Blavatsky News

Did Bob Dylan Plagiarize from Blavatsky?

2012-01-22T15:38:00.000-08:00

Scott Warmuth’s blog Goon Talk has a January 16 post analyzing the possible borrowing by Bob Dylan from Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled. Along the way, comments by Robert Duncan and William Emmette Coleman on Blavatsky’s literary methods are given.

Coleman’s argument, outlined in his 1895 “The Sources of Madame Blavatsky's Writings,” is that

There are in Isis about 2100 quotations from and references to books that were copied, at second-hand, from books other than the originals; and of this number only about 140 are credited to the books from which Madame Blavatsky copied them at second-hand. The others are quoted in such a manner as to lead the reader to think that Madame Blavatsky had read and utilised the original works, and had quoted from them at first-hand, - the truth being that these originals had evidently never been read by Madame Blavatsky. By this means many readers of Isis, and subsequently those of her Secret Doctrine and Theosophical Glossary, have been misled into thinking Madame Blavatsky an enormous reader, possessed of vast erudition; while the fact is her reading was very limited, and her ignorance was profound in all branches of knowledge.

To simplify it: when Blavatsky quotes a classical author or some obscure text, she is using a translation already provided in another text. Warmuth comments:

I can relate to the exhaustive analysis aspects of Coleman's work, but his approach leaves me cold. In the 1952 book Plagiarism and Originality Alexander Lindey discusses the vices inherent in the method that Coleman took, what Jack London called the “deadly parallel” approach in a letter defending his own use of other writer’s material. Lindey suggests that, “Parallel-hunters do not, as a rule, set out to be truthful and impartial. They are hell-bent on proving a point.” This does not always have to be the case, I believe that one can look for parallels without a set agenda, but Coleman clearly had an ax to grind.

This is a subject that needs more attention, and Theosophists, who have had over a century to clarify the matter, have been lax in this regard. Dismissing it is not enough.

When Henry met Helena

2012-01-15T18:08:00.000-08:00

The initial meeting of Olcott and Blavatsky continues to be one of the most written about areas of her life. The task is expedited by Olcott’s People from the other World, published in 1875 before the founding of the Theosophical Society and republished by Tuttle in 1972 in a facsimile edition. It is a record of Olcott’s experiences with the mediums at the Eddy farmhouse in Chittenden, Vermont. Published serially in the fall of 1874 in the New York Daily Graphic, an illustrated newspaper, it also introduced Mme. Blavatsky to a wider audience. “The arrival of a Russian lady of distinguished birth and rare educational abilities and natural endowments, on the 14th of October was an important event in the history of the Chittenden manifestations.” Shapes of the spirits of an assortment of people that Mme. Blavatsky had met in her travels began to appear.

The story is revisited at the blog Interesting Articles, Links and Other Media, with sketches of some the apparitions that appeared during her stay at Chittenden. The writer of the piece tries to relate it to his own experiences.

The Eddy farmhouse where Olcott and Blavatsky met is still in existence, though now a ski lodge, and its present state is shown in a previous post. It has also been the subject of a novel by Greg Guma, who has had a long interest in this subject and met many of the remaining old timers in Chittenden, Spirits of Desire, cited in a previous post here.

Mark Russell Bell, the writer of the piece, follows it up with a post on January 15, “H. S. Olcott and ‘The Science of Eastern Magic’”, where he covers Olcott’s subsequent work with the Holmes mediums in New York.

Blavatsky News

2012-01-08T17:55:00.000-08:00

* Sky Sports in the U.K., reporting on a recent horse race in Newcastle, England, says that “Madame Blavatsky was only beaten a head on her racecourse debut at Musselburgh and is sure to be popular here with Graham Lee taking over the reins.” Musselburgh is the famous Scottish racecourse located six miles east of Edinburgh, and Madame Blavatsky is the name of a four year old grey filly. Her stats can be seen here.

* The American newspaper Newsday for December 26, 2011 carries a news item from the Russian news service TASS:

A monument to Russian philosopher and the founder of the Theosophical Society Helena Blavatsky is to be set up in India’s southern city Chennai, Russia’s Consul in India Nikolay Listopadov stated on Monday. The Theosophical Society was founded in New York City 1875 to study Occultism and the Cabala. The International Headquarters was located at Adyar, the suburbs of Chennai.

* The December 25, 2011, Indian Express features an article by Sudheendra Kulkarni titled “Russia’s rendezvous with Hinduism.” Reporting that “a fringe section of the Russian Orthodox Church” had called for “a ban on the Bhagavad Gita” in Russia, the writer notes the long connection between Indian and Russian peoples: “There is a mystical connectivity between the souls of India and Russia.”

The Gita was first brought to Astrakhan on the Volga by Indian merchants in 1615—nearly two centuries before it was translated in Europe. Peter the Great allowed them to build a Hindu temple and exempted them from all taxes. The best minds in Russia had a deep fascination for Hindu philosophy and eastern mysticism.

Helena Blavatsky, who co-founded the Theosophical Society, was deeply influenced by Hindu-Buddhist philosophies. The Theosophy movement, aimed at forming “a nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or colour”, made a significant contribution to India’s freedom struggle.

Messages from the Masters

2012-01-01T18:47:00.000-08:00

The Masters appear to have been busy of late, if we are to believe a new publication of their writings. Teachings of the Great Brotherhood of Light: in Their Own Words is the title of a 205 page book published in 2011 by the Sanctus Germanus Foundation of Alberta, Canada. Some background on the project is described by the “Amanuensis”:

In November, 2009 I was called up to Lake Louise for what has been an annual meeting with the Masters. St. Germain, El Morya, Kuthumi, HPB, and others honoured me with their presence. One of the many projects we discussed was the Mahatma Letters, as the need to resurrect the teachings contained therein in order to establish as sort of baseline of their philosophical teachings before more teachings were introduced for the coming New Age.

Besides the obvious letters of straight teachings, there are strewn among the wranglings and intrigues associated with the TS, bits and pieces of the Masters' Wisdom that underpin various positions they were forced to take toward members of the Theosophical Society and those interested in the society. Some teachings were deliberately buried in exoteric verbiage for release during these times. Kuthumi explained that as the Mahatma Letters were written and precipitated, there was a logic to them in the revelation of the Brotherhood's teachings. He asked me to use all the spiritual discernment I could muster to extract these teachings from the background of the Letters and put them into a coherent order in modern, discernible English as opposed to 19th Century British English. Madame Blavatsky was at the meeting and shook her head vigorously in the affirmative.

The Master told me that in order to render his teachings into modern English I was to discern the thought-forms behind his writings, then paraphrase them without losing the essential meaning of the teachings. This, I have tried to do, to my best abilities, fully conscious of the necessity to keep the Masters' thought-forms intact even though the English used to express them would be slightly, and in some cases more than slightly different—all in the spirit of rendering the Masters' teachings as clear as possible for 21 st Century readers.

The process required me to plore[sic] through all the letters with “a fine tooth comb” to express what philosophical mandate, rules, laws or requirements were being revealed.

We are happy to hear that the Masters have a chance to visit other parts of the world, though Lake Louise in Alberta may not be too much of a change of scenery for them. The era when the aspirant went through “dangers and hardships” in their quest to reach the Masters belongs to the past for it seems they are now more than ready to come to the disciple. The book itself is made up of extracts from The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, following the editorial procedures given above, and uses much the same outline as J.R. Zulueta’s 1993 editing of the text, Occult Teachings Extracted from the Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett.

It is no secret that the “Amanuensis” is Michael P. Mau, who is also the author of a 2007 screenplay on the life of H.P. Blavatsky, A Most Extraordinary Mission. The story starts at the Tashi Lunpho monastery in 1868: it was a “cold blistery, snowy night in Tibet.” It contains much dialogue from all the theosophical players of the time, and adds to our understanding of Blavatsky with vivid observations like Countess Wachtmeister’s description of the dynamic between Blavatsky and Olcott: “The Theosophical Society is your love-child.” It writes itself.

Blavatsky, Tibet and the Occult, Ctd

2011-12-25T19:59:00.000-08:00

In connection with its exhibition, “Hero, Villain, Yeti,” illustrating our perceptions of Tibet as an occult place as conveyed through comic books, the Rubin Museum in New York will be offering a number of related talks and programs, including orchestrated scores based the exhibition’s themes, screenings of the 1937 and 1973 versions of Lost Horizon, and a discussion on January 18 with Michael Gomes and Mitch Horowitz on the extent of Madame Blavatsky’s contribution to the appreciation of Eastern ideas.

The program notes: A source of both inspiration and scandal, Madame Blavatsky’s interpretation of Asian philosophies provided to be a fundamental turning point in the West’s approach to the ‘mysteries’ of the East. Here contemporary writers discuss Blavatsky’s influence and the origins of the occult in America.

Ticket includes a tour at 6:15 p.m. of the exhibition Hero, Villain, Yeti: Tibet in Comics, in which Helena Blavatsky’s book The Secret Doctrine is on display, as are Madame Blavatsky, Medium & Magician by John Seymour and The Morning of the Magicians: Secret Societies, Conspiracies and Vanished Civilizations by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. There will be a book-signing session after the program.

Michael Gomes is the author of numerous works on Blavatsky and Mitch Horowitz is the author of Occult America: White Séances, Ouija Circles, Masons, and the Secret Mystic History of Our Nation, published in 2010. Having researched the subject so thoroughly, no doubt they have thought deeply on this matter and will have some insight to share.

Blavatsky, Tibet and the Occult

2011-12-18T16:46:00.000-08:00

The Rubin Museum of Art in New York City recently opened an exhibition, “Hero, Villain, Yeti,” which traces the image of Tibet through one of the most popular mediums of our time: comic books. The collection, which is on view from December 9, 2011 to June 11, 2012, is curated by Martin Brauen. According to the catalog notes:

Characters as diverse as Mickey Mouse, the historical Buddha, Tomb Raider Lara Croft, and the Green Lama have something in common: Tibet. For more than sixty years Tibet has figured in comic books from around the world, at times creating and at times perpetuating notions of an otherworldly land roamed by the yeti, inhabited by wise and powerful lamas, or full of dark magic.

Hero, Villain, Yeti features the most complete collection of comics related to Tibet ever assembled, with examples ranging from the 1940s to the present. More than fifty comic books from the Belgium, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, and the United States reflect on the depiction of Tibet, tracing the historical roots of prevailing perceptions and stereotypes and their visual and narrative evolution over time.

Brauen was the curator of the 2000 exhibition, Dreamworld Tibet, in Zurich, and a beautifully illustrated book based on it was published in English in 2004. His feelings about Blavatsky are summed up in a December 11th interview with him in Salon:

Another person who influenced our notion of Tibet very much was a half-Russian lady called Helena Blavatsky. She was the founder of the Theosophical Society, and she had quite weird ideas about Tibet (for instance, she claimed she had been in Tibet, which is quite clearly not true). She said she had telepathic relationships with two so-called Mahatmas — sages living in Tibet — and that they would tell her what to do. Interestingly, these two Mahatmas were not Tibetans, but were Indians of Aryan origin. This is a subject that comes up in many comics again: a superhero or a “lama” who is very powerful, but in most cases — actually in all cases — is not Tibetan but white.

The segment of his book dealing with the influence of Mme. Blavatsky on our imaging of Tibet is online. Dr. Brauen comes down on the side of those who believe that she never went to Tibet and that her knowledge of its religion was a distortion. His reasoning can be seen here. Yet two of the highest religious figures of Tibetan Buddhism, the Panchen and the Dalai Lama, have penned forewords to editions of her book The Voice the Silence, ethical injunctions used by the school she claimed to have belonged to.

In the foreword to the centenary edition of Blavatsky’s Voice the Silence the Dalai Lama wrote: “I believe that this book has strongly influenced many sincere seekers and aspirants to the wisdom and compassion of the Bodhisattva Path.”

And Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup, a prodigious translator of Tibetan texts, including the Tibetan Book of the Dead, was of the opinion that, “despite the adverse criticisms directed against H.P. Blavatsky’s works, there is adequate internal evidence in them of their author’s intimate acquaintance with the higher lamaistic teachings, into which she claimed to have been initiated.”

So, we suppose, it is a matter of whose opinion carries more weight. Though it may be just a difference of perspective. In Europe and America Indic and Tibetan studies have been textually based; proficiency was shown by one’s ability to learn a language in one’s discipline, and translate a text. Blavatsky was among the first to go to the countries she wrote about and study their philosophies as they were lived and practiced. As another traveler through that area, Alexandra David-Neel (whose narratives of her Tibetan journey were at first questioned by the experts of her time) wrote: “Who knows the flower best—the one who reads about it in a book, or the one who finds it wild on the mountainside?”

Of course, it should be noted that Blavatsky never claimed that the esoteric school that she belonged to represented orthodox Tibetan Buddhism. “Our Mahatmas…are neither ‘Hermits’ (now), for they are done with their ‘practice’ of Yoga; nor ‘Wanderers,’ nor ‘Monks,’ since they tolerate, but would never practice, exoteric, or popular, Buddhist rites.”

Misinformation Files

2011-12-11T17:56:00.000-08:00

With alarming regularity people seem to feel the need to write about and interpret the life of H.P. Blavatsky. It only takes a few sentences to show an unfamiliarity with the subject. In a recent post about “Madame Blavatsky and the New Age” at the site Unexplained Mysteries, William B. Stoecker writes:

“She claimed to have occult powers, but the Society for Psychical Research claimed to have exposed her as a fraud,” and, “she said that she met her ‘ascended master’ in London when she was twenty.” Both statements are untrue. The Society for Psychical Research never “claimed” such a thing (as Leslie Price, a long time member of the SPR, has written: “any writer or speaker who says the S.P.R exposed Madame Blavatsky is only exposing his own ignorance”). And Blavatsky never used the term “ascended master.”

Such statements can be credited to a too ready reliance on second hand sources, but what is one to make of this: “she also claimed that the bringer of enlightenment was a spirit called Lucifer; the name literally means ‘light bearer,’ but Christians believe that this refers to Satan, a bringer of a false enlightenment,” which certainly is a misrepresentation of her ideas?

And then this gets thrown in for good measure: “Some researchers also claim that Hitler was personally influenced by Blavatsky, and kept a copy of The Secret Doctrine near him at all times. This, too, is impossible to verify.” Nothing is harder to verify than a fact. But any “researcher” who makes such a claim is writing fiction not providing factual evidence. It shows a remarkable naivety not only for what happened to theosophists and Blavatsky’s writings under the Third Reich but also about the nature of Blavatsky’s work (as if it can be boiled down to the use of a swastika).

This latest contribution to Blavatsky studies ends with: “But of course, Madame Blavatsky can hardly be held responsible for what even some of her followers did after her death, let alone a woman [Alice Bailey] who was expelled from the society. So we are left pretty much where we started: Blavatsky was an ambiguous person, probably something of a charlatan, but not necessarily evil. Yet, overall, her legacy has been a destructive one.” So, let’s see if we get this piece of logic right: the Gospels portray Jesus as saying many exemplary things but because the churches created things like the Inquisition we are accurate in saying: “Yet, overall, her [His] legacy has been a destructive one.” Right?

No one is denying the ability of people to pen such things but asking us to take them seriously is another matter.

Olcott Honored

2011-12-04T15:17:00.000-08:00

Col. Henry Steel Olcott has been much in the news this season. A life-size statue was raised on the grounds of the New Jersey Buddhist Vihara near Princeton (though Olcott was born in Orange New Jersey) on September 10. The member of the American Congress for this district, Rush Holt, in his greeting noted: “Although British rule limited options for Sri Lankans, Clonel Olcott’s schools made it possible for students to seek strong academic instruction while learning and practicing their faith. It is a tribute to Colonel Olcott’s commitment to culture and the pursuit of knowledge that he is being honored today.”

A souvenir booklet, Henry Steel Olcott and the Revival of Buddhist Education, was issued in connection with the event by the Ananda College Old Boys’ Association—EastCoast. At 85 pages it contains a number of contributions focusing on Olcott’s work in the development of education in Sri Lanka and features some attractive color photographs of the schools (now colleges) established by him. While many of the testimonials offer nothing new they show Olcott’s memory is still warm in the hearts of many Sri Lankans. Sunil J. Wimalawansa who has a piece in the collection has also issued a short monograph, The American who revived Buddhism in Asia: Legacy of Colonel Steel Olcott. At 84 pages, it is also benefited by some attractive color photographs.

This year’s Olcott Oration delivered November 12 at the Auditorium of Ananda College, Colombo, by Professor Chandana Wirasinghe, Founding Dean (Emeritus), Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary, Canada, on the “Role of the Individual in National Development - Ananda Can Show the Way”, received much coverage as it coincided with the 125th anniversary celebrations of Ananda College, founded by Col. Olcott. In his address Professor Wirasinghe looked at Olcott’s life and the lessons that could be drawn from it for today’s world. Blavatsky is mentioned briefly in passing: “He came under the influence of a Russian woman called Helena Blavatsky who claimed many super natural powers. More than a decade later, The Society for Psychical Research who investigated her called her an ‘imposter’.”

Of course, in this he is in error, as the Society for Psychical Research has always claimed that the responsibly for the report rests with the Committee that issued it and not the Society. Perhaps as a nod to his audience and alma mater, Professor Wirasinghe concludes: “Having studied Olcott’s life in some detail, from birth to death, I can say to you today that he had many accomplishments, but the establishment of Ananda College is without any doubt his greatest achievement.”

The Olcott Oration for 2011 is now online and can be read here.

On Certainty

2011-12-01T18:28:00.000-08:00

African Athena: New Agendas is the title of a forthcoming book this December from Oxford University Press. It contains a number of articles by various authors, most dealing with the impact of Martin Bernal’s 1987 Black Athena. Chapter 18, “Lay in Egypt’s lap each borrowed crown’: Gerald Massey and Late-Victorian Afrocentrism,” by Brian H. Murray contains the following mention of Blavatsky:

Perhaps the most influential esoteric of the day, and another Egyptophile, was Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder the Theosophical Society and self-proclaimed mouthpiece of the Egyptian Goddess Isis. Blavatsky cited Massey twenty-four times in her esoteric epic the Secret Doctrine and wrote an appreciate letter to him in November 1887, claiming to have ‘read and re-read’ his lectures. Massey would have certainly been familiar with Massey’s work, which like his own, portrayed Christianity as a literalized pseudo-history based on earlier Gnostic philosophy. Though Massey contributed some review articles to the Theosophical magazine Lucifer, he wrote a series of letters to the same publication in 1888 criticizing an article by Blavatsky on the ‘Esoteric Character of the Gospels’. By the 1880s Blavatsky had moved from an Egyptocentric model of religion and was increasingly promoting Tibetan and Sanskrit texts as the purest form of divine wisdom.

Brian H. Murray is completing his doctoral dissertation at King’s College, London, but he will not have much credibility if he continues to promulgate fictions such as Blavatsky was a “self-proclaimed mouthpiece of the Egyptian Goddess Isis.”

And that “By the 1880s Blavatsky had moved from an Egyptocentric model of religion and was increasingly promoting Tibetan and Sanskrit texts as the purest form of divine wisdom,” when, in her first book, Isis Unveiled (which was the publisher’s title), from 1877, in the last chapter of volume 1, headed “India: the Cradle of the Race,” she writes: “we affirm that, if Egypt furnished Greece with her civilization, and the latter bequeathed hers to Rome, Egypt herself had, in those unknown ages when Menes reigned, received her laws, her social institutions, her arts and her sciences, from pre-Vedic India; and that therefore, it is in that old initiatrix of the priests—adepts of all the other countries—we must seek for the key to the great mysteries of humanity.”

And yet Blavatsky is the one ridiculed for shoddy methodology!

