Currents · by Frater Custos · 16-minute read

Theosophy

Out of a New York flat in 1875 comes the vocabulary with which the West still speaks today of karma, reincarnation, subtle bodies and invisible masters. Almost nobody knows where it comes from, and almost everything that is told about the trial that overwhelmed it is wrong — in both directions.

On the evening of 7 September 1875, at 46 Irving Place in New York, some seventeen people gathered in the flat of a forty-four-year-old Russian lady to hear an amateur Egyptologist, George Henry Felt, speak on the lost canon of Egyptian proportions. Towards the end Felt let drop that he would be able to teach those present how to make the elemental spirits visible. The next day the group met again to found a society. Felt never kept the promise, and left the scene almost at once.

The lady was Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. The lawyer and colonel who chaired the meeting was Henry Steel Olcott, lately of the commission of inquiry into Lincoln's assassination. The young secretary was William Quan Judge. Out of that room came the Theosophical Society, and with it the lexicon used a hundred and fifty years later by the neighbourhood yoga manual, the new age novel and most of the people convinced they are speaking of Eastern wisdom.

Two birth dates, and a first object that was not there

The Society has two birthdays, both legitimate. 7-8 September 1875 is the birth in fact. 17 November 1875, the day of Olcott's inaugural address as President-Founder, is the official date: he chose it himself, by analogy with the inauguration of an American president. Those who cite only the second are not wrong, but they lose the scene with Felt and the elementals, which is the real scene.

More interesting is what the Society set out to do. The first object of the theosophists is today, universally, the universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or colour. In the founding act of 1875 it is not there. The only purpose approved on 30 October 1875 was «to collect and diffuse a knowledge of the laws which govern the universe». Brotherhood appears between 1878 and 1879 and becomes the first object only between 1881 and 1882, after the move to India.

It is not a bureaucratic detail. A society born to study occult phenomena rewrites itself, in contact with British colonialism in Asia, as a society for brotherhood among peoples. It is the shift that explains all the rest: why Olcott would become a leading figure in the Sinhalese Buddhist revival, why Annie Besant would preside over the Indian National Congress, and why a sect of New York spiritualists would end up in the political history of India.

The gap

Of Blavatsky's biography the frame is documented: born at Ekaterinoslav in 1831, daughter of a German-Russian officer and of a writer, a very young and very brief marriage to Nikifor Blavatsky, flight. Then, between 1849 and 1873, a quarter of a century for which the only source is herself, in versions that do not agree with one another.

In that gap she places the travels in Tibet and the apprenticeship with the Masters. Here the correct formulation has to be weighed in the balance, because both camps get it wrong. There is no external proof of her Tibetan sojourns. The dates she gives are contradictory, and her version — a detail almost nobody notices — does not include Lhasa, which is instead the heart of the later theosophical vulgate. But absence of documentation is not documentation to the contrary: for a woman travelling alone in Central Asia in the middle of the nineteenth century, the absence of corroboration is what one would expect in any case. The honest sentence is: we do not know, and whoever says they know — one way or the other — is adding something to the papers.

The two books

Isis Unveiled comes out in 1877, in two volumes, and sells its first printing in a week. The Secret Doctrine comes out in 1888 and presents itself as a commentary on a most ancient text, the Book of Dzyan, of which Blavatsky declares she has seen the original.

Of that book philology has never found a trace. No manuscript, no independent citation, no witness. The same holds for the Book of the Golden Precepts from which The Voice of the Silence is said to derive. And here something happens that deserves to be told in full, because it is the kind of fact that suits nobody: that text without an original has received recognition from Tibetan Buddhism at its highest levels. In July 1927, from Peking, an endorsement came from the entourage of the Ninth Panchen Lama — the letter is signed by his interpreter and secretary, B. T. Chang, a detail that has to be stated because in theosophical publishing the text is usually attributed directly to the Panchen Lama. And the Fourteenth Dalai Lama wrote the preface to the centenary edition, in 1989. The two things — spiritual recognition and the philological non-existence of the original — are both true and do not contradict one another, but they have to be kept separate, and as a rule they are not.

On plagiarism: in 1895 William Emmette Coleman published a list according to which The Secret Doctrine contained over two thousand unattributed passages, taken largely from contemporary Western works. That Blavatsky compiled extensively without citing is settled and is no longer disputed by anyone. But Coleman's counts have never been verified by third parties, the documentary volume he had promised never appeared, the author was a spiritualist at open war with Theosophy, he had himself been accused of plagiarism in 1881, and his list appeared as an appendix to a book of accusation. The fact holds; the number does not.

