Introduction: The Occult Revival in America

Writing in the up-and-coming Metaphysical Magazine, Detroit lawyer Hamilton Gay Howard informed readers, and it had also been "taught for hundreds of years in the School of Adepts, at Thebes, which Lord Bulwer Lytton is said to have attended for three and a half years - half the course." "The whole course, requiring great self-denial and continued physical trials was taken," he believed, "by the late Madame Blavatsky, and by Colonel Olcott, of Massachusetts, the advanced free-thinker and theosophist." Howard especially wanted to underscore his conviction that the "wisdom of the East" needed to be noticed, and so he excerpted a piece from a newspaper that he identified only as the Pittsburg Dispatch. Inviting readers into a new and for them exotic-world, its unnamed author boasted of having before him "an English translation of a very old tantric work from the original Sanscrit, by the Hindu pandit, Rama Prasad," a work that contained "the ancient Hindu philosophyas regards the finer forces of nature." In its pages the author found, with evident enthusiasm, references and explanations for "such things as the interstellar ether; its general properties and subdivisions; the laws of vibration; the circulation of the blood and of the nervous fluid; the nervous centres and the general anatomy of the body; the rationale of psychometry and of occult phenomena, and a good many other things of which modern science as yet knows little or nothing." 1

What neither Howard nor the Dispatch writer apparently knew was that Rama Prasad's book had originally appeared as a series of articles in the Indian-based periodical The Theosophist, which had been launched in Bombay by none other than Helena Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott in 1879. Prasad himself was a decidedly Westernized Hindu and a Theosophist, a man who moved in a discourse community that had heavily invested in reinscribing the traditional lore of India in the scientific terms of the modern, British-inspired West. For Prasad and those who followed him, yogic pranayama had become the "science of breath." In the lengthy exposition that preceded Prasad's translation of the short text from the Sanskrit, he in fact took on the famed German scholar Max Muller for reading the Chandogya Upanishad as in places "more or less fanciful."

 By contrast, in Prasad's account, none of the Upanishads could be "very intelligible" without knowing something of "the ancient Science of Breath," which was "said to be the secret doctrine of all secret doctrines" and "the key of all that is taught in the Upanishads." Prasad's allusion was a double entendre. First, the Indian Theosophist had affirmed that traditional Indian religious thought was scientific, and he had rendered the Sanskrit title of the work he had translated as "The Science of Breath and the Philosophy of the Tattvas." The "Tattvas" of his title -literally "thatnesses" - were, in the classical dualistic Samkyha philosophy of India, the twenty-five principles constitutive of the material universe. In Prasad's usage, however-influenced probably by Helena Blavatsky's invocation of the "Great Breath" in her 1888, The Secret Doctrine - they referred specifically to the "five modifications of the Great Breath." 2 Thus Prasad's allusion to the "secret doctrine of all secret doctrines" pointed to Blavatsky's book and, so, to Theosophy.

Both the Howard article and the Dispatch excerpt that was part of it provide windows into a late-nineteenth-century American world in which the imagined otherness of Asia was redirected and rechanneled into culturally available templates for making sense of difference. Arguably, these templates were supplied by a borderlands discourse that arose on the fringes of liberal Protestantism as it existed in constant commerce with a revived and reconstructed Hermeticism this available in theosophical, New Thought, and similar versions, and often in combinations of these. If there was anyone public event that signaled the process and its continuing reinventions of the East, that event was the World's Parliament of Religions of 1893, held in conjunction with the huge Columbian Exposition in Chicago. A world's fair staged to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of the European arrival in the Americas, the exposition, with its displays and attendant events, celebrated, too, American economic and cultural "progress" in a triumphalist spirit that masked an unexamined racism and imperialism.3 The parliament did not and could not disentangle itself from the cultural climate of  its era, even if, with liberal Protestant leadership, its site was physically removed from that of the larger event. In the downtown Chicago Loop during the month of September, representatives of the world's religious traditions came together under the sign of progress, aiming to assess the religious status of the century and to plan for the future.

Viewed with an eye toward American metaphysical religion, the group that assembled under the liberal auspices of the parliament was decidedly congenial to the new spirituality. The combinative instinct of parliament organizers and presenters reproduced a central trope of American metaphysics. At the same time, the canons that governed the selection process brought speakers who promised to function in keeping with the conference's theosophizing agenda-that is, an agenda that promoted perennialism under the rubric of comparative religions. True enough, Roman Catholic James Cardinal Gibbons led the assembled representatives in an Our Father prayer at the Parliament's opening session, and Dionysios Latas, Greek Orthodox archbishop of Zante, had come from Athens. But the unitive theme of the parliament did not go unnoticed by some traditionalists. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church refused to sanction the event, this despite the fact that John Henry Barrows, who headed the parliament's organizing committee, was pastor of Chicago's First Presbyterian Church. The Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury and the Muslim sultan of Turkey also refused endorsement. At the other end of the spectrum, among Asian representatives a clear theosophical presence could be found. G. N. Chakravarti, an Indian scholar there to defend Hinduism, was a convert to Theosophy. So was the Buddhist Anagarika Dharmapala from Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), who had been encouraged by Blavatsky herself to become a scholar of Buddhist Pali-language texts. Kinza Hirai, a lay Buddhist from Japan, similarly had been a Theosophist. Swami Vivekananda, a Neo-Vedantin from Bengal (transformed overnight by the media and popular acclaim into a celebrity), thought along lines congenial to Theosophy. Among non-Asians, the American Alexander Russell Webb (or Mohammed Webb), who had converted to Islam, still told Henry Steel Olcott that he "had not ceased to be an ardent Theosophist." Other theosophical names also could be found among the delegates-Americans William Q. Judge and J. D. Buck and, from England, Annie Besant and Isabel Cooper-Oakley.4

Meanwhile, the Theosophical Society, along with Christian Science, had been accorded a separate "denominational congress" in conjunction with the parliament, a recognition given only to some three dozen separate groups. Both Theosophists and Christian Scientists were elated by attendance at their meetings.

