“Blavatsky and the Geopolitics of Secret Knowledge”

Trinity College Dublin will be hosting a Symposium on “Perspectives on India and the West: Politics, Religion and Art” on Wednesday, June 23, from 5.00 to 7.30 pm. It will be held at the Synge Theatre Arts Building at Trinity College Dublin. The typical type of talk that is usually presented at this sort of event is represented by those to be given here, such as Charles Horton’s “Changed Perceptions: Western Collectors of Mughal Art” or Francis X. Clooney’s “After Post-Colonialism: the Rediscovery of Hinduism.” But an interesting change, and a sign of the times, is Gauri Viswanathan’s presentation “Colonialism’s Shadow World: Blavatsky and the Geopolitics of Secret Knowledge.” According to the Seminar announcement, her talk “will examine notions of colonialism and secrecy in 19th century India.”

The Seminar is being held in conjunction with the Trinity College Dublin Library Exhibition “Nabobs, Soldiers and Imperial Service: The Irish in India,” May 27 to October 3, 2010, which details “the links between Trinity, Ireland, Britain and Europe with India, concentrating on the wealth of printed books and other related material from the 19th and early 20th century that is held in the Library.”

Professor Viswanathan teaches at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University in New York and has dealt with Blavatsky in her writings, most notably in “The Ordinary Business of Occultism” in the Autumn 2000 issue of Critical Inquiry where she took on the subject of the Mahatma Letters.

The School of Disembodied Poetics

Contextual Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art is the title of a new book from Stephen Fredman published by Stanford University Press. Explaining the influence of HPB on the American poet Robert Duncan (1919-1988), who was part of the creative world of San Francisco in the 1940s and 50s with Harry Smith and Allen Ginsberg, Fredman writes:

Later, this would enable him to assert that the founder of the Theosophical Society, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, evinced in the incredible hodge-podge of her writings an intuitive understanding of how the esoteric and avant-garde might work together. “In the mess of astrology, alchemy, numerology, magic orders, neo-Platonic, kabbalistic, and Vedic systems, combined, confused, and explained, queered evolution and wishful geology, transposed heads,” Blavatsky discovered, Duncan claims, “the collagist’s art.”

The elements of collage he discerns in Blavatsky include a “charged fascination” with the material being composed, an obedience to unknown but compelling feelings, and a new respect for discarded phenomena: “Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, midden heaps that they are of unreasonable sources, are midden heaps where, beyond the dictates of reason, as in the collagist’s art, from what has been disregarded or fallen into disregard, genres are mixed, exchanges are made, mutations begun from scraps and excerpts from different pictures…to form the figures of a new composition.”

Perhaps we have been looking at HPB’s works in the wrong way and need to see with new eyes, or rather a new way of seeing, of intuiting, what has been before us all the time. This may explain the ready acceptance HPB has had among artists, especially in the avant-garde. Perhaps through her we can trace an influence to the “Beat” writers who believed that “literature should come from the soul without conscious restrictions.”

The Book of Dzyan

Donald Tyson is an Canadian magician—not the stage version, but the occult type. His latest book, The 13 Gates of the Necronomicon: A Workbook of Magic, continues the Necronomicon mythos used by the American horror writer, H.P. Lovecraft, in his stories. Tyson compares the Necronomicon with Blavatsky’s Book of Dzyan:

Lovecraft refers to the Book of Dzyan, which is part of the lore of Theosophy. Madame Blavatsky, the leader of the theosophical movement, claimed to have read the ancient and lost Book of Dzyan, and pretended that she had published stanzas from this work in her own book The Secret Doctrine. As it happens, Blavatsky invented the Book of Dzyan just as surely as Lovecraft invented the Necronomicon—or perhaps, just as surely did not invent it, as Lovecraft did not invent the Necronomicon. Blavatsky claimed the ability to read books stored in the great astral library known as the akashic records. It is very likely here that she studied the Book of Dzyan. Similarly, Lovecraft did not so much invent the Necronomicon as dream it into existence, and for Lovecraft dreams were very real.

Lovecraft’s brief references to the Book of Dzyan have nothing to do with the actual stanzas published by Blavatsky. Should the Book of Dzyan be classified as fictional or real? Blavatsky claimed it to be a real work. Certainly, a portion of it exists in her Secret Doctrine, so it is real in the sense that it has been published. It was regarded as real enough by Theosophists. Yet most scholars agree that the Book of Dzyan had no existence of any material kind before Blavatsky wrote about it.