Blavatsky and Fiction, Ctd

2011-12-01T16:35:00.000-08:00

Spiritualism, Science and Suspense: Theosophy and the Supernatural Adventure Story is the subject of a recently completed PhD dissertation by Richard Michael Caputo at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Caputo states:

With Darwin’s publication of The Origin of the Species in 1859, the validity of the three major Western religions was called into serious question by science. In the wake of the scientific progress, made at breakneck speed in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, it seemed as if science and spirituality were increasingly becoming mutually exclusive. However, Theosophy, a hybrid science-religion founded by Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in 1875, sought to reconcile science and the supernatural by using the former to explain the latter. For Blavatsky, the miraculous and the paranormal did not defy scientific explanation; they simply could not be explained through a contemporary understanding of science. Blavatsky’s Theosophy was predicated on belief in a secret knowledge, known to ancient civilizations but lost to modern man that represented a deep, true understanding of nature. When realized, this insight allowed for the accomplishment of the seemingly miraculous, not by magic but by science.

Theosophy’s influence on canonical, highbrow modernists such as James Joyce and W.B. Yeats is well known. However, its impact on the more widely read novelists of the day has been less studied and this dissertation in part fills that critical void. After an introduction to Blavatsky’s Theosophy, this project moves into a discussion of Dracula. An understanding of Theosophy provides new insight into the novel's conflict between science and the supernatural. It also provides a new way to view Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, who embraces both the scientific and the unexplainable in much the same way Theosophy did. This project also includes a chapter on H. Rider Haggard’s most enduring literary creation, the femme fatale Ayesha. By examining, through the lens of Theosophy, all four Haggard novels in which “She” appears, I offer a new interpretation of this enigmatic character. Specifically, I argue that Ayesha is a fallen Theosophical adept. The final author included in this project is Marie Corelli, one of the world’s first bestselling authors. Much of her fiction seeks to reconcile spiritualist beliefs with traditional Christianity. She does so using science, and I argue that she borrows heavily from Blavatsky and Theosophy.

At 176 pages it runs a little thin.

Blavatsky and Fairies

2011-11-20T19:22:00.000-08:00

Volume 22, Issue 1, of The Australian Journal of Anthropology for April 2011 carries a paper by Anna Branford on “Gould and the fairies.” “This paper examines Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of science and religion as ‘non overlapping magisteria’ with reference to Spiritualism, specifically the case of the Cottingley fairies.…This paper offers discussion of the relationship between religion and science. In doing so, it problematises the common use of the terms ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ to characterise the experience of religious conviction.”

In 1873, a Russian traveller, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, arrived in New York and is said to have demonstrated considerable skills in clairvoyance, telekinesis and mediumship. There she met with Colonel Henry S. Olcott, editor for the New York Tribune and a keen Spiritualist. With his assistance, she founded a system of belief, thought and investigation called Theosophy, guided by the central tenet that ‘There is no religion higher than truth’. Blavatsky reworked concepts such as reincarnation, karma and meditation, which she presented with the authority of having been taught by masters during travels through Asia, particularly Tibet. She formulated an ‘integration of Eastern mysticism with traditions of Western Spirituality’ (Weisberg 2004: 263). Historian of religion, David S. Katz, identifies her as among the greatest of the ‘entrepreneurial professional occultists’ (2005: 169). Beginning with Blavatsky’s establishment of an independent ‘Theosophical Society’ in New York City in 1875, Theosophy flourished in the United States, India, Germany and Austria, with many branches also operating across the United Kingdom. It was at one such branch, the Bradford Theosophical Society, that Polly Wright, mother of one of the young fairy photographers, had first crossed paths with Edward L. Gardner, president of the Blavatsky Lodge in London.

The paper, which is now available online, also gives some background of the Cottingley fairies and can be read here.

Laura Holloway-Langford

2011-11-06T19:06:00.000-08:00

Indiana University Press announces the publication next year of Diane Sasson’s Yearning for the New Age: Laura Holloway-Langford and Late Victorian Spirituality as part of its Religion in North America series. It is scheduled for release May 31, 2012, and will sell for $35.00. According to the publisher’s blurb:

This biography of an unconventional woman in late 19th-century America is a study of a search for individual autonomy and spiritual growth. Laura Holloway-Langford, a “rebel girl” from Tennessee, moved to New York City, where she supported her family as a journalist. She soon became famous as the author of Ladies of the White House, which secured her financial independence. Promoted to associate editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, she gave readings and lectures and became involved in progressive women’s causes, the temperance movement, and theosophy—even traveling to Europe to meet Madame Blavatsky, the movement’s leader, and writing for the theosophist newspaper The Word. In the early 1870s, she began a correspondence with Eldress Anna White of the Mount Lebanon, New York, Shaker community, with whom she shared belief in pacifism, feminism, vegetarianism, and cremation. Attracted by the simplicity of Shaker life, she eventually bought a farm from the Canaan Shakers, where she lived and continued to write until her death in 1930. In tracing the life of this spiritual seeker, Diane Sasson underscores the significant role played by cultural mediators like Holloway-Langford in bringing new religious ideas to the American public and contributing to a growing interest in eastern religions and alternative approaches to health and spirituality that would alter the cultural landscape of the nation.

The book contains a number of new Mahatma letters to Holloway based on Sasson’s research.

Blavatsky in Fiction, Ctd

2011-11-06T18:25:00.000-08:00

Jess Nevins continues his look at the most noteworthy science fiction and fantasy works from 1885 to 1930. The year under review is 1886 and the works chosen are F. Anstey’s A Fallen Idol, Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds, Rosa Praed’s The Brother of the Shadow, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde, and H. Rider Haggard’s She.

Two of the books mentioned referenced Theosophists as part of their plot. F. Anstey’s A Fallen Idol features the effect on a number of lives of an ill-fated Eastern idol brought to London. This period piece by Anstey (Thomas Anstey Guthrie, 1856-1934) remains an entertaining and insightful read.

Mrs. Praed appears on the list again with The Brother of the Shadow. Nevins says: Despite the much greater use of Theosophical ideology —Praed was involved with Madame Blavatasky and the Theosophist Society almost from the beginning —Brother is a moderately fun late Victorian romantic occult fantasy. Brother has good characterization (especially for the doctor), an agreeably smooth style, hidden Tibetan occult masters, psychic death rituals, and a pleasant lack of racism in its treatment of Indians. One might describe Brother as Bulwer-Lytton without his bombast, straining for affect, or moments of genius.

Links for the novels noted are given at the io9 site.

Edith Nesbit

2011-11-06T17:53:00.000-08:00

The English children’s writer Edith Nesbit is the subject of an extensive biographical sketch by Leslie Evans in a Nov. 1st post at the Boryana books website. Referring to Julia Briggs’ 1987 biography A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858-1924, Evans says: “Briggs quotes a March 1884 letter from Edith to Ada Breakell listing several books she is reading. These include, Edith writes, ‘an intensely interesting book which Harry [her brother, married to Ada Breakell] would like called Esoteric Buddhism by Sinnett.’”

A. P. Sinnett was a recently converted disciple of the Russian mystic Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of the occult Theosophical Society. Sinnett’s book had little to do with any recognized school of Buddhism but was devoted to Blavatsky’s schema of world evolution from the mythical continents of Lemuria and Atlantis, and the teachings of her claimed Mahatmas or Ascended Masters of Tibet, essentially all-wise spirit guides who live on the Astral Plane and from there influence the course of human history. Sinnett was the recipient of a series of alleged letters from the Mahatmas, the question of their authenticity raising a heated controversy even in circles sympathetic to the idea of spirit communication.

Now Blavatsky’s Mahatmas are “Ascended Masters of Tibet, essentially all-wise spirit guides who live on the Astral Plane and from there influence the course of human history” !

Where the East grimaced at the West

2011-10-30T16:22:00.000-07:00

The Whiter Lotus: Asian Religions and Reform Movements in America, 1836-1933, is the title of Edgar A. Weir Jr.’s PhD dissertation toward the completion of his degree, which was awarded in May 2011 by the University of Nevada. Though it breaks no new ground, it is a reminder of the influence of Asian religions and thought on various reform movements in America. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Percival Lowell, William Sturgis Bigelow, Paul Carus, and Dyer Daniel Lum are among some of the people that Weir looks at. Chapter 2, “Transcending The World: Transcendentalists And Theosophists,” has 14 pages on the activities of Olcott and Blavatsky, but little of the philosophy that motivated them. There is too great a reliance on second, and in this case third, hand sources when he says:

Another scandal was to occur while Blavatsky and Olcott were in India in 1883. Blavatsky claimed that she had received letters from the “spirit world” from two Tibetan Mahatmas. Yet it was soon discovered that the letters were taken verbatim from an American spiritualist. This scandal caused many to leave the Theosophical branch in London prompting Blavatsky and Olcott to set sail for England to attempt to mitigate the disaster. As soon as they left India, however, residents of the Theosophical society in India began to accuse Blavatsky of being a charlatan. The accusations were published in the Christian College Magazine in Madras, India, and Olcott and Blavatsky were forced to return quickly to India to attempt to douse another fire. Following close behind the two was an investigator from England, Richard Hodgson, who doggedly investigated the Society for three months and finally determined that the fraud accusations were indeed true. Blavatsky immediately quit her position as corresponding secretary and fled to Europe.

In spite of Weir’s assurances, Blavatsky never “claimed that she had received letters from the ‘spirit world’ from two Tibetan Mahatmas.” The famous letters, now in the British Library in London, to A.P. Sinnett were not from “Tibetan Mahatmas.” The writers were living self-described Indians. The letters were not discovered to have been “taken verbatim from an American spiritualist” but the portion of a letter reflects the ideas of a lecture given by an American Spiritualist. This “scandal” did not cause “many to leave the Theosophical branch in London”; in fact, membership grew at this time. Olcott had been deputed by the Buddhists of Ceylon to present their case at the Home Office in London and so was not prompted “to set sail for England to attempt to mitigate the disaster.” “As soon as they left India, however, residents of the Theosophical society in India began to accuse Blavatsky of being a charlatan.” The “residents” were two employees who had been dismissed on charges of fraud. It is surprising, at this late date, to see Richard Hodgson’s report unquestionably accepted as the final world on the subject, as if nothing had been written about it over the past hundred years. Blavatsky did not flee to Europe; if anything, she was shipped off against her will, as her letters to Olcott show.

Considering that the main source of quotes about Blavatsky’s character in this dissertation comes from a 1929 Dictionary of Biography, this sort of slipshod writing comes as no surprise. It risks the disadvantage, however, of being compared to the already existing exemplary work of Carl T. Jackson, Thomas Tweed, Robert Ellwood and others on the East/West interchange in America.

Blavatsky and Shambhala

2011-10-27T18:31:00.000-07:00

The History of Shambhala, a blog started this year posting parts of Don Croner’s travel writing from Central Asia, carries a lengthy evaluation of Blavatsky’s use of the term Shambhala. This piece was originally posted on one of Croner’s travel blogs two years ago, but it is worth a second look.

There is little if any evidence to suggest that even in her own lifetime she did anything to promote the legend of Shambhala. In fact, as we shall see, in the entire fifteen volumes of her collected writing she mentions Shambhala only a couple of times, and this Shambhala was quite different from the Tibetan version of Shambhala which would later be disseminated in the West.

Those who first learned about Shambhala from Neo-Theosophists like Leadbeater, Bailey, and others might naturally assume that their conception of Shambhala originated with Blavatsky, the founder and guiding light behind the Theosophical Society. This would not seem to be the case.

Blavatsky News

2011-10-27T16:54:00.000-07:00

* Patrick Brantlinger’s Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians (Cornell University Press, October 13, 2011) looks at a number of Victorian writers who used occult motifs in their writing. “[Rider] Haggard did not become a convert to Madame Blavatsky’s new religion, but he was intrigued by Theosophy, as he was by other late Victorian manifestations of interest in the occult.”

* Michael Broyles’ Beethoven in America (Indiana University Press, October 27, 2011) contains a surprising amount of references to Blavatsky and Theosophy. “By far the most important religious movement in regard to both Beethoven and its impact on the arts was Theosophy, which originated in the nineteenth century and which found a sympathetic audience with artists and intellectuals in the United States after World War I.” Four pages follow giving background on Blavatsky and developments in the Theosophical Society. Naming composers like Henry Cowell, Edgard Varèse, Carl Ruggles, Aaron Copland, Dane Rudhyar, and Ruth Crawford Seeger, Broyles says “many were drawn to seeking some sort of spiritual dimension in their lives. More than any other movement or religion, Theosophy filled that purpose.”

What did these musicians find in Theosophy that drew them to the movement? For the most part it was the Olcott, not the Blavatsky wing, that appealed to them.…The scientific bent of Theosophy, which Olcott stressed, and the interest in world religions, particularly those of Asia, which was at the heart of both Olcott’s and Blavatsky’s views, appealed immensely to these composers.

Blavatsky and New York

2011-10-23T20:11:00.000-07:00

Gothamist, the “website about New York City and everything that happens in it”, talks with Mitch Horowitz, author of Occult America, in its October 21st issue. Horowitz sees early 19th century central New York State as “a hotbed of avant-garde, religious and social thought and activities.”

This chapter in religious history took another turn by the 1870s when New York became home to a Russian migrant named Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, or typically known as Madame Blavatsky. Blavatsky was a Russian spiritual adventurer, she was in search of hidden and esoteric knowledge. She came to America, she said, because she wanted to visit the birthplace of spiritualism. She settled in New York City and in 1875, she and some over her colleagues founded the Theosophical Society in the neighborhood of what is now Hell’s Kitchen. That organization became hugely influential—it actually reintroduced the word occult into common use as the word had fallen into disuse—and Blavatsky very convincingly spoke of her search for an occult or hidden philosophy from which all the modern religious sprang. She called it a “Secret Doctrine.” She spoke of traditions emanating out of Buddhism and Hinduism and said that she was under the guidance of hidden spiritual masters who were helping her bring this liberalizing religious revolution to the West. People were enchanted with her, enthralled with her, and it was probably the figure of Blavatsky, more than anybody else, who helped ignite this revolution in alternative spirituality that began to sweep through the West, the effects of which we’re still feeling today. New York played a very special role as a “new age,” and that’s certainly true in terms of recent decades, but in the 19th century New York was this avant-garde religious capital.

The rest of the interview, with a guide to some historic places of occult New York and thoughts about Halloween, can be read here.

Blavatsky in Fiction

2011-10-23T18:24:00.001-07:00

Over the next several months the Book Section of the site io9, a daily publication that covers science, science fiction, and the future, will be looking at the most noteworthy science fiction and fantasy works from 1885 to 1930. The writer of the piece, Jess Nevins, draws our attention to Rosa Campbell Praed’s 1885 novel Affinities that featured Theosophists as part of plot.

Like many Victorian women writers, Rosa Praed was prolific, skilled, successful, popular, and forgotten much more quickly than her male counterparts. Praed made her name with romances and stories of her native Australia, but became much better known in the 1880s as a writer of occult fantasies. Affinities was her first novel of the fantastic. It's a roman a clef-society novel-occult horror about the threat posed to a young womaby a decadent poet and black magician (who is clearly meant to be Oscar Wilde). Praed has an easy, readable style that has aged only a little, and the proselytizing on behalf of Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy is much less obvious in Affinities than in Praed's later work. Affinities isn’t as good as Praed’s The Brother of the Shadow (1886), but nonetheless it's entertaining, found many fans, and is well deserving of the Hugo nomination it would have undoubtedly received.

Praed (1851-1935) had met Mme. Blavatsky and Col. Olcott during their visit to England in 1884. According to the bibliography Theosophy in the Nineteenth Century, Blavatsky appears as Mme. Tamvaco in Affinities. The book is online in a number of editions, including an 1886 edition on the Yellowback site, which contains a list of all the women writers and their works in the Emory University Online Yellowbacks collection. (“yellowbacks are books that were sold in England during the late 19th-century at railway stations.”)

Andrew McCannin adds:

Rosa Campbell Praed left Australia for London in 1876. In the decade or so subsequent to her arrival in the metropolis she forged a successful career as a writer of occult-inspired novels that drew on both theosophical doctrine and a nineteenth-century tradition of popular fiction that included Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. A string of novels published in the 1880s and the early 1890s, including Nadine: the Study of a Woman (1882), Affinities: A Romance of Today (1885), The Brother of the Shadow: A Mystery of Today (1886), and The Soul of Countess Adrian: A Romance (1891), produced a sort of popular aestheticism that melded an interest in fashionable society, a market-oriented Gothicism, and speculations on the philosophy of art that were indicative of Praed’s relationship to a fin-de-siècle Bohemia and its literary circles.

—“Rosa Praed and the Vampire Aesthete,” Victorian Literature and Culture (2007), 35: 175-187.

Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine Commentaries Reviewed

2011-10-09T17:55:00.000-07:00

Aries, the Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism published by Brill in the Netherlands, has a review of Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine Commentaries from Gary W. Trompf in its recently released Volume 11, Number 2, 2011. Trompf, Honorary Professor in the History of Ideas in the Department of Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney, presented a groundbreaking paper at last year’s Legacies of Theosophy Conference at the University of Sydney on the subject of macrohistory, so whatever he has to say about the cosmogonies in The Secret Doctrine will be of interest. The review (3 pages) is too long to print in full here, but concludes by saying:

Michael Gomes, who has already published an abridgement of both Isis Unveiled (in 1997) and The Secret Doctrine (in 2009), is well known as historian and bibliographer of the Theosophical Movement, and he has done a painstaking and reliable job with this new production. It is a work beautifully presented, supplemented by a listing of those attending the meetings, an index almost amounting to a glossary. The Introduction is somewhat thin (and does not touch on the sensitive context I have just detailed) with the footnotes throughout kept to a minimum; but the service is done and we now have at our disposal for further research previously inaccessible materials of great value concerning Blavatsky and influential figures in the Theosophical Society surrounding her. With this work before us, various enigmas referred to at the beginning of our review can now be better addressed and hopefully resolved.

The journal can be ordered here.

Blavatsky, Garibaldi, and Mazzini

2011-10-02T18:09:00.000-07:00

The August-September 2011 issue of Rivista italiana di teosofia, the journal of the Theosophical Society in Italy, carries an article on “Helena Petrovna Blavatsky e l’Italia” by Patrizia Moschin Calvi. The writer informs us that as 2011 marks the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy, H.P. Blavatsky has come into the news there, together with Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, who were the well-known protagonists and heroes in the fight for unification. Blavatsky’s different statements about her presence at the Battle of Mentana, Italy, in November 1867, are referred to, though the writer is forced to mention: it is difficult to make rational sense of her movements, as AP Sinnett explains “We rarely find any logical meaning which might explain her actions and often even she found herself in the position of not understanding ‘why’ at any given moment she was preparing to go here or there. The true reasons for these movements were the orders she received through occult channels.” Obviously another area that needs further research.

Olcott says she was still wearing her red Garibaldian shirt when they met in rural Vermont in October 1874: she told me many incidents of her past life, among others, her having been present as a volunteer, with a number of other European ladies, with Garibaldi at the bloody battle of Mentana. In proof of her story she showed me where her left arm had been broken in two places by a sabre-stroke, and made me feel in her right shoulder a musket-bullet, still imbedded in the muscle, and another in her leg. She also showed me a scar just below the heart where she had been stabbed with a stiletto.

Garibaldi was also shot and wounded at the Battle of Mentana, which occurred on November 3, 1867. Garibaldi’s army was routed by the Papal troops.

