The Caretaker
patreon
Blavatsky - 2/Jan/2025 (Happy New Year)
🕑 Added 2025-01-02 17:45:53 +0000 UTCIT IS BLAVATSKY TIME
If people could be centuries, Mme Helena Petrovna Blavatsky would be the 19th.
Baboon-owner, ardent anti-colonialist, world-traveling occult trendsetter, founder of comparative religious studies, self-admitted huckster, proto-feminist marajuana icon, diehard anti-racist, and an innovator of antisemite, Mme Blavatsky would combine the mythology of spiritualism with the doctrine of western esoterica to create the paradigm-dominating cultural powerhouse that was Theosophy. A one-woman revolution. There is occult history before Blavatsky, and there is occult history after Blavatsky.
(She combined Spiritualism with the doctrine of Western Esotericism)
-(biggest knock-on effect of this was a significant secularization of western esotericism)
(She was the first big East-West syncretist)
Before we get into the nitty gritty, there is some groundwork to be laid. Primary sources about Blavatsky tend to come from one of three places: One, supporters who wrote about her in the social language of an apostle writing about Christ. Two, detractors who –in several cases– may have been supported by the English government, who thought she was a Russian spy. Or three, Blavatsky herself. And Blavatsky was not interested in down-to-earth biography.
I have never seen scholarship more cleanly divided into “pro-blavatsky” and “anti-blavatsky” stances. Sympathetic authors show us Blavatsky the Prophet and Blavatsky the Social Crusader, a chaste, morally pure, ahead-of-her-time radical proponent of social and ethnic equality. Antagonistic stances show us Blavatsky the Fraud, the lascivious, self-obsessed, liar, cheater, and scammer who contributed to early nazi mythology.
I will not claim to have any special insight on the True Blavatsky. The woman is tragically under-studied. Going forward, I will take a feminist position: A woman can be many things at once.
THE BIRTH OF BLAVATSKY
Born August 12 1831 to a respected mishmash of European nobility. Her father, Colonel Peter Alexeyevich von Hahn (1798-1873), was a respected military man, and a descendant of the medieval crusader Count Rottenstern. Her mother was a celebrated novelist who wrote under the pseudonym Zeneida R__va. The family traveled often. Blavatsky’s mother died when she was very young. As a result, she was sent to live with her grandparents in Saratov.
Blavatsky would claim many things about this period. That she began to exhibit psychic abilities, that her grandfather was a high-ranking mason, and that she was given access to his vast occult library. It should also be said that Blavatsky herself said she provided contradictory accounts of her young life.
At 18, she was married to Nikofor Blavatsky, a man nearly 40 years her senior. She obviously had little interest in this arrangement, and left him after three months. This would mark the beginning of her early wandering years. (Someone called this the Veiled Years) Information about her young adventures here is almost entirely uncorroborated. She would claim to visit Constantinople where she learned from Sufi mystics, Cairo where she collaborated with Coptic magicians. She would visit Quebec, and be disappointed that the native americans were not the mystical healers as depicted in her favorite James Fennimore Cooper novels. She would claim to visit New Orleans where she learned from Voudou practitioners, then to New Mexico, South America, India, Sri Lanka, trying and failing to enter Nepal, onto Bombay, Java, Singapore, etc etc etc.
It should be said, that while the details of her adventures are impossible to confirm or deny, it is not impossible that she did in fact travel to these places. Blavatsky enjoyed a frankly unprecedented level of personal and financial freedom for a woman in 1850.
BLAVATSKY TAKES NEW YORK
The story picks up around 1873, in New York City. Spiritualism and its French cousin Spiritisme were in full swing. A young woman couldn’t take two steps without interrupting a seance or knocking over a crystal ball. In a few years, the Fox sisters would send American fascination with the occult into the stratosphere. Blavatsky was in a good place for someone itching to found an occult research society.
The who’s-who’s of 1873 New York were having themselves a Victorian Crisis of Faith. Science had been training in the off season. Geologists had just recently confirmed that the earth was far, far older than the Book of Genesis could account for. That rascal Darwin wrote a book about birds. A literal reading of the bible now directly conflicted with observable scientific fact. For folks who based their entire moral worldview on the Bible, this caused some problems. If your morals are based on the divinity of the bible, and the bible is just a book, what does it mean to be a good person?
