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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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