Recycled Lives

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Chajes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky ◽  
Modern Perspective

This study historicises and contextualises the rebirth doctrines of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), the matriarch of the Theosophical Society and one of the most influential women of the nineteenth century. It analyses Blavatsky’s complicated theories about the cosmos and its divine source as presented in her two seminal Theosophical treatises, Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), as well as her articles and letters. The book argues that Blavatsky taught two distinct theories of rebirth and that the later one developed from the earlier. It reveals Blavatsky’s appropriation of a plethora of contemporaneous works in the construction of these doctrines and contextualises her interpretations in nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural life. In particular, it explores Blavatsky’s adaptations of Spiritualist ideas, scientific theories, Platonism, and Oriental religions, which in turn are set in relief against broader nineteenth-century American and European trends. The chapters come together to reveal the contours of a modern perspective on reincarnation that is inseparable from the nineteenth-century discourses within which it emerged. In addition, it reveals some consequential, perhaps unexpected, and evidently under-acknowledged historical roots of the reincarnationism that is so popular in today’s postmodern world.

Theosophy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael B. Wakoff
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intuitive Knowledge ◽  
Divine Nature ◽  
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Material Bodies

Etymologically, ‘theosophy’ means wisdom concerning God or divine things, from the Greek ‘theos’ (God) and ‘sophia’ (wisdom). Seventeenth-century philosophers and speculative mystics used ‘theosophy’ to refer to a knowledge of nature based on mystical, symbolical or intuitive knowledge of the divine nature and its manifestations. It referred also to an analogical knowledge of God’s nature obtained by deciphering correspondences between the macrocosm and God. In the late nineteenth century, ‘theosophy’ became associated with the doctrines of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of the popular Theosophical Society. She drew on Buddhist and Hindu philosophy and fragments from the Western esoteric tradition, especially Neoplatonism. She espoused an absolutist metaphysics in which there is a single, ultimate, eternal principle which remains unchanged and undiminished, despite manifesting itself partially in the periodic emanation and reabsorption of universes. Her cosmology included a spiritual account of the evolution of material bodies, which serve as the necessary vehicles by which individuals gradually perfect themselves through cyclic rebirth.

The Queen and the Arts: Cultural Life in Nineteenth-Century Cincinnati

1991 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 314
Author(s):  
Samuel F. Pogue ◽  
Robert C. Vitz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The Arts

Ethnomusicology and Philosophy

2020 ◽  
pp. 43-64
Author(s):  
Ellen Koskoff
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Basic Method ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
New Formulation ◽  
Organizing Principles

Ethnomusicology is the study of music in human social and cultural life. Closely related today to the discipline of anthropology, its basic method is ethnographic fieldwork. This chapter begins by presenting a history of the field of ethnomusicology, from its earliest beginnings (as comparative musicology) in late nineteenth-century Europe to its present standing as a major music discipline worldwide. The chapter proceeds by providing a critical analysis of current debates, theoretical directions, new practices, and challenges, before concluding with an examination of some important issues affecting the future of ethnomusicology. These include the effects of postmodernism (such as the development of new paradigms foregrounding fragmentation and multiple subjectivities) on the study of music; the rise of various technologies as harbingers of a new formulation of music as simply one category of sound; the effects of globalism on diasporic studies, conceptions of “musical flow,” and the ethics of fieldwork; and, finally, the roles of sameness and difference as organizing principles of ethnomusicological analysis and practice

scholarly journals Studies on Anticlericalism in Contemporary Spain

2001 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Pérez Ledesma
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Contemporary Spain

Anticlericalism was a decisive trend in Spanish political, social, and cultural life from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the Spanish Civil War. It is true that anticlerical movements also existed in other European states, but the confrontations were much more intense in Spain. José M. Sánchez recalls this in a concise summary of the violence unleashed by these struggles: from 1822 to 1936, at least 235 members of the clergy were assassinated and around 500 churches and religious centres were burned. In addition, in the three years of the Civil War, almost 7,000 priests, monks and nuns suffered the same fate. Despite this, until a few years ago there were frequent complaints about the scant attention paid by Spanish historians to this trend. Julio de la Cueva Merino referred to this lack of research, and even to the ‘historiographic vacuum’, in a summary of publications on the subject which appeared in 1991. Three years later, Pilar Salomón mentioned the ‘absence of fruitful bibliographic production’, and, as recently as 1997, Rafael Cruz spoke of a ‘shortage of works’, or at least a very scarce production of monographs. Outside the field of history, anthropologists such as David Gilmore and Manuel Delgado have likewise criticized the lack of interest of their colleagues in the face of what Gilmore defined as ‘as powerful a social and ideological phenomenon as devotion’, and which should deserve the same intellectual consideration.

Literary Contributions of Catholics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

1944 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-66
Author(s):  
Francis Borgia Steck
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Science And Education ◽  
Real Importance ◽  
The Temple

A Phase of American history that calls for a more adequate appraisal is the role played by Catholics in the cultural life of Mexico during the nineteenth century, from Hidalgo’s dash for independence in 1810 to the collapse of the Díaz regime in 1910. It is commonly believed that during these hundred years Catholics in Mexico were dolefully sitting on the sidelines and sucking their thumbs, wistfully waiting for a chance to enter once more and enrich with their contribution the temple of national culture. So many imagine that Catholics in nineteenth-century Mexico, being fettered politically and black-listed socially, manifested little interest and made no worthwhile contributions along cultural lines. Belonging generally to the so-called “conservative” party in the political arena, they are supposed to have been debarred from the cultured “liberal” circles of the day and for this reason remained inarticulate, contributing nothing of real importance and enduring value to the culture of independent Mexico and exerting no appreciable influence on contemporary literature, art, science, and education.

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