Nothing Personal: Blavatsky and Her Indian Interlocutors

Numen ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-60
Author(s):  
Julie Chajes
Keyword(s):  
New Age ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Power Dynamics

Abstract The Theosophical Society was an influential transnational religious movement founded by H. P. Blavatsky and others in 1875. With its theology of the impersonal Divine, Theosophy was particularly influential on the New Age, which inherited a propensity to see the divine in impersonal terms. Offering a corrective to the recent historiographical tendency that focuses solely on Theosophy’s Western aspects, this article analyzes Blavatsky’s written “conversations” on the nature of the Divine with two Indian Theosphists, T. Subba Row (1856–1890) and Mohini Chatterji (1858–1936). Contextualizing these discussions both globally and locally, it reveals Blavatsky’s engagement with Subba Row’s Vedantic reading of John Stuart Mill and her concurrent rejection of Mohini’s Brahmo-Samaj inspired theism. The article considers the power dynamics that lay behind these negotiations. It argues that they involved a mutual drive for legitimacy and were the result of complex transcultural encounters that resist reductionist historiographical tendencies.

scholarly journals The articulation between evolutionism and creationism in New Religious Movements: Two South American case studies

2020 ◽  
pp. 179-194
Author(s):  
Vitor Campanha
Keyword(s):  
Biological Evolution ◽  
New Age ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
The Internet ◽  
South American ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Religious Perspectives ◽  
American Case

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how certain religious perspectives present nuances between the concepts of creation and evolution. Although public debate characterizes them as polarized concepts, it is important to understand how contemporary religious expressions resignify them and create arrangements in which biological evolution and creation by the intervention of higher beings are presented in a continuum. It begins with a brief introduction on the relations and reframing of Science concepts in the New Religious Movements along with New Age thinking. Then we have two examples which allows us to analyze this evolution-creation synthesis. First, I will present a South American New Religious Movement that promotes bricolage between the New Age, Roman Catholicism and contacts with extraterrestrials. Then, I will analyze the thoughts of a Brazilian medium who disseminates lectures along with the channeling of ETs in videos on the internet, mixing the elements of ufology with cosmologies of Brazilian religions such as Kardecist spiritism and Umbanda. These two examples share the idea of ​​the intervention of extraterrestrial or superior beings in human evolution, thus, articulating the concepts of evolution and creation. Therefore, in these arrangements it is possible to observe an inseparability between spiritual and material, evolution and creation or biological and spiritual evolution.

A “Greek God” in a Japanese New Religion: On Hermes in Kōfuku-no-Kagaku

Numen ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 420-446
Author(s):  
Franz Winter
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
New Age ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Theoretical Question ◽  
New Religion

Abstract The article deals with the presence of the “Greek god” Hermes in the Japanese new religious movement Kōfuku-no-Kagaku, which was founded in 1986. The various references are interpreted in light of the history and development of the movement and with regard to its setting in present-day Japanese religious culture. In addition to the importance of several aspects of the reception of the Euro-American New Age tradition and the prophecies of Nostradamus, the fact that the figure of Hermes is presented as the hero of several manga and anime productions of Kōfuku-no-Kagaku is also taken into consideration. This leads to the theoretical question of the importance of the new media of representation of religious content and the effect this approach has on the development of the various groups.

scholarly journals Annie Besant's Quest for Truth: Christianity, Secularism and New Age Thought

1999 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK BEVIR
Keyword(s):  
Vice President ◽  
New Age ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
The Social ◽  
Crisis Of Faith ◽  
Secular Society ◽  
Democratic Nation ◽  
Christian Nation

Annie Besant was arguably the most famous, or rather infamous, woman of her age. For much of the 1870s and 1880s she promoted the secularist cause with remarkable vigour. She became a vice- president of the National Secular Society, the members of which thought almost as highly of her as they did of Charles Bradlaugh, the president. In 1889, however, she joined the Theosophical Society in a sensational move that shocked even her closest friends. Eventually she became president of the Theosophical Society, the members of which again revered her almost as much as they did its prophet, Madame Blavatsky. Besant moved from the materialist atheism of the secularists to the New Age thought of the theosophists. All of her previous biographers have emphasised the contrast between these two sets of beliefs. They have been unable to recover any coherence in her activities within the secularist, Fabian and theosophical movements. Indeed, they have spoken of her many lives, as though she wandered aimlessly, if enthusiastically, from cause to cause with no guiding theme whatsoever. When they do look for a pattern in her life, they typically turn not to her reasons for doing what she did, but rather to her hidden needs, such as to follow a dominant man or to exercise her powers. They turn to her emotional make-up to explain her final flight from reason, and they then explain her earlier commitments by reference to the emotions they have uncovered. In contrast, I hope to represent Besant's life as a reasoned quest for truth in the context of the Victorian crisis of faith and the social concerns it helped to raise. Besant, with her secularism, Fabianism and theosophy, was very much of her time, for whilst the early part of Queen Victoria's reign was shaped by a religious movement to make Britain a truly Christian nation and a political movement to make Britain a democratic nation, the later part of her reign took its shape from the need to find both a faith capable of surviving the rationalist onslaught and solutions to the social problems an extended franchise had failed to solve.