Many movements arose to mend the rift. America was awash with revival churches who doubled down on biblical literalism. If science contradicts the bible, the science is wrong. You had the earliest murmurs of pagan reconstructionist movements, Romantic poets who wrote of an idealized pre-christian past dominated by druids, attic oracles, and wandering yogis. You had spiritualists who sold themselves as both spiritual re-awakening, and scientific study of those phenomena.
In 1874, a man in Chittiden Vermont claimed he could levitate. First on the scene was occult reporter Henry Steele Olcott. Second, was an interested debutante named Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. The two became fast friends. Blavatsky was a veritable font of oriental wisdom and fun anecdotes. She was practically irresistible to the scene. Her New York apartment almost immediately became the place for the fashionable and strange to hang out and discuss the hidden mysteries of the world. During this time, Blavatsky would write her first major work: Isis Unveiled.
THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
On September 7th 1875, a man named George Henry Felt was giving a lecture to the local spiritualist community. It was titled “The Lost Canon of Proportion of the Egyptians”. Felt used the Egyptian zodiac to prove the existence of numerous elemental spirits present in all things. He claimed that these elemental spirits could potentially be harnessed to supernatural effect. The legend goes that during the lecture, Olcott passed Blavatsky a note that said “[would it] not be a good thing to form a society for this kind of study” Hanegraaf 180. (There was something about Felt being a grifter who ran off with a bunch of money but I need to find the citation for that.)
In 1875 the Theosophical Society is co-founded by Olcott and Blavatskty. Two years later, Blavatsky published Isis Unveiled to widespread success. She had a gift for surveying the field of occult writing, figuring out what people wanted, and giving it to them. (This honestly deserves a whole sidebar of its own. IU is a watershed text for Occultism.)
ISIS UNVEILED
Nothing short of a landmark in Western Esotericisim, Isis Unveiled is an exploration of the similarities between Eastern and Western religions, as well as an attempt to reconcile the occult with recent developments in religion.
(Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 215-217.)
The idea of capital-W Western Esotericism stemming from some ancient hidden single root is nothing new. That’s half of why Hermeticism is so popular. When Pico Della Mirandola looked for hints of the roots behind all pagan texts, he found something suspiciously like Christianity. The renaissance perennialists were dipping their clerical italian toes into the sea of comparative religion. Blavatsky did a cannonball.
Much ink has been spilled as to whether Blavatsky was or was not a spiritualist. She told spiritualists she was a spiritualist. She told Christians she was a christian, and buddhists she was buddhist. Her detractors point to this as evidence of a fundamental deception. This misunderstands Blavatsky. She was peddling something unique. She was privy to the One True Religion, the ancient, secret tree of wisdom, from which all religion, science, and philosophy sprouted. The Bible conflicts with science? No it doesn't. The Bible you know is but a corrupted form, a third-hand translation of a translation of a translation of a lost text written in a lost divine language. Of course the bible conflicted with science. The Bible was just a pork chop. Blavatsky could show you the whole hog. She was an initiate of the Root Religion, therefore, she was a member of all religions.
That whole hog was called Theosophy.
The long and short of theosophical mythology is this: All religions are descended from one original religion. This religion can be rediscovered through the process of esoteric study of existing religions. Some adepts of this religion achieved spiritual attainment such that they became immortal spiritual beings –force ghosts, if you will– who guide novices in their attempt to reconstruct the original religion. These Ascended Masters are folks you know; Moses, Christ, the Buddha, etc. Blavatsky even had her own guide, an ancient priest and spiritual guide named Koot Humi.
In this way, Theosophy was secular, in the sense that it does not belong to any particular sect. It is a stew of Greek, Egyptian, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic, concepts. Plus, an innovative new ingredient. Blavatsky was one of the first westerners to incorporate (dubiously understood) concepts from eastasian religions like Hinduism and Buddhism. Given that she was one of the only occultists who had actually been to East Asia, she had a significant degree of authority over western occult conceptions of Hinduism and Buddhism. The local library probably didn’t have a comprehensive translation of the Pali Canon, or the Bhagavad Gita. People had to take Blavatsky at her word, and Blavatsky’s word was inaccurate.