Theosophists glowed their way through two special sessions held on weekends to accommodate public interest, reporting that at the final one, with seats for four thousand, hundreds more were standing in the aisles and along the walls. An anecdote recounted how a Presbyterian minister and parliament manager interrupted William Q. Judge's speech on reincarnation to tell stray Presbyterians that their own meeting was empty and that perhaps they were confused regarding its location and should leave immediately. Supposedly, no one followed his advice.1n their turn, Christian Scientists filled the hall of four thousand to hear an address by "Rev. Mary Baker G. Eddy, discoverer and founder of Christian Science;' read to them in absentia, and to listen, too, to other Christian Science speakers. The next day they basked in the publicity that the Chicago Inter-Ocean provided them: "One of the best congresses yet held in connection with the Parliament of Religions, judged by number and interest, was that of the Christian Scientists .... For two hours before the hall opened crowds besieged the doors eager to gain admission. At two o'clock, the time set for opening the proceedings, the house was filled to the roof, no seats being available for love or money."5

The parliament was the brainchild of Charles Carroll Bonney (1831-1903), a Chicago lawyer interested in comparative religions who was also, significantly, a Swedenborgian. Bonney's faith in the theology of divine influx shaped his idea and subsequent participation in parliament proceedings in which he functioned as president. He told Christian Scientists, for example, that "no more striking manifestation of the interposition of Divine Providence in human affairs has come in recent years than that shown in the raising up of the body of people known as Christian Scientists." They, indeed, were "called to declare the real harmony between religion and science, and to restore the waning faith of many in the verities of the sacred Scriptures."6 Nor was Bonney alone in his ecumenism and his belief in the all-pervading presence of Spirit. Something akin to the immanential theology of Swedenborg and most of the metaphysicians ran through the organizing ideology of the entire World's Parliament event.

As John Henry Barrows, chair of the parliament, introduced his massive, two volume edition recounting its background and transcribing its speeches, he sounded the theme that appeared repeatedly in the messages of the various delegates. "Faith in a Divine Power to whom men believe they owe service and worship" had been "like the sun, a life-giving and fructifying potency in man's intellectual and moral development." But Barrows followed up the good news of divine immanence with the bad that delegates were aiming to correct. "Religion, like the white light of Heaven," had been "broken into many-colored fragments by the prisms of men." So the parliament aimed, as one of its objects, "to change this many-colored radiance back into the white light of heavenly truth." Its promoters, like closet Theosophists, were "striking the noble chord of universal human brotherhood" and evoking a "starry music which will yet drown the miserable discords of earth." To be sure, a Christian ethos surrounded the universal brotherhood, since it was "embodied in an Asiatic Peasant who was the Son of God." Still, the aims of the parliament stretched the liberal fabric of the Protestant umbrella in directions that, at least potentially, wore thin the Christian certitude of possessing the unique-and most highly evolved-religious truth. The parliament intended "to show to men, in the most impressive way, what and how many important truths the various Religions hold and teach in common."7

To that end, organizers imported "leading scholars, representing the Brahman, Buddhist, Confucian, Parsee, Mohammedan, Jewish and other Faiths," placed them alongside representatives of the Christian churches, and allowed these others time and a platform. The results, as Richard Seager argues, were not quite what the Chicago leaders intended. Instead, non-Christian representatives upended the liberal Christian project and exposed its tenuousness in a discourse intended to display the wisdom and integrity of the East.8 In so doing, the Asians flattened Christian peaks not only for themselves but also, potentially, for Americans. And in so doing, they also underlined a way of talking, thinking, and being in the world that promoted the project of metaphysical religion. Now, though, metaphysics appeared under the banner of an intercepted Asia, caught in complex thickets between separate Asian pasts, Westernized Asian presents, and American polysemous perceptions. By this time, too, American metaphysics had already reached a watershed in its appropriation of global faiths to advance its homegrown spirituality. Theosophical prominence at the World's Parliament of Religions was theologically and poetically appropriate. It was the Asian turn of the Theosophical Society that had brought the universalizing discourse of the 1870s and 1880s to the authoritative statement of the 1890s. In this 1890s statement, the power of mind took on new proportions, correspondence ruled religious perceptions, and healing energies came from new (to non-Asian Americans) Asian wisdoms. This chapter looks first to the Asia mediated to the West by Theosophy and then to metaphysical American versions of yoga and Buddhism, with the presence of Theosophy - and its partner New Thought - never far away.

Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott traveled to India in late 1878, and they never returned to this country to stay. The Asian years of Theosophy and its increasingly close ties with England, the growing rift of the founders with each other, Blavatsky's European and English sojourn, her trials and tribulations over fraud charges, and her death in England in 1891-these do not concern my narrative directly. Important here, instead, are the literary products of these years and their effects on an evolving metaphysical religion in the United States. Isis Unveiled had played a significant role in shifting an older spiritualist language into new and more expansive vocabularies and grammars, and now the continuing work of the theosophical leaders received an eager reception in America. These writings model a reading of Asia that colonized it to suit American metaphysical requirements. In so doing, as Stephen Prothero argues in the specific case of Olcott, they "creolized" Asian cultural worlds with already combinative American discourses.9

Olcott's literary creolization project was apparent as early as 1881 when he first produced his Buddhist Catechism, a work to be considered later. Blavatsky herself provided the more far-reaching metaphysical scripture in her monumental (nearly fifteen hundred pages in two volumes exclusive of front matter and index) Secret Doctrine of 1888.10 Bruce Campbell-who calls it "a, perhaps the, major work of occultism" in the nineteenth century - has recounted its publication history, with the new book-a reconsideration and elaboration of Isis Unveiled announced as early as 1884. Blavatsky first planned to use The Theosophist to issue the book, publishing it in monthly installments of the same length. But by 1885 she left India for Europe, and so that specific project folded. But Blavatsky reportedly wrote - prodigiously - as she traveled and remained for a time in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Belgium. Her handwritten material was transferred for her into typescript, but when he saw it, Subba Row, the Indian Theosophist who had promised to edit it, withdrew before what he regarded an impossible task. Eventually, after Blavatsky moved to London in 1887, Archibald and Bertram Keightley - the two Theosophists most responsible for her presence there - created an outline for a manuscript that by then purportedly stood over a yard high. Of the four volumes that the Keightleys suggested, only two were eventually published as The Secret Doctrine-a first subtitled Cosmogenesis and dealing with the evolution of the cosmos, and a second called Anthropogenesis and addressing the theme of human evolution. Two others, Ed Fawcett and Richard Harte, supplied help for aspects of the project.10

