Theosophy: Origin of the New Age
PART I
THE FOUNDERS OF MODERN THEOSOPHY
Though both the word Theosophy and, in a sense, the thing, are (as modern Theosophists are the first to assert, and as we shall see below) far older than the movement which officially began on 17th November, 1875, what is popularly known among us as Theosophy can never be dissociated from the names of Mme. Blavatsky, of Mrs. Annie Besant, and, in a secondary measure, from that of Col. Henry Streete Olcott.
Madame Blavatsky
Helen Petrovna Hahn{1} (1831-1891) was born in South Russia of a noble Mecklenburg family which had settled there. She lived in an atmosphere of legend and popular fancy, and was surrounded, being born in the night from the 30th to the 31st of July (the seventh month of the year), with an elaborate and mystic ritual. She was, owing to the date of her birth, not only exempt from the power of the household goblin Domovoy, but was enabled to bring preternatural powers to bear upon those less privileged who offended her, and often did so to their disaster.
She was a somnambulist and very psychic. She was supposed to be possessed, and was "drenched in enough holy water to have floated a ship"{2} (p. 25), and was exorcised. However, she still spent hours and days whispering in dark corners "marvellous tales of travel" and the like, to companions visible only to herself. The "enormous library" of the country-house where she lived failed to satisfy her omnivorous curiosity (p. 33); and she was passionately interested in the extraordinary museum of natural history there preserved (p. 35). She haunted the "catacombs" of its cellars, and its midnight park. Miracles of all sorts attended her childhood; she was clairvoyant and clairaudient (p. 46).
Her governess rashly defied this erratic and unmanageable maiden to find a man who would accept her as bride; "even," she said, "old General Blavatsky would decline you" (p. 54). Piqued in her pride and passion, Helen married him in 1848. Immediately upon discovering the meaning of marriage, she fled Egypt, and initiated a series of journeys of which the dates are disputed.
In the August of 1851 her diary says she was in London, and there, during a moonlight ramble by the Serpentine, "I met the Master of my dreams." She proceeds to South America, then to India by way Pacific. After visiting England via China, Japan, and America about 1853, she returns to America, and is back in England again in 1855 or 1856. Again she seeks India, passing through Egypt, and makes a third unsuccessful effort to enter Tibet. She reappears in Russia in 1858- 59; is in Tiflis from 1861-63; and reaches Tibet at last, through Egypt and Persia, in 1864. There she witnesses astounding "phenomena."
On 11th November, 1870, her aunt Mme. Nadejka Fadeef receives "phenomenally" a letter from Tibet, by the hand of "a messenger with an Asiatic face who vanished before my eyes," reassuring her as to her niece's safety (H. P. B. and the Masters, pp. 8, 9).
In 1871 she is in Egypt, and founds a Societe Spirite which ends in fraud and disaster. She makes about this time the acquaintance of the Coulombs, who succour her, but afterwards, for reasons variously given, will be found fighting against her. She returned to America and in 1874 met Col. Olcott, who had been an officer in the Northern Army.
At this time, however, he was an ex-medium and a journalist, and was in fact, examining the spiritist phenomena connected with the brothers Eddy. He came entirely under her influence, and was extremely pleased with his connection with her, though she seems to have had a poor enough opinion of him.{3} He was made, however, first President of the Theosophical Society (the "T. S."), founded in New York, 17th November, 1875,{4} and certainly displayed extraordinary talents for organization and for popular propaganda.
The infant Society, however, was soon all but wrecked, for though it existed professedly to combat spiritualism equally with materialism, and to propagate belief in the existence of certain Eastern sages and their lore, it made use of not a few of the methods of spiritualism, and Mme. Blavatsky was constantly accompanied by a perfect fusillade of rappings, and by other phenomena. She insisted, however, that she was no medium, but a mediator (i.e., between the sages and ordinary men). Soon after this H. S. O. and H. P. B. (as it is the curious but convenient custom of Theosophists to designate their founders) went to Bombay, where they met once more the Coulombs, and where the conversion of Mr. A. P. Sinnett took place.
The stormy incidents of 1884-85, owing to the detection, as it was generally held, of H. P. B. in the wholesale "faking" of phenomena, were, as was quite admitted, a "tremendous blow."
H. P. B. retired into temporary privacy in Europe, and actually refused to return to India if she were not allowed to prosecute the "dastard insinuation" of Mr. Hodgson, the representative in India of the Society of Psychical Research, that she was a Russian spy. This, however, her advisers forbade her to do.
She wrote, none the less, from Switzerland, approving of the assertion that "the T. S., minus Masters, is an absurdity"; and that "I am the only means of communication with the Masters, and for giving out their philosophy-the Society, unless I continue to work for it as in the past, is a dead thing." She did, in fact, remain "the heart and soul of the Society" till her death, which took place in London on 8th May, 1891. This date, known to her followers as White Lotus Day, is observed by social and artistic celebrations.
This extraordinary woman, whose magnificent, scarred, and scowling features have become famous in three continents, was possessed of startling talents, unlimited audacity, and of that personal magnetism so noticeable in all leaders of men. Her principal books, The Secret Doctrine, The Key to Theosophy, and Isis Unveiled, her lesser works, and her many articles in accredited magazines (published under the title A Modern Panarion), carried her influence even where her restless personal activity never reached. Her information was encyclopedic, but altogether confused, always inaccurate, often entirely misleading, and wholly at the mercy of her riotous imagination and unscrupulous methods.
The chronique scandaleuse of the early history of the Theosophical Society is in part to be found in Mr. Maskelyne's Fraud of Theosophy Exposed. It is of no interest to us to enter into these sordid details.
Miss Mabel Collins, however, sometime co-editress with H. P. B. of the Theosophical periodical Lucifer, has bequeathed to us a unique pen- portrait of her associate. We quote from Mr. Maskelyne's book, p. 62:
"She (H. P. B.) taught me one great lesson. I learned from her how foolish, how 'gullible,' how easily flattered human beings are, taken en masse. Her contempt for her kind was on the same gigantic scale as everything else about her, except her marvellously delicate taper fingers. She had a greater power over the weak and credulous, a greater capacity for making black appear white, a larger waist,{5} a more voracious appetite, a more confirmed passion for tobacco, a more ceaseless and insatiable hatred of those whom she thought to be her enemies, a greater disrespect for les convenances, a worse temper, a greater command of bad language and a greater contempt for the intelligence of her fellow-beings than I had ever supposed possible to be contained in one person. These, I suppose, must be reckoned as her vices, though whether a creature so indifferent to all ordinary standards of right and wrong can be held to have virtues or vices I know not."
Col. Olcott, especially after H. P. B.'s circumstantial stories began to be refuted (and her romances about Tibet and the charms of Lh'asa have been dissipated, not only by the reports of the explorer, Mr. Rockhill, but by the observation of our own soldiery), perceived her to be a "dual personality," at one moment "fibbing Russian woman," at another, inspired. But many mediums seem to oscillate between obvious fraud and the inexplicable.
Mrs. Annie Besant
The following outline of Mrs. Besant's career is drawn front her own Autobiography.{6}
Annie Wood was born in London on 1st October, 1847 though "three- quarters of my blood and all my heart are Irish .... The Irish tongue is musical to my ear, and the Irish nature dear to my heart" (pp. 13, 14). Her father, indeed, was the son of a Devonshire man who had married an Irish girl, and her mother's descent was pure Irish.
Mr. Wood was a scholar and a philosopher, and "deeply and steadily sceptical." He indulged in "light, playful mockery of the tenets of the Christian faith"; he "partly rationalized" his wife's "dainty and well-bred piety," till, abandoning such views as "eternal punishment, the vicarious atonement, the infallibility of the Bible, the equality of the Son with the Father," etc., she found peace in the mental atmosphere of "Jowett, Colenso and Stanley."
Mr. Wood's mother and sister were "strict Roman Catholics," but the priest whom they "forced" into his sick-room was "promptly ejected by the wrath of the dying man, and by the almost fierce resolve of his wife that no messenger of the creed he detested should trouble her darling at the last" (pp. 22, 23).
