Sociedad Teosófica
La Sociedad Teosófica
La Sociedad Teosófica (fundada en 1875 en Nueva York) es cada vez más reconocida por su influyente papel en la configuración del nuevo panorama religioso y cultural alternativo de finales del siglo XIX y del XX, y quizás especialmente por ser una de las primeras promotoras del interés por las religiones y filosofías orientales. Muchos estudiosos señalan ahora que la Sociedad Teosófica popularizó tempranamente los conceptos orientales en Occidente y que Blavatsky y Olcott fueron los primeros occidentales conocidos que se convirtieron al budismo, pero a pesar de esta creciente concienciación, muchas de las cuestiones centrales relacionadas con los primeros años de la Sociedad Teosófica y Oriente siguen estando en gran medida inexploradas. Este texto pretende ofrecer un estudio más detallado de la primera Sociedad Teosófica y Oriente (1875-1900). Además de localizar y analizar nuevo material histórico, se explora cómo los teósofos se acercaron a Oriente y cómo al hacerlo se asemejaron y se diferenciaron de los orientalistas de la época. Explora cómo los teósofos representaban a Oriente y se relacionaban con las personas con las que entraban en contacto. Los temas principales incluyen el sánscrito, el budismo, la filosofía hindú, los maestros orientales, el yoga y cómo se escribió sobre estos temas en las revistas teosóficas y en la literatura modernista.
Keywords: Theosophical Society, Orientalism, Easternization, esotericism, cross-cultural studies, Asian religion, South Asian studies, nineteenth century, intellectual culture, history of religions
The Theosophical Society, established in 1875 in New York by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–91), Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907), and others, is chiefly known to scholars of Western esotericism and the study of religions. However, it is becoming increasingly well known to a variety of other fields of scholarship for its role in shaping central facets of the spiritual and cultural landscapes of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 2013 the editors of the significant anthology entitled Handbook of the Theosophical Current noted the importance of the Theosophical Society when stating that the Theosophical Society, and its prime proponent, Helena Blavatsky, represents one of the few pivotal moments in religious history alongside the moments of impact caused by Emperor Constantine, Martin Luther, and the critical voices of the Enlightenment.1
In fact, the Theosophical Society is of such a multifaceted nature that it should spark the interest of scholars of the more general study of modern intellectual history and Orientalism. The Theosophical Society, for example, embraces multiple entangled dimensions related to its interests, organizations, worldviews, cross-cultural interrelations, historical backgrounds, and general impact, which confronts researchers with questions of the relationships between categories such as religion, esotericism, science, philosophy, art, literature, and politics in the modern shift to a globalizing, secularizing, multicultural world.
Specialized scholarship has already opened the study of a number of these facets, such as Theosophy and art, Theosophy and science, Theosophy and gender, Theosophy and politics, and the historical background of the society in relation to larger historical contexts and its interaction with Asian cultures. This last facet is of special significance, because, since the early days of the Theosophical Society, it has been recognized that one of its central activities has been its promotion of and interrelationship with Asian religions and philosophies. From time to time and in a number of studies, questions about the nature of this involvement and the Theosophical presentation of Asian traditions have equally been raised, but only more recently have these questions begun to be dealt with beyond the relatively specialized studies that hitherto have been scattered in specialized journals and anthologies.
Much (p.2) is, however, still left unexplored, and a more unified picture is still needed in order to understand the role that the Theosophical Society has played in cross-cultural transmissions and engagements between the West and the East. The terms “East” and “West” are of course relative terms, but sometimes they unfortunately continue to carry Orientalist connotations of two opposite mentalities, peoples, or cultures. This book also makes use of the terms, but this is primarily to illustrate how the imaginary “East” was construed at the time of the early Theosophists and in related contexts. This book therefore also often makes use of the designation “Eastern traditions” or similar. When possible, the more contemporary designation “Asian” is chosen rather than “Eastern.”