ASIDE: KOOT HOOMI AND THE ASCENDED MASTERS
Initially, Blavatsky would describe Koot Hoomi more in the vein of a tutelary spirit. He was a teacher, a spiritual guide that showed Blavatsky the way. Blavatsky would describe him as a “Kashmiri Brahman” with long hair and blue eyes. As her mythology developed, Koot Hoomi would take a more significant role. He would become one of many Ascended Masters, a person of supreme theosophical wisdom who appears on earth to guide members of the Theosophical Society towards the true path. For the more spiritually inclined members, the Ascended Masters were a load-bearing pillar. They were the source of spiritual wisdom that proved the Theosophical Society was on the right path. If it turned out that Blavatsky was lying about being in contact with an ancient spiritual being, it could be trouble for her.
BLAVATSKY IN INDIA
After publishing Isis Unveiled and founding the Theosophical Society, Bavatsky moves to India. She will never return to the United states. In 1879 she arrived in Delhi as a celebrity. Blavatsky’s brand of world-spanning syncretism was just as popular in India as it was in the west. Her arrival in Delhi was given press attention, as the editor of a local newspaper was a follower. She would almost immediately start a newsletter of her own; The Theosophist, which is still in print today. This choice to move would prove a double-edged sword.
To Blavatsky and her followers, India was where magic came from, it was the ancient mystical source of all wisdom. By starting a second branch of the Theosophical Society in India, she could drink directly from the wellspring of theosophical knowledge. She was already famous for being one of the few westerners to travel to India and learn about their religion. Every moment spent in Delhi was another gallon of rocket fuel for her reputation. The reverse was also true. Her Indian followers were just as fascinated by this bizarre foreigner touting knowledge of ancient wisdom. For Blavatsky, it was a win-win.
However, magical societies are not known for internal discipline. The Theosophical Society was already suffering from internal fractures. Without Blavatsky to assert direct control, the Theosophical Society would suffer near constant infighting. Even when Blavatsky was present, the society was plagued with constant infighting over the identity of the group. Were they Christian? Were they something else? Did they practice magic or just study it? Did they include spiritualists or oppose them, etc. When she left, these problems would only get worse. But that was a problem for future Blavatsky.
In 1880, Blavatsky and Olcott would accept the Five Precepts and Three Gems, effectively becoming Buddhists. Although Blavatsky had been calling herself a buddhist for some time. Shortly after this, the pair would receive a series of letters from the Ascended Masters, who tell them the Theosophical Society is the true inheritor of the secret wisdom religion. They weren’t just studying the ancient secret wisdom religion, they were the ancient secret wisdom religion. Blavatsky, and her small cadre of followers, were the inheritors of the root of all knowledge.
By this point, the Theosophical Society is at the peak of its popularity. Membership is at an all-time high. Public intellectuals and academics are now aware of, and being asked to comment on, her work. She is knocking on the door of mainstream success, and that means scrutiny from mainstream organizations. Blavatsky made huge gains by promoting Occultism along the same rigorous, “scientific” lines as Spiritualism. But if you claim something is scientific, it means you have to demonstrate repeatability in some way, potentially in laboratory settings. This could be disastrous for Blavatsky.
In 1884, Blavatsky and Olcott agreed to travel to England to meet with the Society for Psychical Research. In terms of actual scientific approaches to the magical and esoteric, the SPR are the gold standard. They are initially impressed with Blavatsky, but this will not last.
That same year, the Madras Christian Collective (fact check this, it could be Collective or College) would publish a scathing expose. The contents were largely based on correspondences between Blavatsky and Emma Coulomb, a former accomplice in many of Blavatsky’s scams, now turned traitor. The details of the so-called “Coulomb Affair” are hotly contested, but the end result was strong, public evidence that Blavatsky was a huckster who knowingly falsified her supernatural abilities. I could spend pages cataloging her parlor tricks. Most of them involved bribing servants to hide notes ahead of time, so they could be dramatically revealed –as if summoned from thin air– by the mark. And shock of all shocks: Koot Humi wasn’t real. He was a fiction.
