The Chevalier’s Secret: Emma Hardinge Britten and the Dawn of American Occultism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert C Thompson
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Human Spirit ◽  
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky ◽  
Structured Approach ◽  
Conscious Will ◽  
And Training

Abstract In 1876, prominent spiritualist medium and writer Emma Hardinge Britten published two books written by the Chevalier Louis de B., arguably a pseudonym she used to disguise her own opinions about the nature of the soul and the power of the occult will. As American spiritualism fell into disrepute—dogged by cases of fraudulent mediums and a culture of excess—occultism, typified at the time by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, rose up to replace it. Britten saw the potential that Blavatsky’s views on the development of the conscious will, the existence of a spirit hierarchy, and training with skilled adepts could have for spiritualism’s much less structured approach to supernaturalism, but she worried over occultism’s dismissive attitude toward a unified concept of the soul. Blavatsky tended to fracture the self into several parts in her writing, dismissed the prospect of human spirit communication, and challenged the notion that all human souls were immortal. I argue that Britten created the Chevalier in order to challenge spiritualist orthodoxy while maintaining her identification as a medium who believed sincerely in the spiritualist concept of the soul. I discuss three major areas in which Britten sought to negotiate a space between spiritualism and occultism: the consequences of mediumistic passivity, the existence of non-human spirits, and the predominance of a secret Indian brotherhood at the head of an occult hierarchy.

Theosophy in the Bengal Renaissance

2020 ◽  
pp. 231-252
Author(s):  
K. Paul Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
High Point ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky ◽  
Bengal Renaissance

This chapter explores the Theosophical Society’s association with the Bengal Renaissance in India, which is a significant, yet quite unexplored, dimension of both movements. The chapter traces the rise and fall of Theosophical influence in Bengal, beginning with contacts between Bengali and American spiritualists in the early 1870s prior to the formation of the Theosophical Society. Two years before its move to India, the Society established correspondence with leaders of the Brahmo Samaj. After the move to India in 1879, personal contacts were developed through the travels to Bengal of Henry Steel Olcott and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and the subsequent involvement of Bengalis in the Madras Theosophical Society headquarters. The role of Mohini Chatterji as an emissary of the Theosophical Society to Europe and America was the high point of this association, but by the early twentieth century, Aurobindo Ghose described the Theosophical Society as having lost its appeal to progressive young Indians.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Julie Chajes
Keyword(s):  
Short Discussion ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

The Introduction begins with a short discussion of reincarnation belief in the contemporary world among those who have no particular affiliation with religions that traditionally teach the doctrine. Highlighting some of the typical characteristics of such belief, such as the notion of ‘spiritual evolution’, it poses the question of why reincarnation has become popular in this particular form. The influence of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky is an important part of the answer. After outlining the main points of Blavatsky’s reincarnation doctrine, the Introduction discusses Blavatsky’s colourful personality and the writing of her enormous literary oeuvre. Her interpretations of Kabbalah and Egyptology found their way into her discussions of rebirth, but as these will not be discussed in detail in the book, they are mentioned here briefly. A chapter outline concludes the Introduction.

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.

Conversion and the Idea of the Secret

2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-186
Author(s):  
Gauri Viswanathan
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
African History ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Dynamic View ◽  
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky ◽  
The Individual