One of the reasons for the more general lack of interest in the Theosophical Society and its relation to the East is clearly connected with the skepticism that the domain of Western esotericism in general has suffered from. What can a study of “rejected,” “heretical,” or “distorted” forms of knowledge, such as those associated with esotericism and Theosophy, possibly have to offer historical and cultural studies, it might be asked? In this connection we find, for example, some earlier general studies of Orientalism that have either been ignorant about the Theosophical Society or dismissed its relation to the East as not worthy of notice. Edward Said’s famous or infamous Orientalism (1978), for example, does not mention the Theosophical Society at all, even though the Theosophical Society has been a major popularizer of Eastern ideas in the West since its establishment in India, and its proponents became some of the first Western Buddhists. The Theosophical movement, for example, approached the East in enthusiastic ways that fall outside Said’s general discourse about Western hegemonic Orientalism, which potentially could have nuanced Western approaches to the East, but it was left out. It must of course be admitted that Said’s primary focus was the Middle East. However, Ronald Inden’s Imagining India (1990), which directly focuses on India, for example only mentions Theosophy in a note, along with Jungian psychology and symbolic anthropology, as an example of a European discourse attributing the label “dreamy imagination” to the Indian “other.3 Raymond Schwab also clearly knew of the Theosophical Society but dismissed it as not worthy of any study in his massive The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880 (1984). The Theosophical Society, he noted, is something “on which it is not necessary to dwell.”4 More recently, though, several authors writing about the relationship between India and the East and Europe and the West have recognized the role of Theosophy in the transmittance of Indian ideas to the West and vice versa. Very briefly this is done by Wilhelm Halbfass in his India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (1988). Similarly, Richard King in his Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and “The Mystic East” mentions the influence of Theosophy on the modern concepts of Vedānta and Buddhism. With more emphasis, however, John James Clarke, in his Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between Asian and Western Thought (1997), in the context of Buddhism, deals with the importance of Theosophy in “popularizing Asian religious and philosophical ideas in the West, and in encouraging the East-West dialogue.” He also notes how the Theosophical Society not only influenced the Western context but also “gave substantial assistance to the revival of Hindu and Buddhist self-awareness and self-respect in Asia itself.”5 In the same way it is worth mentioning that Peter van der Veer in Imperial (p.3) Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (2001) argues how nineteenth-century spiritualism and Theosophy played a “crucial role in the development of radical antiestablishment and anticolonial politics, both in Britain and India.” He explores this in three different aspects, namely “the representation of absence in spiritualism, the negotiation of science and rationality, and the role of gender and sexuality.”6
The mechanism of exclusion, based on the inherited notion that esotericism and Theosophy are something unimportant, rejected, and distorted, has hitherto hindered a more nuanced and integrated historical picture of cross-cultural entanglements by not paying attention to the role of esotericism as something that has been and still is a significant part of modern European culture. But, as it has just been shown, as more historical research is done, the role that the Theosophical movement has played is slowly being recognized as being of importance to understanding cross-cultural interchanges in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Today any historian knows that even though the Theosophical Society and its ideas about the East have been shunned by many established authorities, people in general and some authorities, away from the public eye, have been involved with it, interested in it, or inspired by it, and it has had a considerable impact. The popularity of yoga and the way Buddhism and Hinduism have been presented in the West are sound examples of this. Asian traditions became so tied up with esotericism in the twentieth century, and popularly so, that the wider public often cannot distinguish these traditions, and they have certainly in this mixed form become occulture—that is, normal and mainstream. Such significant cultural entanglements resulting from cross-cultural interchanges are certainly worthy of historical study. In fact, it would be difficult to study modern esotericism and new religious traditions in the West and the East without an awareness of these entanglements.
The notion that the Theosophical Society is a distorted image of the East and therefore not worthy of study dates back to the initial Orientalist critique in the nineteenth century and has been upheld by some; but historians, now freed from the quest for origins, can now more critically ask: what is a pure religious or philosophical tradition, anyway? Buddhism, for example, has seen numerous divisions through history and continues to change like any other living religious tradition. The study of the Theosophical Society might therefore very well tell something about the self-same cross-cultural dynamics that cause change to traditions when meeting “others” and at the same time something about the “imagining of the other” that is a part of such dynamics. Furthermore, studying the Theosophical Society and the East also brings to light the connection between Western esotericism and Asian religions, disregarding how rejected or distorted a picture the Theosophical Society has been believed to be.