Blavatsky’s detractors, and even her sycophants, will point to her frauds as evidence of her fundamental deceit. As if her fraud makes her unqualified, undeserving, of being an influential occultist. On this point, I see no reason why a woman can’t be a con artist, and an influential theologian. I am an American. We love a grift.
PART 3: BLAVATSKY IN DECLINE
Blavatsky left for India in disgrace. Upon arriving in India, she became gravely ill, and was forced to return to Europe. She would settle in Wurzburg for a short while but loyal Theosophists eventually convinced her to return to London. Her public reputation in shambles, she would cloister herself in this London apartment, and begin work on her next great work: The Secret Doctrine. This apartment would become known as The Blavatsky Lodge. (fact check: was it an apartment? Or was she staying with some wealthy theosophist?) Once she was all settled in, she would do what she did best; establish a small newspaper. This one was called Lucifer. This publication was essentially a vehicle to build hype for the release of The Secret Doctrine.
In 1890 she meets Annie Besant, who we do not have time to discuss. Under Blavatsky’s guidance, Besant would found the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society, an even more explicitly magical sub-group. Later that year, Secret Doctrine is published.
THE SECRET DOCTRINE
The Secret Doctrine is a commentary and translation of an ancient, hitherto unknown, Tibetan text called the Stanzas of Dyzan. It essentially proves that Blavatsky was correct. There was an ancient wisdom tradition beneath all the religions of the world, and it looked a lot like Tibetan Buddhism. We will get this out of the way early: It wasn’t that. The Stanzas of Dyzan didn’t exist. Most of the material in The Secret Doctrine is plagiarized. None of that stopped it from being one of the most influential religious texts of all time. It solved what I am going to call “The Exodeus Gap.”
THE EXODEUS GAP AND THE BLAVATSKY SPECIAL
Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859. This, along with recent breakthroughs in geology, effectively proved that the earth was significantly older than previously thought. Not 6000 years like the bible implies, but closer to 5.5 billion years. This was a problem for the authorities of pretty much every Abrahamic religion.* If the earth is several billion years old, what the hell happened between the book of Genesis, and the book of Exodus? God said let there be light, several billion missing years, Moses says let my people go. What gives?
Many folks didn’t care. So the earth is older than they thought, big whup, they’re not gonna stop going to church on sundays. Some folks had their faith tested. Some people doubled down on the fundamentalism. If there was a conflict between the bible and science, they believed the bible. Some people ended up more in the Spiritualist camp. They believed that religion should be studied in the same way you study rocks and galapagos finches. The point being, that for the time, this was a hot button issue, a big social trend.
If Mme. Helena Blavatsky had one skill, it was noticing social trends, getting out ahead of them, and making them her own. This was her Special Move. For an example, we will turn to an anecdote from her New York spiritualist days. People would ask Blavatsky if she was a Medium, to which she would respond “I am not a Medium, but I do mediate.”
Do you see the maneuver here? This response implies she is fully aware of the hot button trend, but also that she possesses some extra knowledge, and she is willing to share to the interested. Suddenly, she has positioned herself as someone especially knowledgeable, or at least worth listening to. Her work is riven with rhetorical devices like this. She is a master at climbing to the front seat of a social movement, and grabbing the wheel. I have taken to calling this maneuver, The Blavatsky Special.
The Secret Doctrine is Helena using The Blavatsky Special on the popular culture of 1888.
*We will be focusing on Christianity here, but make no mistake, this caused similar divides within Judaism, Islam, and their numerous cousin religions.
Scholars often call The Secret Doctrine “anti-darwin.” In fact, The Secret Doctrine outright says “The real line of evolution differs from the Darwinian, and the two systems are irreconcilable,” (vol2 185) But I will argue that Blavatsky is pulling some clever slight-of-hand here. Blavatsky is not rejecting Darwin, she is attempting to subsume him. She might say the text is anti-darwin, but The Secret Doctrine paints a grand narrative about the evolution of the human race and its religions, and it uses the Exodus gap as a blank canvas.
Volume One of the secret doctrine is a cosmogenesis, a story about how we went from “big empty nothingness” to “a universe.” We do not have time to summarize the entire creation story, but imagine a combination of the book of genesis and various hindu–buddhist stories of a similar nature, you’ll be close enough to the ballpark to catch a pop-fly.
