|
Review
Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics,
Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America
by Peter Washington
Schocken, 470 pp., $14.00 (paper)
1.
During my several decades of teaching literature at Berkeley,
one of my favorite offerings proved to be a large introductory
lecture course on modern British and American authors. I
always found it a pleasure to lead wary but game lower-division
students at least partway into the rarefied, highly wrought
worlds of Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf, Stevens, and their contemporaries.
Notoriously, however, modernism comes with some awkward
ideological baggage. My distaste for Lawrence's preaching
against insubordinate women and for Pound's fulminations
against "the Jews" made it hard for me personally
to cope with such noxious rant, to say nothing of asking
California sophomores, steeped in egalitarianism and innocent
of history, to put it into some ameliorating perspective.
The juncture in each semester that I approached most warily,
though, was the hour when an accounting had to be made of
W.B. Yeats's magical beliefs and practices. Here was perhaps
the greatest of modern poets, the one who could most fearlessly
and eloquently address perennial human concerns about sexual
striving, wounded pride, lost love, bodily decay, shattered
dreams, and helplessness before blind forces; but here as
well was someone who needed-and not just for the sake of
his muse-to believe in palmistry, crystal gazing, astral
travel, the secret governance of history by phases of the
moon, and a spirit world that could be commanded through
ritual incantations. How, I wondered, could such a "sentimentalism
of the intellect," as Yeats's father justly called
it, square with the poet's exultation in his capacity to
face cold reality without flinching? Moreover, I knew what
to expect at the end of my necessarily equivocal lecture:
the blocking of my exit by a small but intent cluster of
students who would clamor for further news about those 2000-year
cycles that really, professor, really make everything fall
into place at last.
That Yeats was in earnest about his esotericism cannot
be doubted. As his bemused friend Pound observed in a letter
of 1919, "Bit queer in the head about 'moon,' whole
new metaphysics about 'moon,' very very very bughouse."
Neither Pound's sarcasms nor John Butler Yeats's paternal
chiding could shake the poet's conviction that, in his own
words from 1892, "The mystical life is the centre of
all that I do and all that I think and all that I write."
Like some of my students a century later, Yeats felt that
gnostic beliefs and rituals were less a rear-guard protest
against the iron rule of science and materialism than the
advancing edge of an emergent mass consciousness. As he
put it, "I have always considered myself a voice of
what I believe to be a greater renaissance-the revolt of
the soul against the intellect-now beginning in the world."[1]
But until Yeats became a distinguished personage, that
voice was a mere echo of a far more confident one. Like
others who pined for lost certainties, Yeats had fallen
under the spell of one of the gaudiest characters of the
nineteenth century, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, co-founder
(with Henry Steel Olcott) of the burgeoning Theosophical
Society, and a catalyst of unorthodox neo-religious stirrings
in America, England, the European continent, India, and
elsewhere.
For sheer chutzpah, there has never been anyone quite like
Madame Blavatsky. Born in Russia and descended from Russian-German
aristocrats, she fled at age seventeen from an ill-considered
marriage and kept on moving for the next quarter-century,
scooping up assorted occult/religious notions during her
passage through much of the world, and liberally inventing
other travels and adventures that would enhance her self-portrayal
as an initiate into secret brotherhoods. When she settled
in New York in 1873 at age forty-two, she looked to be just
another table-rapping spiritualist. [2]
But she would soon one-up her fellow mediums by copiously
plagiarizing and synthesizing esoteric texts and by making
claims of paranormal contact with Tibetan "Masters"
or "Mahatmas" whom she had allegedly visited in
person. Thus she came to be known as an authority on the
world's religions and ancient cults, which all proved to
have derived from an aboriginal, long- suppressed doctrine
that had been revealed to her in telepathic trances and
in letters that were "precipitated" by psychic
express into her antechambers and train compartments.
Blavatsky moved her society's headquarters from New York
to India in 1878 after the American press, which had gotten
wind of her vulgar deceptions as well as her zany stories,
showed a determination to keep her in the satirical limelight.