His daughter, however, took her "religion strenuously"; she was the "stuff of which fanatics are made"; was always "too religious." She nearly became a Catholic (p. 24), had visions and dreams, and associated with angels, fairies, and dragons. She was often in fancy martyred, by Roman judge and Dominican inquisitor, on the rack and at the stake. Devoted to Paradise Lost, she always hoped that Jesus, her "ideal Prince," would somehow save the "beautiful shadowed Archangel" (p. 24).
Meanwhile Miss Marryat, sister of the novelist, imparted to her a wise and practical education, and took her to Germany and France, but failed to check her increasing tendency to mysticism and ritual. She pores over the Fathers, studies Keble, Liddon, and Pusey, fasts and scourges herself (p. 57). The Crucifix claims her ecstatic love. In the Holy Week of 1866 she writes out, in parallel columns, the Gospel accounts of the Passion, hoping thus to serve her piety. Their "discrepancies" chill her with a first doubt (p. 61). She stifles it. But she has seen her ghost. She will never be the same again.
In 1867, ignorant of the nature of matrimony, and unskilled in money matters or domestic life, she "drifts" (p. 70) into engagement and marriage with the Rev. F. Besant, adored as a "priest," but never loved as husband. This clergyman, precise, methodical, authoritative, and easily angered, demanded a submission impossible to a girl "impulsive, very hot-tempered, and proud as Lucifer." Incredulous wonder, then indignant tears, ended in "a proud, defiant resistance, cold and hard as iron" (p. 81).
She tried to kill thought and to vary the unromantic duties of a home by writing; she fell ill; she brooded over the cruel and inexplicable suffering of her children, and passed thus into a struggle of three years and two months "which transformed me from a Christian into an Atheist" (p. 88). Her religious doubts increased; she contemplated suicide. She resolved "to take Christianity as it had been taught in the churches, and carefully and thoroughly examine its dogmas one by one, so that I should never again say 'I believe' where I had not proved" (p. 99).
She read widely, and always on "liberal" lines: Voysey welcomed her; Pusey repelled her; Thomas Scott, whose house was "a veritable heretical salon" (p. 113), accepted anonymous essays from her pen. She abandoned belief in Christ's Divinity, and, with it, Communion.{7} In 1873 she left her husband; legal separation was to follow (p. 118).
She now earned a miserable pittance as cook, governess, and nurse. She studied at the British Museum and wrote heterodox pamphlets for Thomas Scott; she faced semi- starvation with characteristic pluck.
After facing the question: Is Christ God? and answering it, No, she faced the ultimate problem: Does God exist? She had abandoned prayer as a "blasphemous absurdity," and "God fades out of the daily life of those who never pray" (p. 133).
At this crisis she happened on a copy of the National Reformer. She inquired through it the conditions of admission to the National Secular Society, and was told that "we can see no logical resting- place between the entire acceptance of authority, as in the Roman Catholic Church, and the most extreme Rationalism." She need not profess herself an Atheist, but must accept the principles of the Society. She sent in her name as an active worker. It was Charles Bradlaugh who gave her her certificate.
In the Autobiography there follows a chapter on "Atheism as I knew and taught it" (pp. 141-175). Her atheism was "dogmatic" only in so far as she asserted that there was no God in any of the senses assigned or assignable to that word by human intelligence, though underneath the Many she recognized the One.
She had, however, to be rebuked by Bradlaugh for writing "There is no God"; and was made to alter this. Further, her "passionate desire for the betterment of the world, the elevation of humanity" (p. 153), led her earnestly to seek a new basis for morality, since she considered herself to have destroyed what she supposed the only ethical foundation hitherto, revelation and intuition. Her new basis was Utility (p. 154).
She discarded the Man of Sorrows, "with weary eyes gazing up to heaven because despairing of earth," for the "fair ideal Humanity of the Atheist . . . perfect in physical development as the Hercules of Grecian art . . . the free man who knows no lord . . . who relies on his own strength" (p. 158). "Virtue is its own reward" (p. 160); and faith in Evolution shows her the "sources of evil and the method of its extinction" (p. 164). Strong in this "creed" and the ethical programme consequent upon it, she lives "from 1874 to 1886, and with some misgivings to 1889" (p. 169).
Meanwhile she lectures and writes on social, political, and freethought topics with indescribable vivacity, with a total neglect of health, comfort, and reputation, and with that personal communication which won for her enthusiastic devotion when it did not provoke abuse, slander, persecution, and even assault and physical violence.
In 1877 Dr. Charles Knowlton's pamphlet, advocating the artificial limitation of families, brought about the prosecution of Bradlaugh and Mrs. Besant, who published the pamphlet as a sort of test case to see whether the "population question" could be freely discussed in England. This roused a storm of obloquy, and Mrs. Besant was legally deprived of the custody of her daughter as she already had been of that of her little son. The New Malthusianism which Mrs. Besant at this period did so much to propagate, she abandoned in 1891 (p. 237), when Theosophy had untaught her the materialism on which alone she saw that that practice and theory could be founded.
Chapter X of the Autobiography is well entitled "At War All Round." "Christianity had robbed me of my child and I struck mercilessly at it in return" (p. 245). She was constantly in the law courts, or in violent conflict with distinguished persons on every conceivable subject. In 1884 she turned her attention to Socialism (p. 299), met Hyndman and Shaw, and joined the Fabians. But the Socialists were bitterly opposed to Bradlaugh; she now hampered, not helped, his political career, and had to resign the co- editorship of the National Reformer, breaking thus a close association of thirteen years (p. 321). But from this "turmoil and stress" dawned a fairer vision, a "New Brotherhood," a Church, to be founded largely with the cooperation of Mr. Stead. She flung herself into organized philanthropy.
But ever "since 1886 there had been slowly growing up a conviction that my philosophy was not sufficient; that life and mind were other than, more than, I had dreamed" (p. 339). Psychology, hypnotism, "fact after fact came hurtling in." "Into the darkness shot a ray of light"-A. P. Sinnett's Occult World.
She takes to Spiritualism finds its phenomena "indubitable" and "real," but the "spiritualistic explanation of them was incredible" (ibid.). One evening a "voice that was later to become to me the holiest sound on earth," bids her take courage: light is near. A fortnight passes, and Mr. Stead offers to her two large volumes to review. They are H. P. B.'s Secret Doctrine. A miracle of conversion occurs. She is introduced to H. P. B., is fascinated, struggles against the fascination, yields, and on 10th May, 1889, is admitted as a Fellow of the Theosophical Society (p. 344).
She sees that Science answers the how of much, the why of nothing. Experience and intuition alone suffice, and these are hers. "I know, by personal experiment, that the Soul exists . . . that it can leave the body at will. . .that the great sages spoken of by H. P. Blavatsky exist, that they wield powers and possess knowledge before which our control of Nature . . . is as child's play" (p. 346). Her secularist friends-Bradlaugh soberly, Foote with virulence-denounce her; but the new period of storm is quickly over.
She lived thereafter in "Theosophic peace," having her headquarters at Benares. Inevitably, she was involved in the dissensions briefly alluded to below, with special crises like the Leadbeater one, with Indian politics of a very ill-judged sort, and for some time lived in great isolation and eclipse which, visitors have assured me, were very bitter to her restless temperament despite the interior calm she sought to cultivate.
She returned more than once to England and lectured to crowded audiences with astonishing vivacity. But she had nothing new to contribute, and died on 20th September, 1933. It is improbable that details of the profound desolation of her last days will be made public. Her death leaves the movement for which she did so much to stand or fall by its intrinsic merits.
The Theosophical Society
The Theosophical Society was founded in New York on 17th November, 1875, by Col. Olcott and Mme. Blavatsky. This was immediately due to the promises of a Mr. Felt that he would impart to the associates instruction "concerning those secret laws of Nature which were so familiar to the Chaldeans and Egyptians, but are totally unknown by our modern world of science."
Mr. Felt failed, however, to redeem his pledge, and the Society did little, in its corporate capacity, to realize its then highly complicated programme. In 1878 it was to be amalgamated with an Indian society; this failed also; but the founders migrated to India and there remodelled the Society. Its objects were:
(i) To form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or colour.
(ii) To promote the study of Aryan and other Eastern literatures, religions, and sciences.
(iii) To investigate unexplained laws of Nature and the psychical powers of man.