Volume Two of the Secret Doctrine is an anthropogenesis, a story about how we went from a big wet empty ball of rocks to a big wet ball of rocks with people on it. This is the juicy bit. This details how humanity is just the latest in a series of seven root races split into seven sub-races First off were the Polarians, beings of etheric energy who inhabited the vast oceans of primordial earth and reproduced by mitosis. Next were the Hyperboreans, a race of golden yellow people from the frigid north who reproduced by budding. Third, the Lemurians, who were around during the Jurassic era, lived on a now-sunken continent that is now Oceania, and reproduced by laying eggs. Fourth were the Atlanteans, who lived in the Mediterranean. Fifth were the Aryans, and yes, we are going to talk about that.
BLAVATSKY AND THE ARYAN ATLANTIS
“Diffusion” is an anthropological term. One ancient guy figured out a way to add weird mold to bread so it puffs up when you bake it. He told a friend, that friend traveled to show the folks in the next valley over about the new puffy bread mold. The process repeats, historians and anthropologist can track the movement of cultures by when and where they started having leavened bread.
“Radical diffusionism” is the idea that everything was invented by one culture, which then spread across the globe. This idea was very popular during the Victorian era, especially in Europe and the United States, all of whom were playing a game of “who can have the biggest globe-spanning empire.” The idea of Radical Diffusionism is, needless to say, very racist, but that is not how the victorian era British Empire saw themselves. They were traveling to far off places, bringing culture, education, and technology to barbarous and underdeveloped lands and backwards peoples. A thought begins to emerge: What if this has happened before? What if, a long long time ago, there was an empire just like us who brought culture and technology to everyone on earth? Only to fall one day as all empires do.
Enter Atlantis! The ancient, enlightened civilization of philosopher kings who were swallowed by the waves! Plato wrote about them, so therefore they must be real. Atlantis was a quick and easy shorthand for “The ancient culture responsible for everything cool.” What was Atlantis like? Well, it depends on the writer. Atlantis has a curious way of resembling the exact political system a given writer supports. Atlantis is a vessel, a big jar labeled “the ideal civilization” which a writer could fill with whatever they liked.
Blavatsky filled Atlantis with two important things: Anticolonialism, and established understandings of European race science, read: She wanted to keep the concept of an Aristocracy, and Antisemitism.
In the introduction to this section, I referred to Blavatsky as an “innovator in antisemitism”, this part of the text is why. Blavatsky wrote in an increasingly industrialized world. Writers and philosophers all across the western world saw our modernization and detachment from nature akin to a spiritual fall from grace. Modern humans were disconnected from the earth and the natural forces that shaped our lives. The spiritualists mirrored this sentiment. The 1870s were flush with literature about ancient humans born with firm connections to the divine and incredible magical powers. Blavatsky made a critical addition to this mythology:
When Atlantis fell, its people emigrated to the continent, and became the Aryan race. The Aryan culture then spread out across the globe becoming all the races of the world today. One consequence of this sub-division was the “semitic people.”
Where the rest of the Aryans saw beauty in the unwritten mysticism and esotericism of their religion, those pesky Jews actually wanted to know what the hell was going on with God. Their desire to take a peek under the hood of esotericism caused a spiritual cataclysm, which damaged the connection between humanity and the divine. Simply put; Blavatsky says humans aren’t psychic anymore because the Jews wrote their religion down. Now, it is important to note that Blavatsky was not more antisemitic than the average Joe. It was 1885. The average Joe was pretty damn antisemitic. But! According to Blavatsky, Antisemitism was now of cosmological importance.
Blavatsky wasn’t a Nazi, she was born too early to join, but her ideas would prove fertile ground for the people who would eventually become the Nazis. A few decades later, a man named Guido Von List would refine the ugliest elements of Blavatsky’s theology into a new system called Ariosophy. This would become foundational mythology for one of the groups that would eventually become the German Nazi party. Is Blavatsky to blame? No, not directly. It took two generations of writers tailoring Theosophy to be even more racist before you get to the Nazis. But, the strangest corners of Nazi mythology bear Blavatsky-shaped footprints.