Liberation Theosophy

2011-10-02T16:51:00.000-07:00

Anindita Banerjee, who teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, contributes an interesting article on the Russian poet and writer Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922) titled “Liberation Theosophy: Discovering India and Orienting Russia between Velimir Khlebnikov and Helena Blavatsky” in the latest issue of PMLA, Vol. 126, No. 3, May 2011, pp. 610–624. According to her theory:

Between the Volga and the Ganges lies a vast yet little-examined zone of linguistic, religious, ethnoracial, and political contact shaped over many centuries by mobile communities of traders, saints, soldiers, and rebels. This is the space from which Velimir Khlebnikov, modernist poet and philosopher of history, articulates a vision of revolutionary internationalism. Khlebnikov’s quasi-fictional journey from Russia’s Islamic borderlands to the Indian subcontinent “in search of an idea that will free all oppressed people” transforms Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical interpretation of ancient Indian religious philosophy into a cornerstone of political resistance against global imperialism in the twentieth century. The intersectional history of violence through which Khlebnikov imagines a community of minorities, misfits, and mystics wandering between the peripheries of the Russian and British Empires challenges monolithic constructs of the Orient as well as dominant discourses of Russian and Indian national identity.

The Missing Mondrian Archive

2011-10-02T15:20:00.000-07:00

The Art Science Research Laboratory (ASRL) carries the news of the recently rescued Piet Mondrian Archive: “A Lost Collection emerges for Scholars.”

Known as “the father of geometric abstraction,” Piet Mondrian (1877-1944) was a pivotal figure in the revolution of Modern Art that began with Cubism in the early 20th century. In 1940, the great artist fled the war in Europe to New York City. At his death in 1944, all that was found in his apartment was a cache of personal papers. He had pared down his few possessions to some postcards, cablegrams, address-book pages, a notebook, an important unpublished essay, and his horoscope readings, all of which provide an intimate glimpse of a significant artist. The correspondence details his fears and anxieties elicited by the war. Personal photographs include old-style cabinet cards depicting his parents, candid shots of his early studio in Holland, and a wallet-size photo of Madame Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy. These items were held, unseen and unpublished, by Mondrian's estate until a buyer for them could be found.

Thanks to the Director of the ASRL, it was arranged to purchase the collection and secure the copyrights to display the documents online, free of charge, and the staff of ASRL will be working with Stanford University Library to scan and digitize online the entire Mondrian collection. The digitalized Mondrian Archive will be available on the Internet and in a CD format for the use of scholars and students.

Mondrian’s membership card in the Theosophical Society is in the archives at Yale University, and the wallet size photo of Mme. Blavatsky found among his papers “suggests that Theosophy was more than a passing fancy but continued to the end of his life.” The photograph of Blavatsky that Mondrian kept among his few possessions can be viewed here.

Einstein and Blavatsky

2011-09-25T17:34:00.000-07:00

The Hill, a congressional newspaper published daily when the U.S. Congress is in session, carries a piece by Bernie Quigley titled “Einstein Revisited.” The writer wonders whether recent challenges to Einstein’s theory of the speed of light may end up challenging the world’s god-like faith in him, adding:

Rumor from his niece had it that he got it all from Madame Blavatsky and her book The Secret Doctrine, published in 1888, incomprehensible to all but the best mathematicians. “There is no religion higher than truth,” the Russian savant wrote in her introduction.

Which would be an excellent slogan for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland.

Einstein’s familiarity with Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine remains to be decisively proved. The rest of the piece can be read here.

Theosophical History

2011-09-22T17:17:00.000-07:00

The journal Theosophical History has released its issues for January and April 2011. Vol. XV, No. 1, for January 2011 has some reminiscences by Stephan Hoeller on Ernest Wood in the 1950s. Michael Gomes contributes Col. Olcott’s annotations to an 1892 translation of Blavatsky’s Caves and Jungles of Hindostan, containing his observations on the events narrated. Marc Demarest comments on a November 13, 1875 newspaper article about the Theosophical Society stressing its occult interests. Of interest to us is the newspaper’s assertion that “Madame Blavatsky says that she saw in India marvels that convinced her beyond the possibility of doubt that magic was a genuine art, and that unearthly beings can be invoked by men.” This would make it one of her earliest statements about being in India. The volume closes with reviews of books related to René Guénon.

Vol. XV, No. 2 for January 2011, includes a stinging reply to Stephan Hoeller’s memories of Ernest Wood, an article on “Frank Lloyd Wright, Theosophy and Modern Conceptions of Space,” and reviews by John Patrick Deveney and John Algeo. Issues can be ordered here from Theosophical History, a worthy enterprise deserving of support by all those who have an interest in Mme. Blavatsky.

The Dharmapala Anniversary

2011-09-18T16:20:00.001-07:00

The Sunday Times newspaper in Sri Lanka carries a lengthy biographical sketch on September 18 honouring Anagarika Dharmapala’s 147th birth anniversary, which fell on September 17. Titled “I have work to do in bringing the peace of the Buddha westward,” it notes the influence of Blavatsky on his life:

When Col. Olcott and Madame Blavatsky revisited Sri Lanka, enroute to India in 1884, Anagarika had already expressed to Madame Blavatsky his desire to study theosophy and occultism from Himalyan spiritualists.

His father and elders objected but Madame Blavatsky persuaded them to give their consent. Once in Adyar in India, she also convinced the young Anagarika, that rather than studying theosophy and occultism, learning the Pali language would enhance his future aspirations.

This is followed by an equally eulogistic piece announcing “Today’s generation should honour him for his contribution to Buddhist education,” both of which can be read here.

Dharmapala on stage at the 1893 Parliament of Religions

seated next to Swami Vivekananda

Blavatsky News

2011-09-18T15:30:00.000-07:00

* The International Business Times of September 17 has an article about the proposed Passenger Terminal Building that will link Hong Kong and Shengzen in Mainland China. The writer says: Hong Kong and Shengzen are two leading cities growing with a common destiny. The two entities are related to one another and both incorporated under the People’s Republic of China, with borders defining geographic boundaries of political entities and legal jurisdictions. A symbol: Two major cities growing as one, and together becoming truly “the parts of a part.” There are no symbols, without a deep and philosophical meaning attached to them, “nothing could be preserved in human memory without some outward symbol.” (Madame Blavatsky).

* The Journal of World History for September 2011 has a study by Vahid Fozdar on the function of Freemasonry in India: “‘That Grand Primeval and Fundamental Religion’: The Transformation of Freemasonry into a British Imperial Cult.” Fozdar notes: The Historians of the Raj have usually given the role of validating Hinduism and other Indian religions—and, consequently, in contributing to Indian nationalism—to another Western organization: the Theosophical Society (TS), founded by Helena P. Blavatsky and Henry Olcott.

In light of recent research on the role of Protestant Christianity in the British Empire, this article explores the possibility that the British actually carried to India a “religion” besides Protestantism, something that mimicked a religion so closely that it could virtually serve as an alternative to Christianity for purposes of imperial consolidation—namely, Freemasonry. The article posits that British Freemasonry, although it emerged from a Christian environment, progressively de-Christianized itself in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and increasingly espoused a religious universalism, which in turn allowed it to serve as an institutionalized, quasi-official, and de facto “civil religion” for the British Empire in India.

Soul Inspirations

2011-09-04T17:29:00.000-07:00

Wes Davis, editor of An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, reviews R.F. Foster’s new book on Yeats, Words Alone: Yeats and his inheritances, just published from Oxford University Press. Titled “Putting Sweet Sounds Together,” it appears in the September 1 Wall Street Journal. Davis says: “Mr. Foster, an Oxford historian whose two-volume biography of Yeats has become the standard of reference, is less occupied with tracking particular lines of literary influence in Words Alone than in capturing the mindset to which Yeats was heir. Along the way, however, he does highlight instances of direct inspiration.”

One of those inspirations being Mme. Blavatsky. “Yeats’s fascination with occult oddities like the psychic Madame Blavatsky and the secretive group known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn accords more easily with his nationalist ideals. What looks like a flight from history simply underlines the presence of the past.”

Like most of his generation who were drawn to Theosophy, Yeats drew on a number of sources: William Blake and his visionary poetry, the fairy tales and ghost lore of rural Ireland, Mme. Blavatsky’s Theosophy with its stress on Eastern scriptures, the hermetic kabbalah and ritual of the Order of the Golden Dawn, the works of Plato and the Neoplatonists as translated by Thomas Taylor, G.R.S. Mead’s works on gnosticism, and more. Foster’s new book, Words Alone, “draws out themes which had particular resonance for Yeats, offering a new interpretation of the influences surrounding the young poet as he began to ‘hammer his thoughts into a unity.’”

Wes Davis’s review can be read here.

The Parable of the Sower

2011-09-04T15:08:00.000-07:00

A reader suggests that Osho’s reference to Mme. Blavatsky as a seed-sower may have a grain of truth in it in spite of his flowery language. In the Preliminary Explanation to E.S. Instruction 3, speaking of her work, H.P.B. writes:

It is the parable of the Sower put once more into practice, and a fresh lesson to be derived from its new application. The seeds that fall into good ground will bring forth fruit an hundredfold, and thus repay in each case the waste of those seeds which will have fallen by the wayside, on stony hearts and among the thorns of human passions. It is the duty of the Sower to choose the best soil for the future crops. But he is held responsible only so far as that ability is directly connected with the failures, and that such are solely due to it; it is the Karma of the individuals who receive the seeds by asking for them, that will repay or punish those who fail in their duties to their HIGHER SELF.

They are simply the seeds in which lurks the potentiality of every truth, the germ of that progress which will be the heirloom of only the seventh perfect Race. A handful of such seeds was entrusted to me by the keepers of these truths, and it is my duty to sow them there, where I perceive a possibility of growth.

Osho on Blavatsky

2011-09-01T17:39:00.000-07:00

The Times of India for August 15 carries this apocryphal tale about Mme. Blavatsky from a talk given by Osho (1931-1990):

Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society used to carry two bags in her hands, always. Either going for a morning walk or traveling in a train—those two bags were always in her hands. And she was throwing something out of those bags—from the window while sitting in the train—onto the side of the train.

People would ask, “Why do you do this?”

She would say, “This has been my whole life's habit. These are seasonal flower seeds. I may not come back on this route again, but that does not matter. When the season comes and the flowers will blossom, thousands of people who pass every day in this line of railway trains will see those flowers, those colors. They will not know me. That does not matter.

“One thing is certain: I am making a few people happy somewhere. That much I know. It does not matter whether they know it or not. What matters is that I have been doing something which will make somebody happy. Some children may come and pluck a few flowers and go home. Some lovers may come and make garlands for each other. And without their knowing, I will be part of their love. And I will be part of the joy of children. And I will be part of those who will be simply passing by the path, seeing the beautiful flowers.”

Osho’s record on Blavatsky is mixed, sometimes he ridicules, sometimes he references her favorably as in the piece of folklore he transmits above.

Blavatsky on EsoClassics Plus

2011-08-28T16:24:00.000-07:00

Simon Matts, the developer of EsoClassics, informs us of some new developments with this product:

EsoClassics is now available for Android too. It’s free! I’ve developed a new version with English texts: its name is EsoClassics Plus and you can find it in both Android Market and Apple App Store. There are a lot of books (more than 90!) and the job has been hard, so the app is priced US 0.99 or EUR 0.79.

Included among the more than 90 books, pamphlets, documents, conferences, letters, etc., are some of the most important authors in the history of esoteric sciences: Paracelsus, Alice Bailey, H.P. Blavatsky, H.C. Agrippa, Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, Eliphas Levi, Rudolf Steiner,...and so on! An effort that deserves much respect. This app is designed for both iPhone and iPad and can be downloaded here.

Pitching the Sacred: Art and Spirituality

2011-08-28T15:40:00.000-07:00

The Prague Summer Program for 2012, hosted by Western Michigan University and the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, has been announced. The theme will be “Pitching the Sacred: Art and Spirituality.”

From Swedenborg to Madame Blavatsky, over the past couple of centuries the fringe of secular western culture has had a spooky aspect. The disassociation of spirituality from organized religion proceeded from Romanticism and its Yankee cousin Transcendentalism, and was a defining feature of Modernism. “New Age” is not just Shirley Maclaine and ancient aliens. It permeates both “low” and “high” culture, and though in the former it is often silly, in the latter it often seems the very essence of what is vital in contemporary art. In this nineteenth year of the Prague Summer Program, we will consider the influence of Eastern thought and traditions on popular and serious culture alike, and how that influence is tinged with an idealization of “primitive” cultures, from pre-Christian European to pre-Columbian.

Courses will include Creative Writing, Literature and Jewish Studies, and Photography, and will run from June 30 to July 27, 2012 in Prague, Czech Republic. The program is be available here.

Theosophy, Cultural Nationalism, and Home Rule

2011-08-25T16:17:00.000-07:00

Prof. Mark Bevir of the University of California, Berkeley, will be presenting a paper on “Theosophy, Cultural Nationalism, and Home Rule” at this year’s Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Seattle, Washington, Sept. 1-4. He says:

This essay contains three sections. The first shows how western theosophists simplified and appropriated Indian thought, deploying it to resolve dilemmas confronting occult and other religious traditions. The second section explores how theosophical ideas then provided one inspiration for a tradition of cultural nationalism within India itself. Finally, the third section examines how this cultural nationalism transformed Congress in the years immediately surrounding Gandhi’s return from South Africa.

Bevir, who is Professor of Political History, looks at Blavatsky’s work as part of the response to the problems facing contemporary Christians. He advances the theory that “In defending Hinduism, theosophy idealized Indian culture and society,” and charts the rise and influence of Annie Besant in the Home Rule Movement.

The Péladan Project

2011-08-14T19:32:00.000-07:00

The Péladan Project is a new website by Sasha Chaitow, a PhD candidate at EXESESO (Centre for the Academic Study of Western Esotericism) at the University of Exeter, England, based on the work for her PhD thesis on the life and work of the French novelist Joséphin Péladan (1858-1918). “The purpose of this website is to provide bibliographical data, a repository of all public domain works by (or related to) Joséphin Péladan, as well as a gallery of Symbolist artwork from the artists who exhibited in the Salons de Rose+Croix that Péladan organised between 1892-1897.”

Wherever art and esotericism overlap, Péladan’s influence may also be considered as a parallel, though more practically and socially oriented current, to Helena Blavatsky’s contemporary Theosophical Society (est. 1875 in New York, with further societies in Greece, London and Paris by the 1880s). Peladan’s unique cosmology and synthesis of esoteric thought was influenced by his reading of Fabre d’Olivet, among numerous other contemporary occultists, and found fertile ground in the French occult revival inspired by Eliphas Levi (1810-1875) and his popularization of magic, Kabbalah and Tarot in England and France, while the artists belonging to the Salon d’Art Idéaliste founded 1896 by Jean Delville (1867-1953), the mirror of Péladan’s Salon in neighbouring Belgium, drew on the ideas of the Theosophists Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891) and Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854-1934), as well as Péladan’s work.

The rest of the piece, and further information about Péladan, can be accessed here.

Blavatsky, Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal

2011-08-14T17:22:00.000-07:00

University of Chicago Press has announced a new book from Jeffrey Kripal coming in November. Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal looks at “how comic book heroes have helped their creators and fans alike explore and express a wealth of paranormal experiences ignored by mainstream science. Delving deeply into the work of major figures in the field—from Jack Kirby’s cosmic superhero sagas and Philip K. Dick’s futuristic head-trips to Alan Moore’s sex magic and Whitley Strieber’s communion with visitors—Kripal shows how creators turned to science fiction to convey the reality of the inexplicable and the paranormal they experienced in their lives. Expanded consciousness found its language in the metaphors of sci-fi—incredible powers, unprecedented mutations, time-loops and vast intergalactic intelligences—and the deeper influences of mythology and religion that these in turn drew from; the wildly creative work that followed caught the imaginations of millions.”

Noting the work of Blavatsky and others, the author says: The Theosophical Society was founded in 1875 in New York City by an eccentric Russian woman named Helena P. Blavatsky, an American journalist who had been reporting on Spiritualism under the name of Henry Steel Olcott, and the Irish American occultist William Quan Judge. Through its many sectarian splits and cultural transformations, Theosophy played a key historical role in garnering public enthusiasm for the comparative study of religion, promoting the early study of “the powers latent in man,” and opening Western culture up to an early appreciation of “Eastern religions. In short, Theosophy was a major, maybe the major promoter of the mytheme of Orientation.

Kirpal gives a brief resumé of the theory of the seven races in The Secret Doctrine, focusing on the idea of Lemuria and its survival as a cultural influence. Along the way he covers many other tales derived from these sources as they emerge through the lens of the comic book. Blavatsky News covered his last book in a July 11, 2010 post.

Blavatsky and the Pineal Gland

2011-08-07T18:12:00.000-07:00

The journal, Neurosurgery Clinics of North America, for July 2011 carries an interesting paper “On the Surgery of the Seat of the Soul: The Pineal Gland and the History of its Surgical Approaches” by O. Choudhry, G. Gupta and C. J. Prestigiacomo.

The pineal gland has been studied through philosophy and science for thousands of years. Its role in human physiology was not well understood until the scientific community first started to report on pineal pathology in the eighteenth century. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reports on pineal tumors and the emergence of comparative anatomy allowed more complete understanding of pineal function. Neurosurgical methods of treating pineal pathology first emerged in the early twentieth century. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the emergence of microsurgical technique allowed for excellent outcomes with minimal morbidity and mortality.

The place of the pineal gland in occult anatomy was one of Mme. Blavatsky’s favorite subjects, for it suggested the remnant of what had been the “third eye” of primeval humanity. And her ideas are duly noted: For Madame Blavatsky, humans received this divine inspiration not through a figurative third eye but literally through the pineal gland itself. It was an “organ of spiritual vision.”

W.Q. Judge Writings Online

2011-08-07T16:26:00.000-07:00

The newly reissued volumes of William Q. Judge’s writings, Echoes of the Orient, compiled by Dara Eklund, has been put online by the publisher, Theosophical University Press. Two volumes cover Judge’s magazine output, mainly from his journal The Path and other theosophical journals. Volume three is taken from various tracts and pamphlets bearing his name, newspaper articles, and his Suggestions and Aids to the American members of the Esoteric School of Theosophy, which for some reason does not include one of his most famous pieces issued to his Esoteric School, his November 1894 notice By Master’s Direction, deposing Annie Besant as co-head of the school. The volumes, which come to some 500 pages each, can be accessed as an E-book here.

Art Magic

2011-08-04T17:56:00.001-07:00

Marc Demarest’s long awaited annotated edition of Emma Hardinge Britten’s Art Magic is finally available. The publisher is Typhon Press, a specialty publishing house focused on scholarly editions of spiritualist and occult works, and the announcement for the book says:

First published in 1876, Art Magic is one of the founding documents of the Victorian occult revival. Published under mysterious circumstances, the book was controversial in its own day, and has intrigued and infuriated students of the occult for nearly 150 years. Regarded for years merely as a supplement to the more famous Ghost Land (1876), this new edition of Art Magic demonstrates clearly that Art Magic is actually the more important work: closely connected to the founding and early teachings of the Theosophical Society, to Helena Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (1877), and to the teachings of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, as well as to the work of J. C. Street, R. Swinburne Clymer and other occult figures.

This definitive, corrected edition of the text fixes errors in the first edition text, and includes an in-depth bibliographical and historical introduction, as well as extensive annotations to the text by Marc Demarest, the curator of the Emma Hardinge Britten Archive.

Emma Hardinge Britten (1823-1899) was one of the most influential spiritualist and occult propagandists of the nineteenth century. Her work informs modern-day organizations as diverse as the international spiritualist movement, the Theosophical Society, esoteric Freemasonry, and the Church of Light.

Mr. Demarest’s notes will no doubt make this “forgotten classic” much more accessible than it has been. The 546 page paperback is now available from Amazon.

Theosophy and Kabbalah in the 20th century

2011-07-31T19:37:00.000-07:00

The Emily Sellon Memorial Library in New York City will be hosting a talk by Prof. Boaz Huss of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, on Saturday, August 6, 2011, 2-3 PM, on “The Association of Hebrew Theosophists: an unknown chapter in the history of Theosophy and Kabbalah in the 20th century.”

