he added his mother's Welsh surname Evans to his name, being known henceforth as Evans-Wentz. He travelled extensively, spending time in Mexico, Europe, and the Far East. He spent the years of the First World War in Egypt. He later travelled to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and India, reaching Darjeeling in 1919; there he encountered Tibetan religious texts firsthand.
Read more about this topic: Walter Evans-Wentz
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“No person can be considered as possessing a good education without religion. A good education is that which prepares us for our future sphere of action and makes us contented with that situation in life in which God, in his infinite mercy, has seen fit to place us, to be perfectly resigned to our lot in life, whatever it may be.”
—Ann Plato (1820–?)