The trial

In 1879 Blavatsky and Olcott move to India; from 1882 the headquarters is at Adyar, near Madras. There are produced the phenomena that will give the Society its fame and its ruin: letters from the Masters — Koot Hoomi and Morya — materialising inside a reliquary cabinet, the shrine, hung in the Occult Room.

In 1884, in the absence of the founders, the housekeeper Emma Coulomb and her husband Alexis made public letters in which Blavatsky was said to have instructed them to build the tricks: sliding panels, holes in the walls, a cloth head to simulate the apparitions. The Society for Psychical Research in London sent a young investigator, Richard Hodgson. His report, presented on 26 June 1885 and published in the Proceedings, vol. III, closes with the phrase that has accompanied Blavatsky for a century and a half: one of the most accomplished, ingenious and interesting impostors in history.

This is the part of the affair in which the greatest number of false statements circulate, and they have to be untangled one by one.

Who Harrison was matters, because it is the reason his intervention carries weight. Vernon Harrison (1912-2001) had been president of the Royal Photographic Society between 1974 and 1976, and head of research at Thomas De La Rue, the firm that prints banknotes and passports, with the specific task of studying the methods of forgers: a professional in the recognition of documentary forgeries. He was a member of the SPR and was not a theosophist. In 1986 he published in the SPR's Journal an essay entitled J'accuse; in 1997 he supplemented it with the examination of 1,323 slides of the Mahatma letters held at the British Library.

His conclusions, in their real scope: the Hodgson report is a partisan document that abandons any claim to scientific impartiality; the handwriting analysis on which it rests is methodologically untenable, and in the letters three distinct and consistent hands can be recognised, with the characters of natural writing and not of forgery; the hypothesis that the Blavatsky-Coulomb letters were forged is today very strong, and if that falls, much of the case for the prosecution falls with it.

And, with equal clarity, what Harrison did not establish: that the Adyar phenomena were genuine, that the Mahatmas exist, that Blavatsky never produced a fraudulent phenomenon in her life. A reviewer within the SPR, Leslie Price, added the limit that has to be added: Harrison worked on photographs, the Coulomb letters no longer exist, and neither does the shrine. The matter remains unconcluded, and prudence is needed on both sides.

Those who want a conviction and those who want an acquittal will find nothing here. It is precisely because the question does not close that it goes on being interesting.

The schisms

Blavatsky dies on 8 May 1891 in London. From there on the history of theosophy is a history of divisions, and each one produces a current that is still alive.

In 1894-95 the Judge case: William Quan Judge, head of the American section, is accused of having forged messages from the Masters. The American section separates from Adyar. On Judge's death, in 1896, he is succeeded by Katherine Tingley, who takes the headquarters to Point Loma, San Diego, where she builds a community with an open-air Greek theatre, schools and glass domes.

At Adyar command is taken by Annie Besant — Fabian, trade unionist, feminist, already a leading figure in the matchgirls' strike of 1888 — and Charles Webster Leadbeater, a former Anglican priest and clairvoyant, a figure as influential as he was controversial, against whom grave accusations were made that marked his career. It is to those two, and not to Blavatsky, that the images now universal are owed: the aura with coded colours of Thought-Forms (1901) and Man Visible and Invisible (1902), and the schematic version of the subtle bodies found in any contemporary manual.

In 1912-13 Rudolf Steiner leaves, general secretary of the German section, and founds Anthroposophy. Here too the current sequence is inverted: he was not expelled because he rejected Krishnamurti. It was he who excluded from his own section the members of the Order of the Star, in breach of the statutes, and Adyar responded by revoking the German section's charter. The underlying disagreement was christological: for Steiner the Mystery of Golgotha is unique and unrepeatable, and cannot be reduced to one of the periodic appearances of a World Teacher.

The boy who dissolved his own order

In 1909, on the beach at Adyar, Leadbeater notices an Indian boy of fourteen and declares that he sees in him an aura without a trace of selfishness. It is Jiddu Krishnamurti. He is in effect adopted by Besant, educated in England and presented to the world as the vehicle of the World Teacher. Around him is built the Order of the Star in the East, with tens of thousands of adherents, a castle in the Netherlands and annual gatherings.

On 3 August 1929, at Ommen, before about three thousand people and with Besant sitting beside him, Krishnamurti opens the annual camp with the parable of the devil who is walking with a friend and sees a man pick up something from the ground. «What did that man pick up?» asks the friend. «He picked up a piece of Truth», the devil replies. «That is a very bad business for you, then.» «Not at all: I am going to let him organize it.»

