anima
dubsartur (junior scribe)
Posts: 10
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Post by anima on Nov 11, 2009 19:11:15 GMT -5
Madame Blavatsky and the East
us4-he2-gal2 asked me to research Madame Blavatsky and start a small thread on any relation she might have had to Ancient Eastern Magic. From what I've learned so far, she drew most of her inspiration from Indian magick and culture. Madame Blavatsky- November 10th, 2009 Profile: Maiden Name: Helena Petrovna Hahn Ethnicity : Russian Born: August 12th, 1841 Ekaterinoslaw, Russia (Modern day Ukraine) Deceased: May 9th, 1891 London , 49 Years of Age Parents: Colonel Peter Hahn and Helena Fadeef * Helena appears to be a name passed down from her grandmother : Princess Helena Dolgorouky to Blavatskys mother, and then to herself) Siblings and Relatives: - Sister Vera Zhelikhovsky was a writer of occult fiction (as was her mother, perhaps a source of inspiration for Blavatsky to persue knowledge of the occult and cosmology) Ancestry: -German Nobility of Mecklenburg -descendant of Rurik, a founder of the House of Romanoff ( The ruling house of Russia) Married : July 7th, 1848 to General Blavatsky. At 17 years of age, adopted the title Madame Blavatsky. Marriage lasted for 3 months, when she ran away to her grandparents and left the General behind. To her own account, Helena and General Blavatsky never consummated their marriage, and she remained a virgin her entire life. There is skepticism to this point as some claimed Blavatsky had an illegitimate child in Tibet, however there is no conclusive evidence to support such claims. *Note: In the Occult, Virgins are believed to be more powerful than other practitioners, therefore evidence to te contrary might compromise an Occultists reputation. Perhaps this is why Madame Blavatsky was very persistent in her claims that she had never consummated her marriage. * The Theosophical Society: Founded by Madame Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott and William Quan Judge in 1875, is a union of Metaphysics and world religious doctrine. Theosophy is the belief that every religion holds a portion of the truth. Most accounts of the 17 years after her marriage agree that Madame Blavatsky went to Egypt where she met the Magician Paulos Metamon. Among Occultists, many believe the Egyptians possessed esoteric knowledge that enabled them to perform powerful magic and apprehend the divine. There is little information to tell exactly what she did for the those 17 years- but to Helenas own account, she travelled the world learning about Eastern culture and tradition, like Buddhism and Hinduism. Blavatsky often said that the western world could learn a lot from the Indian traditions, and the way she spent most of her life inherently exhibits her profound desire to solve Western dilemmas using Occultist cosmology and Eastern religious Doctrine. An understanding of the Occult before Blavatsky then, is essential in comprehending the significance of Theosophy on the Occultist world view. Before Blavatsky defined spiritualist phenomena as part of an ordered world in which natural magic was possible- Occultism rested on the principle that world events were governed by the motions of planets and stars, and magicians could manipulate these links and bend the forces of nature to their will. Helena argued the practitioner could work in harmony with the laws of nature and that the spiritualist beliefs in 'army's of all-knowing, earth ruling spirits,' was only a very small piece of the puzzle. Whilst she laughed at the idea of the millions of spiritual overlords, she still defined herself as a spiritualist- and Madame Blavatsky did this by changing what it means exactly, to be a spiritualist. I wonder if Blavatsky could tell me how Noah put 2 of every animal on some ship with her ideas of spirituality and 'Theosophy.' (More to come on Blavatsky next post, as I'm still becoming familiar with the topic) |
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anima
dubsartur (junior scribe)
Posts: 10
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Post by anima on Nov 17, 2009 17:52:13 GMT -5
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Post by us4-he2-gal2 on Nov 17, 2009 22:12:10 GMT -5
Anima and Naomi: Thanks for your input her on Blavatsky - my initial interest in her was sparked by an offhand comment by the editor of one of the volumes "Witchcraft and Magic in Europe" , the volume in question pertained to Biblical and Pagan societies (which translates to Mesopotamian and Old Palestinian peoples - for more see our thread on this volume here. The editor is at one point attempting to contextualize magic and its image and implications for the lay reader - at one point he attempts to explain why spells require an exotic aura in order to seem efficacious - and here he says: "A society where magic is prevalent is always open to borrowing new procedures from other societies, as it is always the next spell or ritual that is potentially the most effective. This observation may help to explain the heavy dependence on orientalism of our Western magical lore from Madame Blavatsky to the New Age." It was this comment which gave me some interest in Blavatsky, but I know believe the sentence is misleading to the ANE researcher - because the editor`s comment introduces a work on Mesopotamian witchcraft and magic, one may assume that orientalism here may refer to the Mesopotamian context (as it often does in these works) - however after our look at Blavatsky, the term was probably meant in a broader context and refers to the interest she and others inspired by her had in India and other regions. This is disappointing, although there were other influential occultists who looked to Mesopotamian texts. I should mention Anima that your above link won`t likely be accessible to very many. As I am able to review it, I will take some notes below on this article. The West Turns Eastward:
Madame Blavatsky and the Transformation of the Occult Tradition