END ASIDE
THE FINAL YEARS OF MME HELENA BLAVATSKY
In 1885, the gold standard of people studying strange phenomena in a scientific way was the SRS, the Spiritual Research Society. Blavatsky had been called to England to test her mettle in front of a panel of SRS researchers. Her reputation was on the line, and it would not escape intact.
When the SRS published their findings as a document called the “Hodgson Report.” it was disastrous for Blavatsky. An old accomplice in her scams, WIlliam Emmette Coleman, had turned traitor. Blavatsky was accused of being all sorts of things she definitely was: a liar, a cheater, a fraudster, etc, and something she only might have been: A Russian spy.*
This infamous “Hodgson Report” had this to say about Blavatsky. “For our own part, we regard her neither as the mouthpiece of hidden seers, nor as a mere vulgar adventuress; we think that she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting impostors in history.”
Blavatsky would die with her reputation in tatters. In the spring of 1891, while living in the home of Annie Besant, she would catch Influenza. On the afternoon of 8 May 1891, she would succumb to the disease. Theosophists commemorate May 8th as “White Lotus Day.”
While Blavatsky died with her public reputation in tatters, her intellectual legacy was intact. By the time she died, a generation of writers had already produced a corpus of work responding to her ideas. In 1936, H.P. Lovecraft published At The Mountains of Madness, a work in which archeologists delve into the esoteric history of humanity, only to discover terrible things. Much of Lovecraft's work, nay the entire Miskatonic mythos, has its roots in direct criticism of Theosophical mythology.
*If she was a spy that would make her even cooler.
NOTES:
REQUIRED: By the time she was disgraced, a huge corpus of work based on her thought was already written. This secured her intellectual legacy
Notices, mythologizes, and gets ahead of cultural/spiritual trends (e.g., evolution)
OPTIONAL: Expand on the whole “genesis gap” and how she appropriates and colonizes Darwinian evolution
“And this is why people don’t realize they’re spouting Blavatsky’s metaphysics”
ToDo:
Add to the sidebars about her two major texts
Roots:
A generalized western mysticism
James Fenimore Cooper novels about native americans
Reacting to Spiritualism
Before her we need a section on spiritualism.
Raymond Lull, Robert Fludd, Henry More
Karl Von Eckhartschausen
Notable Ideas:
Occultism v spiritualism
Ancient Wisdom Religion
The Theosophical Society
Ascended Masters
Influenced:
I mean basically everyone
General Outline:
ERA 1: YUNG VATSKY
Born August 12 1831 to a mishmash of european nobility.
Supposedly a medium at a young age
“I remember that when addressed as a medium, she (Mme. Blavatsky) used to laugh and assure us she was no medium, but only a mediator between mortals and beings we knew nothing about’.” - Blavatsky’s Sister speaking about her quoted in Hanegraaf 178
Claimed that her grandfather was a mason who gave her access to a grand occult library
In 1849, at the age of 18, she was married to Nikofor Blavatsky, and left him 3 months later
She had an unprecedented level of freedom at that point in history, much less for a woman. She had access to essentially bottomless wealth and complete freedom of movement.
She traveled the world, circumnavigating the globe several times. This bitch was everywhere.
FIRST KOOT HOOMI LETTER
Around 1871 she arrives in Cairo and founded the Societe Spirite. Which is initially a more “scientific” occult investigation group that rapidly just becomes a magical society. This would be the blueprint for the Theosophical Society
ERA 2: VATSKY AND OLCOTT
July 7th 1873 she arrives in the US. iN 1874 She meets Henry Steel Olcott. The two rapidly become BFFS and lifelong creative partners.
Blavatsky loves getting involved in the local newspaper scene
Here, we get the first peek into her views on Occultism vs Spiritualism
Spiritualism: Concerned with the investigation of psychic phenomena, but devoid of doctrine.
Occultism: Spiritualism + the doctrine of Western Esotericism
Her theory being that all these seemingly unconnected organizations in history actually have a common doctrinal thread.
So she makes a name for herself by publishing a lot about eastasian religions and her theories on these ancient “Occult Brotherhoods” this makes her pretty popular.
Shes working on her first big work. People come to visit her at her apartment while she works, and these meetings eventually become the Theosophical Society.