It is unnecessary to give many details about the history of the T. S., partly because it has been so stormy and self-contradictory, and also because a kind of law governing the quarrels, at least after a time, can be discerned, and is indeed indicated by Mr. A. B. Kuhn in his Theosophy, especially from p. 301 onwards. Not unnaturally, troubles grew worse almost as soon as Mrs. Besant appeared (1888), and it was indeed unlikely that two such forceful women as she and H. P. B. could well cooperate.
In that year the T. S. was reorganised by a General Convention in India as a constitutional federation of autonomous groups under a head (H. P. B. was still president). But crises and storms occurred "every few years" (Kuhn); the American groups gravitated towards the ethical aspect of Theosophy, the European and Asiatic ones towards comparative religion and psychism. In 1891 H. P. B. died, and forthwith two divergent currents defined themselves.
The struggle has been compared with that between State and Church. Col. Olcott (with Mr. Sinnett) went in the rationalising direction; they wished Theosophy to be exoteric, respectable, disinterested in Mahatmas, refusing to "worship" H. P. B. or to accept her words as dogma.
Mrs. Besant, at first in the company of Dr. W. Quan Judge, remained authoritative, esoteric, Mahatmic. Col. Olcott in his Old Diary Leaves, offers a "true history" of the T. S., and narrates under the date 1892 the story of his own resignation, and speaks of the "treacherous policy" and "lack of principle" of Mr. Judge, who is said to have laboured to evict him, and to have forged numerous letters from Mahatmas: H. S. O. adds, alluding to one of Judge's accusations: "Without making any pretensions to exceptional goodness, I certainly never did anything to warrant him in making, in a forged letter, my own teacher and adored Guru seem to say that if Mrs. Besant should carry out her intention of visiting India, she might run the risk of my poisoning her." But Mrs. Besant separated from Judge in 1893, and commented freely on the provenance of Judge's Mahatma letters. He therefore issued a manifesto declaring her headship to be at an end, for three reasons:
"1. Mrs. Besant has practiced witchcraft and tried her weird spells, her 'psychic experiments' (on Mr. Judge and others).
"2. Mrs. Besant has pronounced one of the letters of the Mahatma, which was precipitated in an orthodox manner and passed on to Mr. Sinnett, 'a fraud by H. P. B. herself, made up entirely, and not from the Master.' If that letter be a fraud, then all the rest sent through our old teacher are the same.
"3. Mrs. Besant, in league with a Hindu named Chakravarti and others, has quite flooded the Society with documents from phantasmal Mahatmas end 'black magicians.' They had all sorts of letters sent me from India, with pretended messages from the Master. The plot exists among the black magicians, who ever war against the white."
Mr. Chakravarti had in fact been reducing H. P. B.'s influence (and Mr. Judge's) upon A. B., by seeking to Brahmanise Theosophy, especially by insisting on the acceptance of the Brahmanic ideal of "Bliss" the moment it was attainable, whereas H. P. B. had leaned towards the Buddhist "renunciation" of bliss in favour of working for mankind.
America backed Judge; Europe and India condemned Olcott. Thereupon the whole topic of Mahatmas, so fiercely insisted on at first as a matter verifiable and indeed verified by experience, became reduced to a matter of pure faith. Judge, The Theosophical Movement, p. 479, wrote:
"Letters from Mahatmas prove nothing at all except to the recipient, and then only when in his inner nature is the standard of proof and the power of judgment. Precipitation does not prove Mahatmas. By following the course prescribed in all ages the inner faculties may be awakened so as to furnish the true confirmatory evidence." [The upshot was, less and less insistence on 'occult' phenomena.] "Occult phenomena, genuine or false, mediumistic or adept, form no part of the legitimate pursuit of the T. S.... (they) cannot be proved as physical phenomena can. Mahatmas, their existence, position, and teaching, become entirely an affair of faith" (Kuhn, p. 316).
It may be worth pausing here to observe that Theosophy, unlike the Christian religion, never was clear whether or not it had a "deposit," an unchangeable core or nucleus of authoritatively revealed truth. Judge considered that it had-a "deposit" given by the Masters to H. P. B. and transmitted by her intact to posterity. But H. P. B. herself wavered in this, as she did in everything else, according to her mood. "The members of the T. S. at large are free to profess whatever religion or philosophy they like-or none, if they so prefer-provided they are in sympathy, etc. The Society is a philanthropical and scientific body for the propagation of the idea of brotherhood on practical instead of theoretical lines.... Theosophist is who Theosophist does" (Key, p. 20; 2nd T. P. S. edition, 1890).
Similarly, morals were entirely the individual member's affair. To become a member of the T. S. all one had to do was to give in one's name, Mrs. Besant declaring that the first of its three objects (see above) alone was obligatory, though emphasis was laid on study as likely to promote that toleration which is the necessary preliminary to brotherly love.
Mr. Kuhn says that in America the stock, so to say, of H. P. B. is rising once more, though her doctrine is being constantly "revised." Her works are taken down from library shelves and thumbed. But he himself is most emphatic (p. 341) to the effect that Theosophists are fluid, questers, nondogmatic. They have to be channels for high ideals pictured in ancient wisdom, for a cosmic consciousness. And this indeed is markedly the tendency on our side of the Atlantic, though this does not imply that those who now fight shy of "phenomena" dislike the "occult," as we shall say below.
A direct consequence, however, of this "fluidity" of mind is the taboo upon one doctrine only-that any existing or possible institution is in possession of Truth in a manner even relatively exclusive or complete. Members must be prepared to gain new truths or revise their old beliefs no matter whence the new illumination may arrive.
Hence, every form of Christianity can find a home within Theosophism, save the Catholic Church, which certainly regards itself as in possession of a unique and final revelation. It also regards any of the truths attained to by Theosophists or anyone else, as fragmentary, accidental, unguaranteed, and usually (in the case of Theosophy) very badly stated.
The Church considers that special revelations granted even to her own members must be tested by her authoritative creed, and can in no case be more than a fuller appreciation of that creed. This is responsible for the extreme acerbity with which Theosophists constantly allude to the Catholic religion, save when they are interpreting it in an "occult" way, and in fact caricaturing it.
Theosophists, then, hold either that a "deposit" was, in some sense, revealed anew through Masters, or a Master, to H. P. B. (which Catholics would deny), and that at most this has become clearer and has been better understood as time goes on: or, that she had her limited understanding of ancient and universal wisdom, told what she could of it to the world, a world within which are certain people who, whether or no Masters exist, are or become able to achieve a deeper insight into reality than others can win, at any rate at present.
Historically, however, Theosophy has obtained its notoriety or indeed even a minimum of attention because of its special claims, and its offer of an esoteric lore. No Society could repose on so wholly fluid a base as a membership of all who in any way seek truth. Nor has the T. S. ever reposed, we repeat, on anything of the sort. Mrs. Besant, indeed, had to distinguish very carefully between the "neutrality" of the T. S. as such and the legitimate occupations of its members, like herself, who was never "neutral" in regard of anything whatsoever.
When she and others encouraged the Indians or Ceylonese to make the most of their own religions, they knew perfectly well that they were thus embarking on political enterprises and creating nothing but turmoil: moreover, "social" reforms, in India or elsewhere, though claimed, as by Mrs. Besant, as due to theosophic enterprise in so far as they had no political basis nor provoked more trouble than they allayed, were not really due to any such thing; and indeed the isolation of Mrs. Besant's later life-she had been almost a pilgrimage-centre-was a tragedy due to that fact. When Theosophists cease to render their lectures attractive to the ill-balanced by their lure of occult knowledge, they will find that the residue creates no interest: and why should it? It has been said better, and with better reason, by almost anyone else.
To resume, Mr. Maskelyne quoted Mr. Judge, after H. P. B.'s death, when the storm broke, in the Westminster Gazette: in 1894 Mr. E. Garrett revived the whole affair there in his "Isis very much Un- veiled."
Mrs. Besant was "dismissed" but refused to go, saying that H. P. B. had appointed her "successor." In 1895 the U.S.A. section practically seceded, and in the next year Mr. Judge died, calm and not without dignity, whereupon innumerable schisms began to occur. A Mrs. Katherine Tingley, of California, wanted a "Universal Brotherhood" which created more splits than anything else did. She eliminated in 1898 both the parent and about 90 per cent. of the membership of the T. S. from her reckonings, and considered herself third in succession from H. P. B., Judge being the second.