As in the case of Isis Unveiled , William Emmette Coleman charged Blavatsky with plagiarism - a charge that was old news, given her previous publishing history. She claimed that her volumes-and "the Secret Doctrine of the Archaic ages" - were built around stanzas from the "Book of Dzyan;' a work that Blavatsky introduced as a fragment from a Tibetan Buddhist text called the Mani Koumboum, the sacred writing of the Dzungarians, in the northern part of the country. While she was in Tibet, she explained, she was allowed to memorize the stanzas. But the text was "not in the possession of European Libraries" and was "utterly unknown to our Philologists, or at any rate was never heard of by them under its present name." On these points, Coleman and Blavatsky agreed, and he added that the language of Senzar, the professed original language of the work, was completely unknown. As in the case of her first huge work, he accused her of unacknowledged reliance on nineteenth-century sources from which she had compiled her work. Chief among them were H. H. Wilson's Vishnu Purdna (1840),Alexander Winchell's World-Life; or, Comparative Geology (1883), and John Dowson's Hindu Classical Dictionary (1879)' Nor was he alone in speculating on her big book's composition. Rene Guenon believed it was based on Tibetan fragments, but different from the ones Blavatsky herself claimed. Jewish mystical scholar Gershom Scholem thought its origins lay in the Jewish Kabbalah. And according to Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Max Muller sardonically observed that Blavatsky was either a "remarkable forger" or the contributor of "the most valuable gift to archaeological research in the Orient."12

Yet, granted evidence for the charge of plagiarism, Blavatsky's facility in joining the South Asian discourse to a series of other cultural conversations-Hermetic, Western scientific, and even Christian-marks her work with a synthetic originality that needs to be noticedY Indeed, gun-shy perhaps from her experience with Isis Unveiled, she herself indirectly acknowledged the extent of her dependence (and also her estimate of what she had done) in her upper-case quotation from the French essayist Michel de Montaigne in her introduction: "'I HAVE HERE MADE ONLY A NOSEGAY OF CULLED FLOWERS, AND HAVE BROUGHT NOTHING OF MY OWN BUT THE STRING THAT TIES THEM.''' "Pull the 'string' to pieces and cut it up in shreds, if you will," she added. "As for the nosegay of FACTS-YOU will never be able to make away with these."14 Still further, for all the scholarly dismissal, Blavatsky's work would shape language not only in theosophical circles but also -as Campbell's assessment of it has already suggested well beyond them. Its statement of the "secret doctrine" of Asia would provide the vocabulary and grammar for a generic metaphysical discourse. In it Asian historical particularity was effaced, and the universalizing potential of concepts like reincarnation, karma, and subtle bodies was amplified many times over. Arguably, the general American metaphysical project of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries would continue to sound themes and enact Asias that originated in the Blavatsky opus.

Beyond that, in the elaborate sacred tale of origins that The Secret Doctrine constructed, Blavatsky provided a story of cosmic and human origins that, whatever it told about Asia, surely imitated the West. In its overall modeling, her narrative resembled ancient Gnostic mythic material or Kabbalistic lore from the Middle Ages. Like Gnostic and Kabbalistic mythologies, Blavatsky's ambitious theodicy explained the predicament of humans by elaborating a series of events and entities that, in effect, harmfully separated things human from their divine or originating source. As in older Gnostic and Kabbalistic forays, the Blavatskian version of the order of the universe complicated human origins - as if interlarding an explanation with numerous layers could prove the intrinsic sacrality of humans and account for evil without alleging a flaw in the source of all. Hermes Trismegistus stayed present in this account. Blavatsky thought the "Divine Pymander" and the "hermetic Fragments" to be echoes of the "Esoteric philosophy and the Hindu Puranas," an order historians might well want to reverse and a connection they might want to challenge on other grounds.15 In the context of the late nineteenth century's preoccupation with Darwinian evolution (and Blavatsky's own engagement with it), The Secret Doctrine-worlds away from what by the early twentieth century would become Protestant fundamentalism - posited a human devolution from the divine that represented also an evolution.

"Kosmos" existed in eternity "before the re-awakening of still slumbering Energy," which became "the emanation of the Word in later systems." The cosmic system was characterized by a perpetual periodicity, a latency and activity by turns. Always, there had been the "ONE LIFE, eternal, invisible, yet Omnipresent, without beginning or end, yet periodical in its regular manifestations, between which periods reigns the dark mystery of non-Being; unconscious, yet absolute Consciousness; unrealisable, yet the one self-existing reality; truly, 'a chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason.' Its one absolute attribute, which is ITSELF, eternal, ceaseless Motion, is called in esoteric parlance the 'Great Breath: which is the perpetual motion of the universe, in the sense of limitless, ever-present SPACE. That which is motionless cannot be Divine." 16

If the divine was motion and energy, the divine was also Mind or Thought, the "Word" from which all things emanated and in which lay concealed the "plan of every future Cosmogony and Theogony." Moreover, in the Blavatskian synthesis-as throughout American metaphysical religion-the third abiding feature became the correspondence that ran through the layers of reality, so that spiritual anthropology replicated the eternal patterning of the universe. God was, in one way, neither close nor intimate; in another, the divine was alive and resonant in every cell. The "Great Breath" kept on breathing, and what it breathed was people. If this sounds like an overture in the direction of the contemplative mind, Blavatsky's own etymology suggests the same. She thought that "Dzyan" (also spelled "Dzyn" or "Dzen") was a corrupt form of Sanskrit Dhyana, which means meditation. Beyond that, with all the preoccupation with science (both Books I and II include a Part III titled "Science and the Secret Doctrine Contrasted") that Blavatsky displayed, she was demonstrably as concerned about aesthetics. The secret wisdom of Dzyan came packaged in "stanzas." She titled the prelude to her first volume "Proem." And her preoccupations with correspondence took the form, often, of attention to numerical symmetries akin to those in mathematics or music. Alluding to her doctrine of seven human races and also to the dangerous power hidden within the symmetries, she told readers that "doctrines such as the planetary chain, or the seven races, at once give a clue to the seven-fold nature of man." "Each principle," she continued, was "correlated to a plane, a planet, and a race; and the human principles are, on every plane, correlated to seven-fold occult forces-those of the higher planes being of tremendous power." 17