Gauri Viswanathan, “Conversion and the Idea of the Secret” (pp. 161–186) Obsessed with the notion of the secret in his writings on religion, Jacques Derrida uncannily evokes a predecessor with whom he has rarely, if at all, been compared—the Russian occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. This essay argues that Blavatsky’s occult writings set the stage for the kinds of speculations on crypto-conversion, conscience, and responsibility that subsequently engaged Derrida. Like Blavatsky, Derrida saw conversion not as change but as retaining whatever it displaces in the form of a secret, persisting as an enduring reminder of supplanted religious beliefs. While Derrida was more interested in conversion as a form of repression that mutually constitutes the old and the new, Blavatsky held a broader and more dynamic view of conversion-as-repression: in describing Christianity’s battle against the heterogeneous belief-systems it eventually supplanted, she sought to illuminate conversion as a larger process well beyond the individual and involving religious expansion and consolidation. The essay culminates in a close reading of an occult text, W. B. Yeats’s “The Manuscript of ‘Leo Africanus,’” that exemplifies the problematics of crypto-conversion as delineated by Blavatsky and Derrida in their respective ways. “Leo Africanus” stages Yeats’s encounter with a dead spirit alternatively grasped as his anti-self and historical conscience. A breakthrough in understanding allows Yeats to acknowledge an occluded history—his as much as that of his deceased interlocutor—that can only be told in the terms of crypto-conversion, in this instance of a sixteenth-century African slave forcibly converted to Christianity and turned into a native informant of African history and geography.

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna (‘HPB’) (1831–1891)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jamie Spears
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Business Partner ◽  
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Inner Circle

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (known as ‘HPB’ to her inner circle) claimed that from childhood she possessed the gift of clairvoyance. She used this well-publicized fact to her advantage in 1875, when she founded the Theosophical Society in New York, with her life/business partner Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907).

The Limits of Text and Tradition: Theosophy, Translation, and Transnational Vedānta in the fin-de-siècle

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-228
Author(s):  
Nika Kuchuk
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Translation Theory ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky ◽  
Fin De Siècle

Abstract Part of a larger project interrogating literal and discursive translation in late-colonial Vedāntic thought, this paper focuses on Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society and its key ideologue. Blavatsky grounded her articulation of Theosophical teachings in a mysterious source text, purportedly written in a sacerdotal language known as the Senzar. In presenting herself as its translator, Blavatsky deftly maneuvers between competing philosophies of language and knowledge paradigms, from philology to occultism. This allows her to simultaneously frame Theosophy as continuous with Vedāntic and Buddhist thought and as superseding them, thus effectively articulating a new—universal—teaching. Utilizing translation theory as an analytical and hermeneutical lens, this paper examines some of Blavatsky’s more notable discursive mechanics and their textual afterlives, tracing the tensions between authorship and authority, tradition and innovation, the particular and the universal. It is proposed that attending to such translational practices (or claims thereof) points to broader questions of meaning-making and commensurability implicated in any project of articulating a tradition across linguistic, cultural, temporal and geographical spaces—as well as its limits and challenges.

Modern Western Magic and Theosophy

Aries ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Tillett
Keyword(s):  
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

AbstractDer Einfluss der Theosophischen Gesellschaft auf die Entwicklung der modernen westlichen Esoterik kann kaum überschätzt werden. Sowohl direkt als auch indirekt funktionierte die Theosophie als Katalysator und Quelle für fast alles in der westlichen Esoterik, das die Veröffentlichung der Lehren von Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) und die Gründung der Theosophischen Gesellschaft im Jahre 1875 folgte. Während der Einfluss der Theosophie auf die westliche Esoterik gut dokumentiert ist, wird sie weniger häufig als Vorläufer der westlichen Magie gesehen. Obwohl Blavatsky das bereitstellte, was man als die den rituellen Magie zugrundeliegenden esoterischen Philosophie betrachten könnte, lieferte Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) die mehr praktischen, und tatsächlich beliebteren und schmackhafteren, Erklärungen, wie und warum sie wirksam sein könnte. Seine Behauptung, dass rituelle Magie nicht einfach symbolisch oder psychologisch sei, sondern eine wirkliche Transformation der Teilnehmer und der äußeren Welt verursachte, hat die meisten modernen ritualmagischen Gruppen und Texte beeinflusst und ist da deutlich offenkundig. Es ist ein Theosophischer Einfluss aber nicht einer, der Blavatsky, oder die Theosophische Organisationen welche das, was oft 'Neo-Theosophie' genannt wird, ablehnen, erkennen würden.

Some Sketches from the Life of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

1997 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 114
Author(s):  
Devin Johnston ◽  
Joanne Kyger
Keyword(s):  
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
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