But the move wasn't just expedient; HPB wanted to tip Theosophy's
scales away from too exclusive an emphasis on Western esotericism-the
body of thought that yoked together magic, alchemy, Hellenistic
and Renaissance Neo-Platonism, the Kabbalah, the Tarot pack,
and communication with spirits-and toward the more mystical,
higher-toned Eastern tradition that included Vedanta and
Mahayana Buddhism. [3] The result was
a still more awkward mishmash of dogmas that would have
troubled even the chronically credulous if HPB hadn't kept
them marveling at her paranormal demonstrations-some of
which, however, were once again being publicly exposed as
shams. When she moved, one last time, to London in 1887,
it was because the skeptics were back on her trail; a commission
of the Society for Psychical Research, investigating her
stunts at Adyar (near Madras), had pronounced her an accomplished
fraud. Yet Blavatsky's apparent persecution by "materialists"
only enhanced her glory in the eyes of neophyte admirers
like Yeats, who was easily persuaded by a dashing Indian
disciple, Mohini Chatterjee, to join the Theosophical Society's
magic-minded Esoteric Section in London.
To be sure, when the hypersensitive Yeats actually met
Blavatsky, he was taken aback by her coarseness of manner.
Nor could he ever quite bring himself to believe in the
existence of her Himalayan Masters. In turn, HPB was made
so uneasy by Yeats's insistence on performing foolish magical
experiments-trying, for example, to raise the ghost of a
flower from its ashes-that she soon exacted his resignation.
Yet Blavatsky had placed her stamp on his mind indelibly.
Without her encouragement to pierce the veil of maya, Yeats
would have been deprived of the prophetic strain and several
of the odd but passionately held beliefs that helped to
lend his verse its uniquely rapt quality.
2.
If Yeats's case were unique, we could dismiss it as a curious
footnote to modern cultural history. But from the 1880s
straight through the 1940s an imposing number of prominent
figures, from Kandinsky and Mondrian through Gandhi and
Nehru to Huxley and Isherwood, intersected the Theosophical
orbit long enough to have their trajectory significantly
altered by it. As some of those names imply, moreover, the
movement distinguished itself from most esoteric fads by
resonating with consequential forces of sociopolitical change.
Blavatsky and Olcott's political message-internationalist,
pacifist, socially progressive-appealed not only to the
enlightened bourgeoisie of England and America but also
to indigenous leaders in colonized lands such as India and
Ceylon, where the Theosophical Society established impressive
beachheads. And although its enrolled membership, worldwide,
never exceeded 45,000, it spawned a number of related associations--most
notably, perhaps, Rudolf Steiner's "Anthroposophy"--that
exert a continuing influence on reformist and utopian thought.
One is tempted to assume that such an effective movement
must have been only superficially irrationalist in emphasis.
After all, the Theosophical Society's charter sounded almost
like a university catalog, referring soberly to "the
encouragement of studies in comparative religion, philosophy
and science" and to "the investigation of unexplained
laws of nature." But it wasn't comparative religion
that instructed Madame Blavatsky about "the Lord of
the World," who, she reported, had dropped to Earth
from Venus with various helpers whose own assistants included
her two chief personal Masters. Nor was it science that
taught Theosophists to construe pure spirit as a sufficient
cause of events ranging from remote communication between
individuals to the secret prearrangement of whole historical
epochs by celestial busybodies.
How could otherwise discerning people have subscribed to
such preposterous ideas? To address that question, one turns
expectantly to scholarly treatises on esotericism in general
and Theosophy in particular. But one quickly finds that
most of the historians are themselves occult partisans who,
for example, "objectively" weigh the likelihood
that enlightened beings paid astral visits to Olcott and
others, making flowers appear in midair, causing an indoor
rainshower, and so forth. [4] One such
expert avers that experimental science is "hardly capable
of accounting for" the correspondences that "unite
all visible things and likewise unite the latter with invisible
realities," and another maintains that work such as
Blavatsky's "demolishes the pretensions of science
by adducing a mass of evidence against the premises of materialism."
[5] Such writers can't tell us why occult
ideas have proved seductive; they merely illustrate the
problem.
So, too, the esoteric historians' gratitude toward the
propounders of transcendent doctrine leaves them reluctant
to be candid or vivid about the shamming, squabbling, and
jockeying for power that inevitably characterize the daily
conduct of any movement that traffics in unconfirmable ideas.
Consider, for example, what becomes of Madame Blavatsky
in the hands of K. Paul Johnson, the best-informed but hardly
the most trustworthy commentator on Theosophy. [6]
Though he acknowledges HPB's light regard for the truth
and reluctantly explodes several features of her legend,
Johnson airily maintains that she "devot[ed] all her
energies to the enlightenment and liberation of humanity."