Blavatsky's statement of a mind-energy-correspondence triad is instructive. Carl Jackson identifies it with "traditional Hindu philosophy" and suggests that concepts of "Brahman, maya, atman, and karma" had been "reformulated in Theosophical terminology," with connections especially to Vedanta. But if this was the case, it is also true that Blavatsky announced the message in ways that intended or not-were congenial to American metaphysicians schooled in the moralism and work ethic of their culture's Protestant moorings. A confirmed perennialist, Blavatsky proclaimed her "Secret Doctrine" as "the universally diffused religion of the ancient and prehistoric world," and she quickly elaborated its propositions. First came the "metaphysical ONE ABSOLUTE - BE-NESS;' the "rootless root" that could only be known by negation, "beyond all thought or speculation" and symbolized both as "absolute abstract Space" and "absolute Abstract Motion."

Second came an affirmation of the eternity of the universe as a "boundless plane," a "playground" for countless appearing and disappearing universes, so that the "law of periodicity, of flux and reflux, ebb and flow" ruled absolutely. Third-and the existential concern that drove the first two-came the "fundamental identity of all Souls with the Universal Over-Soul," which was "an aspect of the Unknown Root." There was, therefore, an" obligatory pilgrimage for every Soul- a spark of the former - through the Cycle of Incarnation (or 'Necessity') in accordance with Cyclic and Karmic law." Blavatsky's world emerged as a hard-work universe in which there were "no privileges or special gifts in man" except for "those won by his own Ego through personal effort and merit throughout a long series of metempsychoses and reincarnations." 18 This multiplication of incarnations (beyond the Asian sources)-the cycle of seemingly endless returns for still more growth (for the soul on a "spiritual" path)-became a hallmark of later theosophical discourse into the twenty-first century. Souls on earth went to school and learned metaphysical lessons as they journeyed.

Blavatsky's "slanderers" would generate "bad Karma," but for those on the path the aesthetics of contemplation opened out into vast expanses. Here space, "THE ETERNAL PARENT WRAPPED IN HER EVER INVISIBLE ROBES HAD SLUM- BERED ONCE AGAIN FOR SEVEN ETERNITIES." Eventually, though, the spatial "MOTHER" swelled and expanded "LIKE THE BUD OF THE LOTUS." Her vibration touched the light in the midst of darkness; a single ray entered the "MOTHERDEEP"; and the egg therein became the "WORLD-EGG." SO it went, as already the number seven began to be manifested both inside and outside the egg. The "GREAT MOTHER; ''Who was at least once called the "FATHER-MOTHER," was the eternal cosmic source from which the divine, the spiritual, and all of the "MINDBORN" emanated. We need not follow Blavatsky's narrative further to glimpse behind its overproduction what Alvin Kuhn'called "a recital of the scheme according to which the primal unity of unmanifest Being breaks up into differentiation and multiformity and so fills space with conscious evolving beings."19

It is, however, worth marking the points in the narrative that reinforce the Hermeticism of the past and reconstitute it as a new statement for the times a statement that, for Americans, domesticated Asia as a function of vernacularized Western mystical categories. Indian sacred lore in the Vishnu Purana told of a vast egg that floated on cosmic waters. Vishnu entered the egg as the creator Brahma-to produce the three worlds of earth, atmosphere, and heaven; he, in turn, preserved them through countless ages and finally destroyed them with flames as Rudra. Then rain fell to form one vast ocean, and, like a coiled snake, Vishnu slept on the waters. The time from Brahma's initial act of creation to the time of destruction was called a day of Brahma, or a Kalpa. Within each Kalpa, a thousand cycles passed. These were known as Maha Yugas (literally, "great years"), with each extending for 4,320,000 human years or 12,000 years of the gods (a year of the gods being 360 human years, and a day of the gods being a single human year). Every Maha Yuga was in turn subdivided into four lesser Yugas, with each shorter than the previous one. During these increasingly shorter Yugas observance of law declined and humankind grew ever more corrupt, with the shortest and most devolved of them being the Kali Yuga of 1,800 years. After the thousand Maha Yugas, Vishnu's sleep upon the ocean lasted as long. Finally, at the end of this protracted night, Vishnu woke up and re-created the worlds as Brahma; and so a distinct day of Brahma began anew. But that was not all. Brahma had a life span, and thus there were 100 years of 360 days and nights of Brahma respectively, whereupon the original evolution of life and worlds reversed itself and Vishnu returned to the contemplation of his Supreme Self, alone with eternal Time (Kala), Spirit (Purusha), and Primary Matter (Prakriti). When Vishnu decided that he wanted to play once more, the vast drama of creation again unfolded.20

In the midst of this cosmic theater of epic proportions, the Vishnu Purana warned that humans were living in the Kali Yuga, the most devolved state of its current Maha Yuga. Blavatsky, at least manifestly, followed its narrative. The Kali Yuga that the West had reached was "an age BLACK WITH HORRORS." "Man" was "his own destroyer" in a Kali Yuga that reigned "supreme" not only in India but also there. Yet more than the Vishnu Purana, Blavatsky historicized freely and pointedly. She predicted that "about nine years" from the time she was writing, "the first cycle of the first- millenniums, that began with the great cycle of the Kali-Yuga" would end. More apocalyptically, she declared that humans stood "at the very close of the cycle of 5,000 years of the present Aryan Kaliyuga; and between this time and 1897" there would be "a large rent made in the Veil of Nature," with "materialistic science" receiving a "death-blow." Still further, in Blavatsky's opus the language of the Yugas receded, and, in fact, at least one extended reference to the Kali Yuga read it decidedly more positively. At the Kali Yuga's close, Blavatsky announced, quoting one source at length, the minds of the living would be awakened, becoming clear as crystal. They would give birth to a new race who would be truly human beings, following the laws of the age of purity. Blavatsky thought that the "blessings" of the Kali Yuga were "well described" and that they "fit in admirably even with that which one sees and hears in Europe and other civilized and Christian lands in full XIXth, and at the dawn of the XXth century of our great era of ENLIGHTENMENT." As important here, working between what she claimed were esoteric Buddhist and Vedantic (Raja Yoga) sources as interpreted already in theosophical writings, she regarded the Kalpas as "Rounds." Indeed, what preoccupied her-more than Kalpas and Yugas-were "Rounds," with each "Round" in the human saga "composed of the Yugas of the seven periods of Humanity."21