(p.4) The early Theosophical Society (1875–1900) was exceptionally placed at the crossroads between cultures under British rule. It imagined its own known cultural background as having lost connection with ancient truths and the unknown Other, the East, full of mysteries, and became actively engaged in exploring, reviving, participating in, formulating, and transmitting the East both to the West and to the East. It is the central dimensions of this early engagement both imaginatively and actively that this book seeks to analyze, thereby cultivating further research in this area.
Imagining the East relates to the imaginative faculty, namely the human ability to produce images and concepts in the mind of past events and places we have not visited, and also that such pictures in the mind of things that we have actually experienced are often colored by desires, feelings, ideologies, and so on. No matter what we do the imagination is in play. When representatives from one culture meet another culture they often do so through a lens of preconceived ideas about the other. These preconceived ideas can be overtly positive, which might result in romanticizing and embrace, or overtly negative, which can result in dismissal and rejection. Both can lead to simplification, especially since concepts and ideas by nature are limited and because emotional force more easily lends itself to a single idea rather than a complex of ideas. Describing the Other holds power, as Said manifestly has shown, but power can move in different directions. Truly it can subdue, but it can also revive. It can pacify or mobilize. Description can be based on first-hand experience or second-hand knowledge and thereby equally lead to confirmation or to further discovery.
Was the approach of the early Theosophical Society to the East positive or negative? Romanticizing or dismissive? Did it proclaim ownership or power, and did it thereby subdue the East to its own conceptions or did it revive and mobilize its culture? Or did it do both? Did the members of the early Theosophical Society find their imagined East or did they discover something new and unknown? What consequences did this strong interest in the imagined Other have, and what influence did it manifest? These questions are primarily based on the premise that the Theosophical Society originated in the West and thereby approached the East from that point, but an important theoretical focus, only briefly touched upon in this book, that deserves serious attention in future research would be a more globally oriented outlook that includes perspectives from Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Theosophists and those of other Asian countries to which Theosophy has spread.
These questions are some of the central questions that this study seeks to explore, in order to demonstrate the reality of the complex nuances. These questions are also integral to the three main parts of this volume.
Major Themes Part 1: Approaches to the East. The first part of this volume includes two chapters dealing with more general theoretical questions concerning the type of Orientalism that the early Theosophical Society represents, namely: how did the early Theosophical Society approach the East?
(p.5) In “Adventures in ‘Wisdom-Land’: Orientalist Discourse in Early Theosophy,” Christopher Partridge analyzes the early Theosophical Society through the lens of postcolonial analysis and argues that although the Theosophical Society represents an affirmative romantic form of Orientalism as it promoted Indian religion and culture and opposed colonial rule and the Christian missions, the Theosophical Society is in fact also rooted in classical Orientalist discourses of power. Analyzing early Theosophical conceptualizations of wisdom, masters, and locations, Partridge argues that the Theosophical Society subdued the East to its own preconceived notions based in Western culture and esotericism. The wisdom found in the East was the esoteric wisdom of Theosophy. Partridge thereby brings attention to the many nuances of Orientalism and the often-overlooked facets of Theosophical approaches to the East.
In the second chapter, “Orientalist vs. Theosophist,” Donald Lopez continues the exploration of the differences in approaches to the East. Orientalists, for example, claimed to represent an accurate picture of Buddhism and the Buddha through academic philological work, but this was without having traveled much, if at all, in the Orient. The Theosophists such as Olcott, Blavatsky, and Alfred Percy Sinnett, on the other hand, being devotees rather than strict scholars, traveled quite extensively in the East and mingled with Buddhists for several years. Lopez shows how Orientalists such as Eugène Burnouf and Max Müller imagined the original Buddha to be a humane, non-secretive, and almost modern religious thinker when stripped of what to them seemed to be distorting mythological elements. The Theosophists, on the other hand, argued that the Buddha was misrepresented by the Orientalists and instead imagined profound secret wisdom in the myths surrounding the Buddha, who is to be understood as a universal adept among a number of masters throughout world history. Lopez follows the interesting debates between the two camps, beginning in 1888 in Oxford with the meeting of Olcott and Müller. Here the tension between approaches was concentrated on the correct placement of a Buddha statue in Müller’s study. Should it be placed according to Greek tradition, as was satisfactory to Müller, or according to Buddhist traditions, as Olcott contended? Lopez next traces the spirited debate between Müller and Sinnett, which began in the pages of the British literary journal Nineteenth Century, concerning Blavatsky and the correct understanding and presentation of Buddhism.