The lecture will discuss the foundation of the Association of Hebrew Theosophists and the activities of Jewish Theosophical associations in England, Iraq, and especially, the United States. As part of his ongoing research, Boaz Huss will examine the interest of Jewish Theosophists in Kabbalah, and the contribution of the Theosophical Society to the renewed interest in Kabbalah in the early 20th century.

Boaz Huss is professor of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, where he is currently serving as chair of the department. His research interests include the Zohar and it reception, the genealogies of Jewish Mysticism and the history of Kabbalah Studies, Kabbalah and the Theosophical Society and Contemporary Kabbalah.

Prof. Huss’s paper, “‘The Sufi Society from America’: Theosophy and Kabbalah in Poona in the Late Nineteenth Century,” was mentioned in a September 10th post last year. It is a model of forensic research, being able to deduct so much from so little available material, and whatever he has to say on the matter will no doubt be of interest.

Magnificent Obsession

2011-07-31T16:41:00.001-07:00

The last 25 years of the 20th century can be characterized as having something of a Blavatsky renaissance. The trend seems to have no intention of letting up, and the first decade of the 21st century has seen a rise in scholarly papers and references in numerous books and conferences to H.P. Blavatsky. The same cannot be said of the modern Theosophical movement. Joy Dixon’s Divine Feminine (2001), which dealt with the interaction of women’s rights and Theosophy in the early part of the 20th century, and Michael Ashcraft’s Dawn of the New Cycle (2002) on theosophical educational life at Point Loma, California, still hold the field. So, the five volumes published by Joseph Ross since 1989 are valuable additions. His books, comprised of extensive quotes from relevant documents, including letters from Besant, Leadbeater, Krishnamurti and others, tell the tale of Krotona, the Theosophical community established in the Hollywood Hills in 1912 and later moved to Ojai, California, where it still exists. It is like have an extensive archive delivered to your door.

Joseph Ross at work

Yet as valuable a record as his books are, they have not really been welcome by the Theosophical Society in America. Perhaps it is because they contain the inclusion of material from the Society’s Esoteric School, which no one would have access to otherwise. Perhaps it is because the Theosophical Society in America does not have the reputation of being a gay friendly organization (there are tales of certain office holders going out of their way to demean and denigrate those who are perceived to be gay).

Still Mr. Ross continues on and has just released the fifth volume in his Krotona series, which takes the story from 1927 to 1931. A sample of the book can be read here. While it is good to get such things without charge, it is also good to support such work by buying the book, for like all collectibles issued by individuals, the run is limited, they are rarely reprinted and existing copies end up being priced out of accessibility. The book and other volumes in the series can be ordered from Joseph Ross’s site Krotona Archives.

Blavatsky and Astrology

2011-07-28T19:07:00.000-07:00

The Swedish astrologer Martin Gansten has posted a paper of his from the Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Sophia Centre Conference, published by last year by Nicholas Campion. His paper, “Reshaping karma: an Indic metaphysical paradigm in traditional and modern astrology,” contains a description of the development of modern astrology from Theosophical circles, especially through the figure of Alan Leo.

With the introduction of new scientific paradigms, interest in astrology declined drastically on the European Continent during the 17th century. At the same time, the art was enjoying an unprecedented popularity in England; but a few decades into the next century, fashions had changed even here, and only the occasional enthusiast was left. It was not until the late 1880s that the first stirrings of a movement to popularize astrology were felt, a movement which was largely the creation of one man: William Frederick Allen, soon to be better known as Alan Leo (1860 – 1917). Leo’s efforts proved successful in the way so common to popularizing ventures: by altering the thing popularized to the point where one has to ask whether it is, in any meaningful sense, the same thing at all, or rather a new product marketed under an old label.

Astrology was only one of Leo’s two great enthusiasms, the other being Theosophy as taught by Helena Blavatsky and, later, Annie Besant – teachings which in themselves were intended as a popularization of the esoteric or ‘occult’ truths supposedly contained in all ancient religious traditions, although couched mainly in eastern terminology. Leo’s life project was to unite the two by reinterpreting astrology as a spiritual doctrine, or, in the words of Wilhelm Knappich, to strip it of its scholastic-Aristotelic dress and shroud it in ‘the shimmering magic cloak of Indian Theosophy’ instead.

The work of another influential Theosophical astrologer, Dane Rudhyar, is also credited. Gansten, who also teaches at Lund University, points out that Blavatsky’s ideas “contrast sharply, however, with the ideas of karman and transmigration present in the Indic religions,” which should come as no surprise as she rules out metempsychosis, the going backward into an animal form by a human, and that karma cannot be propitiated by rituals and priests. The rest of Martin Gansten’s paper can be read here.

Emma Hardinge Britten and Blavatsky

2011-07-17T16:12:00.000-07:00

Marc Demarest looks at the relationship between the medium Emma Hardinge Britten (1823-1899), an early councilor of the Theosophical Society, and Blavatsky, in a July 15 post on his blog Chasing Down Emma.

However committed Emma was to the mission of the First Theosophical Society (and there's plenty of evidence that she was committed), by the time she founds The Two Worlds her occultism is of a purely theoretical and historical variety, and after Olcott brings Theosophy into Emma's backyard in the late 1880s, her position is an uncompromisingly Spiritual (and anti-TS) one -- right down to her repudiation of that which she alleged, from time to time, in the 1870s: that elemental spirits could obsess mortals, and so produce fraudulent communications through mediums.

Demarest has also announced his forthcoming edition of Art Magic, an early attempt to introduce the public to the ideas of occultism, edited by Emma in 1876, which should give us some new insights into this forgotten text.

The Making of British Socialism

2011-07-14T16:22:00.000-07:00

No subject now appears immune to a reference of Blavatsky. Mark Bevir’s new book, The Making of British Socialism, contains the passing nod.

Evolutionary theory unsettled many Victorians not only because the language of development raised the possibility of backsliding but also because scientific discoveries provided a contrast to older religious truths.…The age included extensive discussions of the apparent conflict between faith and reason and of how the two might be reconciled with one another. The attempt to bridge faith and reason energized quasi-scientific approaches to the soul, death, the afterlife, and the divine. The Theosophical Society, founded by Madame Blavatsky, was just one of many organizations to use the language of science and evolution to discuss paranormal and mystical experiences.

Mark Bevir, professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches political theory and philosophy, and public policy and organization, is no stranger to Blavatsky having authored of a number of previous articles mentioning her, including “The West turns Eastward: Madame Blavatsky and the Transformation of the Occult Tradition,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 1994; “Annie Besant's Quest for Truth: Christianity, Secularism and New Age Thought,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 1999; “In Opposition to the Raj: Annie Besant and the Dialectic of Empire,” History of Political Thought, 1998, “Theosophy and the Origins of the Indian National Congress,” International Journal of Hindu Studies, 2003. His book, The Making of British Socialism, will be published September 4 by Princeton University Press.

Blavatsky News

2011-07-10T18:01:00.000-07:00

* The latest issue of PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association, for March 2011, contains an article by Gauri Viswanathan titled “‘Have Animals Souls?”: Theosophy and the Suffering Body,” which continues her recent work on Blavatsky, memory, and history, theories and methodologies.

* There is an interesting, if brief, video that looks at Mme. Blavatsky’s Philadelphia address on 3420 Sansom Street that is now the home of the White Dog Cafe. Unfortunately, other than showing the address above the door, it gives no real idea of the building or location. It is posted on the iGeneralist site, which describes it as: “The home of Madame Blavatsky while she lived in Philadelphia. Not an adherent to her field of study, but I thought this video might be interesting to those fascinated by her life.”

* George M. Young looks at “Esoteric Elements In Russian Cosmism” in the 2011 issue of The Rose+Croix Journal, a yearly publication from AMORC. “Russian Cosmism is a lively and still productive tendency in the history of Russian esoteric thought, important but little known outside Russia. This paper presents a brief introduction to the ideas of several of the major figures in this tendency. From Nikolai Fedorov, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, to Svetlana Semenova, today’s leading Cosmist, the emphasis of this movement has been on the human role in shaping and directing future human evolution, in all its physical, social, and spiritual manifestations.” As Young notes: “Since the late nineteenth century, more than a few notable contributions to international esoteric doctrine have come west with a strong Russian accent: H. P. Blavatsky, George Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, Nicholas and Helena Roerich are names that immediately come to mind.” The rest of the article can be read here.

Constance Wilde and Blavatsky

2011-06-26T14:47:00.000-07:00

The London Express of Friday, June 24, carries a review of Fanny Moyle’s biography, Constance, about Constance Wilde, wife of Oscar Wilde, published in the U.K. by John Murray. The reviewer says:

There is a wonderful episode which brings the whole era alive. She and Oscar are at the opening of Dorothy’s, a restaurant exclusively for women in Oxford Street and they are at Madame Blavatsky’s table talking theosophy. Soon after, Constance joins the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

The Dorothy restaurants were the project of a pupil of Mme. Blavatsky’s, Isabel Cooper-Oakley, who operated two Dorothy restaurants in London, one for West End working girls and one for ladies, which opened until 10 PM with good food “in secure surroundings.” HPB had wanted Oscar Wilde to review her Key to Theosophy, but nothing came of this.

Constance Wilde and her son, Cyril, in 1889

Blavatsky in Adelaide, Australia

2011-06-23T17:40:00.000-07:00

ABC Adelaide reports: The Art Gallery of South Australia is undergoing a vast transformation ahead of hosting its largest ever exhibition in July. The “Saatchi Gallery in Adelaide: British Art Now” exhibit is not only exceptional because of its size, it is also the first collection of work from London's acclaimed Saatchi Gallery ever to be shown in Australia.

The record display is comprised of 150 pieces from 42 artists and will cover 3,000 square metres of the South Australian gallery. This is the first Saatchi exhibition to come to Australia and will be open to the public exclusively at the Art Gallery of SA from the 30th of July until the 23rd of October.

Among the pieces shown will be Goshka Macuga’s 2007 “Madame Blavatsky.”

Esotericism of the iPhone

2011-06-23T15:16:00.000-07:00

The site of iPhoneitalia carries the news of a new app available, so far, only in Italy: “Esotericism of the iPhone app with free EsoClassics.”

EsoClassics is the first collection of Italian classic texts of the esoteric tradition, which is available free on the App Store.

In this first edition all texts are in Italian only, but the next update also adds international texts.

In EsoClassics you will find information, treatises, tips, aphorisms to always carry and read in every spare moment. The topics covered range from hermeticism, alchemy, theosophy, anthroposophy to the cabbala, and many others. Among the authors, Kremmerz, Bailey, Blavatsky, Steiner and many others.

features:

     * More than 50 books, notebooks, handouts, lectures, treatises.
     * Theosophy, Kabbalah, Alchemy, Archeosofica, Anthroposophy, Hermeticism, etc.
     * The most important authors of the esoteric tradition.

The app is available for free on the App Store.

Blavatsky and W. Evans-Wentz

2011-06-19T16:42:00.000-07:00

This week’s Times Literary Supplement of London carries a review by Mark Vernon, the English writer, journalist, and author, of Donald S. Lopez, Jr’s The Tibetan Book of the Dead, A Biography. Speaking of W. Evans-Wentz’s edition of the Tibetan Book of the Dead published in 1927, Vernon upholds Lopez’s conclusion:

It is the product of the creative editing of Walter Evans-Wentz, a Victorian Theosophist. His literary assembly owes as much to the doctrines of Madame Blavatsky as the purported author, Padmasambhava, the eight century Buddhist saint who is said to have buried a series of ‘treasures’ in the form of teachings to aid future, troubled generations...

Evans-Wentz was able to use the book to vest his version of Theosophy with all the authority of ancient wisdom, newly discovered. Interestingly, Lopez argues, the same pattern of scriptural recovery is manifest in Joseph Smith’s The Book of Mormon. So, although it is undoubtedly the combination of Tibetan esotericism and mortal anxiety that has led to the tremendous success of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, it is better placed within the American millenarian tradition that includes Theosophy, Mormonism and Spiritualism too.

Investigating the Supernatural in France

2011-06-16T17:49:00.000-07:00

Mme. Blavatsky and Theosophy get a brief mention in Sofie Lachapelle’s book,
Investigating the Supernatural: From Spiritism and Occultism to Psychical Research and Metapsychics in France, 1853–1931, published in April by John Hopkins University Press.

In 1875, the same year that [Eliphas] Lévi died, a new occultist movement building on this enthusiasm for things Eastern was created in New York when Helena Petrovna Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society with the help of lawyer and journalist Henry Steel Olcott. Theosophy consisted of a set of mystical teachings inspired by esoteric traditions of the East. In its aims, the Theosophical Society demarcated itself from other occult groups by its discussion of universal fraternity and its focus on a set of Aryan and Eastern teachings.

While noting that “Theosophy was never as popular in France as in the Anglo-Saxon world, but it introduced many to occultist traditions and functioned as a catalyst to the larger movement,” the author says, “For most of the 1880s, the occultist revival taking a hold of France centered on the Theosophical doctrine.” Le Lotus Bleu, the theosophical journal started in 1890 in France, did not, as the author claims, survive until 1986, but is still published.

Gandhi, Again

2011-06-16T15:27:00.000-07:00

The July/August issue of The Atlantic magazine contains an examination of Gandhi’s image by Christopher Hitchens, using Joseph Lelyveld’s recent study of Gandhi’s life, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (mentioned in a March 27 Blavatsky News post), for his template.

The word Mahatma (often employed in ordinary journalistic usage without any definite article, as if it were Mohandas Gandhi’s first name) is actually the Sanskrit word for “Great Soul.” It is a religio-spiritual honorific, to be assumed or awarded only by acclaim, and it achieved most of its currency in the West by association with Madame Blavatsky’s somewhat risible “Theosophy” movement, forerunner of many American and European tendencies to be found in writers, as discrepant as Annie Besant and T. S. Eliot, who nurture themselves on the supposedly holy character of the subcontinent.

Hitchens has taken on the claims of a number of prominent individuals over the years, including Mother Theresa. The rest of his comments can be read here.

Blavatsky, Landscape Painting and The Forest

2011-06-12T16:26:00.000-07:00

Dainis Dauksta in his contribution, “Landscape Painting and The Forest—The Influence of Cultural Factors in the Depiction of Trees and Forests,” in the volume New Perspectives on People and Forests edited by him and Eva Ritter (Springer, May 2011) looks at “two twentieth century painters [who] worked extensively, although not exclusively, on images of trees throughout their lives,” and who shared an interest in the ideas of H.P. Blavatsky. “They left in their work progressive series of compositions whereby their developing philosophies can be tracked through the changes in their imagery.”

Writing of Mondrian, Dauksta says: “He was searching for an entry to the world of spirit rather than of surfaces, and in 1909 he joined the Theosophical Society founded by Russian psychic Helena Blavatsky in 1875. This group had as its mission three objects: first to form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity, second to encourage the comparative study of religion, philosophy and science, and third to investigate the unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in human beings. His work became saturated with spiritual metaphor.” The book—267 pages, hardcover—was published by the German conglomerate Springer in May and sells for $189.00 U.S.

The Yost Typewriter

2011-06-12T14:35:00.000-07:00

The Australian blog Oz.Typewriter for June 10 carries a long description of the Yost typewriter invented by George Washington Newton Yost, an American Spiritualist who used his machine to take down the autobiography of the late H.P. Blavatsky. It was published in Boston in 1896 as Posthumous Memoirs of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Dictated from the spirit-world, upon the typewriter, independent of all human contact, under the supervision of G. W. N. Yost, to bring to light the things of truth, and affirm the continuity of life and the eternal activity of the soul immortal.

This obscure book belongs to that remote area of Blavatskiana—Posthumous memoirs dictated from the spirit-world—of which it must hold the sole place. The entry for it in Theosophy in the Nineteenth Century: An Annotated Bibliography (1994) gives a brief overview of its contents. It should come as no surprise that the book, which purports to give Blavatsky’s life history as told by herself, upholds the reality of spirit communication. Robert Messenger, who writes the piece, notes that “Yost had died in New York on September 26, 1895, aged 64, and appears not to have made any further contact with the world from the hereafter thereafter.” The post includes a picture of a Yost typewriter.

David Reigle on Blavatsky

2011-06-09T16:05:00.000-07:00

For over thirty years David Reigle has been contributing to the growing understanding of Mme. Blavatsky. His researches into Sanskrit and Tibetan sources have been utilized by many. So, whatever he has to say on the subject is of interest. The following is a June 6, 2011 post of his commenting on the post on a theosophical website:

I have as much respect for HPB as anyone, but if we are to speak about truth and illusion in Theosophical literature, it may be best to start with truth and illusion in HPB’s own writings. Her writings are full of errors. A large number of these are the errors of writers of her time, whom she copied. For example, in your previous posting, “Masters and the Movement,” this sentence is found:

“The lines above seem to contain key information as to contacts between Masters and the movement after the year 1900. This is the year when the Aquarius Age began, according to a clear and documented statement made by H.P. Blavatsky (‘Collected Writings’, TPH, volume VIII, p. 174, fn).”

For many years, I, too, took the above-referenced statement of HPB’s as giving the correct starting year of the Aquarian age, thinking that it came from the direct knowledge of her Mahatma sources. But then I found it in one of Gerald Massey's large books that HPB had reviewed. She had copied it from there almost verbatim.

It now becomes very questionable whether her teachers actually endorsed this date. When we see this type of thing happening again and again, I must conclude that large amounts of what are regarded as HPB’s own views are in fact just the views of other writers of her time that she copied. The mere fact of her repeating what was then taken as fact does not necessarily endorse its accuracy. Many, many of these can today be shown to be errors.

It would not be fair to attribute these errors that she copied from others to her. Everyone of her time necessarily did the same thing. Any book from 1888 can be shown to be full of such errors. Our task should first be to sort out truth and illusion in HPB’s own writings. We need to sort out what she merely copied from others, and what she actually put forth as truth. After all, she never claimed omniscience, but repeatedly denied it. She was the first to say that her own books are full of such errors (see her article written shortly before her death, “My Books”).

Blavatsky in the Board Room

2011-06-02T16:26:00.000-07:00

Transparency International Sri Lanka (TISL) is a National Chapter of Transparency International (TI), a leading global movement against corruption. Their website posts a presentation given at the Organization of Professional Associations of Sri Lanka (OPA) Seminar on Buddhism and Business Management held in Colombo in May in connection with the 2600th Sambuddhathva Jayanthi. The piece “Buddhism in the Board Room” by Chandra Jayaratne, former Ceylon Chamber of Commerce Chairman, adds a novel touch amid calls for good governance:

Russian esotericist Helena Petrova Blavatsky (1831-1891), best known as the founder of the modern Theosophical Movement, who in partnership with Colonel Henry Steel Olcott set the foundations for Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka through the promotion of education and Buddhist values, initiated a movement based upon “teachings” and “techniques” claimed to have received from real acquaintances whom she called “Masters” or Mahatmas. The “Masters” comprised of other esotericists who acted as humanists committed to global good governance, were willing to be guides, gurus and advocates and even whistle blowers where and whenever required.

The rest of the presentation can be read here.

Rebirth of a Poet

2011-05-29T16:15:00.000-07:00

The New York Times Book Review of May 27 carries a review of a new translation of the Songs of Kabir by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. The reviewer, August Kleinzahler, compares it with previous translations:

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s new translation of Kabir brings the poetry of the great 15th-century Indian poet and holy man to life in English for the first time. Not that others haven’t tried: Pound, Robert Bly and, most notably, Rabindranath Tagore in 1915, with a version consisting of thees, thous and thines, delivered in a sandalwood-scented prayer-book-ese that would not have been out of place atop a teak sidetable at one of Mme. Blavatsky’s legendary seances. But it is Mehrotra who has succeeded in capturing the ferocity and improvisational energy of Kabir’s poetry.

