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HPB AND HER
'MASTERS' OF THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
AN EXTENDED
FAMILY: EXTRAMURAL MASTERS
The problematical
relationship between ante-mortem and post-mortem spiritual progression which to
varying degrees flummoxed Moses, Hockley, and Britten is first given
comprehensive treatment by Blavatsky in 1877. With the establishment of
her cherished dream of an occult fellowship in the form of the Theosophical
Society, and with the support and direction granted her by her Masters,
Blavatsky felt the time was ripe for the publication of her first major
esoteric treatise. Though her early articles exhibited the promise of an
inquiring mind (and a combative temperament), few could have failed to have
been impressed by the sheer scope and size of her first opus, Isis Unveiled. Published
in two volumes, running to in excess of thirteen hundred pages, Isis Unveiled
is the first instalment of Blavatsky's all-embracing mythography and within its
pages the Masters gestalt is shown as the fulcrum upon which her cosmo-historical paradigm balances. That said,
Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled is also by all accounts a prolix work, tending
to sententiousness and aggressive polemics, particularly with regard to
Blavatsky's personal bugbears: materialist positivism and dogmatic ecclesialism. Its rather strident tone has sometimes
led to its author being accused of unreconstructed iconoclasm to the detriment
of her higher ambition, which purported to be an attempt to establish an
all-inclusive testimony of the failure of materialist science and institutional
religion to provide satisfying answers to fundamental questions of ontology and
purpose. For Blavatsky, science had reneged on its promise.
The latter part of
the nineteenth century witnessed a shift in the perceptions of how the social
sciences were to be studied and, perhaps more significantly, by whom. A
heightened sensitivity toward the taxonomic ordering of materials into discrete
social scientific categories, as well as the ever-increasing hoard of data
available to Western researchers, combined to ensure the ascendancy of the
specialist scholar and the passing of the 'gentleman amateur'. By the time
Blavatsky penned Isis Unveiled, grandiloquent all-inclusive testaments
and eccentric universal theories (at least in the study of religion and
mythography) were, for the most part, a thing of the past in the
academy. For esotericists, though, such trends
in academic epistemology meant very little: after all, those granted a special
dispensation and in possession of secret truth require no warrant for their generalities. Certainly
for Blavatsky, the real authors of Isis Unveiled were her Masters; she
was but the amanuensis. Thus her cosmo-historical
pronouncements were subsequently elevated to the status of divine dictate by
her disciples, a position they continue to hold for most ardent Theosophists.
Though Blavatsky
included input from selected acquaintances (Sotheran,
Rawson, Olcott, and others), the work is demonstrably her own
production. That said, it should be noted that the erratic nature of its
creation, the breadth of its erudition, and even the variety of calligraphic
scripts evident in the manuscript, convinced many in her acquaintance that
Blavatsky had been 'entered' psychically and physically by her Master or
Masters, and that he or they were the true authors. Such a notion was
further emphasised by Blavatsky's claim to a
comprehensive ignorance of matters scientific:
I had never been at
any college, and what I knew I had taught myself; I have never pretended to
scholarship in the sense of modern research; I had then barely read any
scientific European works, knew little of Western philosophy and science.
In fact, Blavatsky's
Master operated not simply as inspiration for her endeavour,
but in an entirely active capacity:
Whenever I am told
to write, I sit down and obey, and then I can write easily upon almost
anything - metaphysics, psychology, philosophy, ancient religions, zoology,
natural sciences, or what not. I never put myself the question: 'Can
I write on this subject?...' or, 'Am I equal to the task? but I simply sit down
and write. Why? Because somebody who knows all dictates to
me...My MASTER, and occasionally others whom I knew in my travels years ago
[...] He allows me to simply copy what I write from manuscripts, and even
printed matter that pass before my eyes, in the air...