Her lies, he declares, were told with the most selfless
of motives, to protect the identities of her politically
active tutors in Egypt and India, the real-life prototypes
of her fanciful Mahatmas Koot Hoomi and Morya: "Most
of her public life was an effort to serve hidden Masters
without betraying their secrets." [7]
Such piety obscures both the cynical glee Blavatsky must
have taken in perpetrating ruses and the obvious self-interestedness
of her concocted "Master letters," which, far
from expressing sublime and eternal truths, mirrored her
own opinions and advanced her immediate tactical ends vis-à-vis
jealous rivals. At the same time, Johnson's emphasis on
her role as a handmaiden to male sages occludes the very
traits of HPB's that we can still admire: her feisty independence
and impetuousness, her spurning of a conventional feminine
role, her impatience with petty hypocrisy, her earthy humor,
her well-founded scorn for her lieutenants, and her shrewdly
accurate gauging of other people's eagerness to be gulled.
Happily, though, the story of modern esotericism is not
the exclusive property of esotericists. As of 1995, we have
had the benefit of Peter Washington's invaluable Madame
Blavatsky's Baboon, a work that makes cogent sublunar
sense of HPB and much of her progeny. Not coincidentally,
it is also a comic triumph, a deliciously deflating narrative
about quirky lawgivers-dreamers, power trippers, pedophilic
poseurs-and their unruly rank and file, "the neurotic,
the hysterical, the destructive and the downright mad."
Yet Washington is by no means merely a naysayer. He shows
empathy with seekers who found themselves orphaned by the
loss of traditional faith, and he credits some of them with
a clear awareness of the difference between what Aldous
Huxley would call Theosophy's "bunkum about astral
bodies, spiritual hierarchies, reincarnations and so forth"
and its standing as "a good enough religion-its main
principles being that all religions contain some truth and
that we ought to be tolerant…."
Washington's portrait of HPB is especially nuanced and
convincing. He sees that she was never really in control
of her temperament, her finances, or her courtiers, whom
she couldn't resist needling impishly; but he also detects
in her an endearing note of self-mockery--as when, for example,
she describes herself, in a letter of 1883, being feted
in India by discomfited British officials and their wives.
Writing in the third person, the 245-pound Blavatsky depicts
her own
graceful, stately person, clad in half-Tibetan, half-night-dress
fashion, sitting in all the glory of her Calmuck beauty
at the Governor's and Carmichael's dinner-parties; HPB
positively courted by the aide-de-camps [sic]! Old "Upasika"
[one of her several nicknames] hanging like a gigantic
nightmare on the gracefully rounded elbows of members
of the Council, in pumps and swallow-tailed evening dress
and silk stockings, smelling brandy and soda enough to
kill a Tibetan yak.
Could this be the obedient figure depicted in K. Paul Johnson's
deferential studies? It is a stronger person altogether-self-invented,
whimsical, and enormously amused by the inconvenience she
is causing those who play by the official rules.
This ironic flamboyance on HPB's part comes across vividly
in Washington's telling. Of particular note is her almost
affectionate quarrel with Darwinian biology, a body of theory
whose emphasis on chance adaptations and raw necessity was
diametrically opposed to her spiritualizing and teleological
approach to causality. The theory of evolution through natural
selection, she was well aware, had been acquired through
more legitimate labors than her own, and she acknowledged
Darwin's preeminence in a characteristically high-spirited
private gesture. Her prize possession, as Washington reports,
was "a large bespectacled [stuffed] baboon, standing
upright, dressed in wing-collar, morning-coat and tie, and
carrying under its arm the manuscript of a lecture on The
Origin of Species." And as Washington shows, much
of HPB's magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine (1888),
reads like a hashish-induced satire on The Descent of
Man, with interplanetary spirits preempting the ancestral
role of apes.
But Washington also sees that when it came to established
Christianity, Blavatsky's whimsy disappeared; she wanted
the whole religion overthrown. The touchy, divisive "Personal
God" of the Judeo-Christian tradition, she felt, had
strutted his bloody hour on the historical stage and should
now give way to a mellow, nonspecific pantheism. If her
means of imparting conviction were meretricious, the conviction
itself in this major instance was not.