“On September 7, a lecture was given here by George Henry Felt (1831-1906) entitled “The Lost Canon of Proportion of the Egyptians”. In which he proved the existence of numerous elemental spirits within the Egyptian zodiac, and implied that these spirits could be invoked through ritual and chemical means.
Olcott reportedly passed Blavatsky a note that posed “[would it] not be a good thing to form a society for this kind of study” hanegraaf 180
ERA 3 - THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
1875 the Theosophical Society is founded in America by Olcott and Blavatskty
1877, Isis Unveiled is published. This is basically Blavatsky’s thesis for the existence of the “ancient wisdom religion” identified with magic and the occult
SIDEBAR: ISIS UNVEILED
We gotta talk about this its a watershed text of western esotericism
Heavily criticized for Plagarism and yeah
1879 she moves to India and never returns to the US. Her arrival in India gets a ton of favorable press attention. The editor of one magazine was even a fan.
1879 they start publishing a monthly magazine called The Theosophist (I have some issues of this lol)’
1880 two important things happen:
Blavatsky and Olcott accept the five precepts and three gems, becoming buddhists. Although Blavatsky already kinda called herself a buddhist.
They get a long series of letters from the AMs who tell them the Theosophical Society is the inheritor of the secret wisdom religion
Also around this time. We should mention that the Theosophical Society is CONSTANTLY fracturing, or threatening to fracture.
The Theosophical Society is also now popular enough that it is coming under fire from other groups. The fact that Blavatsky is attempting to sell Occultism with an edge of science opens it to more scrutiny than usual.
1884 Blavatsky and Olcott agree to a meeting with the Society for Psychical Research, who are generally impressed with her, but that will not last.
The Madras Christian Collective publishes a SCATHING expose in 1884, based on some correspondences B had with Emma Coulomb. This was essentially an accusation of fraud.
1885 the SPR sends an observer to India to do some investigation into the fraud. Specifically, to investigate the competency of the witnesses. The findings could not be more damming.
‘For our own part, we regard her neither as the mouthpiece of hidden seers, nor as a mere vulgar adventuress; we think that she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting impostors in history’.
ERA 4 - THE BLAVATSKY LODGE
Leaves in relative disgrace for India, becomes Ill, heads back to europe, floats around Wurtzburg for a bit, ends up in London working on Secret Doctrine. In 1887 she becomes the Blavatsky Lodge.
Establishes a magazine called Lucifer as public propaganda for Secret Doctrine
1890 we meet Annie Besant
1890 B establishes the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society, a few days later, Secret Doctrine is published
Much of SD is based on translations of a “hitherto unknown” tibetan text called the Book of Dyzan, and later The Golden Precepts. These books almost definitely never existed lol.
Now, plenty of people criticized her, but the most damning was actually fellow Occultist William Emmette Coleman, who claimed she plagarized contemporary sources like “Ennemoser’s History of Magic and Demonologia, Dunlap’s Sod: The Son of Man and Sod: The Mysteries of Adoni, King’s Gnostics, Jacolliot’s Christna et le Christ and Le Spiritisme dans le monde. He goes on to name about ONE HUNDRED secondary sources. Though to be fair, none of the living authors who she plagarized ever indicted her. Editorial position: Its likely she never actually intended to plagarize. She is not the sort of person who cares overmuch for formal citation standards, but plagiarism is plagiarism.
When she died, Theosophists described her significant achievements as lying not in her mediumship, but in her skill as a syncretist. I am inclined to agree.
ADDITIONAL NOTES
Described as a “magpie” for spiritualism
Start with Orientalism?
In the 1600s, Egypt is kinda the center of the ideas of magic
But eventually it moves to India, thats largely because of Voltaire, specifically in The Princess of Babylon, which has a golden age civilization on the banks of Ganghes
Probably the most influential orientalist of his day, (1694-1778)
“On The Spirit of Nations” which lists China and India as the oldest. This wasn’t an archealogical argument, it was for DIFFUSIONISM
DIFFUSIONISM: Its the Atlantis myth. The idea that all culture and technology are descendant from a few ancient civilizations. Radical diffusionists believe in the Atlantis myth.
Voltaire was arguing against the primacy of Judeo-christian ideas as the progenitor of all wisdom. By arguing that China and India were older, he’s making a pretty big claim for the time.
