The Secret Doctrine Reviewed

The April-June 2010 Beacon magazine from the Lucis Trust carries a perceptive review of Michael Gomes’ edition of The Secret Doctrine. Gomes “brings a fresh and clearer insight to this important work,” says the reviewer who goes on to write:

many will find this annotated abridgement a useful primer for the original Secret Doctrine, for having grasped the basic ideas, the details and finer points presented in the original become easier to comprehend. Mr. Gomes has done a service in presenting the essence of The Secret Doctrine with this abridgement. By scaling back The Secret Doctrine, not only do the core teachings become more readily accessible, but potentially this abridgement provides a clearer access to the intuitive and transforming experience in consciousness, at the core of the original, as well.

Theosophy in Australia announced it in the November 2009 issue under the heading, “Major Publishing Event,” noting “To have had The Secret Doctrine published by Penguin is a major achievement in itself, but the present work also manages to make accessible to the reader of today a nineteenth century classic of esoteric literature, that was itself based on arcane all-but-incomprehensible texts.”

The End of the World as We Know It

Sooner or later anyone doing research on Helena Petrovna Blavatsky will come across the website Blavatsky Archives. Started by Daniel Caldwell of Tucson, Arizona, in the U.S., it is a massive collection of historical material about HPB, primarily 19th century and often from hard to find sources, as well as a lengthy selection of Mr. Caldwell’s self-published writings. Critics have assailed him since some items are not HPB-friendly. One thing is certain, Blavatsky Archives, now part of the larger Blavatsky Study Center, has changed the way people do research on the subject.

In response to our query about this, an old-timer replied:

You can’t imagine how different it was just some forty years ago. So little was available. Olcott’s Old Diary Leaves was out of print till 1975. One read through the available sources, digested it, and was spurred on to the next layer of hard-to-find material, often having to travel to libraries and out-of-the-way places. It was almost like an archeological dig, sifting layer by layer. Now all this has changed and there is a surplus of material, good, bad, and unoriginal, available at the click of a mouse. So the ability one developed through this sifting process is lost, and the discernment that comes with it, as well as the breath of scope from actually interacting with the documents, magazines, journals, as opposed to extracted material. People may know more but be less insightful in their opinions.

Perhaps new skills will develop from trying to make all the disparate images of HPB now so abundantly available fit. It is doubtful that anyone will want to go back to those days of effort and enquiry now that everything is so easily accessible thanks to Daniel Caldwell’s brainchild. If you don’t know it by now, Blavatsky Archives can be accessed here.

The Future of Theosophical Publishing

A reader sent the following video with this note:

Here’s an adorable, tricky and clever video on the future of publishing, courtesy of the Penguin folks, who produced it for an internal presentation and then released it into the wild after everyone loved it. Be sure to watch to at least halfway, when the clever gets visible.

Add “theosophical” before “publishing” and “books” and it becomes an even more accurate representation of the state of affairs. The 2:26 minute video can be seen here.

When Academics get it Wrong

Here is a sampling of references to Blavatsky in a few recently published books by people who make their living teaching at American colleges.

* Mark Singleton’s thesis in Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, February 10, 2010. 272 p. hardback, $99.00) is that “yoga as it is popularly practiced today owes a greater debt to modern Indian nationalism and, even more surprisingly, to the spiritual aspirations of European bodybuilding and early 20th-century women's gymnastic movements of Europe and America, than it does to any ancient Indian yoga tradition.”

Blavatsky (and Swami Vivekananda) are held up as the authorities who helped fuel the initial “distain and distrust” for hatha yoga practices. Page 77 briefly explores HPB’s views on the subject. “Baleful propaganda such as this from the doyenne of late nineteenth-century Asian esoterica substantially contributed to shaping the attitudes that show up in contemporaneous translations of hatha texts…” There is an interesting bit of information about Dr. N.C. Paul (Navīna Candra Pāla), whose 1850 A Treatise on Yoga Philosophy was reprinted in 1888 as part of Tukaram Tatya’s theosophical series, and whom HPB cites, but not much else for readers of this site to pay $99.00 for.

Mark Singleton teaches at St. John's College, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

* In chapter 2, “Laying the Foundation for American-Style Hinduism,” of Lola Williamson’s Transcendent in America: Hindu-Inspired Meditation Movements as New Religion (New York: NYU Press, January 1, 2010. 272 p. hardback, $75.00, paper, $23.00) there is mention of the contribution of the Theosophical Society, along with Emerson and New Thought, preparing Americans for “Hindu-Inspired Meditation Movements”. Williamson’s statement that Blavatsky “claimed to have received written communications from two dead Tibetan mahatmas” (p. 29) is simply misinformation, as Blavatsky claimed no such thing.