3.
As Washington's narrative reveals in fine detail, the dilemma
that kept HPB continually off balance--how to advance sincerely
held principles that had become entangled with improvised
nonsense--was bequeathed to her associates when she died
in 1891. Most of Madame Blavatsky's Baboon is given
over to that largely farcical but sometimes poignant aftermath.
Washington's masterly telling of the story is not just a
chronicle but, implicitly, a parable about the progress
of any religion from visionary zeal through the consolidating
of a privileged and corruptible priesthood. That HPB was
never so innocent as to believe herself a divinely instructed
messenger would appear to set Theosophy apart from many
another religion, but the more important difference is that
it remained a comic-opera affair: no intimidation of the
wretched, no collusion with rapacious potentates, no burning
of heretics, no genocidal crusades.
After HPB's earthly remains were maneuvered into the grave,
the manifest topic of Theosophical debate became how best
to honor her legacy; but of course the real question was
who should rule. Narrowly partisan letters from the Masters
and even from Blavatsky's own shade now began floating like
aerial leaflets into the hands of the schemers who stood
to gain from them. HPB herself was eventually "occulted"
to the status of an Ascended Master sitting between Morya
and Koot Hoomi in spirit heaven, and a whole new theology
began to crystallize around her. Meanwhile, every tendency
she had tried to suppress--Christ worship, ecclesiastical
solemnity, apostolic succession, sexual libertinism--blossomed
in one cranny or another of the ungovernable international
movement.
Insofar as leadership was maintained, furthermore, it was
nothing to boast about. Most prominently, there was the
ubiquitous and ritual-happy Annie Besant, who remained president
from 1907 until her death in 1933. Besant had been a fiery
Victorian atheist and socialist, and at the helm of the
Theosophical Society she retained her genius for fundraising
and public relations. But esoteric notions, once they had
taken hold, appear to have addled her judgment. At once
the new president began establishing superfluous suborders--the
Preparation League of Healers, the Imperial Services League
of Modern Thought, the Prayer League, and so forth--while
courting for herself such extra titles as Very Illustrious
Most Puissant Grand Commander of the British Jurisdiction
of the Co-Masonic Order. Dottiness overtook her long before
senility set in for good. In 1925, for example, she and
others attempted to locate the Hungarian castle of one of
HPB's lesser Masters, the Count of Saint-Germain, by choosing
a seemingly random but divinely inspired destination from
a railway timetable. The "Dark Forces," she concluded
after a week of vexatious trainhopping, were responsible
for the party's having gotten no farther than Innsbruck.
Besant's choice of trusted associates was a continuing
source of imbroglios and recriminations. Above all, she
remained steadfastly loyal to Charles Leadbeater, who remained
in positions of authority for twenty-five years after the
first of many plausible accusations of child molestation
were voiced against him in 1906. Leadbeater specialized
in cosmological systematizing and in divining the past incarnations
of himself and other Theosophists, who had all, it seems,
been related to one another not only in earthly ages but
on other planets as well. It was Leadbeater, too, who accepted
a bishopric in the "Liberal Catholic Church" of
James Wedgwood--an even more improbable personage who shared
Leadbeater's fondness for invented ranks, beribboned frocks,
and pubescent boys, and who once told the police, after
having been observed visiting eighteen public lavatories
within a two-hour period, that he was seeking a friend who
had "gone wrong" in a previous life.
Leadbeater was also instrumental in engineering the Theosophical
Society's greatest and most ironic success, the grooming
and selling of Jiddu Krishnamurti, the "World Teacher"--supposedly
an incarnation of Maitreya, the Messianic Buddha--to a holiness-parched
international public. Washington leaves us to surmise whether
Leadbeater's quasi-abduction in 1909 of this fourteen-year-old
son of an impoverished Indian Theosophist was motivated
more by lust or by ambition to play John the Baptist to
a new savior. What we do know is that Krishnamurti, who
confessed after twenty years of grooming for guruhood that
he had never finished reading a single Theosophical book,
remained a virtual prisoner of the society's directorate
from 1909 until the day in 1929 when he publicly renounced
not only occultism, ceremony, and hierarchy in general but
the society in particular.