Since all things traveled in sevens in Blavatsky's universe, every star or planet was linked to six "companion globes." Life proceeded on the seven globes in seven rounds or cycles, with rest periods or times of "obscuration" between, and in a complex rebirthing process each globe had to "transfer its life and energy to another planet." Into this cosmic scenario of action and rest, Blavatsky inserted the earth, and in so doing she historicized her narrative in ways that hinted more of Western occultism than Eastern puranas. The earth, as the "visible representative of its invisible superior fellow globes," was required to live through seven rounds. For the first three, it formed and consolidated; for the fourth, it settled and hardened; and in the final three, it returned "to its first ethereal form ... spiritualised, so to say." Significantly, in the fourth round humanity carne to be, and in the later rounds the human race would be "ever tending to reassume its primeval form." "Man" would become "a God and then-GOD, like every other atom in the Universe." 22

Here, in the fourth round, a series of "root-races" had sprung up in succession, each of them dwelling on a particular continent. As Blavatsky plotted their history, in what Bruce Campbell has called a "process of involution and evolution," she invoked "Ethereal" beginnings and a "spiritual" end. The earliest (prehistoric) root-race, the "Self-born," arose on a continent called "The Imperishable Sacred Land." Thereafter came a second race on the "Hyperborean" continent, a third on Lemuria (see Case Study), and a fourth on Atlantis. After that, the fifth root-race, the Aryan, appeared, and it was this race that flourished in most of recorded history, including Blavatsky's nineteenth century. She had first identified its continent  as "America" but went on to explain that, as it was "situated at the Antipodes," it was "Europe and Asia Minor, almost coeval with it" and then simply Europe as the "fifth great Continent."23

From whence had Blavatsky synthesized this material that took shape as a dissident history of the human species? If a reconstructed (which to a degree she acknowledged) metaphysical Asia supplied a part and Western Hermeticism contributed another part, a third came from a mix of novelistic sources with popular science accounts of the period. Plato, of course, had been the ancient literary source for Atlantean speculation in his Timaeus and his unfinished Critias. But by Blavatsky's time Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (with an English translation in 1873) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race (with, in its publication year, 1871, five editions) brought Atlantean themes and the notion of hidden, forgotten human history-to the fore. By 1882, however, these science fiction sources were eclipsed by Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis:

The Antediluvian World, the work of a former Republican lieutenant governor of Minnesota, United States congressman, and continuing civil servant and politician. With seven editions in the year of its publication and accolades from William Gladstone, prime minister of England, the work was translated into Swedish the year after it appeared and by 1890 had been printed in twenty-three American and twenty-six English editions. Donnelly had immersed himself in the latest findings of his era's science and had summarized the material. Here Plato's description of the island-continent of Atlantis could be read historically, with the natural catastrophe that destroyed it obliterating a spectacular human civilization. Still more, some of the Atlanteans had managed to escape and survive. England's civilization was Atlantean in its origins and that of the United States thus derivatively so.24

Blavatsky's third root-race of Lemurians looked even more credible in terms of the science of the time. The Pacific "land of lemurs" had first been proposed by Philip Lutley Sclater, former secretary of the London Zoological Society, fellow of the Royal Society, and friend of Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin. Interested in ornithology and the fauna of Central and South America, he theorized species distribution in evolutionary terms, invoking a land bridge that began in Madagascar, moved through southern India, and ended in the Malay Peninsula, and calling it Lemuria. Later, the well-known German evolutionary biologist Ernst Heinrich Haeckel argued for Sclater's Lemuria as the original home of humankind, even if he later changed his mind. Like Atlantis, Lemuria had sunk into the sea, well below the surface of the Indian Ocean. Its former existence, however, helped Haeckel in explaining the way that migration assisted the geographical distribution of humans.25

Blavatsky absorbed it all-Vishnu, Hermes, popularized science, and even the Christian narrative of the original sin and fall of humanity-in the comprehensive unity of her account. The Atlantteans of her telling had fallen into sin and begotten monsters. In the racialism characteristic of her time, she reported that they had started out being brown-colored but later became "black with sin," degenerating into "magical practices and gross animality." They were "the first 'Sacrificers' to the gods of matter," and their worship devolved into "self-worship" and "phallicism." "Marked with a character of SORCERY," they had lost the ability to use their "third eye." Still, the shadow of Atlantean evil was swept away for Blavatsky in the ebb and flow of the law of periodicity. The Atlanteans, in effect, had died because their time had come, not - she stated specifically - because of their depravity or because they had become "black with sin." And in yet another apparent contradiction, their development as "giants whose physical beauty and strength reached their climax" followed evolutionary law.26

Read another-Asian and Hermetic-way, however, the fall that began human history meant the "descent" onto earth of the gods who became incarnate in human beings. Every avatar (or, Blavatsky said, "incarnation") meant "the fall of a God into generation;' and she went on to cite the Upanishads for support. There was a loss of purity here, a compromise with perfection rather than a moral decision by a weak and disobedient human pair. But the "Fall of Spirit into generation" was necessary for self-consciousness, for Atman by itself would pass into '''NON-BEING, which is absolute Being.''' At the same time, the universe of humans was an illusory affair; it was Maya, with everything "temporary therein." Evil came with thought, which introduced a principle of finitude and separation, and it was related, too, to karmic law in which over countless eons of time humans worked out their destiny. Blavatsky orchestrated a complex choreography between this destiny and human freedom, rejecting notions of fatalism and invoking free agency for humans in their earthly sojourn. No individual could escape what she called a "ruling Destiny;' but always a choice of paths to it existed. Karma neither created nor designed. Rather, each human planned and created "causes," and the law of karma adjusted "the effects." "Those who believe in Karma have to believe in destiny," she declared, "which, from birth to death, every man is weaving thread by thread around himself, as a spider does his cobweb." 27