We’re not quite sure what “legendary séances” the reviewer is referring to, but Tagore was a favourite with early twentieth century theosophists. The review, which gives a number of examples of the new translation, can be read here.

Blavatsky and Science Fiction

2011-05-26T17:39:00.000-07:00

Locus Online, the website of the magazine of the science fiction and fantasy field, carries a May 25 review by Stefan Dziemianowicz of a new collection of short stories by the American science fiction writer Henry Kuttner. He points out how the writer referenced his tales.

Probably the most interesting aspect of Kuttner’s shudder pulp stories is their esoteric references to the work of Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and other writers of supernatural fiction, as well as the teachings of celebrity occultists like Madame Blavatsky. (References to The Book of Dzyan, an ancient book of Tibetan lore that Madame Blavatsky was fond of flogging, appear in several tales, notably the title story.) Like his mentor, Lovecraft, the young Kuttner was reading and absorbing the work of a lot of different writers, and he knew that mentioning them in a story helped to enhance the verisimilitude of the seemingly supernatural shenanigans.

Blavatsky’s influence in the field of science fiction is another area that has not received enough attention. The collection by Kuttner (1915–1958), Terror in the House: The Early Kuttner, Volume One, is comprised of stories published in the 1930s. The rest of Stefan Dziemianowicz’s review can be read here.

Blavatsky and Australian Art

2011-05-22T17:20:00.000-07:00

The Sydney Morning Herald for April 30, 2011, has a long review of the exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Art, Love and Life: Ethel Carrick and E. Phillips Fox, on the two Australian artists.

The Foxes were a successful partnership, both as husband and wife and as two artists working in complementary styles. Emanuel Phillips Fox (1865-1915) was academically trained and naturally cautious in his version of impressionism. Seven years his junior, Ethel Carrick (1872-1952) was a more adventurous painter. Each had much to offer the other. The tragedy is that their marriage lasted a mere 10 tears before Fox - a chain smoker - died of cancer at the age of 50.

The reviewer notes “Carrick’s burgeoning interest in Theosophy - Madame Blavatsky's fizzy cocktail of ersatz ancient wisdoms that enjoyed a remarkable vogue among artists at the time. Mondrian and Kandinsky were fellow believers, so Carrick was in good company.” The rest of the review can be read here. The exhibition, which runs until August 7, “offers unprecedented access to more than 100 paintings, works on paper and ephemera exploring the artists’ lives, subjects and milieu, drawn from major institutions and private collections across Australia.”

Ethel Carrick
Arabs bargaining c.1911. Painting oil on canvas

The Poet as Prophet

2011-05-22T14:44:00.000-07:00

New York poet Eric Norris publishes an extended meditation on “Madame Blavatsky, Poetry, and Me: An Appreciation” on his blog When I was One and Twenty.

It is not easy to overestimate the influence of 19th Century Theosophist thinker Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky on the development of modern poetry; but it is always possible to try.

Helena Petrovna remains, if she remains in our minds at all, a mystery, a medium, a mystic—an enchanting metaphor, perhaps—the raisin in our rice pudding, if you will. Numerous numerologists have noted (with hysterical hand-rubbing) the mathematical symmetry of her name—the very recipe for collective wisdom as it is received around a workshop table.

How then, you may be inclined to ask, can we know Madame Blavatsky, if not from the Internet? How do we approach her? How do we embrace the sorrowful soul buried beneath her ample bosom, poetically speaking? Posthumously, of course, and with reverence, yes. But how do we distinguish her from the fraud in her photographs? From her books? From a trance? From France?

The rest of his ruminations on the subject can be read here.

The Kybalion

2011-05-19T15:56:00.000-07:00

The Kybalion is one of an elect set of metaphysical books from a century ago that have remained in print and have had a continued readership. Subtitled “A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece” by Three Initiates, it purported to come from “a compilation of certain Basic Hermetic Doctrines, which were passed on from teacher to student, which was known as the KYBALION.” The main part of the book served as a commentary on Seven Hermetic Principles that were enunciated.

In his Introduction to the “Definitive edition” of the book just published by Tharcher/Penguin, Philip Deslippe reveals the author to be William Walker Atkinson (1862-1932), a prolific writer living in Chicago at the beginning of the twentieth century. Atkinson is better remembered today for his series of yoga books published under the name of Yogi Ramacharaka. Deslippe concludes: “the source material for The Kybalion of 1908, despite all the myth and lore surrounding it within the introduction, appears to have never existed at all. The Kybalion expounds on a center that was either imagined or employed purely as a device. The only literary parallel to this would seem to be the Book of Dzyan, a supposed primeval work of cosmology, which the founder of Theosophy, Helena Blavatsky, claimed to have read and memorized in Tibetan Lamaseries. Her landmark 1888 work, The Secret Doctrine, can be considered a type of exegesis on the Book of Dzyan, although some scholars in her time considered it a more a reworking of texts already existent. William Walker Atkinson was clearly an admirer of Blavatsky, and Theosophic traces can be found in most of his works.”

Philip Deslippe’s interesting introduction gives further background on the man who also wrote as Theron Q. Dumont and Magnus Incognito.

The Mongolian translation of Blavatsky’s The Voice of the Silence

2011-05-15T19:34:00.000-07:00

Matri Books of Mongolia, in cooperation with Quest Books and the Theosophical Society in America, has published a Mongolian/English edition of H. P. Blavatsky’s Voice of the Silence. In the Foreword to this edition, Glenn Mullin writes:

Blavatsky was the first Westerner to present Tibeto-Mongolian Buddhism in an authentic and sympathetic light. Earlier Western writings had largely been done by Christian missionaries, who looked at the tradition through glasses distorted by Christian prejudices of 18th and 19th century Europe. Blavatsky had the advantage of a naturally open spirit, that could look at all world traditions with an appreciative intellect. Moreover, she encountered the teachings of Mongolian lamas in her childhood in Russia, and visited Mongolian temples in Kalmukia. She traveled widely in India and Tibet, and even claims to have visited Mongolia itself. Later in life she adopted two mystics from Tashi Lhunpo Monastery in Tibet as her two deepest sources of spiritual inspiration.

The English in this edition has been updated by David Reigle, mainly in the changing of “thus,” “thou” and “thine” to “you” and “your,” and the addition of Sanskrit and Tibetan spellings after terms used in the book. In an Endnote Mr. Reigle suggests that the methods outlined in the First Fragment of the Voice of the Silence “clearly corresponds primarily to the Raja-yoga system of Patanjali.” Some of Reigle’s other conclsuions are gone over in a May 11 post at the site Everything Related to Mongols and Mongolia.

A Foreword by H.H. the Dalai Lama to Raghavan Iyer’s 1989 edition of Voice of the Silence had been added. Doss McDavid in his Introductory Note tells of the work of the Roerichs and hopes that “the people of Mongolia find inspiration in the works transcribed by this ‘fiery messenger of the White Brotherhood’.” At 121 pages, the book sells for $12.95 U.S., 5000 tögrög in Mongolia.

Blavatsky News

2011-05-15T14:40:00.000-07:00

* The New York Times carries a review of John Gray’s new book The Immortalization Commission, commented on in a March 24 post here. The reviewer, Clancy Martin, professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, mentions an incident in book concerning a visit to Russia by H.G. Wells:

Wells had proposed an ambitious program, in which “an intelligent few — scientists, engineers, aviators, commissars — could seize control of evolution and lead the species to a better future” and “eventually, humans would become like gods.” Wells’s great fantasies charged the batteries of mystically inclined intellectuals like Madame Blavatsky, G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky and especially Gorky, a celebrated writer on friendly terms with Chekhov, Tolstoy and Lenin. Like Sidgwick before him, Gorky was convinced that the human personality, which he believed to produce “thought-energy,” was eternal, and essentially interwoven with the fabric of the universe. Unlike Sidgwick, Gorky believed that humans could evolve into “gods” and eventually influence the development of the universe itself — a notion that gave birth to a pre-revolutionary movement called “God-building.” “A kind of secular mystery cult, God-building was another part of the late-19th-century European current in which occultism and science marched hand in hand,” Gray writes.

“Mystically inclined intellectuals like Madame Blavatsky”! An online version of the May 6 post, “The Scientific Revolt Against Death,” can be read here.

* V. Narayan Swami who posts the blog, Rabbiting On, takes us to task for pointing out some errors in a 2008 post by him mentioning Hudleston’s Garden, the Madras property purchased by Olcott and Blavatsky in 1882 as headquarters for the Theosophical Society. His comments are served up with a good dose of mockery and attempted sarcasm. “What makes Theosophists come down from the supposedly high ground which they occupy to take issue with an obscure blogger,” he writes in his self-justifying post of May 3, though admitting that we were correct in at least one instance!

In regard the property he describes as Hudleston’s Garden, we must agree to disagree: the building he indicates it to be has two stories with rooms on the top, while Hudleston’s Garden (at least when the Theosophists bought it) was a one story building with rooms on the roof. In response to our query as to what happened to these buildings, for there is no indication of them at present on the property owned by the Theosophical Society, he coolly says: “I consider them to be buildings outside the estate and on the other side of the Elphinstone bridge,” though not stating so in his original post.

And if the artist could take such liberties (the point of “The Indian Picturesque: Images of India in British Landscape Painting, 1780-1880,” in C.A. Bayly’s An Illustrated History of Modern India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1991, how European landscape artists manipulated the portrayal of India), could he not imagine other structures? Since, as V. Narayan Swami says: “the centerpiece of my [his] blog story” was “my [his] attribution of Hudleston House,” we can understand the difficulty of his position, for the validity of any other viewpoint would be impossible. As Blavatsky News is an attempt to share the collected research of those who post here, made possible by the global contribution of our readers, we commend any attempt to decipher this intricate field, and V. Narayan Swami’s entry into the murky waters of Theosophical history can here read here. For us, it is not so much about the building but what happened there.

Misinformation Files

2011-05-08T15:19:00.000-07:00

Red Shambhala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia by Andrei Znamenski is the title of a forthcoming book to be released in June by Quest Books, the publishing arm of the Theosophical Society in America. According to the author:

The first to introduce this legend [of Shambhala] into Western spiritual culture was the famous Western seeker Helena Blavatsky, founding mother of Theosophy,…Adjusting the Buddhist legend to the theory of evolution, which was becoming popular at the end of the nineteenth century, Blavatsky argued that Shambhala was the center of evolving superior wisdom—the abode of the so-called Great White Brotherhood located somewhere in the Himalayas. The hidden masters (whom she also referred to as mahatmas) from this brotherhood guided humankind in its evolution away from materialism toward the highest spirituality, which would eventually give rise to the superior sixth race that would replace contemporary imperfect human beings. Such politically incorrect generalizations, especially after what happened after World War II, might offend the sensibilities of current spiritual seekers, yet during Blavatsky’s lifetime and well into the 1930s, this kind of evolutionary talk was quite popular among all educated folk who considered themselves advanced and progressive, including Theosophists.

Blavatsky studies would have been enriched if the author had provided the source for his claims. Unfortunately, he has attributed later theosophical concepts that developed after Blavatsky’s death to her. This is also stated in another recent offering from Quest Books, but as Blavatsky News has pointed out: Blavatsky never used the term Great White Brotherhood. She never “argued that Shambhala was the center of evolving superior wisdom.” “Such politically incorrect generalizations” about Blavatsky do not inspire confidence in the rest of what Andrei Znamenski has to say in his book.

Read what Olcott had to say on the matter: The fact is—as I was told many years ago—the headquarters of the White Lodge [Olcott’s term, by his admission] is shifted from place to place according to the exigencies of occult management; it used to be in Arabia Petraea, but two years before the British came to possess themselves of Egypt it was removed to Tibet, not to Lhassa but to another place. When H.P.B. and I were preparing to come to India, arrangements were in progress for the removal of the White Lodge from Tibet to another retreat where there was the minimum chance of their being disturbed by any of these movings of pawns across the political chequer-board. The inaccuracy of the editors who have been talking about Lhassa as the “Mecca of Theosophy” will be apparent from what has been said above.—Old Diary Leaves, vol. 6.

Secrets of the Dead

2011-05-05T13:52:00.000-07:00

The upcoming schedule for the American television station PBS features a program
on the British explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in 1925 with his son
Jack and Jack’s friend Raleigh Rimmell when the trio entered the Amazon
jungle in search of an ancient lost city he called “Z.” The program, Lost in
the Amazon, traces the explorer’s last days. “ For decades, explorer Colonel
Percy Fawcett captivated the world. His exploits in the Amazon featuring
lost cities and fantastic creatures inspired books and Hollywood movies. In
1925, at the age of 58 Fawcett headed into the jungle with his son and a
friend to find a mysterious lost city called Z. It was one of the biggest
news stories of the day, and millions followed reports of their exploits.”

Then all three vanished without a trace. Despite countless rescue missions,
Fawcett was never found. Only mystery remains. Was he killed by Indians as
most believe? And is there a factual basis for his Lost City? Now modern day
explorer Niall McCann travels to South America armed with new clues: Fawcett
’s signet ring, secret map coordinates, and an understanding of the mystical
purpose behind Fawcett’s final journey.

Blavatsky plays a part in this story. “Percy’s brother introduced him to the
Theosophy movement—created by Madame Blavatsky, a famous 19th century
psychic and spiritualist. Her global religious movement influenced leading
figures of the day including Gandhi, Thomas Edison and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Blavatsky taught that enlightened Master Priests delivered psychic messages
to help mankind; they lived in various hidden cities around the world
including Tibet and South America.” (!)

This became the draw for him, and “Fawcett fell under the movement’s spell,
and would never forget the Masters in the hidden cities.” A similar
narrative of Percy Fawcett and his interest in Theosophy is given in The
Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann,
published last year. A transcript of the program can be viewed here.

The producer of Lost in the Amazon feels “The image that everyone believed
about the Amazon: a pristine jungle inhabited by primitive hunter-gatherers
is coming to an end. As Fawcett himself believed, huge populations and
advanced civilizations once lived in the Amazon: they are only now just
emerging and waiting to be fully revealed.”

Gothic Egypt

2011-04-28T17:27:00.000-07:00

As part of Museums at Night 2011, hundreds of London museums, galleries, libraries, archives and heritage sites are unlocking their doors for special evening events over the weekend of May 13-15. On Friday evening, May 13, the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, at University College, London, will be offering a walk through titled “Gothic Egypt.”

Gothic Egypt is an attitude to Egypt. An image of Ancient (and Modern) Egypt based on ideas of decay, an obsession with death, a civilization alien to Western cultural norms. Egypt is related to and yet lies outside the ‘West’ and has been perceived as typifying Oriental excess.

Aside from the exhibits, there are notes on the motif of Egyptian horror, from Bram Stoker to the Hammer films of the 1960s. Referring to Mme. Blavatsky, the program guide says:

The Theosophical Society, originally for the study into medium and spiritualistic traditions and practices, was founded in New York in 1875. One of the founding members was Madame Helena Blavatsky who had lived in Cairo in the early 1870s and published the massive Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology in 1877. Blavatsky attributed the ancients, and in particular the Egyptians, with superior knowledge and wisdom and drew on ancient texts as well as current Egyptology. Of particular significance to her was the Book of the Dead as well as the divine figures of Osiris and Isis….The magical wisdom offered from Ancient Egypt by Queen Tera in [Bram Stoker’s] The Jewel of Seven Stars seems to embody the secret and lost spiritual knowledge revered by Blavatsky and others.

The program guide can be accessed here.

Enlightenment for Sale

2011-04-28T15:54:00.000-07:00

The Chakra (ChakraNews.com), “the most comprehensive and up-to-date source of worldwide Dharmic-related news,” for April 28th has a piece of the popularization of Indian ideas through the New Age movement. “Modern Transpersonal Psychology, Consciousness Studies, the occult religion of Theosophy, Landmark Education’s The Forum and ‘est’ seminars with more than 700,000 graduates, Filmore’s Unity School of Christianity, occult religion of Eckankar, Scientology and many thousands of new-age schools and philosophies are in fact all crude derivatives and adulterated spin-offs of a mix of ancient Hindu concepts.”

More importantly, Madame Helena Blavatsky (founder of Theosophical Society) who has been considered one of the biggest pioneers and the ‘mother’ of new-age thinking has wielded a far reaching influence on occult thinkers and on Western mysticism as a whole. What is not commonly known however is that her magnum opus (book) ‘The Secret Doctrine’ that set the pulse for most of the new-age thinking was in fact inspired by Hindu theories on cosmic evolution and manifestation. She often quotes the Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and Puranas in her works and is even said to have travelled in India and studied under Brahmin teachers.

In response to this diffusion of Indian culture, there has been a move in India, it reports, to patent “nearly 900 yoga asanas (postures), to prevent European and American companies involved in fitness-related activities from claiming them as their own.”

Donald Lopez, Jr. on Mme. Blavatsky

2011-04-28T14:18:00.000-07:00

Karl Pohrt posts on his blog, thereisnogap.com, an interview with Donald Lopez, Jr., that will appear in issue #48 of The Crazy Wisdom Community Journal (May through August 2011). The main topic is Lopez’s news book, The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography, recently published by Princeton University Press. In the course of the interview, Pohrt asks:

Karl Pohrt: From our vantage point, it is easy to dismiss Evans-Wentz, who was born in Trenton, New Jersey and never learned the Tibetan language, or Lama Govinda, who was born Ernst Hoffman in Germany, or Madame Blavatsky, a Russian medium who started the Theosophical Society as—at best—romantic amateurs who misrepresented and twisted Hinduism and Buddhism to fit their own agendas. But is this too harsh a judgment? Maybe the window through which we observe others is always cloudy. Evans-Wentz, Govinda, and Blavatsky were also early western pioneers in the encounter with Asian religious traditions.

Donald Lopez: I agree entirely. I’ve often tried to talk about the importance, especially, of Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society. In the late 1800s India and Asia were being overrun by Christian missionaries who were telling the Buddhists that their religion was idolatry and superstition. Madame Blavatsky, a Russian medium, and her friend Colonel Olcott, an American Civil War veteran, sailed to Sri Lanka to defend the Buddhists against the British and they went to India to defend the Hindus against the British. There’s something quite heroic about them. They believed that there is a single mystical tradition from which all religions spring, an idea that continues to this day. And so the fact that they were trying to see Hinduism and Buddhism through that lens is not surprising in the least.

The rest of the interview can be read here.

Mondrian

2011-04-24T17:21:00.000-07:00

The blog Art History Unstuffed continues its exposition of art and artists at the turn of the 20th century. Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) receives the treatment in a post on April 22:

An important indication of the underlying meaning of Mondrian’s art is one of his last representational paintings, the Evolution triptych of 1910, a symbolic evocation of a human journey to spiritualism. Mondrian had been an adherent of the pan-philosophy, Theosophy, since 1909, and embraced its idea that absolute laws rule the universe. Founded by Madame Hélène Blavatsky at the end of the nineteenth century, Theosophy attempted to explain why neither science nor religion could provide the answers to life’s mysteries. Theosophy was widespread and many early twentieth century artists, such as Kandinsky and Malevich and Klee, were adherents of the philosophy. The Dutch artist, J.L.M. Lauwerkis stated that, “The concepts of Theosophy are preeminently suited to be expressed by art because of their magnitude and profundity.”

His involvement with the Dutch art group De Stijl, “The Style,” and its influence on his style, can be read here.

