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

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.

DR. ANNIE BESANT AND HER CONTRIBUTION TO EDUCATION IN INDIA

The paper manages the profound education with uncommon reference to Dr. Annie Besant's perspectives on education wherein her life and social way of thinking impact on Indian educational system. The paper additionally manages her theosophical way of thinking dependent on the standards of 'The Unity of God' and of 'The Universal Brotherhood' which are the fundamental piece of profound education. An endeavour has been made to perceive, grasp, discover, break down, combine, assess and fundamentally look at the prevailing variables answerable for reinforcing otherworldly education with respect to Dr. Annie Besant's perspectives. It is education which assists with satisfying the intrinsic limit of people through the Theosophical Idea of Education dependent on Universal Brotherhood, Self-control, Self-investigation, Self-regard, Control of psyche, self-acknowledgment, self-talk with otherworldly arrangement, Love and Sympathy, Service, Freedom, Patience, Peace and Tolerance and to set them up to take care of the ordinary issues. Annie Besant was an Irish political dissident, independent person and Fabian communist. In the wake of grasping Theosophy under the tutelage of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a Russian spiritualist, Besant set out on her strategic spreading theosophical standards, and arrived at the shores of India in 1893. In India Hinduism entranced her to such a degree, that she gave herself to advancing Hinduism. She visited the length and broadness of India, and addressed seriously on the grand beliefs of Hinduism. In any case, Besant was of the supposition that nonattendance of strict education in government schools and universities and instructing of Christianity in preacher educational organizations was answerable for strict lack of bias and doubt among Hindu youth, and subsequently the fallen territory of Hinduism. To cure this state, she underlined the requirement for its recovery, and spread the possibility that strict education of Hindu young people should turn into a necessary piece of their education. So as to concretise these thoughts, Besant set up a school for the strict education of Hindu youth in the heavenly city of Benares, in India, in 1898. Besant is generally known in India for her political exercises as author of Home Rule Movement and as the main ladies President of Indian National Congress, the boss ideological group engaged with the battle for national opportunity. Despite the fact that Besant's political profession in India has been widely investigated, little is thought about her educational thoughts and exercises. “She loved India with a fervour and devotion all her own. Our country’s philosophy, our history or legends, our spiritual heritage, our achievements in the past, our sorrows in the present, our aspirations for the future were part and parcel of Mrs Annie Besant’s own life.” – Sri Prakasa in Indian Political Thought.

Theosophy in the 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.

The Marriage between the Theosophical Society and the Arya Samaj

This chapter explores the relationship between the Theosophical Society and the Indian Arya Samaj during the period between 1878 and 1882. While some of the overall details of these events are well known, this chapter offers new insight into how the two parties imagined and misrepresented each other and how these misrepresentations were reflections of the wider contemporary cultural representations of East and West. The chapter charts the relationship between the founders of the Theosophical Society, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, and Swami Dayananda Saraswati of the Arya Samaj over the course of their initial written correspondence and their subsequent personal encounters in India, which began enthusiastically on both sides but ultimately ended in a public breaking of ties.

H. P. Blavatsky’s Early Reception of Hindu Philosophy

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky is generally recognized as one of the major popularizers of Eastern philosophy in the West, yet not much detailed work on her specific use and knowledge of Hindu philosophy exists. This chapter explores the way the notion of the “six schools of Hindu philosophy” was used and received in Blavatsky’s early work, such as Isis Unveiled (1877) and during her time in India before the publication of The Secret Doctrine (1888). It shows how Blavatsky’s work was a part of the Oriental Renaissance in the sense that the East, here the notion of the six schools of Hindu philosophy, clearly became a part of her esoteric tradition, but also that Hindu philosophy ultimately became just one aspect to be integrated into the syncretistic project of Theosophy, which in many respects framed the continued Oriental Renaissance in the West.

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

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.

Introduction

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.

Recycled Lives

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

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.