Theosophy had had no small success in Australia. A Mr. Leadbeater (died 1st March, 1934), "esoteric" and pretentious, with no claim to be attended to at all, none the less was responsible for great upheavals. Older theosophists called his clients neo-theosophists, perverting H. P. B. In 1906 a crash came. Mr. Leadbeater was teaching young boys practices proper, it was said, to Hindu temples. Mrs. Besant, horrified, rejected him and then revised her horror. The storm passed but blew up again in 1922.
He then explained that relief from the sexual urge was justifiable, lest these youths, who would soon enough grow out of their own karma (see p. 29) should, by suppressing it, entangle other people in it. In 1907 Col. Olcott died, miraculously visited by Mahatmas on his death-bed. He appointed A. B. as his successor, and she was forthwith elected.
In 1909, an unfortunate episode was begun. An Order of the "Star in the East" was inaugurated because it had been decided that the World- Teacher, the Lord Matreya, was incarnate in the person of Jiddu Krishnamurti, who was, after a while, to go to Oxford and then transform the world. He was, moreover, to come walking over the waters between the Heads into Sydney, and an enormous "theatre" was built overlooking the harbour.
I gather that this was afterwards let out to various entertainments. I remember seeing it from an aeroplane. In 1929 this young man, far from devoid of modesty and good sense, revolted, abandoned his claims, and dissolved the Order. Mrs. Besant said he was a teacher "in his own right." Mr. Leadbeater had, however, written a "Lives of Alcyone" (a name suggestive of his literary level): they were the last 40 incarnations of Krishnamurti: he also became (to the fury of many Theosophists) a religioniser of the movement. He started a Liberal (at first "Old") Catholic Church.
A Mr. Wedgewood was, apparently, consecrated bishop, in Holland, and then consecrated Mr. Leadbeater, who indeed presented himself at the Sydney Eucharistic Congress in 1928, and saw (so we were told) auras round altars and round various people's heads including mine. This ritualisation of Theosophy followed upon the attempt in 1914 of Miss M. Russak to evolve a ritual based on the "magnetic purity" of objects: she started the Temple of the Rosy Cross which collapsed, no explanation being given, after three years. This ritualising, religionising, of Theosophy has not won approval.
It is not possible to give accurate statistics of the T. S. or of its rivals. The "Golden Book" carries its history up to 1925, and a further volume is being prepared; and a curious collection of documents can be read in The Theosophic Society, published in 1925, containing reprints from H. S. O., A. B., and Mr. C. Jinarajadasa, who provides also a letter from Maha-Chohan, the great Adept, "to whose insight the future lies like an open page." Written between 1881 and 1888, in poor English and more definitely anti- Christian than usual, it contains nothing new and merely promises that evidence will be given later on that the Theosophist doctrine is "the only right one."
The actual address of the London H.Q. is 50 Gloucester Place, W. 1, where we were kindly received.
PART II
BELIEFS OF MODERN THEOSOPHY
Name and history
THE name Theosophy has had a long history. Ammonius Sakkas (d. about 245), father of Neo-Platonism, claimed to have invented it; and since his time it has often been used to describe the method of reaching a direct intuition of God, and of all things only "in" Him, and a way of achieving a mysterious self-identification with the Self of God. Those who possessed this ideal and this method considered themselves men of "divine wisdom," superior to all others.
The notion was flattering and captivated men of high character, but also, of inferior calibre. The former displayed an activity which may be called, roughly, "mystical"; the latter, one that can be no less roughly called "magical." Mysticism is the effort to reach the direct vision of God by spiritual means: magic, in this sense, the effort to do so by relatively mechanical means.
The Catholic Church has always preached the Beatific Vision, which transcends even the most sublime intellectual conceptions of God and all imagination, as the destiny of all those who leave this life "in grace," grace being mediated through Christ only, incorporating us with Him, causing the Holy Spirit to indwell us in a particular way, and making us true adopted sons of God.
The most startling manifestations of sanctity are but manifestations of an interior fact, i.e., an exceptionally close supernatural union between a soul and God; and theosophists are quite right in subordinating the special phenomena that they claim to experience, to the substance of their doctrine, even though it has been, historically, the exhibition of such phenomena which gave modern Theosophy its vogue.
Christian mysticism passed from St. Paul and St. John through writers like the pseudo-Dionysius to St. Augustine, the Victorines, German mystics like St. Gertrude, St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure, SS. Catherine of Siena and of Genoa, the Spanish school like SS. Teresa and John of the Cross down to modern times, and Catholic writers on mysticism are perhaps more numerous than they ever were.
There have been "second class" Catholic writers, like Maria d'Agreda; but it is noticeable that Theosophists have preferred "mystics" who diverge more or less from Catholic orthodoxy, like Tauler and Eckhardt, "illuminist" authors, J. Bohme, and even Swedenborg. Indeed, they display very great interest (and rightly; the subject in itself is interesting, even though concerned with a perversion of the human spirit) in "magical" writers such as the degenerate Gnostics, inferior Neo-Platonists, the Kabbalists, and men like Cornelius Agrippa, "Paracelsus," or Pico della Mirandola. The occultist passion of the Templars and the Masons proceeds to the Rosicrucians of the nineteenth century revival, through men like Saint Martin "Eliphaz Levi" (the ex-abbe Constant), "Papus" (Dr. Encausse), till it reaches those moderns who prefer even the unwholesome and fantastic to the normal.
But Theosophy has its history "backwards," too. Through the Gnostics, the Graeco-Judaic philosophies of Philo and Alexandria, obscure parts of Plato's work (and the Pythagoreans, or Orphics) it reaches back towards India and Persia, and ends by claiming affinity with, if not the fatherhood of, some schools of Buddhism, and in fine Brahmanism.
I fear we have to insist that the modern literature of Theosophy, so far as it concerns itself with history, is of no value at all, unless of course you admit a priori that clairvoyance provides the authors with knowledge accessible to no one else. In particular, Theosophic books dealing with oriental religions are misleading. I recommend as an antidote two works of M. R. Guenon (Payot; Paris): Thosophisme: Histoire d'une Pseudo-Religion: and his Introduction Generale a l'Etude des Doctrines Hindoues. I do so the more readily as these works were not by a Catholic; indeed, the author displays a veneration for oriental modes of thought, and a contempt for ours, which outpasses the due measure.
At least he shows very clearly how shoddy is the material turned out by Theosophists on their own subject; and, while the distinguished Italian scholar, P. Oltramare, could call his studies of ancient Indian thought "L'histoire des idees theosophiques dans l'Inde: I, La theosophie brahmanique" (Paris), he has to apologise for the distrust his title must excite nowadays, when the name Theosophy "is affixed to the strangest wares: an amalgam of mysticism, charlatanism and thaumaturgic pretensions which have been combined, in the most unlikely fashion, with an almost childish anxiety to apply the method and terminology of science to transcendent matters. India itself could not but be besmirched by the ridicule and disfavour so justly incurred by the curious doctrines of Mme. Blavatsky and Mrs. Besant" (pp. ii., iii.).
M. Paul Carty competently contrasts M. Oltramare's work with Mrs. Besant's quite unscientific study of Indian religions (Four Great Religions: and The Religious Problem of India). It is a pity, too, that English-speaking Theosophists should have learnt what they know of the Hermetic literature not least through the work of Mr. G. Mead, whose books have no scientific value.
Theosophy, then, makes its peculiar boast out of its organic connection with a world-stream of human-divine effort witnessed to by a continuous history. Theosophy is a "divine science," complete and eternal, known in its entirety to but a few, and communicated by them so far as possible to those capable of receiving it, under various symbols suited to the assimilative capacity of each, or of successive generations. It is then the source of all religions, all philosophies, all science, but it is no one of them.
"Theosophy is not a religion. But something of Theosophy can be found under all religious symbols, in all religious dogmas, for the good reason that it is the RELIGION-SCIENCE whence have issued all religions and all sciences." (A. Arnould: Les Croyances fondamentales du Bouddhisme, Paris, 1895, p. 5).
To the question "Is Theosophy a religion?" "It is not," answers H. P. B. (cf. Key, p. 1). "It is Divine Knowledge or Science." Similarly, "it is the doctrinal exposition of the Truths demonstrated by OCCULT SCIENCE" (A. A., p. 6).