The irony of Krishnamurti's career, Washington demonstrates,
lay in the spectacular aftermath of that renunciation. His
Theosophical handlers had so exasperated him with their
transparently hollow mumbo jumbo, while nevertheless convincing
him that he was a chosen vessel of some kind, that he could
turn his manufactured celebrity to a sane end, namely, informing
millions of seekers that there were no Masters and no fixed
paths--nothing to follow but their inner light. Krishnamurti,
who settled in Ojai, California, and died in 1986, lived
long enough to see even this mild lesson twisted into "flower
power" narcissism. Even more sadly, grave risks of
egotism and insulation from needed criticism awaited the
increasingly pampered sage who would show people everywhere
how to distrust all ideas except his own. Still, by thwarting
the plans of Leadbeater and Besant to turn him into a living
god and by preaching self-reliance and toleration, Krishnamurti
perpetuated the more viable element in HPB's confused original
vision.
Was the mature Krishnamurti, then, a great exemplar of
the Theosophical outlook or an exasperated rebel against
it? Washington doesn't resolve the question, but he frames
it for us in a stimulating way by pairing Krishnamurti with
an equally extraordinary personage, his manic antagonist
G.I. Gurdjieff. These two figures stand out from all others
in Madame Blavatsky's Baboon, marking the most divergent
paths that share a starting point in the teachings of HPB.
Whereas Krishnamurti disdained systematic assertion and
took a meditative and pacifist approach to every issue,
the anarchically charismatic Gurdjieff--"a cross between
guru and carpet dealer," as Washington characterizes
him--blended gnostic cosmology and numerology with an aggressively
impulsive policy of disorienting and humbling his adherents,
supposedly so as to cut through their defensive layers of
acquired personality and arrive at the core of being within.
But Washington seems more inclined to believe that Gurdjieff
had founded an eccentric personal cult--one that sadistically
exploited his disciples' yearnings for remission from bourgeois
respectability.[8]
Washington feels that if Gurdjieff discarded the Theosophical
Society's platform of harmony and fraternity, he couldn't
have been a Theosophist with a capital "T":
If Theosophy represents the idealistic tendencies in
early-twentieth-century Europe-the currents of feeling
which gave birth to the League of Nations, social democracy
and youth movements-Gurdjieff is part of the complementary
fascination with barbarism and primitivism which colours
the politics of Fascism and works of art from Lawrence's
novels to Stravinsky's early ballets. Gurdjieff's doctrine
was war and his method of teaching was to stir up productive
strife with all the means at his disposal.
This contrast is well drawn, yet insofar as it absolves
Theosophy of blame for Gurdjieff's excesses, it is open
to dispute. Washington's whole book shows the incapacity
of Blavatsky, Olcott, and their heirs to keep the Theosophical
urge within prescribed doctrinal bounds. Once HPB had set
the precedent of combining a flouting of decorum with fraudulent
assertion of contact with divine powers, the emergence of
a madcap Pied Piper like Gurdjieff could not be regarded
as a complete surprise.
Gurdjieff also appears closer to the Theosophical mainstream
if we set his temperament aside and concentrate instead
on what people took away from his "Work"--a communal
but far from egalitarian blending of menial tasks with dancing,
chanting, breathing exercises, and metaphysical pep talks.
To the jaundiced Washington, the quintessential Gurdjieffian
acolyte may have been Katherine Mansfield, whom Gurdjieff
had scrubbing carrots in cold water at midnight just before
her final tubercular collapse. But many survivors of the
Work, which continues even today in unpublicized communes,
never repented of what they took to be an enlightening discipline
focused on the core message that they must awaken from the
slumber of routine existence. That was just what they were
hearing from Krishnamurti as well, without seeing any need
to choose between the two otherwise disparate sources of
advice.
4.
It scarcely matters, in any event, who should and shouldn't
be called an authentic Theosophist. What remains puzzling
is the still unresolved "Yeats problem." In some
of the most striking instances of Theosophical allegiance
and self-transformation, the celestial flummery and mock
science provided by Blavatsky and others did play a central
role. Wild assertions about lost continents, interplanetary
visitations, and ranked angelic hosts superintending the
universe were either countenanced or actively embraced by
well-educated and otherwise discriminating people. Once
again, how can we explain it? What benefit could have been
great enough to make such a sacrifice of judgment appear
worthwhile?