Blavatsky was careful
to assure her readers, particularly those who were members of the nascent
Society, that although Isis Unveiled was the product of meta-empirical
agency, and contained heretofore unpublished revelation, it was not produced by
any species of automatic writing: 'I have never been unconscious one
single instant'. Such demonstrative declarations from Blavatsky are
a concerted attempt to contrast the production of her writings from those of Spiritualists
such as Moses, and yet at the same time to retain their intrinsic revelatory
character as having been generated with supramundane insight. The reader
is left in no doubt of Blavatsky's first-hand acquaintance with those entrusted
with esoteric arcana: the first sentence of the preface emphasises
that '[t]he work now submitted to public judgment is the fruit of a somewhat
intimate acquaintance with Eastern adepts and study of their science.'
Few analyses of Isis
Unveiled have been attempted. Those which exist have tended to divide
neatly between scholars who dismiss the work as pompous and uniformed
posturing, and those who assert Blavatsky's purpose to have been nothing more
sophisticated than a bombastic frontal assault on entrenched religious and
scientific orthodoxies. Certainly, the evidence for such an assault is
demonstrably present, yet few have intuited that her desire was neither
anarchic nor atheistical, but rather to highlight her
conviction that materialist science and institutional Christianity, far from
being at enmity, were indeed complementary, if odd, bedfellows. As it
happened, both were, in Blavatskian historical
mapping, inherently transient and symptomatic of devolutionary
tendencies. Blavatsky's goal was larger than simple nihilism and involved
nothing less than the dismantling of the exclusivist presuppositions of Church
and science in order to remove the stigma which had occluded humanity from an
unimpeded vision of its own origins and destiny. Unsurprisingly, it would
be the Masters who would remove the offending scales:
The universe is
there, and we know that we exist; but how did it come, and how did we appear in
it? Denied an answer by the representatives of physical learning, and
excommunicated and anathematized for our blasphemous curiosity by the spiritual
usurpers, what can we do, but turn for information to the sages who meditated
upon the subject ages before the molecules of our philosophers aggregated in
ethereal space?
To achieve this end
Blavatsky was required to paint with a very broad palette indeed.
For all of its
Oriental airs, the Weltanschauung of Isis Unveiled remains
steadfastly grounded in established Western philosophical and historical
reflection. As an example, the first volume, devoted to an indictment of
scientific materialism, conjures the Indic Mahayuga
as evidence of a cosmo-historical cyclic periodicity
in order to counter the linear visioning of time so prevalent in Thomas Huxley
(1825-1895) and, above all, Auguste Comte (1798-1857). Yet such Indian
borrowings are incorporated into Blavatsky's programme
not solely so as to promulgate India as the matrix of human spiritual and
cultural history, as too many Blavatsky scholars have repeatedly
assumed, but more keenly in order to emphasise
the universalist aspirations of her preexisting Occidentally-generated spiritualised processus
theory. In reality, the Indic materials at this point add little other
than a vocabulary to conceptual figurations whose grammar was already available
from classical models of time and history, such as those of Hesiod (c. 750
B.C.E.) and Aristotle (384-355 B.C.E.), or from the expansive visions of such
luminaries of esotericism as Boehme and Swedenborg.
In a similar vein
there has been a noted tendency in Blavatsky scholarship to dismiss the syncretising elements so evident in Isis Unveiled
as but the prelude to what is perceived to be her ultimate wholesale
subjugation of Western motifs to Eastern ones. Consequently, commentators
have, for the most part, mistakenly conflated her pre-Isis Masters of
Wisdom with the ascetic adepts of Buddhist and Hindu devotional praxis who
figure prominently in Isis Unveiled. Though it is true that this
confusion is only aided by Blavatsky's tendency to conflate terms at will, the
work does, however, insist that the latter comprise a less exalted subset of
the former:
Many and varied are
the nationalities to which belong the disciples of that mysterious school [the
Masters], and many the side-shoots of that one primitive stock. The secresy [sic] preserved by these sub-lodges, as well
as by the one and supreme great lodge, has ever been proportionate to the
activity of religious persecutions; and now, in the face of the growing
materialism, their very existence is becoming a mystery.