"In the sense given to it by those who first used it," writes Col. Olcott,{8} "the word means divine wisdom, or the knowledge of divine things. The lexicographers handicap the idea with the suggestion that it meant the knowledge of God, the deity before their minds being a personal one; but such was not the intention of the first Theosophists.
"Essentially a Theosophical Society is one which favours man's original acquisition of knowledge about the hidden things of the universe, by the education and perfecting of his own latent powers. Theosophy differs as widely from philosophy as it does from theology (italics ours). It has been truly said that, in investigating the divine nature and attributes, philosophy proceeds entirely by the dialectic method, employing as the basis of its investigation the ideas derived from natural reason; theology still employing the same method, superadds to the principles of natural reason those derived from authority and revelation. Theosophy, on the contrary, professes to exclude all dialectical process and to derive its whole knowledge of God from direct intuition and contemplation."
This has been quoted to emphasise the fact that Theosophy bases its statements either upon the ipse dixit of some Mahatma, or on a special psychic process unknown to the ordinary man. This must always be recalled when it declares it advances nothing that has not been proved up to the hilt.
The Mahatmas
Arnould writes of these Guardians of the Immemorial Doctrine that "their number is great," that they are "Beings more completely developed than antecedent or existing humanity. These more advanced Beings have traversed the entire human course, and help their less advanced brethren. All humanity shall one day reach this degree of development, like that which Westerns assign to their anthropomorphic God," and then it will be their turn to help others (pp. 15, 16).
For while "a few isolated individuals, borne on by a peculiar enthusiasm, a spiritual moral, and physical hygiene and persevering toil," achieve the goal before their brothers (p. 46), and alone have evolved that sixth principle, or Buddhi, which is as superior to the intellect as the human soul is to the animal (p. 66) yet they can and do put off their entry into Nirvana for the sake of teaching fragments of their lore to men, and may then be called Buddhas of Compassion (p. 49). H. P. B. rationalizes{9} these Mahatmas (=Great Spirits) not a little: though they guide and protect, yet they do not inspire the T. S. or the writings of its leaders (p. 299). So, too, Mrs. Besant says they work for humanity, use the T.S. as an instrument, bless it, and help it at a crisis.{10} Miss Lillian Edger, in a very convenient little book called Elements of Theosophy,{11} says of them that they can "function at will on any one of the three planes on which our evolution is proceeding." They work "unseen, unthanked, even as God Himself works in every form" (p. 121).
From them come the inspirations of art, the intuitions of genius, and the promptings of heroism. From them come physical discoveries and spiritual movements. They appear, it may be, as men, and are misunderstood and persecuted. They may be called Initiates, Adepts, Magi, Hierophants, Mahatmas, Elder Brothers, Great Souls, or Masters. We are told to number among them Pythagoras, Orpheus, Moses, Christ, St. Paul, St. John, Clement and Origen, Krishna and Buddha, high-priests of various cults (including that of the Temple at Jerusalem), Alexander the Great, and many others.{12}
The evidence for their existence may indeed be its "metaphysical necessity."{13} It is postulated by the Law of Cyclic Evolution. The divine germ in man comes from and returns to God, through an uninterrupted series of more or less divine Beings. There cannot, therefore, but be Mahatmas. However, H. P. B., H. S. O., A. B., and even humbler disciples, have been in epistolary communication with these Masters, and A. B., in H. P. B. and the Masters, collects a considerable amount of what she considers adequate evidence of their consorting with mankind.{14}
The Lamas of Tibet (where they are usually domiciled) are said, however, to have denied their existence, while Mr. Hodgson, in the service of the Society for Psychical Research, together with most independent students, will not admit it either.{15} To those who do not grant its a priori necessity, the evidence of the few "eyewitnesses" seems, he argues, valueless; and so is the correspondence by which they, mistakenly enough, reveal their "miserable poor style" and ideas which are "absolute rubbish."{16}
Mme. Blavatsky, however, despises the attacks of the S.PR., which she calls "a flock of stupid old British, wethers, who had been led to butt at them by an over-frolicsome lambkin from Australia" (p. 297).
If she is asked why the Masters do not appear to disprove the charges which are made against them, she asserts that they sometimes do, but that they usually despise to (Key, p. 295). She reiterates the argument that if they do not exist, then she herself has invented the entire contents of their philosophy and all the practical knowledge ascribed to them, so that since she exists, it doesn't really matter whether they do or don't (ibid., p. 298); that to attempt to prove they do not exist is to wish to prove a negative and, finally, that she wishes to goodness modern Theosophists had never mentioned Masters, Adepts, or Occult Knowledge (ibid., pp. 300, 302).
The Church has a doctrine of Tradition, of Sainthood, and of the Beatific Vision and the "spiritual body" to which the saved are destined. But the Tradition is not secret: nor is it doled forth by privileged individuals. Nor can Sainthood be produced by human effort only still less by any "cyclic law."
Nor are Christian beliefs held "blindly," as Theosophists often say (e.g., Key: pp. 87, 218, etc.). Those of the Theosophist, however, are. For they rest on evidence provided clairvoyantly or clairaudiently or in some other extra-scientific way, or transmitted by "Masters." But there is admittedly no "proof" of the validity of the former, or of the existence of the latter. Therefore the whole affair becomes subjective, and quite unlike Christian "evidence."
God
Mme. Blavatsky's Key is in the shape of a catechism; for the sake of brevity we shall condense slightly its questions and answers without affecting, we trust, their bearing.
"Do you believe in God-the God of the Christians, the Biblical God?"
"In such a God we do not believe. We reject the notion of a personal, or an extra-cosmic and anthropomorphic God. The God of theology is a bundle of contradictions. We will have nothing to do with him."
"Then you are Atheists?" "Not that we know of. We believe in a Divine Universal Principle, the root of ALL, from which all proceeds, and within which all shall be absorbed at the end of the great cycle of Being. Our DEITY is everywhere, in, over, and around every invisible atom and divisible molecule; for IT is the mysterious power of evolution and involution, the omnipresent, omnipotent, and even omniscient creative potentiality. IT does not (think); because it is Absolute Thought itself. Nor does it exist, as it is Be-ness, not a Being. Our Deity is the eternal, incessantly evolving, not creating builder of the universe; that universe itself unfolding out of its own essence. It is a sphere without circumference-ITSELF" (Key, pp. 61-66).
The confusions here are manifold. Man has an "analogical" knowledge of God: that is, he knows Him in a human way, not false, but essentially inadequate. He does not know Him as God knows Himself, immediately and comprehensively: if he did, he would be God. Hence man's very idea of God as "Being" is derived and inadequate, but not false. Moreover, God is eternal-this does not mean "very old," but existing wholly simultaneously: and He is omnipresent, which does not mean extended throughout the universe, but wholly present in every part of it. Nor does the "personality" of God mean that He exists as we do, with our "personal" limitations; but that whatever perfection there is in "personality" is also, essentially and as in its source and infinitely, in Him.
H. P. B. is right in claiming for God that He is infinite and unqualified: wrong, when she suggests that (i) we cannot know anything about Him by our reason; and (ii) that He is the universe or evolves into it. The "negative way" of speaking of God-denying to Him anything that we humanwise know-is not adequate though legitimate. It means, that we deny any of the human limitations of our experience as true about God; but affirm all their substantial content as infinitely true of Him.
The Christian God is therefore thinkable in a way imperfect, yet true so far as it goes: the Theosophic God is not thinkable at all. Yet the Theosophist keeps on thinking about God. He calls it the causeless cause, the rootless root, the One, etc. To be consistent He should say (and sometimes does) that we are equally right in calling Him nonroot, non-cause non-principle, etc. He had better define God as O=X, and let the matter drop.
The universe
Theosophy inclines to "idealistic Pantheism"; the Universe emanates from God, as ray from sun, or is immanent in Him, as drop in ocean, or is Himself, as my dream is I. There is no "creation," but the "'periodical and consecutive appearances of the universe from the subjective on to the objective plane of being.' This is the 'Cycle of Life,' the 'Days and Nights of Brahma,' or the time of Manvantara and that of Pralaya (dissolution). (This process is) Eternal reality casting a periodical reflection of itself on the infinite spatial depths. This reflection 'is a temporary illusion, and, as flitting personalities, so are we' (Key, pp. 83-85). 'In Eternity,' M. Arnould reminds us (p. 12), 'there is but a single moment, ALWAYS.