He also argues the jews stole their culture from other people whoops
Dan Eddlestien. Blavatsky and the Hyperborean Atlantis
https://pismin.com/10.1353/sec.2010.0055
Okay. Her defenders will say that she was simply echoing the mentality of her time. Her detractors will say that she was not just a mirror, she contributed something new. She combined two previously disconnected ideas; antisemitism and the new atlantis theory. She gave antisemitism “cosmological importance.” The jews were now an inevitable enemy on a cosmic scale. Although, to be fair, the Jews as some ultimate spiritual enemy is nothing new. One need only look at the history of christian polemics. The greatest effect here is, I think, the secularization of a previously christian idea.
Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality by Gary Lachman
Europeans see themselves as conquering the whole world and they’re like damn maybe this happened before. Hence the Atlantis myth becomes pretty popular
Jean Sylvane Bailey tries to find atlantis.
In bailey we see a new appreciation for mythology. Previously seen as the purview of “pre rational” civilizations,
The idea being that there’s truth in a lot of myths so we should study them. But many scholars decide that they are all branches of a great historical truth that has been corrupted or fallen.
Imagine. IF you think that Atlantis was just like you but in the past. Your civilization is kinda the inheritor of their mythology. Thats YOUR mythology.
Bailey is who MOVED atlantis. He read old greek mythology and theorized that based on the position and occurrences of an eclipse, that Atlantis was actually closer to the north pole. In Hyperborea.
His argument is not terribly popular. 20,000 leagues under the sea is kinda Verne mocking Bailey.
Blavatsky’s dad is a military guy. So she is moving all the time
Blavatsky’s dad is a celebrated novelist. All her books are a bout unhappy women in marriages to brutes
Blavatsky gets to spend time with the Kalmuk (a nomadic russian steppe tribe who are buddhist) bc a family member i
s appointed some position of ambassadorship or something idk check the Lachman biography
Blavatsky was friends with a Wizard-Prince named Alexsander Gollittzin maybe
Who was apparently friends with KARL VON ECKHARTSCHAUSEN
Blavatskys favorite Bullwer-lytton book was Zononi, which is about the rosicrucians
A big part of theosophy is Aeceticism. So its worth discussing her apparent asexuality.
https://www.amazon.com/Madame-Blavatsky-Woman-Behind-Myth-ebook/dp/B00J2IK7YK
Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth
SHWEP BIOGRAPHY
https://www.blavatskyarchives.com/theosophypdfs/early_theosophical_publications_authors.htm
Bevir, Mark. “The West Turns Eastward: Madame Blavatsky and the Transformation of the Occult Tradition” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994), 747-767.
Carlson, Maria. ‘No Religion Higher than Truth’: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875-1922. Princeton University Press, 1993.
Chajes, Julie. Recycled Lives: A History of Reincarnation in Blavatsky’s Theosophy. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Faxneld, Per. “Blavatsky the Satanist: Luciferianism in Theosophy, and Its Feminist Implications.” Temenos 48.2 (2013).
Ferguson, Christine. “The Luciferian Public Sphere: Theosophy and Editorial Seekership in the 1880s.” Victorian Periodicals Review 53.1 (2020): 76–101.
French, Brendan. “Blavatsky, Dostoevskii, and Occult Starchestvo.” Aries (Leiden, Netherlands) 7.2 (2007): 161–184.
Hokanson, Katya. “Russian Women Travelers in Central Asia and India.” The Russian Review, Vol. 70, No. 1 (January 2011), 1-19.
Lachman, Gary. Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality. Tarcher Perigee, 2012.
Lubelsky, Isaac, and Yael Lotan, trans. Celestial India: Madame Blavatsky and the Birth of Indian Nationalism. Equinox, 2012.
Murphet, Howard. When Daylight Comes: A Biography of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Quest, 1975.
Reenberg Sand, Erik, and Tim Rudbøg. Imagining the East: The Early Theosophical Society. Oxford UP, 2020 [contains several excellent articles, too numerous to list separately].
Viswanathan, Gauri. “In Search of Madame Blavatsky: Reading the Exoteric, Retrieving the Esoteric.” Representations, Vol. 141 No. 1, Winter 2018; 67-94.