Hume, Allan Octavian

2011-04-21T16:56:00.000-07:00

Meiosis.org.uk, “A small site that is interested in things botanical and historical, associated with the herbaria@home project,” posted a piece on April 13 about the post theosophical pursuits of A.O. Hume (1829–1912) as part of their series on British botanists. “During his latter years, he devoted time and money to the establishment of the South London Botanical Institute; this was and is based in a large house on Norwood Road, Tulse Hill.”

The piece, which has since been taken down, had the obligatory reference to Blavatsky and Theosophy: During his time in India, Hume become involved in the Theosophy Movement (Blavatsky and Olcott) but later dissociated himself from most of its tenets though he remained a vegetarian (and was a vice president of the British Vegetarian Society). Hume was not alone in the adoption of such beliefs—Mary Ann Atwood embraced theosophy, Wallace–Spiritualism, and H C Watson –Phrenology: the interpretation of bumps on the head.

Hume, along with A.P. Sinnett, was one of the recipients of what came to be known as the Mahatma letters. Some of the best-known letters were to Hume. He must have been a formidable personality. Critical of the British Government in India, he took early retirement after being demoted, got involved with the Theosophical Society in India, and, leaving that, went on to help start the Indian National Congress. A passionate ornithologist in India, he became an equally passionate botanist after he settled in London in the 1890s.

The South London Botanical Institute, which was founded by Hume in 1910, still exists, and according to their website: “the aims of the Institute have remained almost unchanged in 100 years. Hume’s lasting contribution has been to provide an environment where those interested in plants, be they amateur or professional, may meet and develop their knowledge of plants.” The Institute, at its original location in London, houses a library with an extensive collection of botanical books and journals, a herbarium, and impressive garden, and hosts a number of related events during the year.

Blavatsky’s Influence in Australia

2011-04-17T17:00:00.000-07:00

An article in the magazine section of the Sunday April 17, 2011, issue of The Hindu newspaper of India carries the news that “the fastest growing religion in Australia is Buddhism.” Starting with the arrival of Chinese labourers in Adelaide in 1851 to the more recent immigrants from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, Buddhism has been a presence in Australia.

The next link with Buddhism was through the Theosophists. Helene Blavatsky and Col. Henry Olcott, who had formally converted to Buddhism in 1880 in a temple in south Ceylon. Olcott spent several months on a lecture tour of Australia in 1891 and though there are many differences between Theosophy and Buddhism, his assertion at several lectures that the central aim of Theosophy was to draw attention to Buddhist philosophy led to a greater white Australian interest in Buddhism. Particularly as Alfred Deakin, a Liberal politician and later to be Prime Minister of Australia three times, was a Theosophist and chaired several of Olcott's meetings.

The paper reports that “The biggest stupa outside the countries with a significant Buddhist presence is being built in Bendigo, not far from Melbourne….The FPMT’s [Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition] Great Stupa of Universal Compassion will be 50 sq. m at the base, will rise to a height of 48 m. and resemble the Great Stupa in Gyantse, in southern Tibet, which dates to 1474. In the acres surroundings the Bendigo stupa there will be raised a monastery, a meditation centre, a hospice and accommodation for visitors.” The Dalai Lama laid the foundation on June 7, 2007, and the town “is expected to boom with thousands of visitors anticipated every year.”

The rest of article can be read here.

model of The Great Stupa

Hilma af Klint

2011-04-17T15:03:00.000-07:00

The German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung for April 17 contains the news about an exhibition at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm’s National Museum of Modern Art, planned for 2013. It will be a retrospective of Hilma af Klint, who was born in 1862 in Sweden and died there in 1944. While Kandinsky is credited with creating his abstract paintings as early as 1911, Hilma af Klint was working in the same way much earlier, as this exhibition will show. Using sketches, notes and diaries from the painter’s estate, “Diese Ausstellung wird Hilma af Klint als Urheberin des ersten abstrakten Bildes der Moderne auf den Plan der Kunstgeschichte bringen. (This exhibition will put Hilma af Klint as the author of the first abstract image of modernity on the map of art history.)”

Of course her interest in Mme. Blavatsky is mentioned. Theosophy is portrayed as a kind of Masonry for women: “Sie hatten plötzlich Zugang zur Metaphysik, den höheren Sphären also, die als unentbehrlich für die Schaffung großer Kunstwerke galten. (They suddenly had access to metaphysics, so to the higher spheres, which were considered essential to the creation of great art.)” Hilma af Klint also knew Rudolf Steiner. The rest of the article can be read here.

No doubt this exhibition will bring her work greater recognition. Hilma af Klint was never interested in selling her paintings or drawings. At her death in 1944, she willed her belongings to her nephew Erik af Klint. The will specified that her works should not be shown publicly until 20 years after her death. It took, however, 40 years before Hilma af Klint’s art was first shown to the public at an exhibit on spiritual art in Los Angeles in 1986. The first large separate exhibition in Sweden was in 1989 at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. In 1998, Södertälje konsthall had a large exhibit with focus on her anthroposophic period. The entire Paintings for the Temple series was shown at the Liljevalchs konsthall in 1999. Today, the collection is owned by the Hilma af Klint Foundation.

There was an exhibition of her paintings at BildMuseet, Umeå, Sweden, in 2004, titled “Geometry and Spirituality,” and one in the Netherlands in 2010.

Hilma af Klint, Diary page

Gustav Holst and Blavatsky

2011-04-17T12:09:00.000-07:00

London’s Independent newspaper for April 15 has a revealing review of a film that will be shown on BBC 4 in the U.K. on Easter Sunday (April 24). The film, In the Bleak Midwinter, about the English composer Gustav Holst (1874-1934), “contains more than a few startling revelations about this apparently quiet and enigmatic figure.”

“Holst’s The Planets is one of the best-known pieces of classical music written by a British composer,” the reviewer notes.

But the central spur of the planned Seven Large Pieces for Orchestra was neither astrological nor political: it was Theosophy. This spirituality, pioneered by Helena Blavatsky, was immensely popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, influencing figures as diverse as the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, the artist Paul Gauguin and the poet WB Yeats. It drew on Eastern philosophies, and Holst was involved in it enough to learn Sanskrit. Many of his works have an intense Eastern flavour, including the three-part suite Beni Mora, his Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda and the operas Savitri and Sita.

The rest of the review can be read here.

W.Y. Evans-Wentz and Blavatsky

2011-04-14T15:22:00.000-07:00

Lama Kazi Dawa Samdup and Walter Evans-Wentz
photographed circa 1919

The online journal, Berfrois, for April 13 has a promotional piece by Donald Lopez Jr. for his The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography featuring much the same slant as in the book. Referring to W.Y. Evans-Wentz, who was responsible for bringing the text to public attention, he writes:

He was a devotee instead of several of the Hindu swamis of the day, and his deepest devotion was to the Theosophical Society, founded by the Russian medium Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891) and the American Civil War veteran, Colonel Henry Olcott (1832-1907) in New York in 1875. Although largely forgotten today, the Theosophical Society was very influential in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, especially among European and American artists and writers (from William Butler Yeats to L. Frank Baum). They believed that the mystical traditions of all religions arose from a single core, set forth to the world by a series of Mahatmas or “great souls,” who included Jesus and the Buddha. Once living on the island continent of Atlantis, in recent centuries the Mahatmas, seeking to escape the increasing levels of magnetism elsewhere in the world, had congregated in Tibet.

And so on and so forth, the rest of which can be read here. All this, by-the-way, for a text attributed to a semi-legendary figure, Padmasambhava, and “discovered” hundreds of years later and made the basis of a spiritual belief!

Western Pioneers of Buddhism

2011-04-14T14:34:00.000-07:00

The blog, Jampa Tenzin, for April 11 looks at “Western Pioneers of Buddhism”: “The first people that made Buddhism known in the West were not Buddhists from Asia, but Westerners themselves. I would like to introduce you to western pioneers of Buddhism.”

However bizarre it now seems, Western interest in Tibetan Buddhism was first stimulated by a spiritual genius, Madame Blavatsky. She said that she had travelled to Tibet where she became the disciple of very special teachers, whom she called the Mahatmas. These teachers guided her by sending her telepathic teachings and sending her magic letters with instructions. Madame Blavatsky wrote books full of tales of her Mahatmas and thereby spread the notion of Tibet as a land of endless phantasmagoric wonders, meaning a land full of sprits and magicians.

The rest of the piece, which also mentions the work of “General” Olcott for the promulgation of Buddhism, can be read here.

Buddhism History for March 31 carried a piece on “A Brief History of UK Buddhism” by dharma, noting that “150 years ago, this response was primarily scholarly. The Buddha himself became well known as a moral and spiritual hero with the publication in 1879 of Sir Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia. Alongside this came the start of interest in Buddhism as a path of practice. This was pioneered by the Theosophists, Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, and in 1880 they became the first Westerners to receive the refuges and precepts, the ceremony by which one traditionally becomes a Buddhist.”

The idea that the contribution of Blavatsky and Olcott to the Western awareness of Buddhism (and other eastern religions) was in viewing it as “a path of practice,” instead of just a scholarly pursuit, is an important one and too often overlooked in mere recounting of their colourful exploits.

“A Brief History of UK Buddhism” can be read here. While noting the founding of the Buddhist Society in 1924 there is no reference to T. Christmas Humphreys, who helped nurture it and was a potent force for the spread of Buddhism in England after the WWII as well as being a great admirer of Blavatsky, though there is acknowledgement of the work of the English Buddhist convert Sangharakshita, who formed the Triratna Buddhist Community (formerly the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order) and who has acknowledged Blavatsky’s impact on his spiritual journey.

Blavatsky and Hinduism

2011-04-10T14:24:00.000-07:00

Arvind Sharma in his new book, Hinduism as a Missionary Religion, to be released later this month from the State University of New York Press (176 pages, $70.00), questions whether this is so. In the course of his examination he turns to the Theosophical Society. “Some readers will doubtless wonder whether the Theosophical Society is to be regarded as a Hindu body. Whether in itself Hindu or not, there can be little doubt that the Theosophical Society constituted an element in the evolving neo-Hindu worldview. To be sure, it was founded in New York in 1875 by Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, but its headquarters were moved to Adyar, near Madras, in 1882.”

Looking at the evidence, he adds: “It is also significant that membership in the Theosophical Society did not involve severing connections with one’s ancestral faith. Indeed the claim was made that a Theosophist was enabled to penetrate to the heart of his or her own religious tradition….Thus—in its origin, aspirations, and influence—the Theosophical Society seemed to share the neo-Hindu ethos in which the non-desirability of conversion in general, and the non-missionary character of Hinduism in particular, are important ingredients.”

Arvind Sharma is Professor of Comparative Religion at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. According to one estimate: “He has published over fifty books and five hundred articles in the fields of comparative religion, Hinduism, Indian philosophy and ethics, and the role of women in religion.” He is General Editor of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Indian Religions.

The Lemuria Myth

2011-04-07T14:40:00.000-07:00

Frontline, “India’s National Magazine,” for April 9-22, 2011, carries an article on “The Lemuria Myth” by S. Christopher Jayakaran. “There is an old, persistent Tamil tradition about a land that existed south of India called Kumari kandam (continent), a belief that is linked to the myth of the lost land of Lemuria, a figment of Western imagination. Accounts of the lost continent vary, but the common theme is that a large area went under the ocean as a result of geological cataclysms, a theory that geologists of today do not subscribe to,” he writes.

In 1888, Helena Blavatsky, a founder of the Theosophical Society, incorporated the concept of the lost continents of Lemuria and Atlantis in her controversial book The Secret Doctrine. Her information, it was claimed, was based on esoteric ancient books from the east and messages received through mystical transference and clairvoyant trances.

The article examines how the story entered into Tamil literature to the point where it is even taught in school textbooks. In trying to find a logical explanation for these ideas the writer believes that global warming between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago was the source for this story: “As the sea levels rose, resulting in periodic flooding and deluges, prehistoric settlements that were located in the low-lying coastal lands and the exposed continental shelf were inundated. The people who lived in the coastal area of the Indian peninsula and Sri Lanka and who escaped the deluges perpetuated the oral tradition of a lost land. It is my considered opinion that it is this development that gave rise to the legend of Kumari kandam.”

The idea of a submerged landmass south of India with its narrative of a lost homeland now plays a part in Tamil identity, for it increases the antiquity of Tamil culture. This is nothing new. Sumathi Ramaswamy, Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, has written about it in The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories, which was published by the University of California Press in 2004. The article in Frontline, which covers the main points of the book, can be read here.

Revisiting the Spiritual in Art, Ctd

2011-04-03T20:25:00.000-07:00

The virtual symposium Beyond Kandinsky: Revisiting the Spiritual in Art continues online. Topics such as “The hidden spiritual dimension of American art,” “Some Formal Qualities of Visionary Art,” and discussions defining the “Spiritual,” have been among some of the areas covered by the panelists. In a post on April 3, “Steiner, Thought Forms, and Kandinsky,” Jeff Edwards gives the results of his investigations:

Kandinsky was very open about his appreciation for Helena Blavatsky. He was a lot more elusive about Steiner. I just took a quick look back through the Collected Writings on Art, and couldn’t find a single mention of Steiner anywhere in the texts. However, his name comes up several times in the editors’ introductions, and—most importantly—they cite Kandinsky’s attendance at several of Steiner’s anthroposophical lectures in 1908.

The rest of his post can be read here. He provides a link to a provocative piece on the exhibition “Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction” at the Tate Modern in London in 2006 that describes its reception: “It was met with a mix of praise and hostility, ridicule of theosophy and a simplified reliance on the theory of synthanaesia, the ability to see music.”

The Mystical Life of Franz Kafka

2011-04-03T18:23:00.000-07:00

Oxford University Press will be releasing a new study of the influential writer, Franz Kafka (1883-1924), later this year. The book, The Mystical Life of Franz Kafka: Theosophy, Cabala, and the Modern Spiritual Revival by June O. Leavitt, will be out in October 2011. As the publisher’s announcement has it:

Kafka lived during the modern Spiritual Revival, a powerful movement which resisted materialism, rejected the adulation of science and Darwin, and idealized clairvoyant modes of consciousness. Kafka's contemporaries - such theosophical ideologues as Madame H.P. Blavatsky, Annie Besant, and Dr. Rudolph Steiner - encouraged the counterculture to seek the true, spiritual essence of reality by inducing out-of-body experiences and producing visions of higher disembodied beings through meditative techniques. Leaders of the Spiritual Revival also called for the adoption of certain lifestyles, such as vegetarianism, in order to help transform consciousness and return humanity to its divine nature.

Interweaving the occult discourse on clairvoyance, the divine nature of animal life, vegetarianism, the spiritual sources of dreams, and the eternal nature of the soul with Kafka's dream-chronicles, animal narratives, diaries, letters, and stories, Leavitt takes the reader on a journey through the texts of a great psychic writer and the fascinating epoch of the Spiritual Revival.

This comes at a time when Kafka’s papers are the source of a legal battle between the state of Israel and a German literary archive. In a lecture at the British Museum on February 7, 2011, Judith Bulter examined the case in her “Who Owns Kafka?” Kafka left his published and unpublished works to his friend Max Brod, “with the explicit instructions that the work should be destroyed on Kafka’s death. Brod refused to honour the request, although he did not publish everything that was bequeathed to him.” After Brod’s death in 1968 the manuscripts passed to his secretary. In 1988 she sold the manuscript of The Trial for $2 million. Her heirs are now planning to sell off the material by weight.

Butler cited a passage from Kafka’s parable “The Coming of the Messiah” which, in light of June O. Leavitt’s forthcoming book, The Mystical Life of Franz Kafka: Theosophy, Cabala, and the Modern Spiritual Revival, is worth repeating here: “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary. He will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.”

Conference Announcements

2011-03-31T16:43:00.000-07:00

Blavatsky's birthplace in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine

* Commemorating the 180th birth anniversary of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and the 120th year of her passing, HPB’s birthplace, Dnipropetrovsk (then Yekaterinoslav, Russia), will be the site of a Forum that will “focus on the influence of HPB’s ideas on the development of science, transnational cultural cooperation and study of spiritual traditions of the East and West.” The event is organized by the H.P.Blavatsky and Her Family Museum Center (Dnipropetrovsk), Ankh CulturalFoundation (Kiev), the Sofia Theosophical Association, the Yavornitsky Historical Museum (Dnipropetrovsk), and the Committee for ethics and humanitarian expertising (Kiev).

Scheduled for June 23-26, 2011, in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, the announcement and contact information are available here.

* The European School of Theosophy will be having its annual meeting this year in St. Albans, England, just north of London. The syllabus includes John Gordon and Christian Bodhi, from England; Eric McGough, from Wales; John Algeo via Powerpoint and Pablo Sender, from the U.S.A., along with the directors of the School, Harold Tarn, Colin Price, and David Roef. Since the theme of this year’s session is on “Studies in the ‘Mahatma Letters’,” lectures will deal with “The Nature of the Monad,” “The Theosophical Society and the Masters of Wisdom,” “Mahatmas on the Limits of Knowledge,” “Life after Death with the Mahatmas,” and similar erudite matters. There will be two talks in the morning, two most afternoons, and an evening session at 8 PM. It is reassuring therefore to see that the last day will be devoted to a tour of Windsor, including Windsor Castle, and a walking tour of Oxford.

The School will be meet October 6-12, 2011. The brochure and registration information can be found here.

* Dr. April Hejka-Ekins, professor at California State University Stanislaus, will be one of the featured speakers at the 76th Annual Convention of the Texas Federation of the Theosophical Society in America. Since one of Dr. Hejka-Ekins areas of specialty is ethics, it will be interesting to hear how she approaches her subject: “The Ethics of HP Blavatsky.” The other featured presenter will be Jerry Hejka-Ekins, her husband, one of the premier historians of the Theosophical movement in America. He will expound on “Key Ideas in H.P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine.”

The Convention will be held April 29 to May 1, in San Antonio, Texas. Program and registration can be accessed here.

Revisiting the Spiritual in Art

2011-03-31T14:17:00.000-07:00

From March 30 through April 8th the BFA Fine Arts Department at the School of Visual Arts, New York, will be hosting an online Symposium having as its theme the publication of Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art a century ago. The project, Beyond Kandinsky: Revisiting the Spiritual in Art, will feature a number of noted artists, writers, filmmakers, and educators brought together online by this common theme. Session I: The Spiritual Then and Now, raises a number of questions relevant to this dialogue. In response, one of the presenters has noted:

As the focus of this symposium is “Going Beyond” the views Kandinsky presented about art and spirituality in one book, On the Spiritual in Art, it’s important to realize that he was strongly influenced during the eight years or so of journal entries that became that book by the enthusiasm among young artists in Germany and elsewhere then for the spiritual orientation called Theosophy. (Before and after that period, Kandinsky’s main spiritual orientation was Russian Orthodox Christianity.) When Mme. Blavatsky framed Theosophy in her two major books, Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), her goal was to jump in front of the “parade” formed by the huge following that Darwin had. She trumped Darwin by announcing that the evolution he describes is merely material but that the evolution she describes is far larger, greater, more subtle, and encompasses “the merely material.” This idealist, anti-material bias to the spirituality in Kandinsky’s book is still available in many quarters (in fact, Theosophy itself still lives), but with our planet in extremely serious ecological peril, attention to transcendent levels of being without attention to the physicality of our existence and that of the entire Earth community is irresponsible and destructive. The idealist orientation is clearly something we need to “go beyond.”

Yet, Blavatsky may not be as other-worldly as the writer imagines. In her last lead article, “Civilization, the Death of Art and Beauty,” she warned:

Owing to the triumphant march and the invasion of civilization, Nature, as well as man and ethics, is sacrificed, and is fast becoming artificial. Climates are changing, and the face of the whole world will soon be altered. Under the murderous hand of the pioneers of civilization, the destruction of whole primeval forests is leading to the drying up of rivers, and the opening of the Canal of Suez has changed the climate of Egypt as that of Panama will divert the course of the Gulf Stream. Almost tropical countries are now becoming cold and rainy, and fertile lands threaten to be soon transformed into sandy deserts. A few years more and there will not remain within a radius of fifty miles around our large cities one single rural spot inviolate from vulgar speculation.