Here several tensions emerge between Orientalists and Theosophists regarding their respective approaches to the East, questions that have still not been settled, such as: living traditions versus philological and historical work, respecting the Eastern or the Western traditions, demythologization versus esoteric interpretation, and primitives versus profound ancient esoteric wisdom.
Part 2: The seven chapters in the second part of this volume continue to add nuances and answers to questions about the various significant early (p.6) Theosophical “representations of the East.” This relates to the history of ideas, such as usages, appropriations, imaginings, and conceptualizations of Asian ideas, and thereby also to cultural interchanges and the transformation of ideas in new contexts. This section particularly deals with the representation and appropriation of Sanskrit, Buddhism, Indian philosophy, the notion of masters, and yoga in the early Theosophical Society. It will also be shown how the East was represented in Theosophical journals, and how shared Oriental themes influenced modern literature.
Sanskrit plays a major role in Blavatsky’s writings and equally so in Theosophical literature to the present day—not only as a language but as the language of the gods. Not much has been written on Blavatsky’s or the Theosophical understanding of Sanskrit, but James A. Santucci has devoted a complete chapter to “H. P. Blavatsky’s Acquaintance with the Language of the Gods.”
Santucci shows how Sanskrit is understood within the framework of Blavatsky’s account of history related to the fall of Atlantis and a supposedly even older language known as Senzar, which embodied the ancient universal Wisdom-Religion. Sanskrit is perceived as a highly accurate direct descendent of this older, more profound mystery language and thereby signifies a central source of the esoteric wisdom teachings. In relation to this conceptualization of the importance of Sanskrit and the fact that Blavatsky is one of the most important early proponents of Theosophy, Santucci explores the long-overdue question of Blavatsky’s actual knowledge and use of Sanskrit.
Chapter 4 in Part 2 by Tim Rudbøg, entitled “Early Debates in the Reception of Buddhism: Theosophy and Esoteric Buddhism,” analyzes the origin, meaning of, and debates about the notion of an “esoteric Buddhism” as it was used in the early Theosophical Society, especially in the work of Blavatsky and Sinnett. Both Sinnett and Blavatsky primarily conceptualized Buddhism in relation to the notion of an esoteric doctrine, while scholars of Buddhism disregarded the existence of any esotericism in Buddhism. Based on an analysis of the debates about esoteric Buddhism, this chapter shows how differences between Orientalists and Theosophists can be contextualized in specific imaginings of Buddhism that they had and thereby also in varying receptions of Buddhism in the nineteenth century.
Chapter 5, entitled “H. P. Blavatsky’s Early Reception of Hindu Philosophy” by Erik Reenberg Sand and Rudbøg, turns the focus from Buddhism to the six schools of Hindu philosophy. Blavatsky is generally recognized as one of the major popularizers of Eastern philosophy in the West, yet not much detailed work on her specific use and knowledge of Hindu philosophy exists. This chapter explores the way the notion of the “six schools of Hindu philosophy” was used and received in Blavatsky’s early work, such as Isis Unveiled (1877), and during her time in India before the publication of The Secret Doctrine (1888). It shows (p.7) how Blavatsky’s work was a part of the Oriental Renaissance in the sense that the East, here the notion of the six schools of Hindu philosophy, clearly became a part of her esoteric tradition, but also that Hindu philosophy ultimately became just one aspect to be integrated into the syncretistic project of Theosophy, which in many respects framed the continued Oriental Renaissance in the West.
