It would probably be no exaggeration to say that the entire revival
of occult and esoteric knowledge as a form of
public knowledge, rather than as arcana known only to a few, stems from the
tremendous intelligence and energy of one woman - Madame Helena Petrova
Blavatsky (1831-1891), the founder of the Theosophical Society. If the Golden Dawn and its off-shoots
represented the private face of occultism, the Theosophical Society was its
public face.
Born of Russian Aristocratic parents, Blavatsky, a flamboyant and
charismatic personality, was from an early age aware of her psychic
abilities. She spent much of her life
traveling through
In fact, the concept of Masters was actually derived from the
Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, a little-known occult organization that was
established in
In
Traveling to
Coming at a time when Spiritualism and Mesmerism were all the rage,
when
Within a few short years other movements and organizations had
sprung up alongside the Spiritualists and Blavatsky's Theosophical
Society. Mary Baker Eddy's Christian
Science, the Society for Psychical Research, and the Hermetic Order of the
Golden Dawn were perhaps the three most important. The Occult renaissance was well and truly flourishing. But it was to last only a few decades before
conservatism once again took over. Not
until the Counterculture movement of the mid-sixties would any comparable
revolution of consciousness occur.
Main works
Blavatsky was a woman of great intellect and prodigious
output. Her two most important books
are Isis Unveiled and her magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, published in
1888. Both of these books are almost
unreadable. She also wrote The Key to
Theosophy, a general introductory work.
Overall, Blavatsky's teachings were strongly syncrestic, drawing
from Indian, Tibetan, Platonic and Neoplatonic, Kabbalistic
(the latter learned from Mathers), and contemporary 19th century occult and
scientific sources. But although her
writings, especially her monumental two volume Secret Doctrine, had a
tremendous effect on a great many people, especially those who were
spiritually-intellectually inclined, their convoluted and turgid style made
them difficult to digest for the layperson.
Yet Blavatsky was not only a great synthesizer, but a great
innovator as well (just consider her two enormous master works, Isis Unveiled
and the Secret Doctrine). She
introduced many new concepts: cyclic evolution, root races, Atlantis baroque
stories ( not just Plato's parable, or even Donnelly's research), a cosmology
of innumerable cycles and worlds., and the completely original ideal, not of a
yogi-saint, nor a boddhisattva, but, for want of a better word, a
"superman"-adept, active on all planes in fulfillment of divine
purpose, unlike the transcendence-striving boddhisattva ideal.
It is significant that the Theosophical Master predates both the
Hermeticist's Inner Chief and the Nietzche's Obermensch. Nietzsche himself only came to fame in the
1900+s, whilst the original Theosophy was around in the 1880s.
Blavtsky's vast cosmology and psychology, with all its interminable
details, makes the authentic Indo-Tibetan tradition seem prosaic in
comparison. For whilst the genuine
Indian and Tibetan teachings present a clear and straight-forward psychology,
tending towards the dry and scholastic, Blavatsky re-introduces poetry and
drama, and hard-core, occult-gnostic-style, esotericism. The Indo-Tibetan tradition is less
occult-esoteric and more pragmatic and metaphysical, being a philosophical and
iconographical adjunct to the praxis of yoga and meditation and the path to Liberation. Blavatsky in contrast constructed a whole
new esoteric paradigm (re chakras, bodies, what happens after death, karma,
universe,... of great detail and devoid of obsolete cultural conditioning, even
if her terminology was rather difficult).
Her problem is that she didn’t know how to write clear prose (a
failing common to many esotericists - Steiner, Aurobindo, etc etc), and that
she was confusing two impulses - the creative fire of authoring a new mythos,
and the synthesizing intellect of bringing together what is already
established, but in a larger unity. In
this context she was trying to create a new synthesis of science and
esotericism - using the most upto date science of her time, and separating the
wheat from the chaff as far as esotericism goes. Yet despite her success as an innovative visionary, she failed to
establish a new universal science precisely because she put too much of her own
stuff in - fascinating as all these ancient worlds and cycles and root races
may be - they are also simply one more layer of myth - not the un-reality
behind all the myth.
Despite - or perhaps because of - their obscurity, the essentials
of Blavatsky's teachings were absorbed by enough people, who in turn popularized
and simplified them, to form the foundation of a wide range of so-called
"esoteric" movements and teachings.
All of these share a common cosmology, derived from Theosophy, and
ultimately from Blavatsky herself: the existence of seven planes of existence
and of subtle bodies and principles corresponding to each plane, the
reincarnation of the higher spiritual principle(s) which evolve towards greater
and greater perfection and Godhood through a seemingly endless succession of
greater and greater stages of existence, the existence of nature spirits
("devas"); the existence of a hierarchy of secret spiritual Masters
or Adepts who are from the Himalayas or from the spiritual planes guiding the
evolution of humanity, and so on.
Blavatsky's legacy, through all of the planes and subplanes, and
eras and sub-eras, was a new occult vision of reality (further developed by
later Theosophical and related esotericists such as Rudolph Steiner, Alice
Bailey, etc), which offered a detailed occult analysis of the structure of
manifest reality and the spiritual forces and hierarchies behind it. And in spite of all its convolutions, it
cannot be denied that in her cosmology and anthropogony Blavatsky recovers and
repopularises the universal emanationist cosmology of previous esoteric
teachings, stating it in a form that was to sustain the intelligent and
mystically orientated Westerner at least until the explosion of occult
knowledge and influx of original Indian mysticism that began in the late
sixties, and that still has power and influence in both the Hermetic tradition
and the New Age movement even today.
It has been said (by the modern American philosopher A. N.
Whitehead) that all Western philosophy has been ultimately footnotes to
Plato. In the same way, all subsequent
western esotericism can rightly be described as footnotes to Blavatsky.
Authors: M. Alan Kazlev (most of article) and Arvan Harvat (some of
"Teachings")