This article is published in an academic journal by Mark Bevir (1994). The author begins by positioning Blavatsky within the greater framework of Oriental leaning in the west; he assigns an earlier precedent to certain Romantic authors in Europe. Romanticism was a certain intellectual and artistic philosophy which ran (or continues to run) counter intuitively to the flow of these modern times - it was popular among those intellectuals disillusioned with enlightenment thinking and industrialization (which even in early stages did not relieve by systematized human suffering); the author informs us that certain Romantics (Emerson, Whitman, Forster) turned to the Indian example as a people "who shunned material luxeries..[and who turned] to a simple life centered on self-realization and religious understanding" in line with Romantic principals. The Romantics however did not reach far into doctrines such as reincarnation or the law of Karma. Bevir explains that Blavatsky on the other hand, in her perusal of Indian religious doctrine, enthusiastically applied its doctrines to Western religious dilemmas: she asserted that Indian evolutionary cosmology "met the challenge of Darwinism" and "the law of karma ..met the moral qualms many of he contemporaries felt about vicarious atonement." As an occultist, she also went farther than the Romantics by asserting that Indian concepts of magic could have practical value to the west. Blavatsky and Spiritualism: The occult world of the mid-1800s which Blavatsky lived through was one heavily influenced by a new movement known as Spiritualism. While ideas about the lost Egyptian magic and Hermetic philosophy and approachable spiritual realms were circulating in this or that format since the Renaissance, a new form of these loosely defined beliefs and ideas arouse in 1848 when occultist Andrew Davis (an American) entered a series of trances in which he believed he found the nature of the universe - an odd picture of a universe as a single spiritual whole with Martians far in advance of us (in their ability to communicate with spirits). New converts to Spiritualism all across America believed they could hear "raps" (as in knocks) which were sent from the spirit world in response to questions. Henry Olcott was a writer for the Sunday Chronicle who set off to a farmstead in Chittendon, Vermont, to investigate a case of the "raps" (a spiritual event). When Blavatsky read the article she was intrigued, set off for Chittendon herself, and on the occultists arrival at the farmstead it was said that "the spirits became more spectacular than ever before" - thereafter Blavatsky became a prominent spiritualist. While this brought some measure of notoriety, spiritualism didn`t last and Blavatsky was quick to downplay her former endorsement when spiritualism was discredited as fundimentally fraudulent. Blavatsky`s occultism: Bevir writes that the occultists own blend of occultism began to surface after 1875 - in essential, Blavatsky subordinated spiritualism, and reinterpreted it within an magical context; she claimed that magic is "but a science, a profound knowledge of the Occult forces in Nature, and of the laws governing the visible and invisible world." This Bevir says, is more like the traditional occult belief in an ancient wisdom incorporating both a mystical religion and natural magic. Realizing the chance that Occultism had with a weakening Christianity and a not yet entirely risen modern science, Blavatsky described her work as "a plea for the recognition of the hermetic philosophy" - together with Olcott (from the Sunday Chronicle) she formed the Theosophical society. __________________ Must pause for Hebrew - to finish shortly.0_0 |
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anima
dubsartur (junior scribe)
Posts: 10
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Post by anima on Nov 18, 2009 14:16:20 GMT -5
So in essence Blavatsky really didn`t change the world view of Occultism, she simply brought ancient traditions back into it`s perspective. While Blavatsky may have been the face of this movement, most of the Eastern world still practiced and believed in such traditions. Hinduism has been defined as one of the oldest and most ancient of beliefs, and after her journey to Tibet it seems she decided to hand craft her own belief system- which inspired a vast eclectic following in the United States.
Madame Blavatsky inspired `New age thinking, `, probably what the author had intended to convey to the reader. Alternatively, I think we can all agree with Naomi that Blavatsky while perhaps `inspirational, `is not a key figure in Occultism, but rather the face of a fraudulent, corrupt religious movement under the name of `Theosophy.`
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Post by us4-he2-gal2 on Nov 20, 2009 14:38:31 GMT -5
Anima:
All of that is probably astute enough, however I am still reading the article - and reading it without summing it would be a waste at least according to my thinking. So to continue on then:
Blavatsky's contribution to the occult world/
Blavatsky's change, the author explains, or her impact, was to take existing occultist ideas and to fit them into her times. These were the times when Christianity was rocked by the discoveries of evolution and by geological data which put the earth's creatuib at a much older point than Bishop Ussher's estimate of 4004 BC.
Blatvatsky took old occult concepts, such as, for example, the idea that "the universe began with a single all-embracing deity who was mind and who infused each particle of matter with a spark of the divine" (which is more less the dogma of the Hermetic neo-platonists), and she infused these concepts with modern day thinking: Mind (or "the deity") actually had the universe *evolve* (as in the theory of evolution), slowly, through a series of "emanations" with high and lower orders (like species). Blavatsky's own "occult cosmology" then reinterpreted old idea's and put a "new age" spin on them, it was an effort to wedge old concepts into a gap science was creating in the minds of some believes at the time, relying on what might be consider pseudo-scientific garb. We may wonder what was lost in this process?