The esoteric knowledge of Sanskrit, Buddhism, and Indian philosophy is generally perceived to have been given to Blavatsky and other early theosophists by Eastern masters or Mahatmas, especially the masters Koot Hoomi and Morya.
Chapter 6 in Part 2 by Joscelyn Godwin, deals with the so-called “Mahatma Letters” allegedly originating from Koot Hoomi and Morya. Godwin systematically relates and analyzes the two original recipients of the letters, Allan Octavian Hume and Sinnett, showing how they became interested in the Eastern masters and their teachings. Next Godwin explores the arrival of the letters, problems regarding their publication, and the physical letters themselves. The content of the letters is analyzed to see what they might tell us about the characteristics of the masters. Blavatsky’s role in the production of these letters is considered from various aspects, as is the purpose and effect of the myth of the masters.
Chapter 7, entitled “ ‘The Real Pure Yog’: Yoga in the Early Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor” by Patrick D. Bowen, demonstrates how yoga was introduced to Western readers interested in occultism and the East in the pages of The Theosophist in the early 1880s. In 1885, the newly formed occult society, the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor (HB of L), which took inspiration from Theosophy, began instructing its members to read about and practice Theosophy-connected forms of yoga as a way to prepare for occult initiation. It was presumably the first society to do so. Using newly unearthed letters of early members of the Theosophical Society and the HB of L, Bowen pioneeringly traces the early history of the introduction of the practice of yoga in these organizations, which later, through Rev. William Ayton, led to Aleister Crowley and other British occultists’ interest in yoga.
Gillian McCann continues the study of the significance of how the East was presented in Theosophical journals in chapter 8 in Part 2, entitled “Emerging Representations of the East: The Role of Theosophical Periodicals, 1879–1900.”
Using The Lamp, a publication of the Toronto Theosophical Society, as its primary example, this chapter examines the ways in which Theosophists advanced their cause both inside and outside the mainstream through their periodicals. The Theosophical journals functioned as platforms for cultural brokers between the East and West and included the exchange of a great number of topics related to the East, such as ancient philosophy; sub-continental politics; and debates around cremation, karma, imperialism, and Indian immigration to countries such as Canada and Australia. McCann demonstrates how the Theosophists in this way consciously participated in the creation of the occult counter-public (p.8) sphere that helped to introduce new ideas into the mainstream. It was this oppositional sphere that was their key means for engaging with the public.
Chapter 9 in Part 2 by David Weir, entitled “Theosophy and Modernism: A Shared but Secret History,” shows that even though the esotericism of Theosophy might seem far from modernist literature, modernist icons such as William Butler Yeats, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot, among others, took inspiration from Madame Blavatsky’s writings. Theosophy’s romantic reverence for ancient cultures and imitation of the “wisdom literature” of Asian traditions was shared by the modernist dismissal of contemporary cultural traditions. Weir argues that Blavatsky’s Koot Hoomi, for example, structurally is quite similar to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Blavatsky’s investigation of the Vedāntic tradition is also on par with the modernist tendency to reject Christianity or, in Eliot’s case, to employ Eastern theology as a means of revivifying Western religious traditions. Modernist Orientalism has many sources, but as Weir argues, Theosophy must be counted as one of the more pertinent of such sources, since it was through Theosophy that a number of important modernist figures first became aware of Asian traditions. Theosophy, as this chapter shows, provided a template for the modernist re-evaluation of religious traditions—Asian traditions, especially—as rich material for new cultural production.
Part 3: The third part of this volume deals with “interactions with the East” and thereby moves beyond representation into the domain of engagement. This part contains six chapters providing concrete examples of direct social, political, and cultural impact and exchange—more particularly, the Bengal Renaissance, the Arya Samaj, universal brotherhood, and nationalism.
