Roxanne Cash on Blavatsky

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

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

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

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.

The Inimitable Madame B.

EnlightenNext is the journal of American self-styled guru and “twenty-first century spiritual teacher,” Andrew Cohen. Issue 47 (no months are given) just out contains a nine-page article by Gary Lachman titled “The Inimitable Madame B.” It begins:

New York’s Irving Place isn’t a place we’d usually associate with the start of a new spiritual movement, but on September 13, 1875, that’s exactly what it was. In a room cluttered with oriental bric-a-brac in Manhattan’s bustling and often dangerous East Side, three people came together then to form an occult society that would have a profound influence.

Where to begin? Irving Place is not a location we’d usually “associate” anything with. At the time of Blavatsky’s brief stay the street was one of residential houses, with exclusive clubs at the north end where the street joined Gramercy Park (Col. Olcott’s Lotos Club was there). On September 13 a committee of four, which had been appointed at the September 8 meeting to draft a constitution and by-laws of what would become the Theosophical Society, reported progress. This was done after the conclusion of George H. Felt’s lecture telling of his discoveries on the Cabbala, but neither Blavatsky nor Judge, as the writer adds, were part of it. As far as the room being “cluttered with oriental bric-a-brac,” this is just imagination expressing itself in speculation.

In a number of places Lachman refers to H.P. Blavatsky’s mother as a “princess,” this is not so—it was her grandmother who had the title. Nor has the Society for Psychical Research ever “retracted Hodgson’s report a century later,” as he states. He gives as his source for this statement, Sylvia Cranston’s 1993 biography, H.P.B., page xvi, but in checking it we find she does not make that claim. “She [HPB] washed ashore in Cairo” in 1871 when the ship she was on, the S.S. Eumonia [sic], blew up. But as the explosion took place off the coast of Greece, it must have been a big bang and a mighty wave to send her across the Mediterranean and inland to Cairo.

The article is illustrated by garish depictions of events in Blavatsky’s life, including one of her sitting at a table, apparently in a trance, while the rest of the circle look up at letters falling from above.

Lachman tries to present a sympathetic portrait, though burdened with the usual stereotypes about Blavatsky—weight, madcap ways, hashish smoking, etc. His sources are all the usual suspects and he adds nothing new, except, perhaps, when he writes things like: “the Christian College Magazine was only too happy to blow the whistle on the Madame.”

Lachman, an American living in England, is writing a biography of Blavatsky, though, if this is any indication of what is to come, those wanting an accurate portrayal of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky may have to look elsewhere.

The H.D. Book Reviewed

“Robert Duncan’s long-awaited meditations on H.D., modernism, and esoterica,” the recently published The H.D. Book, continues to garner favorable notice. Erik Davis provides an extensive review in the Feb/Mar 2011 issue of Bookforum under the heading of “The Shadow Catcher,” which can be read here.

Duncan cautiously praises the much-mocked Madame Blavatsky, recognizing her enormous Theosophical books—declared to be revealed wisdom but actually "midden heaps" of quotations and unacknowledged borrowings—as textual collages avant la lettre: "From what has been disregarded or fallen into disregard, genres are mixed, exchanges are made, mutations begun from scraps." This could, in part, describe The H.D. Book as well, a diffuse and heterogeneous matrix whose heaps of obscure references can, as with Blavatsky's books, become tiresome and overwhelming.

Perhaps to some, but not to others.

The Nautch Girl and Imperial Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (!)

The University of Alberta in Canada posts a PhD thesis by Charn Kamal Kaur Jagpal, “‘I Mean to Win’: The Nautch Girl and Imperial Feminism at the Fin de Siècle,” awarded by its Department of English and Film Studies this year. “This dissertation explores Englishwomen‘s fictions of the nautch girl (or Indian dancing girl) at the turn of the century,” mainly between 1880 and 1920. While the subject might not warrant a reference to Mme. Blavatsky, it does here.

As one of many examples, writing in the 1890s, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky positions nautch girls (specifically devadasis) as an exception to the rule about Indian womanhood. She asserts that, out of the women in India, “Only the nachnis, the dancing girls consecrated to the gods and serving in the temples (a hereditary position), can be said to be free and happy and live respected by others.”

The citation is from Blavatsky’s Indian travelogue, From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan, 1892 (1975 edition, p. 231), and, if as a clarification, the writer notes

Critical of Western ideologies and practices, and disappointed with Western religions, many Europeans and Americans at the turn of the century “were increasingly turning to Asian goods, philosophies, arts and cultures” to define themselves and their modernist sentiments. Under this motive, movements like Theosophy, Transcendentalism, and Occultism gained ground, and promoted the values of eastern spirituality over western materialism. Theosophy was among the most popular, spreading internationally in the late nineteenth century through the work of scholars such as Max Müller, and the leadership of Henry Steel Olcott, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Annie Besant. These theosophists elevated ancient civilizations to a utopian world, a counterpoint to the turmoil, change and scientific scepticism marking the urban landscape of Europe and America. Of particular interest were ancient Hindu beliefs, specifically those from the Vedic period and scriptures, that offered westerners hope of curing contemporary ills, of reinvigorating European culture through contact with the more benign faiths of Eastern cultures.

There is a brief mention at the end that “These theosophical beliefs led to the revival of the so-called classical dance of India, known as Bharatnatyam,” though no reference to the work of Rukmini Devi, a theosophist and sister of N. Sri Ram, President of the Theosophical Society, Adyar, who helped Indian dance gain its respectability as an art form, and whose school, Kalashetra, started in 1936 on the Adyar campus of the Theosophical Society, brought together performers, musicians, and designers. Rukmini Devi’s work is documented in two large volumes of photographs by C. Nachiappan (now Koviloor Swami) published by Kalashetra Publications, 2003, Rukmini Devi Bharata Natya and Rukmini Devi Dance Drama.


The entire thesis, “‘I Mean to Win’: The Nautch Girl and Imperial Feminism at the Fin de Siècle,” can be read here.