Changes in concepts of Magic/
Occultists had long believed in the existence of another plain, a astral or spiritual plain which magicians can draw on to effect things in the physical world. Sometimes the Hermetic "as above so below" is employed to convey how influences on one sphere will transfer to the other - this all seems more or less like a sophisticated retrospective explanation for the principles of sympathetic magic, the practice of which long predated such elaborate belief systems.
Blavatsky, as Bevir states, as she did in the case of occult cosmology, attempted to recast magic in modern day garb, giving it a pseudo-scientific terminology perhaps calculated to appeal to the newly faithless. The author remarks: "she wanted to defend magic on natural and scientific grounds, not on suprnatural or dogmatic grounds such as that of the Bible..Thus, she denied that occult science transgressed the laws of nature. As she explained: "Nothing can be more easily accounted for than the highest possibilities of magic. By the radiant light of the universal magnetic ocean, whose electric waves bind the cosmos together, and in their ceaseless motion penetrate and in their ceaseless motion penetrate every atom and molecule of the boundless creation...."
Culture and the occult/
Besides the scientific "new age" spin Blavatsky applied to more time honored occult ideas of cosmology and magic, Bevir remarks on a third significant influence she had on occultism - that being her introduction of Oriental (read: Indian) traditions. Occultists to this point had from the time of the Greeks credited Egypt as the font of ancient wisdom. Blavatsky had read some scholarship of the day written by enthusiastic scholars of Indian culture that suggested India as the alma mater, the essential, of early civilization, religion, arts and sciences. Blavatsky seemed little informed in regards Mesopotamian culture, as she remarks:
"when we find some of the oldest Ceylonic traditions in the Chaldean Kabala and the Jewish Bible, we must thing that either Chaldeans or Babylonians had been in Ceylon or India."
Her technique of fusing Indian culture (Buddhism, Hinduhism and ancient Brahmanism) with her own reworking of Victorian occultism (inspiring occultism in the new age), was fairly simple according to Bevir: if some modern dilemma needed a non-Christian moral solution, she would muddle an Indian doctrine and paste it in place; if someone accused her of misusing an Indian doctrine, she would counter that they were not able to see the esoteric truth behind it which her own interpretations reveal.
While Blavatsky's learning and understanding of Sanskrit materials was occasionally impressive and sometimes had the agreement of Orientalists (the Indian literary scholars actually interpreting the texts), other times she differed from them markedly with her interpretations: Bevir describes that "her subjectivist approach becomes so marked that she seems almost to declare that Indian religions and so Indian society must be as she wishes irrespective of any evidence to the contrary. Orientalists might or might not support her analysis: if they did, well and good; if the did not, they were wrong."
Concluding - the Rise of the New Age Movement/
Bevir now concludes the article with a look at Blavatsky's lasting impact on Orientalism (Indian culture - i.e yoga, meditation etc.) in the west, and tendencies in new age occultism. The Theosophical society is consider the "grand parent" to the new age movement, which the author now describes concisely:
"More importantly, many of Blavatsky's views remain fashionable throughout the New Age movement. The general problem which she confronted continues to provide rationale for many New Age groups. They too try to reconcile religious life with a modern world dominated by a scientific spirit. Thus they seek natural accounts of working of the divine and possible of magic, often appealing to indiosyncratic interpretations of things such as the new physics as evidence for their religious beliefs. Further, New Age groups continue to show a predilection for equating their beliefs with ancient wisdom associated with the religious traditions of cultures other than their own. Finally, New Age groups often adopt Blavatsky's method for bridging any obvious gaps between the pseudo-scientific religious beliefs that they espouse and the alternative religious traditions that that champion. They appeal to some sort of esoteric understanding of these alternative religious traditions to justify their loose interpretations based on a selective use of contemporary scholarship. Indeed, they sometimes seem to define their understanding of alternative religious traditions and cultures in terms of their own preferences without bothering to study these traditions and cultures in anything other than the most superficial manner."
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Post by xuchilpaba on Nov 21, 2009 19:33:27 GMT -5
Blavatsky, as Bevir states, as she did in the case of occult cosmology, attempted to recast magic in modern day garb, giving it a pseudo-scientific terminology perhaps calculated to appeal to the newly faithless. The author remarks: "she wanted to defend magic on natural and scientific grounds, not on suprnatural or dogmatic grounds such as that of the Bible..Thus, she denied that occult science transgressed the laws of nature. As she explained: "Nothing can be more easily accounted for than the highest possibilities of magic. By the radiant light of the universal magnetic ocean, whose electric waves bind the cosmos together, and in their ceaseless motion penetrate and in their ceaseless motion penetrate every atom and molecule of the boundless creation...."
I know people who don't think things like ghosts are "supernatural", they think they are just parts of the natural world. They don't have to have a scientific explanation, however. Just the fact that spirits are part of the natural. Similarly, the otherworld concept can also be seen as a part of the natural world. As science has confirmed other dimensions are intertwined with our own.
This is a view point I also take as well. But i used terms like "supernatural" because its less confusing to the lay person.
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Post by us4-he2-gal2 on Dec 7, 2009 16:41:27 GMT -5
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Post by xuchilpaba on Dec 15, 2009 21:13:26 GMT -5
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