In chapter 10 in Part 3, “Theosophy in the Bengal Renaissance,” K. Paul Johnson explores the Theosophical Society’s association with the Bengal Renaissance in India, which is a significant yet quite unexplored dimension of both movements. The chapter traces the rise and fall of Theosophical influence in Bengal, beginning with contacts between Bengali and American spiritualists in the early 1870s prior to the formation of the Theosophical Society. Two years before its move to India, the Society established correspondence with leaders of the Brahmo Samaj. After the move to India in 1879, personal contacts were developed through the travels to Bengal of Olcott and Blavatsky and the subsequent involvement of Bengalis in the Madras Theosophical Society headquarters. The role of Mohini Chatterji as an emissary of the Theosophical Society to Europe and America was the high point of this association, but by the early twentieth century, Aurobindo Ghose described the Theosophical Society as having lost its appeal to progressive young Indians.
Chapter 11 in Part 3, entitled “The Marriage between the Theosophical Society and the Arya Samaj” by Sand, explores the relationship between the Theosophical Society and the Indian Arya Samaj during the period between 1878 and 1882. (p.9) While some of the overall details of these events are well known, this chapter offers new insight into how the two parties imagined and misrepresented each other and how these misrepresentations were reflecting the wider contemporary cultural representations of East and West.
Chapter 12 in Part 3, “The West Moves East: Blavatsky’s Discourse for Universal Brotherhood in India” by Rudbøg, explores why the Theosophical objective “to form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color” became important to the Theosophical Society. The chapter identifies and analyzes the intellectual contexts that informed the development of the idea as it entered the Theosophical Society, such as the great Enlightenment ideals of the eighteenth century and spiritualistic reform movements and freemasonry in the nineteenth century, and argues that the idea became central to the relocation of the Theosophical Society’s headquarters from New York to India (1879–1882).
Chapter 13 in Part 3, “Allan Octavian Hume, Madame Blavatsky, and the Foundation of the Indian National Congress” by Isaac Lubelsky, demonstrates how the Theosophical Society deeply influenced the early days of Indian nationalism and was crucially responsible for the birth of the Indian nationalist movement. For example, Hume, one of Blavatsky’s closest disciples during the early 1880s, was the person behind the foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885. This chapter tells in depth the story of Hume’s Theosophical period and analyzes Hume’s writing from that period, followed by a thorough description of his efforts to erect the Indian National Congress, based on his Theosophical beliefs. It shows how Theosophy had a direct influence on the birth of the nationalist movement of the world’s largest democracy.
Chapter 14, entitled “Theosophy, Cultural Nationalism, and Home Rule” by Mark Bevir, also examines the role of Theosophists in mobilizing Indian politics or the home rule movement, especially in the form of “cultural nationalism.” The first section shows how Western Theosophists simplified and appropriated Indian thought, deploying it to resolve dilemmas confronting occult and other religious traditions. The second section explores the ways in which Theosophical ideas then provided inspiration for a tradition of cultural nationalism within India itself. The third section briefly shows how this cultural nationalism transformed Congress in the years immediately surrounding M. K. Gandhi’s return from South Africa. It is argued that Theosophy was one strand feeding into cultural nationalism, as Theosophy introduced important and largely novel themes to cultural nationalism including a principled commitment to nonviolence and an alternative to liberal subjectivities.
Michael Bergunder continues this theme in the final chapter entitled “Experiments with Theosophical Truth: Gandhi, Esotericism, and Global Religious History.”Bergunder argues that there is strong textual evidence to (p.10) suggest that Gandhi’s notion of Hinduism, his specific view of Christianity, and his general belief that all religions refer to the same truth were shaped by the ideas of the Theosophical Society. The article presents the respective sources, discusses their plausibility, and puts these findings into perspective. This perspective is provided by a global history approach, which holds that the religious concepts in play since the nineteenth century were already products of globally “entangled histories.” Furthermore, it is argued that the impact of esotericism on global religious history, from the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, needs to be investigated with more academic rigor.
Based on these studies it is the hope of the editors that a more unified picture of the multifaceted role of the early Theosophical Society in relation to the East has emerged in the pages of this collected volume, and that in the future further study of the Theosophical Society and modern esotericism will become a more significant part of general historical surveys of cross-cultural studies.