According to The Secret Doctrine's report, Atlanteans and Lemurians had done so, and likewise members of the Aryan race were presently so engaged. Given all of this-and the exotic call of lost worlds and ancient, unknown peoples-the metaphysical afterlife of Blavatsky's Atlantis and Lemuria proved as extensive as her reinscription of the law of karma and reincarnation. Meanwhile, Asia bockoned again in her doctrine of the subtle bodies. Newly impressed (since Isis Unveiled) with the all-encompassing "sevenfold principle;' which she found everywhere in nature, she discovered the seven once more. Whereas previously in Isis she had found nature and humanity to be triune-each human had a physical, astral, and spiritual body (or body, soul, and spirit) - now a grand multiplication of subtle bodies took place. Just as the visible planets and their rulers (the planetary gods) numbered the fabled seven, "principles in Man" corresponded. Seven bodies existed on "three material planes and one spiritual plane;' and they boasted Asian-sounding names that had already been divulged to A. P. Sinnett in Esoteric Buddhism (by the Mahatmas, he claimed). The highest body was the "atma" (Hindu Atman, or "Universal Spirit"); the lowest, the "gross Matter" of the physical body. On an ascending scale in between came the "life" body, or the "Prana" (literally, "breath" as the "active power producing all vital phenomena"); the astral body, or Linga-Sarira (an "inert vehicle or form on which the body [was] moulded"); the animal soul, or "Kama-rupa" (the "principle of animal desire"); the "Manas" (Mind, or human soul); and the "Buddhi" (spiritual soul). In this ambitious and overarching schema, Blavatsky had provided a tour de force on the "Septenary Element in the Vedas," but she was also backtracking toward the West. She told readers that, in the ancient world, "socalled Christian Gnostics had adopted this time-honoured system" and that she had found Kabbalistic borrowings, too.28

 

See Case Study: The T.S. Inner Group

Not all the parts of the septenary human were fully developed, however, and this, too, supported Blavatsky's earlier threefold designation. As Kuhn summarized, for her humans were "sevenfold potentially, threefold actually," and this meant that of the "seven principles only the lower three have been brought from latency to activity." Blavatsky employed the term Monad to describe the Atma Buddhi, the last two-and highest- "principles" within the septenary human, and she called the Monad the "dual soul." She also called the human Monad, in its "informing principle," the "HIGHER SELF;' and saw it as "one and the same" with an "animal Monad," even if the first was "endowed with divine intelligence" and the second "with instinctual faculty alone." Human Monads participated in a far vaster monadic universe, since individual Monads were "spontaneously selfactive" units characteristic of nature. In an echo of the mid-nineteenth-century spiritualist cosmology, all "Matter" was "Spirit, and vice versa"; and "the Uni sophical Society in America. Beginning after Blavatsky's death in 1891, Judge claimed esoteric privileges and declared his personal contact with the Masters or Mahatmas of theosophical lore (see the previous chapter). In a bitter feud between the two men continents apart (Olcott, the president of the Theosophical Society, was in India), judicial proceedings were launched against Judge, who was vice president. Accused of deception on a series of matters, of falsely claiming communication with Masters, and of also falsely sending personal messages and orders as if authorized by Masters, Judge faced a council and committee of the Theosophical Society hat first found grounds not to act against him. However, when evidence contained in the private papers of the Englishwoman Annie Besant-who would later head the society-was made public without her consent, matters came to a head. A convention of the society in 1894 resolved, after Olcott's urging, that Judge should resign as vice president and go through a reelection process. The American section responded quickly. Meeting in a Boston convention the following year, members voted to secede, declaring their autonomy and changing the name of the American section to "The Theosophical Society in America." Then they elected Judge president for life-a role he held only for a year until his death in 1896. In his turn, Olcott expelled Judge from the parent Theosophical Society. No winner took all. Most of the American lodges followed Judge, but later-with lecturing and organizing efforts on the part of Besant and Countess Constance Wachtmeister, the widow of a former Swedish ambassador to London - some of the American work of the parent body was recouped.34

For both branches of the society in the United States, American readings of Asia continued to mold it to metaphysical categories already abroad in the nation. Here could be found roots both in the Hermetic tradition of the West and in the polyglot and combinative culture of the land, in which Native American and African American memory and practice functioned as the repressed knowledge of white Americans. And here, too, could be found a spirituality that, however much and however vociferously it protested, was engrafted on the Anglo-Protestant base that had shaped public culture. We need not subscribe to an essentialism that posits a one true reading of Asia to notice that Americans were creating an Asia to their own visionary requirements, an Asia of their dreams that would facilitate the shaping of their waking selves and Selves.

Metaphysical Self-fashioning, strongly influenced by theosophical representations of Asia, grew apace as the nineteenth century wound down and the new "world soul" entering "into the elements, such as air, fire, water, and then into the mineral, vegetable, animal, and human worlds." Each "soul spark," they would learn, went "through all things thus" and slowly reached "perfection," with "soul-union with the all" as the "only real state." Meanwhile, they were assured that the "Life Principle" that flowed through all could be called "the living Breath of the unknown Eternal One" and that its "great Law" was "Karma." Matter, or "Substance;' said the catechism, was that into which the "Great Breath" breathed, and they could identify it as the "World Mother or the Oversoul." When they asked what next, the stock children's answers explained that "after a long period, The Great Breath" was "drawn in again" and that then the world "all dissolved back again into The Breath." The "Breath," however, moved "to and fro;' and young readers were brought back to the law of Karma, with its "strict justice" as "the eternal nature of all being" and "Universal Brotherhood" as the moral of the tale. Where could "an example of this in human life" be found? The answer came swift and sure. "If I speak an angry word to anyone at the beginning of the day, it makes both him and me feel differently for some time. This affects what we say to others, changes them to us, and so all are injured by the one selfish deed."32