Lola Williamson is assistant professor of religious studies at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi.

* “A self-christened ‘countess,’ Blavatsky began her career as a Spiritualist medium and esoteric omnivore.…Blavatsky’s writing is generally divided into two periods, the so-called ‘Egyptian’ period and the Buddhist one”, writes Cathy Gutierrez in Plato's Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, September 3, 2009. 232 p. hardback, $55.00). Gutierrez gives no sources for these claims, and it is left to the reader to accept her imaginative interpretation as fact.

“[Isis Unveiled] is perhaps America’s greatest conspiracy theory and is characterized by Blavatsky’s paranoid tone.” What can one say after this but that Cathy Gutierrez is an associate professor of religion at Sweet Briar College, Virginia.

Roy Mitchell, 1884-1944

Mitchell by Canadian illustrator Arthur Lismer
courtesy of the Arts and Letters Club, Toronto

The piece on “Blavatsky in Canada” evoked requests for more information on Roy Mitchell, the dramatist who sought to find expression of his theosophical principles through his work. The catalog for his theater papers at York University in Toronto, Canada, provides the following biographical sketch:

Roy Matthews Mitchell was a dramatist and educator; he was born on February 4, 1884 in Fort Gratiot, Michigan, but was educated in Canada where he received a bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto in 1906. After a period working as a journalist and press agent in Canada and the United States, he moved to New York City in 1915 to study theatrical design. From 1917-1918, he was director of the Greenwich Village Theatre in Sheridan Square. From 1918 to 1919, he was director of motion pictures for the Canadian Department of Public Information. From 1919 to 1930, he was director of the Hart House Theatre, University of Toronto. After his return to Toronto, he produced experimental plays for the Arts and Letters Club; he also became involved with the Toronto Theosophical Society. In 1930 he was appointed professor of dramatic arts at the School of Education in New York University. Mitchell was the author of Shakespeare for Community Players (1919), The School Theatre (1925) and Creative Theatre (1929), the last considered one of the most important books on the subject. He died in Canaan, Connecticut on July 27, 1944.

In the 1920s in Toronto Mitchell started the Blavatsky Institute (not to be confused with the earlier English institution of the same name) to reissue small theosophical books that had gone out-of-print. After his death it became the main source for his theosophical writings, the best known being Theosophy in Action, and his lecture The Use of The Secret Doctrine.

The impact of Theosophy on his career is presented by Renate Usmiani, “Roy Mitchell: Prophet in our Past,” Theatre Research in Canada 8:2 (1987): 147-168, here, and Scott Duchesne’s response, “The Impossible Theatre: Roy Mitchell and The Chester Mysteries: Experience, Initiation and Brotherhood,” Theatre Research in Canada 27:2 (2006): 227-244, here.

Sun Ra and HPB

D. Green in his blog for March 13 at the British music magazine, The Word, reminds us of the connection of the African-American composer Sun Ra (1914-1993) with HPB.

In early 1971 Sun Ra was artist-in-residence at University of California, Berkeley, teaching a course called “The Black Man In the Cosmos.” Rather few students enrolled but the classes were often full of curious persons from the surrounding community. One half-hour of each class was devoted to a lecture (complete with handouts and homework assignments), the other half-hour to an Arkestra performance or Sun Ra keyboard solo. Reading lists included the works of Madame Blavatsky and Henry Dumas, the Book of the Dead, Alexander Hislop’s The Two Babylons, The Book of Oahspe and assorted volumes concerning Egyptian hieroglyphs, African American folklore, and other topics.

The citation also appears in Sun Ra’s profile in Wikipedia here.

Kurt Vonnegut on Blavatsky

Lapham's Quarterly, “a magazine of history and ideas,” for March 13, 2010, has a piece, “Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard,” where the writer gives a lesson in creative writing. Dealing with Hamlet’s soliloquy with the ghost of his father, Vonnegut (1922-2007) adds:

To this day we don’t know if that ghost was really Hamlet’s father. If you have messed around with Ouija boards, you know there are malicious spirits floating around, liable to tell you anything, and you shouldn’t believe them. Madame Blavatsky, who knew more about the spirit world than anybody else, said you are a fool to take any apparition seriously, because they are often malicious and they are frequently the souls of people who were murdered, were suicides, or were terribly cheated in life in one way or another, and they are out for revenge.

“Lapham's Quarterly is published by the American Agora Foundation, Inc., a not-for-profit foundation dedicated to fostering interest in, and developing an acquaintance with, history.” The rest of the article can be read here.