In scenery, the picturesque and the natural is daily replaced by the grotesque and the artificial. Scarce a landscape in England but the fair body of nature is desecrated by the advertisements of “Pears’ Soap” and “Beecham’s Pills.” The pure air of the country is polluted with smoke, the smells of greasy railway-engines, and the sickening odours of gin, whiskey, and beer. And once that every natural spot in the surrounding scenery is gone, and the eye of the painter finds but the artificial and hideous products of modern speculation to rest upon, artistic taste will have to follow suit and disappear along with them.

Information about this Symposium and comments by the participants can be seen here.

Live and Learn

2011-03-27T18:56:00.000-07:00

The site Casus Belle Époque has been following the development of different schools of Buddhism. It has now reached the point of what it describes in a post on March 22 as “The ‘Discovery’ of Buddhism,” noting that “Works of Indian Buddhism weren’t discovered by Europeans until around the 1820s”:

Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron searched for the ancient works of Zoroastrianism in this connection (and found the ancient Hindu Upanishad scriptures translated from the Sanskrit into Persian instead, which he, in turn, translated into Latin). His work was the origin of the theosophy movement begun by Perennial Philosophers, Madame Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, who later professed to be Buddhists. I will discuss their link to Gandhi and thus to “Engaged Buddhism” in the next post.

Like John Gray making Mme. Blavatsky a “nightclub singer” among other things in his book The Immortalization Commission, the work of Anquetil Duperron (1731-1805) is now made the “origin of the theosophy movement.” As great as Duperron’s work was making Zoroastrian texts and the Upanishads available to Europe in translation, this is another first: to claim it as “origin of the theosophy movement.”

Although the writer promised to discuss the Theosophists’ link to Gandhi, and though subsequent posts have dealt with him, nothing further on the subject has appeared on their site. Just as well. Gandhi’s image has received a new examination by Joseph Lelyveld in his book: Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle With India, to be released by the American publisher Alfred A. Knopf later this month. The review in the March 26 edition of The Wall Street Journal emphasizes some of the unflattering parts, as can be seen here. Joseph Lelyveld was executive editor of the New York Times until recently. He is the brother of David Lelyveld, known for his pioneering work on British India, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India, 1978.

Misinformation Files

2011-03-24T15:22:00.000-07:00

Later this month the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the U.S. will be releasing The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death by John Gray, Emeritus Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics (not to be confused with John Gray, the U.S. self-help author). The book is already out in the U.K. from the publisher Allen Lane. Publisher’s Weekly, in its review of the book, calls it: “a nakedly scornful, fatalistic attack on human efforts to avoid extinction, both individual (cryonic preservation) and collective (anti–global warming initiatives). The historical underpinnings of Gray’s argument are rickety, especially the confused God-builder section, which swirls pointlessly around the story of H.G. Wells and a beautiful Russian spy. His argument that Soviet atrocities flowed from a mad longing to transcend death is free-associated rather than reasoned, and his implicit yoking of dotty British psychics with Stalin’s executioners reveals little.”

In the section on Henry Sidgwick, F.W.H. Myers, and the Society for Psychical Research, Gray writes:

The arrival of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in Cambridge [in 1884] seems to have been one of the episodes that led Sidgwick to conclude that proof might never be found [for post-mortem survival]. Initially Sidgwick welcomed Madame Blavatsky, a former circus equestrienne, entrepreneur (earlier in her career she founded an ink factory and an artificial flower shop, both of which failed) and sometime informant of the Tsarist secret police and nightclub singer who had taken up the profession of medium. Founding the Theosophical Society, Blavatsky published one of the canonical texts of Western occultism, Isis Unveiled. The earnest Cambridge philosopher found Blavatsky ‘a genuine being, with a vigorous nature intellectual as well as emotional and a real desire for the good of mankind’. He seemed unfazed by her claim to be receiving letters of esoteric wisdom from mysterious Tibetan masters. It was only after a thoroughgoing SPR [Society for Psychical Research] investigation that Sidgwick recognized that Blavatsky was a charlatan and an imposter.

If his mythologizing of Mme. Blavatsky is any indication of the accuracy of the rest of the book, then we must agree with Publisher’s Weekly: “The historical underpinnings of Gray’s argument are [extremely] rickety.”

This can be attributed to the sloppiness one occasionally finds in academic writing by authors who are out of their league and who expect the reader to take their words as ipse dixit, but what can one think when a theosophical publisher puts out the following:

According to Blavatsky and Olcott, ancient Europe had inherited pieces of a unified tradition that had originated in the far reaches of Asia. The source was still intact, and core teachings concerning the spiritual evolution of humankind were still kept secret by this “Great White Lodge” in the vastness of the Himalayas. Blavatsky claimed that she in particular had been contacted by the hidden adepts, or “Mahatmas,” of this lodge in mediumistic trance and that they had tasked her with now revealing their teachings. Apparently Blavatsky’s form of communication with the Mahatmas was insufficient, for she, Olcott, and many other Theosophists would journey for years throughout the Middle East and most of South Asia to meet them.

Modern studies about Blavatsky would have been greatly enriched if the author, Yannis Toussulis, had provided the source of Blavatsky’s “claim.” But to no avail, and the book, Sufism and the Way of Blame, from Quest Books from the Theosophical Society headquartered in Wheaton, Illinois, leaves us unenlightened. The book is appropriately scheduled for an April 1st release. Blavatsky herself never used the term “Great White Lodge.”

Baseball in the Garden of Eden

2011-03-20T16:54:00.000-07:00

In every country where Theosophy has taken root, it has been assimilated in a distinct and local way: in India and Australia, it was through political and educational life; in England, in areas like woman’s suffrage and other social movements; in various parts of Europe and Canada, in the arts; in the U.S.A., through fiction, music, and a connection with baseball.

The story of Theosophy’s connection with the sport of baseball usually gets a passing reference, mainly because of Abner Doubleday’s involvement with the group. John Thorn, who has numerous books on the subject of baseball, has written Baseball in the Garden of Eden: the secret history of the early game, just published by Simon and Schuster. Doubleday had been named President, pro tem, of the Theosophical Society after Olcott and Blavatsky left for India in 1879. After his death in 1893 he was elevated to founder of baseball mainly through the efforts of a group of Theosophists and their cadre, most notably, Albert Goodwill Spalding, the sporting goods magnate, and his second wife, Elizabeth Mayer, a close friend of the theosophical leader, Katherine Tingley—at least this is Thorn’s belief:

Theosophists were a secret society opposed to organized religion, hoping to convert the masses through spiritual flimflam. More troubling to those inclined to see conspiratorial plots in Theosophy were its philosophical underpinnings in Tibetan Buddhism. While widely respected today, this religion was regarded by Orientalists of the nineteenth century as Lamaism, a faith radically apart from mainstream Buddhism and one that was dominated by magic or even black magic. Blavatsky fed this flame with her slight of hand tricks and her “precipitated” letters from venerable Tibetan masters (the “Himalayan Brotherhood”), written documents that would mysteriously appear in her possession following a question arising from a session with skeptics.

Which shows that one can be an expert in one area and not in another.

Doubleday’s distinguished early career in the Union Army during the American Civil War has already been covered in the Blavatsky News post of July 15, 2010, on Thomas Barthel’s Abner Doubleday: a Civil War biography published last year.

Der Blaue Rieter

2011-03-20T15:05:00.000-07:00

Art History Unstuffed of March 18 gives a brief history of Der Blaue Rieter (The Blue Rider), a group of artists in Germany in the early part of the twentieth century, the best known member of which is Wassily Kandinsky.

In 1912, Kandinsky wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which fused Theosophy and the teachings of Rudolf Steiner and Madame Helena Blavatsky on the universality of all elements. Like many of the art colonies in Germany, their intense interest in all things spiritual was paradoxical. The Blue Rider came to an end by the Great War when it broke out in August, 1914 and scattered the artists. Leaving Gabriel Münter behind in Switzerland, Kandinsky returned to Russia where he married his second wife. Tragically, Franz Marc was killed in action. Kandinsky and Klee were reunited after the War at the Bauhaus, where the now-mature artists were installed as master teachers.

Art History Unstuffed, which describes itself as “a new way to learn the history of art, on line, at your convenience, in your own time, on your own terms,” notes:

For too long art history has been held hostage by scholars speaking to scholars and not to people. The purpose of this site is to educate and to inform and to do so with respect to the intelligence of the readers. Designed as a site for serious students of art history in need of solid substantive material, Art History Unstuffed is written for Twenty-First century learners who prefer reading “text-bytes” and “sound-bytes” of targeted information. Written by a published scholar who has researched and consolidated both well-respected classical sources and vetted the latest research, this site creates a middle ground between arcane scholarly jargon and informed discourse that is accessible to all.

This post and many others of interest, such as Orphism and Simultaneity, Late Nineteenth Century Social Philosophy, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, trends that would have been part of Blavatsky’s world, can be accessed here.

Blavatsky and Elliott Coues

2011-03-13T17:34:00.000-07:00

The blog of the American Birding Association for March 10 carries a brief note about ornithologist Elliott Coues’s association with Theosophy.

It’s not the strangest thing a birder has ever done, but Elliott Coues’s association with the American Theosophical Society remains a remarkable chapter in the history of ornithology. Coues joined Mme Blavatsky's gang in 1880, and by mid-decade had ascended to the presidency of the Society, only to be expelled as an apostate in 1889.

Coues brief trajectory through the Theosophical Society is given a chapter in his 1981 biography, Elliott Coues: naturalist and frontier historian, and more specifically in Michael Gomes’ “History of a Humbug,” in The Canadian Theosophist, 1984-86, which gives HPB’s letters to Coues, and his Witness for the Prosecution, 1993, Annie Besant’s deposition in the libel case Blavatsky brought against Coues and the New York Sun.

Elliott Coues (1842-1899), an American ornithologist of note, met Olcott and Blavatsky in Europe in 1884 and was made head of the Theosophical Society’s newly formed American Board of Control. In 1886 Olcott dissolved Board of Control and created the American Section of the Society. W.Q. Judge was voted its leader and Coues was furious, writing letters threatening dire consequences if he was not made President in America.

In the April 30, 1889, letter that closes her correspondence with him, HPB wrote:

You will not move me by either threats, sweet irony, or Parthian arrows—because I am not a “woman in general.” And also because I have become of late a dead body, dead to outside influence, dead to love or hatred, to praise or blame, and that the few years, or perhaps days I have to live, I have determined to devote to the service of the God within me, and my terrestrial or Earthly master, who is beyond the Himalayas.

Work for the Society and show me that you can do it good, real good, and my life will be at your service. Go on flapdoodling, attempting to play with me as cat plays with a mouse, and the latter will prove too strong for you.

There is a a story about a freethinking hero, or perhaps a president of the United States, whom Satan would not have in hell, and therefore gave him a box of matches and some coals, asking him to go and make a hell of his own.

A Persian proverb says: “He who spits against the wind, receives it back in his face.” Better swim with, than against the tide.

Coues responded with a scandalous interview about Blavatsky that appeared in the Sunday New York Sun of July 20, 1890. HPB sued for libel, but her death terminated the suit. A year after her death the Sun published a long sketch of her life by Judge as a corrective to Coues’ statements, adding: “we desire to say that his allegations respecting the Theosophical Society and Mr. Judge personally are not sustained by evidence, and should not have been printed.”

Gomes says: “Elliott Coues died on Christmas Day, 1899, at John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, where he had gone for surgery for cancer of the rectum. He passed away from the exhaustion of the operation.”—The Canadian Theosophist, Jan-Feb 1986, p. 137.

Gandhi

2011-03-13T14:56:00.000-07:00

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has been airing what they describe as “the first definitive series on Gandhi’s life, examining his controversial views on race and his role in Indian independence.” Journalist Mishal Husain follows the life and legacy of Mahatma Gandhi in this BBC production. The first installment traced his roots to his birth town in India and looked at the early influences on his life. A local commentator, Sudha Hamilton, notes on his blog:

Indeed Gandhi’s commitment to vegetarianism came to fruition, during his time in England, where he was studying law. He was exposed to a rich vein of social and spiritual practices in the great city of London, where he met many influential people. Gandhi became acquainted with Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophists and greatly admired their appreciation of the rich diversity of religions and spiritual approaches. He was very young, and I would imagine impressionable, as we all are in our youth, during his time in the capital of the British Empire.

Gandhi’s brush with Theosophy, or more specifically with Mme. Blavatsky and her circle in London, is often touted by Theosophists. While he acknowledges the influence those early Theosophists had on his awakening to the Bhagavad Gita, he was not as enthused about later developments in the Society. He wrote to Theosophist Ernest Wood in 1933:

I was invited to become a member of the Society when I was in Johannesburg, and I told the Theosophical friends that I could not join a Society which believes in secret methods and messages from invisible Mahatmas. I have always felt that these things are a serious hindrance in the search for truth.

“Madam Blavatsky Lives”

2011-03-10T17:20:00.000-08:00

Tavistock in Devon is known as one of the most elegant towns in the South West of England. The Tavistock Arts and Entertainment Centre, the Wharf, which hosts live concerts, theatre, cinema, an art gallery and events throughout the year, will be presenting a new play in June, “Madam Blavatsky Lives,” as part of this year’s programme.

Have you ever wanted to know about the future? Do you dream of wealth and happiness? Madam Blavatsky Lives will change your mind forever. It is a comedy which shows the affect of an all-knowing spiritualist on the lives of three women. Two of them are suddenly faced with dreadful futures and the other is suffused in happiness. Which one of them will be faced with their worst fear? Will the predictions come true? All of them? None of them? This play will make you laugh at their predicaments and cry at their heartbreaks. You will never think of fortune telling in the same way again! The play stars the original cast of ‘Mutton’ – Donna Flinn, Jean Heard, Julia Munrow and Julia Rufey, four actresses who are renowned for their great comedy skills and they will delight you all over again in this new play written by Joan Greening the creator of ITV’s ‘The Cabbage Patch’ and ‘Troubles and Strife’. If you want a hilariously spirited evening out – this is it!

Further information can be found at the centre’s site, here.

Cambridge Library Collection—Spiritualism and Esoteric Knowledge: Update

2011-03-10T15:43:00.000-08:00

In a December 5, 2010, post Blavatsky News alerted readers to the forthcoming series from Cambridge University Press: Cambridge Library Collection—Spiritualism and Esoteric Knowledge. Some twenty books in the series—reprints of 19th century books on spiritualism, theosophy, anthropology and psychology—were anticipated. The list has now grown to 115 titles, which can be seen here. Scheduled for May release: Eliphas Levi’s Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, two volume set, £42.00; Daniil Avraamovich Chwolson’s Die Ssabier und der Ssabismus, two volumes, £70.00; Olcott’s People From the Other World, £23.99, and numerous volumes of his Old Diary Leaves; Edward Maitland’s two volumes on Anna Kingsford: Her Life, Letters, Diary and Work; Alfred Percy Sinnett’s Incidents in the Life of Madame Blavatsky, £18.99; V. S. Solovyov’s A Modern Priestess of Isis trans. by Walter Leaf, £20.99; Charles Maurice Davies’ Mystic London, or, Phases of Occult Life in the Metropolis, £20.99; the two volumes of Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, and posthumous volume three, £35.00 each; among others. The publisher’s overview for the series explains:

Magic, superstition, the occult sciences and esoteric knowledge appear regularly in the history of ideas alongside more established academic disciplines such as philosophy, natural history and theology. Particularly fascinating are periods of rapid scientific advances such as the Renaissance or the nineteenth century which also see a burgeoning of interest in the paranormal among the educated elite. This series provides primary texts and secondary sources for social historians and cultural anthropologists working in these areas, and all who wish for a wider understanding of the diverse intellectual and spiritual movements that formed a backdrop to the academic and political achievements of their day. It ranges from works on Babylonian and Jewish magic in the ancient world, through studies of sixteenth-century topics such as Cornelius Agrippa and the rapid spread of Rosicrucianism, to nineteenth-century publications by Sir Walter Scott and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Subjects include astrology, mesmerism, spiritualism, theosophy, clairvoyance, and ghost-seeing, as described both by their adherents and by sceptics.

As the needs of the marketplace and technology relentlessly push us to digital versions of texts (most of the titles listed above are already available online), it is encouraging to see an institution like Cambridge, with one of the oldest publishing houses in English, invest their time and resources to allow these texts from another time to find an audience again.

With the printed book on its way to becoming an endangered species, it is interesting to note that artists have taken up it functions to allow us to see it in a different way. An example is the work of Brian Dettmer. “Using knives, tweezers and surgical tools, Brian Dettmer carves one page at a time. Nothing inside the out-of-date encyclopedias, medical journals, illustration books, or dictionaries is relocated or implanted, only removed. Dettmer manipulates the pages and spines to form the shape of his sculptures. He also folds, bends, rolls, and stacks multiple books to create completely original sculptural forms. ”

The site, My Modern Met, gives other examples of his work, which can be seen here. Dettmer explains:

I’d like to open a conversation to think about the book’s current role in media culture, its history and its future. Everything is turning digital and information is more accessible than ever yet its more formless and fragile at the same time. We are at a pivotal point in our history and the way we are recording it. It’s frightening and exciting at the same time.

Art as a Gateway to Early Western Buddhist History

2011-03-06T17:05:00.000-08:00

The blog, Dangerous Harvests, which focuses on writings about Zen Buddhism, yoga, social justice and politics, the arts, and life in general, notes “while we continue to struggle with defining what it is that we mean by Buddhism in the West, perhaps it would be valuable to go further back in time, and consider more thoroughly how the planks we stand on today were laid. And if nothing else, there is plenty of beautiful artwork and interesting life stories just waiting to be re-discovered.” Using the work of Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) as an example, he writes:

Swedish artist Hilma af Klint was, like many others of the period, influenced primarily by the teachings of Theosophy. In a lot of ways, theosophy paved the way for the New Age movement, especially with its emphasis on blending spiritual and religious teachings and focus on the evolution of consciousness. It's an interesting, if odd mixture of things, and certainly one can argue that Blavatsky and others cherry picked and culturally appropriated a myriad of traditions to suit their needs. However, it also can be viewed as the spirited, if overreaching reaction of spiritual people to a world that suddenly was becoming globally connected right before their eyes. We are in a similar period now, with the internet and other technology, making the gap between nations even smaller - and in the process, shaking up the entire way we - as humans - understand and interact.

Hilma af Klint

Blavatsky and Count Witte

2011-03-03T17:18:00.000-08:00

HPB’s first cousin, Count Sergei Witte, will get a new evaluation based on his written memoirs. Oxford University Press will be publishing Francis W. Wcislo’s study, Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849-1915, which is scheduled for release in May. Subjecting Witte’s reminiscences to historical record, Wcislo writes: “Truth be told, his memoirs are, quite simply stories: narrated tales and remembered impressions of a life in imperial Russia that allow the historian access to the cultural values, human identities, and patterns of life experience, which constituted its rhythms.…Indeed, Blavatsky’s story was the very first genuine ‘tale’ he told. All of Witte’s narrative devices were here for the first time on display.”

The English version of Witte’s Memoirs, based on dictated material and translated by Abraham Yarmolinsky in 1921, and by Sidney Harcave in 1990, has been a prime source of information on Blavatsky’s life in Russia. His mother, Katherine Witte (née Fadeeva), was the younger sister of HPB’s mother, and he spent part of his childhood living with his grandparents, as HPB had done.