The practical simplicity of the teaching was inescapable, suited more to the urbanized American Northeast with its Anglo-Protestant culture of moralism than a putative South Asian ashram. The progress of the soul-spark through the forms - the return of the Monad to the One - not only performed itself as agency but, ever and especially, as moral agency. Several readings away from Blavatsky's Hindu and Hermetic sources, Judge's Theosophy functioned as a distinct species of American metaphysical religion. Meanwhile, the American lodges flourished. The same year that the children of would-be adepts were learning their theosophical catechism, The Path was reporting some thirty-four American branches of the Theosophical Society, with lodges not only in obvious places like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston but also in medium-sized cities such as Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and St. Louis and smaller ones like Grand Island (Nebraska), Bridgeport (Connecticut), Decorah (Iowa), Santa Cruz (California), and Muskegon (Michigan). A year later, the magazine counted fifty-four lodges in North America, including one in Toronto, Canada, a sizable number of the 258 lodges worldwide. By the next year (1892), there were sixty North American lodges, including the single Canadian lodge. The pattern was similar for the next two years. There were seventy-seven North American lodges in 1893 and eighty-four the following year, including three in Canada for both years.33

By this time, Judge was heavily embroiled in the conflict with Henry Steel Olcott that would lead to rupture and independence for what became the Theo sophical Society in America. Beginning after Blavatsky's death in 1891, Judge claimed esoteric privileges and declared his personal contact with the Masters or Mahatmas of theosophical lore. In a bitter feud between the two men continents apart (Olcott, the president of the Theosophical Society, was in India), judicial proceedings were launched against Judge, who was-vice president. Accused of deception on a series of matters, of falsely claiming communication with Masters, and of also falsely sending personal messages and orders as if authorized by Masters, Judge faced a council and committee of the Theosophical Society that first found grounds not to act against him. However, when evidence contained in the private papers of the Englishwoman Annie Besant - who would later head the society - was made public without her consent, matters came to a head. A convention of the society in 1894 resolved, after Olcott's urging, that Judge should resign as vice president and go through a reelection process. The American section responded quickly. Meeting in a Boston convention the following year, members voted to secede, declaring their autonomy and changing the name of the American section to "The Theosophical Society in America." Then they elected Judge president for life-a role he held only for a year until his death in 1896. In his turn, Olcott expelled Judge from the parent Theosophical Society. No winner took all. Most of the American lodges followed Judge, but later - with lecturing and organizing efforts on the part of Besant and Countess Constance Wachtmeister, the widow of a former Swedish ambassador to London - some of the American work of the parent body was recouped.34

For both branches of the society in the United States, American readings of Asia continued to mold it to metaphysical categories already abroad in the nation. Here could be found roots both in the Hermetic tradition of the West and in the polyglot and combinative culture of the land, in which Native American and African American memory and practice functioned as the repressed knowledge of white Americans. And here, too, could be found a spirituality that, however much and however vociferously it protested, was engrafted on the Anglo-Protestant base that had shaped public culture. We need not subscribe to an essentialism that posits a one true reading of Asia to notice that Americans were creating an Asia to their own visionary requirements, an Asia of their dreams that would facilitate the shaping of their waking selves and Selves.

 

1.  Hamilton Gay Howard, "Psychic Law of Attraction and Repulsion," in "Department of Psychic Experiences;' Metaphysical Magazine 3, no. 5 (May 1896): 396-4°4,4°2 (emphasis in Metaphysical Magazine). The work to which the Pittsburg Dispatch writer was alluding was Rama Prasad, The Science of Breath and the Philosophy of the Tatwas: (Translated from the Sanskrit) with Fifteen Introductory and Explanatory Essays on Nature's Finer Forces (Eight Re-printed from "The Theosophist," with Modifications, and Seven New (London: Theosophical Publishing, 1890), which appeared in a second and revised version in London in 1894 as Nature's Finer Forces: The Science of Breath and the Philosophy of the Tattvas, edited by G[ eorge]. R[ obert]. S[ tow].
Mead. It is not clear from the context which edition was being cited in the newspaper nor whether the paper was published in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, represented in a variant spelling, or a town with a similar name (such as Pittsburg, California, which is northeast of Oakland).

2.   Bruce F. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980),79; Rama Prasad, The Science of Breath and thi!"f'hilosophy of the Tattvas, 2d ed., ed. G[eorge]. R[obert]. S[tow]. Mead (1894), reprinted as Nature's Finer Forces: The Science of Breath and Philosophy of the Tattvas (Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, [1997]), 179, 1 (emphasis for "science" in the title is mine); H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, 2 vols. (London: Theosophical Publishing, 1888). On Samkhya philosophy, see Edeltraud Harzer, "Samkhya," in Mircea Eliade, ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 13: 47-51. I am indebted to my colleague Barbara Holdrege for pointing me toward Samkhya and toward dualism here and elsewhere.

3.   See Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Exhibitions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and, with particular application to religion, Richard Hughes Seager, The World's Parliament of Religions (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995); John P. Burris, Exhibiting Religion: Colonialism and Spectacle at International Expositions, 1851-1893 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), esp. 86-166.

4.   See Carl T. Jackson, The Oriental Religions and American Thought: NineteenthCentury Explorations (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981),244-45, 251-52; Sylvia Cranston, H.P.B.: The Extraordinary Life and Influence of Helena Blavatsky, Founder of the Modem Theosophical Movement (New York: Putnam's, 1994),426.

5.   Cranston, H.P.B., 426-27; Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived, 102-3; John Henry Barrows, ed., The World's Parliament of Religions: An Illustrated and Popular Story of the World's First Parliament of Religions, Held in Chicago in Connection with the Columbian Exposition of1893, 2 vols. (Chicago: Parliament Publishing, 1893), 2: 1419; Chicago Inter-Ocean, 21 September 1893, as quoted in Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1977), 49.

6.   Jackson, Oriental Religions and American Thought, 244; Eric J. Ziolkowski, ed., A Museum of Faiths: Histories and Legacies of the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 7; Seager, World's Parliament of Religions, 51-52; Barrows, ed., World's Parliament of Religions, 2: 1419.

7.    Barrows, ed., World's Parliament of Religions, 1: 3, viii-ix, 18.

8.    Ibid., 1: 18; see Seager, World's Parliament of Religions, esp. 103-20.

9.    See Stephen Prothero, The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), esp. 5-10, 176-82.

10.  Henry Steel Olcott, A Buddhist Catechism, According to the Canon of the Southern Church (Colombo, Ceylon: Theosophical Society, Buddhist Section, 1881); Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, see n2 above.

11. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived, 48 (emphasis in original), 40-41.

12. Ibid., 41-42; Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Theosophy: A Modern Revival of Ancient Wisdom (New York: Henry Holt, 1930), 195; H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, 2 vols. (1888; rpt., Los Angeles: Theosophy Company, 1974), 1: xxii (all subsequent references are to this edition). Blavatsky's nineteenth-century sources were available in their earliest editions as H[orace]. H[ayman]. Wilson, The Vishnu Purana: A System of Hindu Mythology and Tradition (London, 1840); Alexander Winchell, World-Life; or, Comparative Geology (Chicago: S. C. Griggs, 1883); John "bowson, A Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology and Religion, Geography, History, and Literature (London: Triibner, 1879).

13.  It is beyond my scope here to evaluate ColCJ;pan's evidence. However, on a much smaller matter - Coleman's charge in a short essay that Blavatsky "largely" plagiarized from Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (New York: Harper, 1882) and that she "coolly appropriated" a significant series of "detailed evidences" on the relationships between Eastern and Atlantean civilizations without giving Donnelly credit-my own comparison of Donnelly and Blavatsky suggests something different. Reading Donnelly's part 3, chapter 4, against Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine has revealed a comprehensive reliance not merely on this Donnelly chapter but on the whole of his book. Nor was I able to locate clear verbal dependence in a three-page series of items to which Coleman pointed, even as Blavatsky's series was different from Donnelly's. Moreover, Blavatsky quoted Donnelly once and cited him twice more. What she did not do was to credit Donnelly as her source when she cited another author purely from a quotation in Donnelly. See William Emmette Coleman, "The Sources of Madame Blavatsky's Writings," Appendix C, in Vsevolod Servyeevich Solovyoff, A Modem Priestess of Isis, trans. Walter Leaf (London: Longmans Green, 1895), 358. For a more extensive discussion, see Catherine L. Albanese, "Dissident History: American Religious Culture and the Emergence of the Metaphysical Tradition;' in Walter H. Conser Jr. and Sumner B. Twiss, eds., Religious Diversity and American Religious History: Studies in Traditions and Cultures (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 186 n72.

14.  Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, 1: xlvi (upper case in original).

15.  Ibid., 1: 285.

16.  Ibid., 1: 1-2 (upper case in original).

17.  Ibid., 1: 1, xxxv; Kuhn, Theosophy, 194.

18.  Jackson, Oriental Religions and American Thought, 167 (emphases in original); Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, 1: 14 (upper case in original), 16-19.

19.  Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, 1: xxxvi, 27-29, 33 (upper case in original); Kuhn, Theosophy, 201.

20.  For a brief and useful summary, see Thomas J. Hopkins, The Hindu Religious Tradition (Encino, Calif.: Dickenson, 1971), 100-101.

21.  Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, 1: 645 (upper case in original), 644, 377, xliv, 612, 378 (emphasis and upper case in original), xliii. Blavatsky's source, she claimed, was Yamadeva Modelyar.

22.  Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine 1: 158-59 (emphasis and upper case in original).

23.  Ibid., 1: 160, 2: 6, 164, 7-8; Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived, 44.

24.  Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea; or, The Marvellous and Exciting Adventures of Pierre Aronnax, Conseil His Servant, and Ned Land, a Canadian Harpooner (Boston: G. M. Smith, 1873); Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood, 1871) (the work was also published in New York and Toronto the same year); Donnelly, Atlantis (see m3 above); Albanese, "Dissident History;' 172-75. For Donnelly's political career, see Martin Ridge, Ignatius Donnelly: The ~rtrait of a Politician (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); and David D. Anderson, Ignatius Donnelly (Boston: Twayne, 1980).

25.  On Sclater, see C. Brown.Qoode, ed., The Published Writings of Philip Lutley Sclater, 1844-1896, Smithsonian Institution, Bulletin of the United States National Museum, No. 49 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1896), xvi-xix; Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation; Or, The Development of the Earth and Its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes, trans. and rev. by E. Ray Lankester, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1876), 1: 361, 2: 325-26, 399; Albanese, "Dissident History," 178-79·

26.   Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, 2: 227, 785, 273, 286, 350, 319 (emphases and upper case in original); see, also, Albanese, "Dissident History," 177-78.

27.  Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, 2: 483-84, 1: 192-93,274, 639 (emphasis and upper case in original), 2: 305, 1: 639 (emphases in original); see, too, Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived, 47-48.

28.  Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, 1: 152-54, 2: 593, 596, 604, 605-11; A[lfred]. P[ ercy]. Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism (London: Trtibner, 1883)' Blavatsky introduced some confusion in her listings regarding the hierarchical placement of the astral and life bodies, and she reversed them in different lists.

29.  Kuhn, Theosophy, 214; Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, 1: 178,2: 102-3, 1: 631, 179, 175,2: 185 (emphases and upper cases in original)

30.   Kuhn, Theosophy, 214-15.

31.  On misreadings, or "misprisions," see Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), esp. 16-51.

32.  J. Campbell Verplanck, "A Theosophical Catechism: For the Use of Children, Lesson I;' The Path 5, no. 7 (October 1890): 213-16; J. Campbell VerPlanck, "A Theosophical Catechism: For the Use of Children, Lesson II," The Path 5, no. 8 (November 1890): 249-51; "A Theosophical Catechism: For the Use of Children, Lesson III;' The Path 5, no. 10 (January 1891): 304-7.

33.  "American Branches: Theosophical Society," The Path 4, no. 12 (March 1890): 390; "American Branches: Theosophical Society;' The Path 5, no. 12 (March 1891): 394-95; "Sixteenth Annual Convention;' ibid., 405; "American Branches: Theosophical Society," The Path 6, no. 12 (March 1892): 408-9; ''American Branches: Theosophical Society," The Path 8, no. 3 (June 1893): 94-96; "American Branches: Theosophical Society;' The Path 9, no. 2 (May 1894): 66-68.

34.   See Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived, 103-11; Cranston, H.P.B., 45.

For updates click homepage here