Donald Tyson has written over twenty books on ritual magic issued mainly through Llewellyn, a New Age publisher, based in Woodbury, Minnesota. While previous practitioners of western magic were fairly sympathetic to Blavatsky—W.W. Westcott, wrote of her erudition, S.L. Mathers, who was not enthusiastic about her eastern approach, still recognized her ability, Aleister Crowley, thought enough of her Voice of the Silence to write a commentary on it, Dion Fortune’s Cosmic Doctrine follows Blavatsky’s schema in The Secret Doctrine, and Israel Regardie, responsible for much of the Golden Dawn revival in the second part of the twentieth century, quotes her approvingly throughout his writings—Tyson is openly dismissal.

The biographical sketch of her on his website claims, among other things:

There is no reason to believe that she spent any amount of time in Tibet, or in a religious retreat. It seems far more likely that she occupied this decade in her life learning the trades of confidence artist and fraudulent medium--skills that served her so well in later years. Criminal activities were probably involved, which may explain her reluctance to discuss this "veiled" time.

In December of 1875 she and Olcott founded the Theosophical Society. Olcott assumed the post of Chairman.

Speaking of the S.P.R. Committee report “exposing” her: Blavatsky's guilt was so obvious to everyone, she made no attempt to deny it.

And so on. The rest of his comments on her, unreliable as they are, can be read here. His book, The 13 Gates of the Necronomicon, will be released by Llewellyn July 1.

How Others See Us

The Observer newspaper of London for Sunday, June 6, 2010, looks at the exhibition, “Newspeak: British Art Now,” that has arrived at the Saatchi Gallery there. Blavatsky News carried an account of its showing at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg earlier this year. The reviewer, Sean O’Hagan, asks:

One cannot help but wonder at shows like this what will become the signature work – the Dead Dad or Myra of the Newspeak generation. That tainted honour might fall to Goshka Macuga's Madame Blavatsky or littlewhitehead's It Happened in the Corner. The first is a sculpture of the famous 19th-century aristocrat and theosophist suspended between two chairs, as if levitating in a hypnotic trance. It speaks of death, mysticism and illusion, not to mention charlatanism, and is compelling perhaps because we live in a supposedly post-rational age where the pseudo-spiritual blatherings of Blavatsky and her followers retain an attraction for the impressionable and the anti-scientific. It also seems oddly holy.

The rest of the review can be read here.

“Christ the Yogi”

Anti-Blasphemy Central: Documents, articles blasphemous against the christian religion, posts a piece, “Origin of Fantastical tales about Yus Asaf of Rozbal also known as Jesus of Kashmir,” suggesting that Nicolas Notovitch’s (1858-?) 1894 La vie inconnue de Jesus Christ, translated as The Unknown Life of Christ, owed its inspiration to a passage on Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled, “in which a traveler with the broken leg is taken to Mount Athos in Greece where, in the monastery library, he discovers the text of Celsus’ True Doctrine. The idea of Jesus’ flight to India was also inspired by particular a statement in Isis Unveiled that alludes to his travel to the Himalayas. She wrote”:

Do what we may, we cannot deny Sakya-Muni Buddha a less remote antiquity than several centuries before the birth of Jesus. In seeking a model for his system of ethics why should Jesus have gone to the foot of the Himalayas rather than to the foot of Sinai, but that the doctrines of Manu and Gautama harmonized exactly with his own philosophy, while those of Jehovah were to him abhorrent and terrifying? The Hindus taught to return good for evil, but the Jehovistic command was: “An eye for an eye” and “a tooth for a tooth.”
Isis Unveiled, 2:164

This is nothing new. Notovitch’s entry in Wikipedia says as much. When his book, based on a manuscript he claimed to have discovered in a monastery in Ladakh, appeared in 1894, revealing the early years of Jesus were spent in India, the Orientalist F. Max Muller denounced it as a fraud. Repeated searches for the manuscript failed to produce anything conclusive. As usual, HPB is blamed for this, that, and every other thing, without giving her qualification about Jesus—if he ever existed. Louis Jacolliot had already published his Bible dans l’Inde (vie de Iezeus Christna), suggesting Indian parallels before Blavatsky started writing her books. The mythic appeal of Jesus having been in India, like all myths, has taken on a life of its own, and books on the subject continue to be published.

Imagining Tibet

The website, Tibetan Buddhism Goes West...Problems of Adoption & Cross-Cultural Confusion, recently posted a piece by Tsering Shakya, Canadian Research Chair in Religion and Contemporary Society in Asia Institute for Asian Research University of British Columbia. Titled “The Myth of Shangri-la: Tibet and the Occident,” it raises a number of issues of interest to readers of this site.

There is the real Tibet, what I have called the geographical Tibet, and the imaginary Tibet, which has a potent force of its own. In the Western mind the distinction between the two has merged to form a particular Western perception of Tibet and Tibetanness. In the process of mythologising, the real or geographical Tibet is subservient to the imaginary Tibet. The confusion is caused by the failure to distinguish between an object and a thought about the object.