What Witte knew of Blavatsky’s debut in the 1850s was mainly family lore, buttressed by both his belief she possessed ‘some sort of supernatural talent’ and his own few boyhood memories of her. In that sense he constructed Blavatsky. There was Blavatsky the orphan, raised by his grandparents after Elana Gan’s early death. Blavatsky was a young, harried woman, married off to a much older civil official in Armenia when she was 17, who within months had fled home to her grandparents. She was the runaway. Returned to Tiflis, Blavatsky was dispatched to her father in Russia, but, arriving in the Black Sea steamship depot of Poti, she ‘took the scent (sniukhat’sia)’ of an English steamship captain and sailed off with him to the capital city of the Ottomans, which Witte in Greek and Slavic fashion called Constantinople. There she became…a circus bareback rider, lover of the European opera bass Mitrovitch, companion of a London man on business in America, follower of the mid-century’s ‘greatest spiritualist’, concert pianist and choirmaster of the Serbian king. This bewildering array of indentities for the illicit woman was very much Witte’s concoction. They all bore little facsimile to the historical record, none more so than his own memory of a chastened Blavatsky, returned in 1860 to Tiflis and a respectable life, when Witte would have been 12.

“Women’s History Month Celebrates Female Cannabis Connoisseurs”

2011-03-03T15:05:00.000-08:00

This was the headline posted by the magazine Cannabis Culture on March 1. The feature, listing, among others, H.P. Blavatsky, directs the reader to the site, Very Important Potheads, which has profiles of several female connoisseurs mentioned, including an entry on Blavatsky, which can be read here. The source for its information of her indulging is A.L. Rawson, “a close friend of Blavatsky for over forty years,” who wrote:

“She had tried hasheesh in Cairo with success, and she again indulged in it in this city under the care of myself and Dr. Edward Sutton Smith, who had had a large experience with the drug among his patients at Mount Lebanon, Syria. She said: ‘Hasheesh multiplies one’s life a thousandfold. My experiences are as real as if they were ordinary events of actual life. Ah! I have the explanation. It is a recollection of my former existences, my previous incarnations. It is a wonderful drug and it clears up profound mystery.’”

VIP comments: The modern day Theosophical Society denies hashish had any great influence on Blavatsky’s life, admitting she may have experimented with it in her youth, but that is about the extent of it. But a number of well known authors, such as Benjamin Walker and the much respected English writer Colin Wilson, thought her use of cannabis was relevant enough to have commented on it. The Theosophists point to a couple of negative comments towards hashish Blavatsky made near the end of her life when her health had deteriorated from chain-smoking cigarettes, and found herself unhappily surrounded by scandal. Many people have blamed a substance for their own personal downfall, and marijuana makes just as good a scapegoat as any. As many of us have experienced, few seem as self-righteous as the reformed addict. The Theosophists also challenge the legitimacy of A.L. Rawson, suggesting his claims are suspect. The fact is that A.L. Rawson was one of a few life-long friends Blavatsky had, and she herself attested to the validity of his character.

The “validity” of Rawson’s character has been the subject of a good piece of investigative journalism by John Patrick Deveney, “The Travels of H.P. Blavatsky and the Chronology of Albert Leighton Rawson: an unsatisfying investigation into H.P.B.’s whereabouts in the early 1850s,” published in the October 2004 issue of Theosophical History. Simply put: Rawson = suspect.

Who Was Fred S. Ellmore?

2011-03-03T14:28:00.000-08:00

The blog, Me, Myself, and I, has an interesting sidelight on the identity of someone mentioned in Lucifer, September 1890. In the section, “Queries and Answers,” in that issue, Mme. Blavatsky was asked to comment on an account in the August 8, 1890, Chicago Tribune where Fred S. Ellmore, a young Chicagoan back from India, described some feats of legerdemain, including the Indian rope trick and the instantaneous growth of a mango tree, witnessed at Gaya. Even though the paper later revealed that the account was a fabrication by one of their writers, the story of the Indian rope trick took on a life of its own. As the blog points out:

Even H. P. Blavatsky was lured into it (September, 1890) never getting the “Fred S. Ellmore” punch line.
You see, Fred S. Ellmore was a pseudonym used by John Elbert Wilkie.
The inside joke being:
Fred S. Ellmore ==> Fred Sell More.

John Elbert Wilkie (1860–1934), an American journalist, later went on to head of the United States Secret Service from 1898 to 1911.

Blavatsky and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Pt 2

2011-02-27T16:34:00.000-08:00

Donald Lopez, Jr., begins his recent biography of The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol) with an anecdote about his exchange with a journalist who was planning a piece on the text: “he wondered whether I could answer a few questions. ‘Is The Tibetan Book of the Dead the most important work in Tibetan Buddhism?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Do all Tibetans own a copy?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Have all Tibetans read it?’ ‘No.’ I said. ‘Is it a work that all Tibetans have heard of?’ ‘Probably not,’ I said.”

The chance encounter with the text in Darjeeling, India, by Walter Evans-Wentz (1878-1965) at the beginning of the twentieth century was to make it the most recognizable of Tibetan works. A terma text, said to have been hidden by Padmasambhava in the eighth century and rediscovered by Karma Lingpa in the fourteenth, the Bardo Thodol dealt with the transit through the bardo, or intermediate state, between death and rebirth.

It is not a text Blavatsky referred to (for someone who visited Tibet she mentions little of the major religious scriptures of the country, the exception being Tsong-kha-pha’s Lam Rim, an important instruction of the Geluk group), though the term bardo appears in one of the Mahatma letters from 1882.

Although Lopez implies that Evans-Wentz used the text as a means of Theosophical propaganda, not all Theosophists were welcoming of it. A letter from Basil Crump (an associate of Alice Cleather, one of Blavatsky’s personal pupils), written from Peking in 1928 and published later in The Canadian Theosophist of August 1942, warned that the book was not consistent with Blavatsky’s teachings. While in Darjeeling, Crump says: “We warned the Dr. to be careful about the Red Doctrine but he paid no attention and persisted in that line of study.” The Bardo Thodol was a leading text of the Nyingma school, also known at the Red Caps, a term Blavatsky used for those who practiced black magic.

Parts of The Tibetan Book of the Dead are meant to be read to the dying individual: “Having read this, repeat it many times in the ear of the person dying, even before the expiration hath ceased, so as to impress it on the mind [of the dying one].” This is at variance with the instructions given by Blavatsky’s teachers: “Speak in whispers, ye, who assist at a death-bed and find yourselves in the solemn presence of Death. Especially have you to keep quiet just after Death has laid her clammy hand upon the body. Speak in whispers, I say, lest you disturb the quiet ripple of thought, and hinder the busy work of the Past casting on its reflection upon the veil of the Future.”—“Memory in the Dying,” October 1889.

Yet, at the same time, Evans-Wentz spoke highly of Blavatsky. He cited some parts from her Voice of the Silence (Book of the Golden Precepts) in his later Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines, and says: “The late Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup was of opinion that, despite the adverse criticisms directed against H. P. Blavatsky’s works, there is adequate internal evidence in them of their author’s intimate acquaintance with the higher lamaistic teachings, into which she claimed to have been initiated.” It should be noted, however, that whatever she claimed to have learned in Tibet was of an esoteric nature, a term she consistently uses for oral teaching, outside the canonical scriptures.

Bibliography

Lopez, Donald S. The Tibetan Book of the Dead: a biography. Princeton University Press, 2011. 173 p.

Evans-Wentz, W.Y. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Oxford University Press, 2000. lxxxiv, 264 p.
Compiled and edited by Evans-Wentz, with new Foreword and Afterword by Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

Karma Lingpa. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Viking/Penguin, 2006. xlix, 535 p.
The largest selection of texts available in English, translated by Gyurme Dorje.

Cuevas, Brian J. The hidden history of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Oxford University Press, 2003. 328 p.

Blavatsky and The Tibetan Book of the Dead

2011-02-24T17:18:00.000-08:00

When W. Evans-Wentz’s Tibetan Book of the Dead was published in 1927 it was regarded as a work of scholarship, Donald Lopez Jr.’s new book, The Tibetan Book of the Dead: a biography, just out from Princeton University Press, indicates that it may no longer be so viewed by academics. The book’s main crime seems to be that it has become too popular, remaining in print.

Evans-Wentz was a member of the Point Loma Theosophical Society, and his text was interpreted through the eyes of a Theosophist. This gives Lopez the opportunity to take a look at Mme. Blavatsky and dismiss her. But along the way furthers a few myths of his own.

“Ancient Egypt and its mysteries had been particularly important to Madame Blavatsky; her first major work was entitled Isis Unveiled.” But the title was the publisher's. And anyone who has read the book knows that, in her view, Egypt was settled by colonizers from ancient India.

“In 1894, she published in Lucifer a letter she had received from one of the mahatmas…” But, as she had died in 1891, this must have been a phenomenon in itself.

He quotes from the Society for Psychical Research Committee’s investigation on Theosophy as if it was the last word on the subject, with no indication that its credibility has slowly been eroding over the past century.

Spiritualism and Theosophy seem to be convertible terms for him, for he writes: “If we were to trace the lineage of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, it would not be Walter Evans-Wentz back to Kazi Dawa Samdup to Karma Lingpa to Padmasambhava. It would be Walter Evans-Wentz to Helena Petrovna Blavatsky to Colonel Olcott to the Fox sisters.”

Readers of Blavatsky News will be surprised to hear that “Madame Blavatsky, who inspired many of the greatest poets and painters of the turn of the century, is but vaguely remembered a century later.” Perhaps this may be the view from Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Lopez teaches at the University of Michigan, but, as our coverage over the past year has shown, it is hardly the case in the outside world.

Lopez may have already provided an evaluation of his critique when he wrote in the Foreword to the Oxford University Press edition of Evans-Wentz’s The Tibetan Book of the Dead in 2000: “anything that a scholar might add today will only serve as material for a scholar some fifty years from now, who will demonstrate the biases and misunderstandings of a preface written fifty years ago, a preface that merely offers evidence of the fin de siècle zeitgeist of those who once called themselves postmoderns.” One may not have to wait that long.

Major Figures in Philosophical Theology

2011-02-24T15:16:00.000-08:00

Courses referencing Helena Petrovna Blavatsky at the university level have been slow coming in the U.S.A. Other than those offered over the years by Prof. James Santucci at Cal State in Fullerton, California, they have been few and far between. So the following course listing offered this year at Drew University in New Jersey was particularly surprising:

HEPH 391 | Major Figures in Philosophical Theology
A seminar focusing on one major figure from the Western or Eastern traditions. Examples include, but are not limited to, Martin Heidegger, Charles Sanders Peirce, Helena Blavatsky, Sri Aurobindo, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and William James. Signature of instructor required for registration.

This is even more unusual considering that Drew University is a Theological School “rooted in the Wesleyan heritage and celebrates the centrality of Christ to our faith. The school does not require students to adopt a particular position or creed, but expects that students will remain in touch with and develop their own distinct faith tradition. Students take responsibility for articulating their own convictions, yet remain in dialogue with those of other faiths and with Christians who may think and believe differently. Students find many persons who share their faith experience and learn from persons who challenge them with their differences. In a world where diversity is often an excuse for hatred and a trigger for violence, Drew students learn to use diversity as a key to unlock the mysteries of a God beyond individual understanding, who is revealed more fully through our shared faith and experience.”

Alexander Wilder on Blavatsky

2011-02-20T18:34:00.000-08:00

Marc Demarest, who maintains the online Emma Hardinge Britten Archive, where one can find all things pertinent to the British medium Emma Hardinge Britten (1823-1899), posts a link on his blog, Chasing Down Emma, to a piece by Alexander Wilder in the April 1907 Metaphysical Magazine eulogizing the late Henry Steel Olcott. While it is a memorial to Col. Olcott, Wilder also gives his impressions of Blavatsky:

At his [Olcott's] pressing invitation, I visited Col. Olcott’s abode on [West] 47th street. There he introduced me to Madame Blavatsky….Mme. Blavatsky was portly, large-chested, broad of abdomen—in short, what I conceive to be a Tartar figure. Her hair was golden like that of the goddess Aphrodite, her head large, the brow full, and other features well filled out. She knew well how to adapt her conversation to every one’s humour, but she did not scruple to denounce, or to speak contemptuously to individuals.

Parts of Wilder’s appreciation appear in his “How Isis Unveiled was written” published a in the New York theosophical journal, The Word, of May 1908. Compare what he wrote above with his description a year later:

She did not resemble in manner or figure what I had been led to expect. She was tall, but not strapping; her countenance bore the marks and exhibited the characteristics of one who had seen much, thought much, traveled much, and experienced much. Her figure reminded me of the description which Hippokrates has given to the Scyths, the race from which she probably descended….Her appearance was certainly impressive, but in no respect was she coarse, awkward, or ill-bred. On the other hand she exhibited culture, familiarity with the manners of the most courtly society and genuine courtesy itself. She expressed her opinions with boldness and decision, but not obtrusively. It was easy to perceive that she had not been kept within the circumscribed limitations of a common female education; she knew a vast variety of topics and could discourse freely upon them.

Wilder’s “Henry Steel Olcott” on pp. 371-77 of The Metaphysical Magazine for April 1907 is a good period piece, conveying something of the time by an eyewitness to the events, and, thanks to Marc Demarest, can be read here.

Alexander Wilder (1823-1908), whose editing shaped Blavatsky’s first book, Isis Unveiled, remains an unrecognized influence as one of the sources for the modern American esoteric revival. Mark R. Jaqua gives about all that is known of him in his introduction to his collection of Wilder’s magazine output, The Later Platonists, which can be accessed here.

Leander Edmund Whipple was editor of The Metaphysical Magazine at the time, which led us to wonder if he might be any relation to Edward Whipple, author of that monument to industry from 1901, A Biography of James M. Peebles, M.D., A.M.?

February 17

2011-02-17T19:18:00.000-08:00

The Sri Lankan Daily News reports that there is a move in Colombo for “the old building where Col. Olcott lived and used as the old Ananda College and the building where the Buddhist schools were administered to declare them a National Heritage by National Heritage Minister Dr Jagath Balasuriya.” February 17, the date of Olcott’s passing, is still a day of remembrance in Sri Lanka, and the paper features a piece by S P Weerasekara “Col Henry Steel Olcott: Great name in Buddhist history,” in today’s edition, giving some background on his accomplishments.

With a sense of pride and utmost we have to point out to the country at large that as a result of pursuing the thinking of Col Olcott, Colombo Buddhist Theosophical Society was able to establish 460 Buddhist schools, including leading colleges, such as Ananda, Nalanda, Dharmapala, Dharmaraja, Visakha, and Musaeus College. Amidst various adversities, difficulties, obstacles great men like Col Olcott who directed our nation in the proper direction towards advancement, during a stage when Sinhala Buddhists had forgotten their good culture and traditions, it is our duty to commemorate them with a sense of deep gratitude. The younger generation in particular must be knowledgeable about the excellent qualities of this great leader, about his life and history and follow his path leading to advancement of our country. We have to record our highest gratitude to Madam Helena Blavatsky who assisted him in all his endeavours.

The rest of the article can be read here.

Roxanne Cash on Blavatsky

2011-02-17T18:18:00.000-08:00

The February 2011 issue of the monthly literary review, Word Riot, publisher of “the forceful voices of up-and-coming writers and poets,” contains an interview with the American writer Roxanne Cash. In response to the question “What book are you currently reading?” she says:

Today I am reading a book about Madame Blavatsky. I thought it would be a biography but it is more like a history of the occult in America. The author obviously doesn’t like Blavatsky much, but the dislike can’t temper Blavatsky’s outlandish personality. In the book it says that she “claimed to have ridden bareback in a circus, toured Serbia as a concert pianist, opened an ink factory in Odessa, traded as an importer of ostrich feathers in Paris, and worked as an interior decorator to the Empress Eugénie.” She also founded the Theosophical Society that runs Krotona, a place in Ojai, California I visited frequently with my friends during high school. Mostly because it was quiet there and we could wander, taking photographs of each other without anyone bothering us. I always imagined that Madame Blavatsky lived at Krotona because her name is on buildings up there and they have many of her books in the library, but according to the book I’m reading she never even went to California. Still. Her name is fun to say. Madame Blavatsky. And I would love to ride bareback in a circus, it sounds like fun.

Blavatsky Material at Harvard

2011-02-17T17:41:00.000-08:00

The Andover-Harvard Theological Library at the Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has a feature titled “Ask a Research Librarian.” On Feb. 15, 2011, the question was asked: “Do you have any special collections related to Theosophy?” Here is the reply:

The Andover-Harvard Theological Library does have one of the largest collections of 19th c. Theosophical literature. The books, which are cataloged in HOLLIS, came mostly from members of the former Theosophical Society in America. We also have letters of an important Theosophical leader—Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. The Blavatsky collection includes correspondence between Madame Blavatsky and William Quan Judge, who was general secretary of the American Section of the Theosophical Society. Background information about these letters appeared in the October-January, 1992-1993, double issue of Theosophical History, and the letters themselves were transcribed and published in volumes 5-6, 1994-1996, of this publication. For more information about Theosophy sources, see Theosophy in the Nineteenth Century: An Annotated Bibliography (1994).

The Theosophical Society in America referred to was one of the independent groups that emerged from Judge’s American Section of the TS, not the present organization of that name. It's membership derived from those who were not willing to follow Katherine Tingley as leader. The group published the Theosophical Quarterly from New York from 1903 to 1938.

The Secret Doctrine Commentaries Reviewed

2011-02-17T15:08:00.000-08:00

Mme. Blavatsky’s old magazine, The Theosophist, for February 2011 carries a four-page review of the recently published The Secret Doctrine Commentaries: The Unpublished 1889 Instructions by H. P. Blavatsky, The Hague, 2010. After giving some background on how the material came about (stenographic notes of the discussions with her at the weekly meetings of the Blavatsky Lodge, London), the reviewer, Dr. John Algeo, comments:

Until now, the full transcriptions of those early meetings and no records of later ones have been generally available. Now, Michael Gomes, one of our premier Theosophical historians, has produced a full and accurate edition of the 1889 discussions. It takes the place of the old Transactions [of the Blavatsky Lodge], which are neither complete nor adequate because they formalize the discussion, thereby disguising the spontaneity of exchanges. This new edition deserves a place next to The Secret Doctrine itself on the bookshelf of every serious student. It also merits the attention of even casual readers who want to know what The Secret Doctrine is about.

Dr. Algeo gives examples of how the book can be culled for additional information on subjects written about by Blavatsky, and says: “This new edition also makes for charming reading: the banter and interchanges among the participants are often humorous and indicate the easy relationship they shared.”

“This edition is what is now called a ‘keeper’ (i.e., one suitable for or worth keeping). Indeed, it is an invaluable addition to our stock of Theosophical books.” What he does not mention is the price, 59 euros, which may keep it out of wider circulation. It is rumored that the Theosophy Company of Los Angeles, California, may finally come out with their edition this year and at half the price.

Blavatsky and Derrida

2011-02-17T14:08:00.000-08:00

Room 56 at the Arts Faculty Building at the North Campus of the University of Delhi’s English Department was the venue for a talk by Gauri Viswanathan of Columbia University on January 31. Prof. Viswanathan outlined her theme, “Secrecy, Conversion, and Historicity,” in part as:

Obsessed with the notion of the secret in his writings on religion, Derrida uncannily evokes a predecessor with whom he has rarely, if at all, been compared—Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. My paper argues that Blavatsky's occult writings set the stage for the kinds of speculations on crypto-conversion, conscience, and responsibility that subsequently engaged Derrida. Both Blavatsky and Derrida develop the concept of the secret to signal the histories that have been occluded in the course of religious change. Occult writings unfold this process, and my talk considers a few exemplary texts engaged in producing an ethical knowledge of the effects of religious conversion and crypto-conversion.