Blavatsky News

*  A piece on the spiritual climate of California, published in the March 29 London Observer, has been picked up as far away as the New Zealand Herald. The writer, Andrew Gumbel, after noting that “For more than 50 years, California has played host to every imaginable form of self-realisation and spiritual enlightenment, many of them talked up by Hollywood celebrities and musicians,” claims

The new age movement took off here. So did Scientology, meditation, yoga, the Krishnamurti Foundation and the modern incarnation of Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Society. The credo of self-empowerment is everywhere: people who talk about living “in the moment” and “giving back to the universe”, people who say they are spiritual but not religious, people who finish their yoga practice with a bow and a namaste every bit as reverent as the amens they learned in church as children.

Many of the modern new age trends stem from two distinctly Californian sources. The first is the small mountain town of Ojai, an hour-and-a-half drive from Los Angeles, where the Theosophical Society set down American roots at around the same time that the Indian mystic Jiddu Krishnamurti paid his first visit, in 1922. To this day, Ojai remains a mecca for spiritual warriors seeking balance, crystals and enlightenment.

The second is the Esalen Institute, built around a hot spring overlooking the Pacific at Big Sur.


*  The Press Release for Die Marmory Show at the Deborah Schamoni in Munich prints the contents of an unpublished letter from Walt Kuhn, painter, organiser and promoter of the groundbreaking New York Armory-Show in 1913, who inspired the present exhibition. Writing to his wife Vera from Munich, October 24, 1912, he says

Yesterday afternoon on my way to the hotel I met Kandinsky, who convinced me to take part in a meeting of the theosophically-interested. He said that they met regularly to read from Helena Blavatsky’s books and practice applying her theories. Today was to be one of those evening’s of praxis.

These people, seven including me, assembled – Marianne von Werefkin, amongst others – in a bleak villa only a few streets from my hotel. I was welcome, however, I was requested in a serious tone of voice, only to speak if absolutely necessary and otherwise see to that I quickly adapt to the proceedings. It all began with an instructed exercise in concentration: on a snowflake obsidian. In the mean time, the outside strangely seemed to melt into the inside. Somehow, it was as if I were this stone or as if I had the same frequency as it.
 
Do you think it would be possible to recreate these kind of experiences in the exhibition?