"'If, for a single moment, there had been nothing, then there would always have been Nothing. Before creation, as after, is Eternity! Where seize, where place, the moment of Creation? It exists not! It cannot exist!
"'The periods (of activity and rest) can be compared to the double rhythmic beating of the heart. There is a great rhythmic throbbing in the Infinite, in the UNIQUE ALL, which causes transitory forms to emanate, where through the UNIQUE SPIRIT circulates and develops and reabsorbs them.'
"Theosophists can never free themselves from this welter of metaphor: and even Mrs. Besant says: 'God is all, and all is God'" (Theosophy: Religious Systems of the World, p. 642,1903, etc.).
H. P. B. rejects Pantheism, at least in so far as its "real and primitive meaning has been distorted by blind prejudice and a one- sidedness of view. If you accept the Christian etymology of this compound word, and form it of pan, "all," and theos, "God," and then imagine and teach that this means that every stone and every tree in Nature is a God or the ONE God, then, of course, you will be right, and make of Pantheists fetish-worshippers" (Key, p. 63). But one must etymologize the word, she goes on, "esoterically." The Christian etymology is as correct, as H. P. B.'s conception of their theology is absurd.
The Indian terms quoted above are not only used by Theosophists as symbols, but are explained in materialistic detail. A Manvantara comprises 360,000,000 years,{17} and, together with a Pralaya, composes the 100 billion (and more) years of a world period, or Kalpah. During a Pralaya (putting the thing in its Indian form) only Brahma (neuter) exists-Sat, the Unknowable and Absolute.
A new Manvantara dawns: Brahma (masc.) awakes. At once He sees, "Nothing exists." Forthwith we have the opposition of Being and Not Being, the Duality, sat-avidya. The vision of the "being" that once was recurs to Him-Brahma's own revelation, Mahat, the third "logos." The Trinity, Sat, Satavidya, Mahat, is complete. The out-and in-breathings of Brahma then make and reabsorb the Universe.
Mrs. Besant (Introd., p. 21) develops this doctrine of the Emanating All by means of a quite unhistorical adaptation of the Greek term Logos, enabling her to assure the Bishop of London that after all Theosophists believe in the Trinity. Underlying this is a (i) fatalist and (ii) meaningless conception of the Infinite "evolving," that is, in any case, changing, which it cannot do; and either improving itself by becoming more than it was, or degrading itself by getting mixed up with matter and having to disentangle itself once more. The Christian doctrine of creation is only inadequately thinkable: the Theosophist one of a fluctuation, a throb, in the Godhead, is positively unthinkable.
Theosophy's structure
Theosophic teaching presents the world as existing in seven planes, not superimposed, but interpenetrating, for each consists of a grosser or purer manifestation of reality so that the slightly less gross has plenty of room to exist and vibrate between the atoms of the grosser. Each plane therefore has its special dimension, time, consciousness and inhabitants.
It seems idle to offer details of the history of this our evolving world. Briefly, it rises in a septuple spiral, mankind passing through seven cycles corresponding to the planets. Mr. Sinnett, Growth of the Soul, 1896, p. 265, says that seven root-race periods make up one world period; seven world-periods (following each other on as many planets in succession), one round; seven rounds, one manvantara; seven manvantaras, one scheme of evolution; seven schemes of evolution (more or less contemporaneous in their activity), the solar system.
He proceeds to relate just how far each planet has got in its evolutionary process-Mars is behind us; many of us lived there; did we but visit it, "as some of our more advanced companions can and do," we should find traces of our passage. Venus is far ahead of us: in fact, "the guardians of our infant humanity" descended thence, stimulated our faculties, and caused us to stand rather further on in our process than we have the strict right to do.
To these Elder Brothers he devotes an entire chapter. Earth-men are at their fourth stage, our third having been lived in the lost continent of Lemuria, where consciousness dawned and man split into the two sexes. Mr. Scott Elliott, in The Lost Lemuria (with two maps) established H. P. B.'s revelations about Lemuria by geology and so forth, and describes also the fourth race that lived in Atlantis (The Story of Atlantis; 4 maps).
Its catastrophes occurred respectively 800,000, 200,000, and 80,000 years ago. But, like H. P. B., he relies for his information upon clairvoyance, scoffing somewhat less than she does at the "abysmal ignorance" of palaeontologists who deny such things, and indeed the whole school of Western Science formed in the school of "Mill, Darwin, Tyndall, Hegel, and Burnouf." The fifth or Aryan race is rushing down to absolute evil: Europe is in a religious, philosophic and philanthropic cul de sac: it is in America that the sixth root-race of our cycle shall be prepared, due some 700 years hence.
Mr. Leadbeater indeed knows its very diet, consisting largely of a sort of blancmange variously flavoured and tinted, and partaken of in tea-gardens: no chairs; but marbled hollows in the ground: the plates too are marble and the whole is flooded after each repast. (Man, p. 427; 1913). No one will want us to offer more of this sort of detail.
Man
Meanwhile Man, the Microcosm, is himself septuple, four parts composing the physical, three the spiritual, man. The following is H. P. B.'s chart (Key, p. 92):
(a) Rupa, or Sthula Sha ira = Physical Body
(b) Prana = Life, or Vital Principle
(c) Linga Sharira = Astral body
(d) Kama rupa = Seat of animal desires and passions
(e) Manas-a dual principle in its functions = Mind, intelligence, the higher human mind, whose light or radiation links the Monad, for the lifetime, to the mortal man
(f) Buddhi = The Spiritual Soul
(g) Atma = Spirit
The first four "principles" compose a man's personality, the last three his Individuality. The Atma, H. P. B. says, is "one with the Absolute"; Sinnett, that it is matter like the rest, only very subtle. Arnould (who describes all this, pp. 63-67) prudently exclaims, "Quant au septieme principe, Atma, n'en parlons pas."
At death, the first four principles, or rather "states of consciousness," evanesce: the one real man, immortal in essence, if not in form, Manas, embodied consciousness (Key, p. 100), "God fallen into matter" (A. B., Introd., p. 27), alone will subsist. Human evolution is the effort of this god to reascend to its proper plane, taking as much of its purified personality with it as it can. But it cannot do this in one lifetime only; reincarnations are therefore necessary, a discarnate existence averaging 1,500 years occurring between each, in the Devachanic or "heaven" plane.
Of this and of the Astral plane, Mr. Leadbeater can give many details based on clairvoyance and the teaching of the Masters. Each is divided into seven sections. In the Astral plane, its scenery, inhabitants and phenomena, the soul is in a sort of Hades or Purgatory: crass sensualists live as in a black viscous "fluid" at the bottom: on the second highest is the selfish religionist enjoying harp and crown; on the highest, the selfish intellectualist.
This astral condition is largely responsible for fairies, angels, ghosts, etc.; apparitions are often the astral corpse shelled off by the purified spirit; they try to maintain a fictitious life by obsessing living persons, or haunting public-houses or butchers' shops. Mr. Leadbeater's account of the Devachanic Plane (1902) is fuller; to its planes he assigns inhabitants according to what he considers their degree of unselfish but anthropomorphic religion or respectability: on the lowest you may find a "small grocer"; on the sixth, Vishnu and Siva worshippers "wrapped up in a cocoon of their own thoughts", the Irish peasant and the Madonna; the Spanish ecstatic and her Christ. On the fourth are unselfish pursuers of spiritual or artistic knowledge, like Mozart or Bach; but Mohammedanism or Christianity seldom get their devotees so far as this, save for a few Gnostics or Sufis.
Devachan is a result, not a reward: it is still illusory; you get there the best version of the best you had absorbed before death. It lasts as long as one's garnered spiritual forces need in order to energise and express themselves. There is then for the Theosophist no permanent heaven nor hell: nothing finite can remain "stationary." We do not remember our previous incarnations, for the Ego is furnished in each with a new body, brain, and memory-a clean shirt on which it were idle to look for bloodspots though the murderer may wear it.
And the "astral eidolons" of man's lower quaternity await a "second death"; meanwhile, they are but phantoms without divine or thinking elements left in them; it is these that can be magnetised towards a medium, take form within his aura (outside which they dissolve like jellyfish outside water) and live through his brain.