Happiness Is Not Only Your Right; It’s Your Duty!

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-84
Author(s):  
E. Stone
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Identity ◽  
New Age ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Spiritual Community ◽  
Late Modern

Salto Quântico is a rapidly growing religious movement based in Aracaju, Brazil. Syncretizing New Age, Spiritist and Christian precepts, the group exposes followers to spiritual discourse and ideology imparted by enlightened spirit guides through leader and medium Benjamin Teixeira de Aguiar Machado. Followers are encouraged to embrace the adage, “Happiness is not only your right; it’s your duty!” This article will draw on ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews conducted in Aracaju in 2012 to depict a profile of the group. It will also critically consider and explore ways in which the group encourages adherents to seek happiness in the midst of the challenges of late-modern life in Brazil, through participation in the group’s spiritual community, progressive interpretations of sexual identity and sexuality, and spiritual discourse around happiness and the combating of depression.

Extraterrestrial Biblical Hermeneutics and the Making of Heaven's Gate

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 34-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin E. Zeller
Keyword(s):  
New Age ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
Extraterrestrial Life ◽  
Close Encounters ◽  
The Bible ◽  
New Age Movement ◽  
Heaven's Gate

The new religious movement popularly called Heaven's Gate emerged in the mid-1970s. This article argues that its two co-founders, Marshall Herff Applewhite (1932––1997) and Bonnie Lu Nettles (1928––1985), employed what I call extraterrestrial biblical hermeneutics in constructing the theological worldview of Heaven's Gate. This hermeneutics developed out of the New Age movement and its broader interest in ufology, extraterrestrial life, and alien visitation, and postulates a series of close encounters and alien visitations. Borrowing from its New Age and ufological origins, the hermeneutics assumes an extraterrestrial interest in assisting human beings to self-develop, as well as a technological materialism antithetical to supernaturalist readings of the Bible. As I argue here, this extraterrestrial biblical hermeneutics led Applewhite and Nettles to read the Bible as supporting a message of alien visitation, self-transformation, and ultimately extraterrestrial technological rapture.

Scaling Heaven's Gate: Individualism and Salvation in a New Religious Movement

2006 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Ethan Zeller
Keyword(s):  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
New Age ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Heaven's Gate ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Religious Subcultures ◽  
Historical Antecedents

Abstract: This article considers the new religious movement popularly known as Heaven's Gate within the context of American religious history, focusing on its soteriology (scheme of salvation) and the place of the individual within it. I argue that this contextualization reveals a movement that held unusual yet clearly identifiable religious beliefs reflecting popular religious subcultures and possessing clear historical antecedents. Specifically, within Heaven's Gate's soteriology one finds a synthesis of elements drawn from New Age thinking, Christian beliefs, and popular attitudes, and built upon assumptions of individualism and personal autonomy that pervade American religion. Rather than being an aberration of American religious history, Heaven's Gate was quintessentially American, albeit outside the religious mainstream.

Mormonism and the World Religions Discourse

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Lee Wiles
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Comparative Religion ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
World Religion ◽  
World Religions ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Status

This article examines the ways in which the status of Mormonism within academic comparative religion discourses is quite different from that which has evolved among Latter-day Saint leaders and within the burgeoning field of Mormon studies. Whereas Mormonism is a quasi-Christian New Religious Movement in most world religions textbooks and reference works, some scholars of Mormonism have advanced the expanding Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints into the position of world religion. In doing so, they have adopted the terminology of a broader taxonomy largely without regard for maintaining its established demarcations. This classificatory tension, which will likely increase in the future, reveals some of the underlying logics, semantic confusions, and power dynamics of comparative religion discourses, ultimately problematizing the categories of Christianity, world religion, and New Religious Movement as currently constituted.

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