This chapter shows that even though the esotericism of Theosophy might seem far from modernist literature, modernist icons such as William Butler Yeats, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot, among others, took inspiration from Madame Blavatsky’s writings. The chapter argues that Blavatsky’s Koot Hoomi, for example, structurally is quite similar to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Blavatsky’s investigations of the Vedāntic tradition are also on par with the modernist tendency to reject Christianity or, in Eliot’s case, to employ Eastern theology as a means of revivifying Western religious traditions. Modernist Orientalism has many sources, but as this chapter argues, Theosophy must be counted as one of the more pertinent of such sources, since it was through Theosophy that a number of important modernist figures first became aware of Eastern traditions. Theosophy, as this chapter shows, provided a template for the modernist re-evaluation of religious tradition—Eastern tradition, especially—as rich material for new cultural production.