Now reincarnation is not in itself unthinkable: whether it takes place can be decided only by a due authority. Vague elusive impressions that "I have been here before," "I inexplicably dislike so and so," have no probative value of any sort: "unmerited inequalities of birth," or physique, etc., do not need reincarnation to explain them, and men are judged according to their lives in their circumstances, and not in the air, merely according to an abstract morality: finally, if the break in my consciousness between two incarnations is complete, I am morally and practically a new person; continuity between my selves is merely mechanical; it would be immoral to punish my new self for sins committed by the old one.
Karma
Karma means the law of cause and effect working itself out, deterministically, and rigorously governing the whole process of man's existence and the series of his states. It is the Ultimate Law of the Universe, for social and national Karmas grow out of the aggregate of individual ones (Key, pp. 198-215). It leaves then no room for regret, hope, repentance, atonement, or prayer.
"'We do not believe in vicarious atonement, nor in the possibility of the remission of the smallest sin by any god. What we believe in is strict and impartial justice. [This is the sense in which Karma is "Relative and Distributive," a law of readjustment giving back Harmony (which is synonymous with Good) to the world.] There is no repentance' (here we resume H. P. B.'s assertions in standard works): no 'casting our sins at the foot of the Cross.'
"'There is no destiny but what we ourselves determine; no salvation or condemnation except what we ourselves bring about.' Weak natures may accept the 'easy truth of vicarious atonement, intercession, forgiveness.' The Ego, then, becomes its own saviour in each world and incarnation (Key, p. 155). Christianity does but introduce one external, miraculous, and therefore unmoral Saviour.
"Hence prayer especially is idle.
"'Do you ever pray?' the Theosophist is asked. 'We do not, we act.' 'Pray?' (Buddhists would exclaim)'to whom? or to what?' (and yet they are confessedly far more virtuous than Christians.) To ask for help from Christ were 'morel idleness, revolting, degrading to human dignity' (Key, pp. 66-72). It is absurd to suppose that an answer can be given to every foolish and egotistical prayer.
"Both Buddha and Christ corroborate this. Doubtless Jesus says: 'Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name (that of "Christ"; H. P. B.), that will I do'; but this, interpreted esoterically, means Christ = Buddhi-Manas = Self. The only God we must recognize and pray to, or rather act in union with, is that Spirit of God of which our body is the temple" (ibid.).
Free Will is certainly the greatest mystery of human life, and no metaphor drawn from the mechanistic universe around us can properly describe it, though we have a direct consciousness of it. The history of Theosophy, in this matter, has been a desperate effort to reconcile the doctrine of Karma with free will.
We are told that we can "choose" to alter the tendency due to some wrong act; but that very choice is as much dictated by one's Karma as the wrong act was-each is the necessary result of what preceded it.
Do what I will, I cannot see any reason, offered by Theosophists, for denying that Karma is a doctrine of fatalism and, quite logically, involves a rejection of merit, reward, or punishment, all of which flow no less logically from a belief in the radical freedom of the will. Karma offered as an explanation of an undoubted mystery annihilates the possibility of choice.
H. P. B., therefore, by Prayer, "will-prayer," "internal command" to "our Father in heaven" in its esoteric sense, is but an inevitable communing with self, i.e., the core of self, and a "suggestion" administered to all the outer selves. All men (Christ included) have Divinity more or less dormant within them. Wake it up! Or rather when because of Karma, it inevitably starts to wake up, your prayer will become less of a petition from a man, that an angel could grant, than-just God talking to Himself.
Ethic
Theosophy tends towards a "social," non-self-regarding Ethic, with a sort of mechanical justice because everything, in the long run, is one. The Theosophist will therefore de-animalise the body, but not injure it-especially by abstinence from meat, alcohol and marriage, by breathing exercises accompanied by noble thoughts:
"I breathe the breath of Life: I send love to all mankind. I breathe the life-dispensing ether: I send forth thoughts of life for all mankind. I breathe the eternal movement of the divine life; I send wishes for health for all mankind. I breathe the universal Life Spirit, full of strength: And deny all weakness of Life and of the Soul." And so on, ending, for Amen, "So breathes every man that is born of God."
But there are no hard and fast rules for behaviour, and all such practices are "esoteric," the Enlightened seeing that there is but one soul in all, and refusing to sacrifice the life even of beast or fish. We are not told what to do about vegetables. The essence therefore of Theosophist ethic is altruism-though even this is a misnomer, since All are One, I am you, and you I. Hence, on lower planes, tolerance, social effort, forgiveness-even the supreme sacrifice made by those who put off their Nirvana so as to help others. We refer, for Nirvana, to Essay No. 6, since Theosophists, while rightly refusing to call it annihilation, or to admit Pantheism, have added nothing to an explanation of what it is.
It would then seem that Theosophy, confronting the immemorial problem set by the coexistence of the individual and society, and the fact that the former can never cease to be an individual yet reaches his perfection only in "society," have, by their habitual looseness of talk, modifications
of doctrine to suit their audiences, and personal impressionisms, complicated that problem not a little, save when they have destroyed it by teaching a fatalistic Karma, which explains nothing, either as to origin or end, let alone as to route.
III. THEOSOPHY AND RELIGIONS
Buddhism and spiritualism
Theosophy professes to be the ancient wisdom allegedly lying behind all philosophies and religions. But it has been so strongly coloured with Indian expressions that it is often confused with Buddhism, and Buddhism (as in Ceylon) has been much used by Theosophists for political and nationalist purposes.
Col. Olcott, by the way, had been King Asoka in a previous incarnation, and H. P. B. (Key, pp. 12-15) considers even the "dead letter" of southern Buddhism to be far grander, nobler, more philosophical and scientific than that of any other religion.
In India, theosophy was given a Brahman colour, and Mrs. Besant fought bitterly against Catholic missionaries, being indeed received as an incarnation of the goddess Sarasvati, goddess of science, wife of Brahma, Christ being, she said, an incarnation of Vishnu.{18} Enough to say that Theosophy would disdain to be linked with Spiritualism, though H. P. B. allows a certain amount of credibility to spiritualist "phenomena" provided the spiritualist explanations be not admitted. She regards such phenomena as proper to one of the lower ranges of occult science, a science singularly apt to be misused for selfish ends.
Theosophists made much more of phenomena at first than they do now: H. S. O. was in fact converted from Spiritism because he saw spiritist phenomena equalled and transcended at will and in broad daylight by H. P. B. and eastern adepts. He gives examples in Theosophy, Religion and Occult Science, p. 251. Whatever be the facts about Theosophist "miracles," it must be noticed that they differ from those of the Gospels and of Catholic history at large, in origin, nature, moral and spiritual setting and consequences, and probative value.
We mentioned above (p. 2) the Coulomb scandal, information about which exists in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. iii., parts vii., ix., pp. 201-400. Mme. Coulomb said that H. P. B. faked her "phenomena"; H. P. B. said that all the letters alleged by Mme. Coulomb to have been written by her were forgeries. A. B. says that they could not possibly have been written by her, because they are "uneducated," whereas H. P. B. was "brilliant, however familiar and conversational." To others they seem exactly in H. P. B.'s style.
H. P. B. repudiated the accusation, in the undisputed words subjoined, which sufficiently show her style:-
"I swear by the Master whom I serve faithfully, and for the sake of carrying whose orders I suffer now, let Him curse me in the future birth, aye, in a dozen of births, if I have ever done anything on my own hook, if I have ever written one line of these infernal letters And if the only person I believe implicitly on earth-Master-came and told me I had, then I would lay it at his door; for nothing and no one in this world could have taken away the recollection of that deed-that idiotic and insane deed-from my brain and memory but Himself-so you had better shut up and ask Him. The idea of it! Had I been such an ass...." etc.
H. S. O. prevented Mme. Blavatsky from prosecuting for libel the Christian College Magazine, Madras, which had published the letters, just as she was stopped from prosecuting Hodgson when he called her a Russian spy.
Christianity
When Theosophists speak well of Christianity it must be firmly remembered that they do so at the cost of denying its absolute, final, and unique validity, and of detecting in it an esoteric doctrine which Christians are ignorant of or deny. Mrs. Besant finds (rather like Modernists) a way of using the terms "Trinity," and "Redemption," but also of holding that in "all religions of the world" the Second Person of her Trinity somehow incarnates Himself and that Christ is adored by the Hindu as Vishnu.