This last comment has
a particular practical resonance for Blavatsky's Theosophical imaging. For
her, the Masters were a people apart, transcending the particulars of culture,
creed, and nationality. Attendant upon this emphatic universalism, the astute
reader can propose a simple observation: if the 'disciples of that mysterious
school' exist in all places and times, and are not confined by the cultural,
geographical, and linguistic barriers which encircle the general human
populace, then why is it that the Theosophical Masters personify ever more Orientalising traits? From the recognisably
Western John King of the early 1870s, thence to the Egyptians Serapis and Tuitit Bey of 1875, and later to the Kashmiri Brahmin
Mahatma Koot Hoomi and
Rajput prince Mahatma Morya of the late 1870s,
Blavatsky's Masters appear to steadily - even geographically - remove
themselves from any engagement with the Western complex. Intriguingly,
this 'Indicisation' of the Masters mythologem is
exactly emblematic of Blavatsky's personal philosophical pilgrimage of the
later 1870s.
It is true that the
late nineteenth century swell of acceptable translations of ancient Eastern religious
and mythological texts, as well as the burgeoning interest in Religionswissenschaft (attending upon Friedrich Max
Müller's conviction that in the science of religion, 'He who knows one,
knows none') had combined to establish the Orient as a promising
subject for the Western gaze. Yet it is surely less the attractions of
the East than the active hazards of the West which ultimately convinced
Blavatsky that, though her conceptual framework would remain that of a Western esotericist, her Theosophical Society, together with the
mythos and idiosyncratic historiography which engendered it, were best removed
to India. Significantly, the hazards, the 'persecutions', which Blavatsky
intuited in the West were not to be found most insidiously in ecclesial opposition,
nor indeed in either EuropeÕs entrenched Deism or the
incipient historical or dialectical materialism of Engels' Marxism. What
Blavatsky recognised as the prime danger for the West
was that the progeny of the bitter union effected between a de-sacralised science and doctrinally reactionary religion was
likely to be an illegitimate 'scientism'; a faith with all of the awe of
religion and none of the transformational power. She was particularly
concerned that the mythology of scientism would hallow naturalistic determinism
and would thus deny the reality of conscious spiritual and physical
evolution, the prime tenet of esotericism. For Blavatsky the only viable
alternative to this mongrel 'scientism' was a renovated hybridised
esotericism whose inventive blending of Eastern iconography and Western
Enlightenment progressivism, of Indian kalpa
theory and Kabbalistic aeonic configurations, and of lamasery and Rosicrucian
vault, would aspire to a cosmo-historical synthetic
universalism never before conceptualised by
esotericism. Indeed, only by a rigorous and systematised
policy of appropriating all the world's cultural and historical grist and
feeding it to the esoteric mill could the new esotericism parry with
'scientism' which, appropriately enough, was attempting much the same thing in
its own gambit for epistemological dominance. Central to Blavatsky's endeavour was the Master; only he could personify her
desire to wrest matter from the Materialists and refashion the anthropos as the centre of a re-enchanted
world: he was, after all, the ideal, template, and proof of conscious
evolution.
Isis
Unveiled is concerned primarily with Blavatsky's
attempted resuscitation and revisioning of Western esotericism in the light of
Darwinian naturalism and Comtist Positivism, both of
which promulgated a radically demythologised
world. Yet the epistemological rupture caused by the ascendancy of
empirical science over Bibliocentric cosmology and anthropology meant that the
radically elongated prehistory and human developmentalism advocated by the
evolutionists had somehow to be accommodated in any new esoteric
historiography. For Blavatsky the options were clear; she could either favour entrenched reactive positions and retreat to
less-confronting conceptualities such as she had known during her career as a
Spiritualist, or she could disengage from the Judaeo-Christian
historical stream, which until that time had been the harbour
of Western esotericism and which was now becoming increasingly harried by the
bright glare of scientific rationalism, and search for an entree into new
domains by turning her mythistorical locus ever
farther eastward.
go to:
HPB AND HER
'MASTERS' OF THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
AN EXTENDED
FAMILY: EXTRAMURAL MASTERS
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