A clue can perhaps be found in another noteworthy career
that is overlooked by Washington, that of Henry A. Wallace,
Franklin Roosevelt's vice president. Wallace was a leading
agronomist who knew as much about hybridizing corn as anyone
alive, a crusading secretary of agriculture who pleaded
for the wise husbanding of Earth's resources, an astute
advocate of free trade and of the concept that led to the
Marshall Plan, an early proponent of racial integration,
and a voice of restraint in the tense early years of the
cold war, whose eventual end he clearly foresaw. Yet he
was also a zealous Theosophist, schooled in Blavatsky's
doctrines by none other than Yeats's friend George W. Russell
("AE"), and a firm believer in what he called
"an order of reality which can be contacted by people
who have certain types of perception." [9]
Indeed, the competent and well-traveled Wallace was no less
a moonbeam climber than Yeats himself. [10]
Wallace's excellent biographers Graham White and John Maze
make it clear that without his esoteric beliefs, he could
not have become the pragmatic activist that he was. They
also supply the crucial mediating factor that makes such
a paradox understandable: Wallace needed to get out from
under a sense of religious paralysis. Freed by Theosophy
from a confining Presbyterian obsession with individual
sin and damnation, he found that he could allow his equally
Christian zest for good works to operate without impediment
on a universal scale. Wallace could match or surpass the
nonconformist righteousness of his forefathers only by adopting
a still more heterodox creed than theirs--one that vested
enormous (if illusory) power in supplicants who had acquired
a proper awe for nature's hidden correspondences.
Yeats's case was very different, but it was no less involved
with the search for a way to detach religious and creative
impulses from any entrenched creed. The poet was driven
toward magic by the force of his father's rationalistic
arguments against organized religion--arguments that he
found himself incapable of refuting. With his churchly leanings
thus thwarted but with his yearning for certainty and closure
more urgent than ever, Yeats was disposed to reach directly
for supernatural insight. That was just what Blavatsky was
urging all of her lapsed-Christian contemporaries to do;
and it wasn't just her opinion, she emphasized, but that
of history's all-star team of sages and of the living Masters,
too.
We might well ask what was to be gained, intellectually,
by scrupling over the resurrection of Jesus but asserting
general reincarnation, or by putting one's own psychedelic
visions and prophecies in the place of St. John's. But cogency
of assertion was less crucial to Yeats than establishing
his autonomy, and Theosophy aimed its lessons precisely
at self-development. Despite the alleged immemorial antiquity
of its doctrines, it was a do-it-yourself religion, allowing
the believer to regard his own reveries as authorized from
the other side. As the once shy, now bold Yeats put it,
"All that we do with intensity has an origin in the
hidden world, and is the symbol, the expression of its powers…."
[11]
There can be no escaping the fact that in our nominally
empirical, technology-driven age, the creativity and initiative
of many significant achievers has been bound together with
transparently absurd beliefs and practices. While Theosophy
has hardly been the sole locus of such enabling supernaturalism,
it is the most blatantly counterscientific one to have been
taken up by serious thinkers. Mere faith in a Creator, after
all, tends to leave the laws of physics and chemistry (if
not always of biology) unchallenged, but the Theosophical
believer specifically trumped those laws with the assertion
of a Prospero-like power that Gurdjieff's explicator P.D.
Ouspensky aptly called "the miraculous." Yet it
was precisely that illusion of omnipotence-the fancy that
all things are possible when the will is attuned to hidden
sympathies-that proved efficacious as a solvent to inhibitions.
Nevertheless, cases like those of Yeats and Wallace may
leave us more indulgent toward Theosophy than the full record
warrants. To judge from them, one would conclude that nothing
but psychological and social benefit can result from surrendering
one's critical judgment to a gnostic way of knowledge. It
may be, however, that Theosophical occultism was benign
only because the people who adopted it had been schooled
since childhood in public-spirited ideals.
What happens, we may wonder, when occult assumptions are
seized upon by malcontents who are not disposed to settle
for the tolerant eclecticism that formed the heart of Aldous
Huxley's "good enough religion"? And what if broadly
gnostic means of acquiring certitude have infiltrated our
mainstream institutions, producing widely accepted dogmas
that are neither true nor harmless? There is more to be
said about these matters than can be found in the dryly
satirical pages of Madame Blavatsky's Baboon. By
turning, in the concluding part of this essay, to other
books and to a somewhat broader conception of irrationalist
loyalties, we will reopen the question of modern occultism
in a more disquieting key.