Tibet has been very useful to the West: it is a place which is being constantly discovered by the West. It has been unveiled and revealed for decades by travellers, explorers, missionaries, soldiers, scholars and colonial officers. Tibet has become a source of adventure and mystery in a world where there is little magic and mystery…. The public was satisfied by Madam Blavatsky's revelation of telepathic messages from the mystics meditating in caves in the majestic Himalayas.

In the Western mind, Tibet was mythogised precisely because it was never colonised and Tibetans were never subservient to European rule. Therefore, Tibet became Shangri-la in the Western mind…. The opening of Tibet to mass tourism in the 1980s meant that the West once again rediscovered Tibet…. Tibet has become a Disney World for the Western bourgeois. Tibet possesses all the thrills and adventure of a customised fantasy world: danger, romance, magic and cuddly natives.

The rest of the article can be read here. Although written some years ago, it surveys a wide range of concerns, better than recent books published on the subject. Only two examples need be noted. Martin Brauen’s Dreamworld Tibet: Western Illusions was initially published in German in 2000 for the exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Ethnology at the University of Zurich, May 26, 2000 to June 4, 2001, and translated into English in 2004. With its hundreds of illustrations, it is a beautiful example of what the art of bookmaking is still capable of. Covering Western impressions of Tibet, the part about Blavatsky is written with the “of course she couldn’t possibly have been in Tibet” attitude and gives an account of the “strictly hierarchical system” of Masters that appears nowhere in her writings. Dibyesh Anand’s 2007 Geopolitical Exotica: Tibet in Western Imagination, published as part of the University of Minnesota’s political series, reads like a book-length version of Tsering Shakya’s essay above. The obligatory reference to Blavatsky, though brief, is much more nuanced, and shows the current shift in attitudes about her. Fact or fiction, she was one of the first to claim Tibet as a source of enduring spirituality.

Blavatskiana: The Esoteric Papers of Mme. Blavatsky

Aside from the published writings that H.P. Blavatsky is known for, there is another corpus of material that has intrigued students for years: the papers of her esoteric school. Started as an Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society in October 1888 it became a non-affiliated body before her death (though only members of the T.S. were eligible to join). Mme. Blavatsky’s reason for initiating the group was based on her belief that by 1888 the Theosophical Society was “a dead failure,” i.e., that it had failed in its mission to become a nucleus for universal brotherhood and functioned only as an organization where comparative religion was studied not practiced. “It is through an Esoteric Section alone,” she notified members, “that the great Exoteric Society may be redeemed.”

Members of the Esoteric (later Eastern) School of Theosophy took a pledge of secrecy about the papers they received. Three instructional booklets, sent to members in 1889 and 1890, dealt with esoteric correspondences of color, number, and sound. After Blavatsky’s death in 1891 the school was carried on, at the suggestion of William Q. Judge, under the dual headship of Judge and Annie Besant. But in 1894 Judge ousted Besant from her position as co-Outer Head and removed the ban of secrecy on Blavatsky’s E.S. instructions. Besant published an edited version of this material, along with instructions given to Blavatsky’s Inner Group of students, as part of the so-called Third Volume of The Secret Doctrine in 1897.

It remained the main source for this material until Health Research, an offset reprint company in California, issued a typescript version of Blavatsky’s first three instructions in 1969. In 1980 the full text of the E.S. instructions were included in volume 12 of the Blavatsky Collected Writings series, published by the Theosophical Publishing House in Wheaton, Illinois. In 2004 Daniel Caldwell put together what he has described as the “most comprehensive collection of H.P.B.’s esoteric papers now available,” the contents of which can be seen here.

Caldwell’s The Esoteric Papers of Madame Blavatsky, available through the photocopy reprint company Kessinger of Whitefish, Montana, covers 673 pages in an 8 by 11 inch format and weighs over three pounds. Most of the documents reproduced are facsimiles of the originals, encapsulated in black borders reminiscent of Godwin, Chanel, and Deveney’s 1995 The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. It is an admirable, if bulky, attempt at presenting this material to the world. Though he gives little commentary of his own, it is interesting to note that Caldwell begins the genesis of the E.S. with Blavatsky’s statement in an 1887 letter to Countess Wachtmeister of her intention to start “a school of my own.”

For his efforts Caldwell was condemned by certain people associated with the United Lodge of Theosophists. Who was he to dare make public these documents (even though published versions had been circulating for years)? Caldwell, never one to waste an attack, responded by revealing that the ULT carried on its own esoteric group under the name of the Dzyan Esoteric School, using HPB’s E.S. instructions. By whose authority, was his rejoinder? His posts on the matter can be read here, and form a novel historical addenda to his Esoteric Papers of Madame Blavatsky.