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

Then he dissolved the Order, returned the property to the donors and refused ever after to have followers. It is worth saying what he did not do, because the vulgate tells it as an unmasking: he accused nobody of fraud, he did not denounce Theosophy, and he remained affectionately attached to Besant until her death. The argument with which he demolished the organisation built around himself was structural, not moral: truth cannot be organised. For the Theosophical Society it was all the same a blow from which many sections did not recover: it had reorganised itself for decades around that expectation.

The root races, and how to say the right thing

In The Secret Doctrine humanity passes through seven «root races» on scales of millions of years; the first have no physical body, the third is Lemurian, the fourth Atlantean, the fifth is called Aryan. On this point two things are commonly said, and both are false.

The first is that Theosophy is the occult root of Nazism. The author most cited in support of this thesis is Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism (1985), who maintains the opposite: Austro-German Ariosophy is «a symptom rather than an influence». The book is written against the sensationalist literature of Nazism as a magical sect. It documents that there is no proof of contacts between Hitler and the Thule-Gesellschaft, that the memberships of Himmler and Hans Frank in that society are false, and that the only source for the meeting between Hitler and Lanz von Liebenfels is Lanz himself, in a late interview. The subtitle of the American edition of 1992 promises much more than the text delivers, and a good part of the mistaken citations arises from there.

The second is that Theosophy has nothing to do with it and was merely put to use. This too is false. Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels drew directly on the root races and on Atlantis: the formal filiation is there, and is documented. What is not in Blavatsky is the content that Ariosophy poured into it — Nordicism, biological antisemitism, eugenics. «Aryan», in her, means Indo-European with its centre of gravity in India, according to the usage of nineteenth-century comparative philology, not Germanic. And Theosophy was later persecuted: the theosophical societies and the anthroposophical one were dissolved in the Third Reich.

One last point remains, which must not be removed for the sake of symmetry: the root races are evolutionary stages of consciousness, not ethnic groups — but the text also contains hierarchical statements about living populations of its own time, and those are there and have to be read. Whoever omits the first thing is conducting a trial; whoever omits the second is producing a brochure.

What it really left us

Here lies the reason why Theosophy deserves a page even for those who care nothing about it. The criterion is this: it invented almost none of these terms. It made them current in the West, and changed their meaning in doing so.

But the most remarkable case is reincarnation, and it is the reason why Julie Chajes is worth reading (Recycled Lives, Oxford University Press, 2019). Two facts, both documented.

First: in Isis Unveiled, in 1877, Blavatsky substantially denies ordinary human reincarnation, admitting it only as an exception. The doctrine of serial rebirth as a universal law — the one the whole world today associates with theosophy and with India — is acquired afterwards, in the Indian years.

Second, and stronger: modern Western reincarnation is not an import from India. It is a nineteenth-century European compound — Platonism, French spiritism, evolutionism, the life sciences, orientalism — that presents itself as Eastern wisdom. Progressive, evolutionary, with memory of past lives, without the character of condemnation that rebirth has in the Indian sources. Theosophy did not bring reincarnation to the West: it invented it in the form in which we know it, and then attributed it to the East.

The rest of the legacy is plain to the naked eye once one knows where to look. Kandinsky cites Blavatsky in Concerning the Spiritual in Art; Mondrian was a member of the Theosophical Society; Scriabin was steeped in it. In India, Besant presided over the National Congress in 1917 and Olcott was one of the architects of the Sinhalese Buddhist revival, with his Buddhist Catechism of 1881 and his work on the Buddhist flag — which, however, contrary to what one reads, was designed by the Colombo Committee in 1885: Olcott intervened afterwards, to bring it back to usable proportions.

And finally Gurdjieff, of whom these pages speak elsewhere. Here too the two current assertions are both wrong. That the Fourth Way derives from Theosophy is false: on the decisive points the doctrines are opposed — evolution is not automatic, the soul is not given at birth, clairvoyance is regarded with distrust. That it has nothing to do with it is equally false: the milieu is the same and so is the recruitment, Ouspensky first of all comes from there. And the two founding initiatory journeys — Blavatsky's Tibet and Gurdjieff's Sarmoung Brotherhood — have exactly the same evidential standing, which is none.

One question remains that holds for anyone, believer or not. How is it possible that a doctrine whose founding text comments on a non-existent book, whose trial for fraud never closed, and whose racial categories were plundered by horrible people, has furnished the West with half the vocabulary in which it speaks of spirituality? The answer is neither «because it was true» nor «because people are credulous». It is that Theosophy did something nobody else was doing in 1875: it took seriously, at one and the same time, science, the Asian religions and the idea that the universe has a meaning, and it built a language in which the three things could stand in the same sentence. That language has outlived those who invented it, the proofs that are not there and the uses that have been made of it. We still speak it, almost always without knowing it.