This is the first of two articles. (Second
article)
Notes
[1] This discussion, including the quotations
from Yeats, his father, and Pound, is indebted to William
H. Murphy, Family Secrets: William Butler Yeats and His
Relatives (Syracuse University Press, 1995), pp. 369-389.
See also the classic account in Richard Ellmann, Yeats:
The Man and the Masks (Macmillan, 1948), passim.
[2] Indeed, Blavatsky and Olcott came
together, platonically, over their common interest in the
summoning of ghosts-an object of naive awe for him, a workaday
meal ticket for her.
[3] Some definitions are called for here.
I will treat occultism as the belief that nature possesses
secret properties contradicting the presumed laws of science;
a dedicated occultist believes that those properties can
be manipulated through adept exercises of magic. Esotericism
is the broader project that weds occultism to self-transformation.
Spiritualism is the attempted practice of communicating
with the dead through séances. Mysticism purports
to bring the seeker into direct experience of, even merger
with, a transcendent deity. Gnosticism, broadly conceived,
is the intuitive apprehension of deep truth without a felt
need for corroborating evidence. Theosophy, uncapitalized,
is gnostic and esoteric lore that relates human destiny
to speculation about the origin, nature, and governance
of the universe. Finally, in its capitalized form Theosophy
refers to the specific theosophical doctrines and organizations
launched by Madame Blavatsky and her successors.
[4] I take it as axiomatic that in assessing
paranormal claims, we ought to be guided by Hume's sturdy
principle for authenticating miracles: that the testimony
to establish a given miracle be so credible that its falsehood
would be more miraculous than the alleged phenomenon itself.
Thus the possibility of fraud or self-deception (neither
of which defies common sense) deserves priority over the
hypothesis that a reported wonder, such as the receipt of
psychic e-mail or the appearance of an adept in two places
at once, has somehow slipped the hold of known physical
laws.
[5] Antoine Faivre, Access to Western
Esotericism (State University of New York Press, 1994),
p. 34; Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment
(State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 305.
[6] See K. Paul Johnson, The Masters
Revealed: Madame Blavatsky and the Myth of the Great White
Lodge (State University of New York Press, 1994) and
Initiates of Theosophical Masters (State University
of New York Press, 1995).
[7] Johnson, The Masters Revealed,
pp. 226 and 244.
[8] That Gurdjieff was deeply strange
is not in dispute. Washington cites one occasion when "a
party of rich and respectable New Yorkers dining with Gurdjieff
were shocked by a recital of his most obscene stories, liberally
decorated with four-letter words. Nevertheless, they gradually
succumbed to his power of suggestion and threw themselves
into an orgy under Gurdjieff's direction-until violently
and humiliatingly interrupted by his harangue on the slavery
of all Americans to the sex instinct."
[9] Quoted by Graham White and John Maze,
Henry A. Wallace: His Search for a New World Order (University
of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 25.
[10] Look, for example, at one of Wallace's
so-called "guru letters" to his fellow Theosophist
Nicholas Roerich-letters whose rumored existence probably
doomed his renomination as vice president, and whose later
authentication by the journalist Westbrook Pegler finished
off his already hopeless campaign for the presidency in
1948:
Dear Guru,
I have been thinking of you holding the casket-the sacred
most precious casket. And I have thought of the New Country
going forth to meet the seven stars under the sign of
the three stars. And I have thought of the admonition
"Await the Stone."
…We think of the People of Northern Shambhalla and
the hastening feet of the successor of Buddha and the
Lightning flashes and the breaking of the New Day. (Quoted
in Maze and White, p. 65)
This is wonderfully daffy prose, but the greater wonder
is that if FDR had died one year earlier than he did, the
awaiter of the Stone would have become our chief executive.
[11] Quoted in Ellmann, Yeats,
p. 95.
Letters
November 14, 1996: K. Paul Johnson, Blavatsky
Lite. A response to Frederick Crews' review/essay.
Biographical Note
Frederick Crews is Professor of English Emeritus at the
University of California, Berkeley.
Source
"The Consolation of Theosophy" was originally
published in The New York Review of Books Vol. 43,
No. 14 (September 19, 1996) and is also contained in the
author's last book, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays
(Emeryville, Ca.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007), and is reproduced
here with the permission of the author.
|