This is the bad old system of amateurish comparative religion, which vaguely identified, or interconnected, the stories of Mithra, Osiris, Krishna, and Christ. It has no scientific value nor ever had, but was current in Mrs. Besant's middle life. Mrs. Besant, in Esoteric Christianity (1901) said that Comparative Mythologists derived their "similarities" in religion from a common trunk-human ignorance: and Comparative Religionists also did so from a common trunk-Divine Wisdom.
Supreme Teachers, possessed of the whole Wisdom, doled it out, though reluctantly (pearls before swine) to inferior men, Paul, the Great Initiate, for example, saying he gave them but milk, and insisting much on the "mystery" that was his to impart. (We say curtly, that what St. Paul meant was that divine revelation hitherto believed to be given by God to the Jews only was as a matter of fact, for all men, and that he in particular was "apostle to the Gentiles." (see Essay No. 21, p. 31).
Relying on some worthless Gnostic work, but above all on clairvoyance, she and H. P. B. know that the Roman Church really considers Christ as the Gnostics did, i.e., as chief of the Aeons. Of the iniquitous Roman distorters of theosophic truth, need we say that the Jesuits are the worst (A. B., in the Theosophist, January, 1913, p. 481, etc.). "Money is poured out like water; one day's post brings attacks from Rome, from Stockholm, Hong Kong." Since the Masters confessedly convey their instruction in a shell of myth, we need not suppose that A. B. believed all, or any, of this.
What is clear about most Theosophists that I have read is that they neither had, nor have, any knowledge of the ordinary doctrine of the Catholic Church (open to all, not to an elite); that they originally drew their notions about it from the worst version of Christianity supplied (as apparently it still is) by the Middle West of the U.S.A., and that they utilised the shockingly bad religious history of the period in which modern Theosophy blossomed in order to speak of Isis, Buddha, and what not in connection with Christianity, and, that they have never learnt anything ever since.
A. B. therefore borrows a historical, a mythical, and a mystical "Jesus" from other writers; considers that the historical Jesus was born 105 B.C., became an Essene monk, studied Indian occultist books, travelled into Egypt and at 29, surrendered his body to a Buddha of Compassion, who entered it at the Baptism. The man Jesus in his human body suffered for the services rendered to its superhuman occupant. Gradually a "myth" crystallised around this, the husk of legend being identical all over the world.
The Mystical Christ is the Logos, crucified (i.e., extended throughout matter) and, equally, the divine spark in man. Mr. Kingsland, in his Esoteric Basis of Christianity, and Mr. Leadbeater, in his Christian Creed, respectively prepare the way for follies of this sort by declaring that science has destroyed the credibility of the historic Bible and that clairvoyance reveals the "inner meaning" of the Creed.
Others interpret the Catholic ritual "esoterically," seldom, we may mention, describing it accurately.
The Catholic Church has never admitted that it has an esoteric and an exoteric doctrine, suitable to the few and the more crass of Christians. St. Paul's doctrine of "mystery" has, of course, nothing to do with any such thing. The "discipline arcani" is a special subject and has nothing to do with a special lore, and the term in fact appears to have been invented about 1750 by a Protestant.
In a word, Theosophic treatment of Christianity has nothing historical to recommend it: on the contrary, it is historically inexcusable, unless of course you resort to clairvoyant knowledge which cannot be tested by anyone. If it be said that those who claim to possess it "know" that they do so possess it, one can only say that the material they offer as the result of their knowledge, while containing elaborate descriptions of alleged mental and other conditions, explains none of them, and is exhibited with a vulgarity such that one hardly knows to whom these writers can be speaking, and, that there is nothing in the ethical character of Theosophist protagonists, as discernible in their writings or lives, that would tempt anyone for one moment to attach any significance to their assertions.
There are certain vast problems that have tormented mankind ever since it began to reflect. Such are the existence and nature of God and the extent to which man can know Him: the origin and destiny of human life: the relation of the "one" to the "many": the extent to which man can term himself free, or again, immortal. Human intelligence cannot form complete ideas about all of this nor can it know all that has happened in the past, or will yet happen.
Human curiosity has, however, loved to speculate upon such matters; and we feel human vanity has recurrently wished to flatter itself and impress others by alleging that it possesses all such knowledge, or at least more of it than other people do. It is into this category of "knowers" that Theosophy enters.
Unfortunately H. P. B. and A. B. lived at a time when there was an outburst of new human knowledge, and an accumulation of intriguing books, especially about ancient religions, full of the most unsifted and now discarded information. Intoxicated by this, they made use of all of it, and bequeathed their damnosa haereditas to their successors.
However since all such things are, or should be, logically held by them to be illusory and as false as they are true, and anyhow conveyed to the world by a method of knowing that the world cannot share, yet without any guarantee for the method, we are justified in regarding them, as a rule, as an amateurish and indeed disgusting mismanagement of ancient philosophies and myth, a realm into which quite untrained minds like those of H. P. B. and A. B. and their subordinates exasperatingly intruded themselves. Yet the will to seek and the effort to know are to be respected: we can but regret the addition of so much confusion into English and American minds, themselves as a rule so untrained.
This essay was published by the London-based Catholic Truth Society as part of its "Studies in Religion" series. Fr. Cyril Charlie Martindale (1879-1964) was a memeber of the Jesuit college, Campion Hall, and he lectured in the faculty of Literae Humaniores. A well-known Jesuit writer of the early part of the century. he published numerous biographies and many works of Christian apologetics.
ENDNOTES
1. The most recent summary of her life is in A. B. Kuhn's Theosophy, New York, 1930, c. 3 and following. It will probably be impossible ever to write a proper history of her first 42 years: she is already lapsing into myth.
2. We quote from her sister, Mme. Vera de Jelihovsky, whose evidence is given in A. P. Sinnett's Incidents.
3. "Psychologized baby," she calls him; cf. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, ix., London, 1885, p. 331. His writings are always, certainly, very funny, the more so because their quaintnesses are unconscious. He and he alone supplies a note of humour to theosophic pages. Mme. Blavatsky's uproarious sense of the comic was quite different.
4. Col. Olcott describes its beginning and history from 1875 to 1878 in Old Diary Leaves, and in three more series bearing the same title, to 1883, 1887, and 1892 respectively. All these are published by the Theosophical Publishing Society, and another volume is, we believe, in preparation.
5. Mr. Maskelyne says she turned the scale at seventeen stone.
6. Fisher Unwin, pp. 368, 1893. Her Autobiographical Sketches, Freethought Publishing Company, pp. 169, 1885, carry her story no further than 1879, the year of the Knowlton pamphlet prosecution.
7. But when her mother lay dying, she refused to receive Communion, however necessary to salvation, unless Annie took it with her. "I would sooner be lost with darling Annie than saved without her." Her daughter explained the case
8. Theosophy, Religion, and Occult Science, 1885, p. 246. 2. Key to Theosophy, 1890, pp. 215, 288-303.
9. Introd. a la Theosophie, tr., Paris, 1903, p. 20.
10. T.P.S., 1907; it is based on Mrs. Besant's Ancient Wisdom, reprinted in 1922, and a handy textbook for reference. It is increasingly the fashion to suggest that the existence of "Masters" is but one theory to account for the underlying "unity" of religions, etc.
11. Arnould, pp. 17-19. But H. P. B. calls Alexander (Key, p. 289) "a drunken soldier."
12. So "Hera," in Le Lotus Bleu for Sept., 1904, pp. 193-199.
13. pp. 10-20. "If human evidence can ever substantiate a fact, the appearance (and therefore existence) of the Masters is placed beyond the possibility of a doubt."
14. P.S.P.R., 1891, ix. p. 312.
15. Month, 1892, 1xxiv, p. 180.
16. Ibid.
17. H. P. B., in the Glossary to Key, says Brahma's day consists of 4,320,000,000 years. Brahma's Age = 100 years of 3,110,400,000,000 solar years each.
18. See an account of her triumphal progress in Etudes, cxxiv., pp. 261-265, 1901: H. S. O.'s methods in Ceylon are criticised in C. Gordon Cumming's Two Happy Years in Ceylon, ii., pp. 413-419.
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