1. In Es2, §7, I mentioned René Guénon (1886-1951) as being a major figure in esotericism and one among the Traditionalists (who believe that all religions and spiritual teachings are given by the Supreme Intelligence to Wise Teachers but acquire their distinct form because of the needs of the people of that place and period and because of the propensity of the Teacher; that the teaching is communicated after proper initiation according to an established traditional form). But I had also mentioned in §2 the Russian theosophist Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891). Before we examine Guénon’s esotericism it is more appropriate to look at Helena Petrovana Blavatsky and her theosophy as she antecedes Guénon by a full generation and more. We cannot avoid it, as her influence on contemporaries and subsequent occultists (esotericists, magicians, mediums and other dealers in apocrypha) was very marked. And the title of this paper is deliberate, because I do not lay any credence in Madame Blavatsky’s narratives: I consider them utterly and laboriously imaginary with not a minimal esoteric quality.
Many things have been said and written about this Russian Madame, who early on left her own family and her husband and thanks to generous financial handouts from her father and her husband, was able to travel in Asia, Europe and America and set up, with others’ contribution, the offices of the Theosophical Society. But there are other accounts, too, which I shall not explore, involving a second and third marriage and other nefarious adventures like her residence in the early 1870’s with Mary Baker and her third husband Gilbert Eddy who were mediums, practicing in the common area of Spiritualism, Mesmerism and Christian Science. It was in their farm that Blavatsky met Colonel Henry Steele Olcott who became her close collaborator (for which all – see James Webb, as in Es1, §5, The Occult Underground, pp 79 – 81 and 122 – 124). In all these narratives there appear some good, positive things – extolling her search for Truth, her clairvoyance and similar psychic powers. Also, some very bad, negative things, like suppressed and distorted sexuality, plagiarism and charlatanism and fraud in producing occult phenomena. Let us see.
2. Blavatsky’s magnum opus is The Secret Doctrine (1888), written in India after she (and her entourage) left America in 1879 having founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. She claimed that she had contact with spirits or higher beings from childhood and certainly during her travels in the East and the West, but now she was more specific naming two supreme sages called Morya and Koot Hoomi, who resided in a secret, inaccessible fort in the Himalayas. Her book is a commentary on the cryptic text “Stanzas of Dzyan” (name which may be a corruption of dhyāna, meaning “meditation, spiritual reflection”, giving also “zen” from d-zen, Chinese chan, Vietnamese thien). This she claimed to have seen in an underground Himalayan monastery – but otherwise unknown to everybody. The book is in two volumes. In the first she describes cosmogony (the creation of the worlds that constitute the Universe) and in the second anthropogony (the genesis and evolution of mankind). In this twofold narration she plagiarized far too many contemporaneous works related to Indian sacred lore and other ancient and exotic mythologies, spiritualism, demonology, Freemasonry, etc. (See W.E. Coleman “The source of Madame Blavatsky’s writings” in Vsevolod Soloviev a Modern Priestess of Isis, London 1895, pp353-366.)
In 1877 Blavatsky had published her earlier work Isis Unveiled (hence the epithet “priestess of Isis”). In this she attacked intensely the materialist and money-minded culture of Western civilisation and its positivist science and technology. In this she employed many sources of pagan mythology, theurgy and mystery religions, Gnosticism, the Hermetic tradition and others. The spring from which all these traditions flowed was, the thought, the occult lore of Ancient Egypt. However, here S. B. Liljegren showed that Blavatsky had been strongly influenced by, and plagiarized from, the novels of the English politician and occultist (whom we met in Es1, section §5) E. Bulwer-Lytton (The Last Days of Pompei 1834, Zanomi 1842, A Strange Story 1862, The Coming Race 1871) in her Isis Unveiled. In a book published in Uppsala, 1957, Buler-Lytton’s novels and Isis Unveiled, Sten Bodvar Liljegren points out her many plagiarisms. The same author had published earlier to the same effect an article in French “Quelques romans anglais, source partielle d’ une religion moderne” in F. Baldensperger (ed) Mélanges d’ histoire littéraire Générale, 2vols, Paris 1930, 2nd vol 60-77. We saw in ES1 §5 that Madame Blavatsky indulged in similar deceptions.
3. J. Godwin sums up nicely from Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine the Anthropogenesis material, the rise, spread and disappearance of successive primal human races in the course of millions of years connecting them with the Indic yugas and other traditions of ancient lore (Arktos… 1996, pp19ff). There is no historical or archaeological evidence for any of this, of course, but only the information from the subterranean monastery and from some Tibetan Masters which Blavatsky gathered plus her own fertile imagination! Godwin for his part finds inconsistencies in Blavatsky’s presentation but also seems inclined to absolve her and accepts as a possible reason her own explanation of her “deliberate confusing the reader” so that the teachings in The Secret Doctrine do not become easy of understanding! She gives in all seven Root-Races, as she calls them, on seven continents. I follow him but add some further information for clarification.
a) An “Imperishable Sacred Land” was the first Continent and home of mankind in this very long period called in the Indic texts a “Manvantara”. This now consists of 71 mahāyugas of 4 yugas each (Sat or Kṛta, Tretā, Dvāpara and Kali). All these periods are hundreds of thousands of years. The Manvantara, 14 times itself, completes a Kalpa. And this “kalpa” is a full cycle of the emergence, duration (Day) and re-absorption of the Universe back into the Unmanifest Nature of the Creator so that an equal period of non-manifestation (Night) will follow: this is a period of many millions of years! The continent of the “Imperishable Sacred Land” was the North Pole. The First Root-Race “had neither type nor color and hardly an objective, though [it was] of colossal form”. These first humans had ethereal forms that could not be injured or affected by water or fire and just melted away gradually into the material of their own “sweet-born progeny”, which became more solid than the ethereal form.
b) While they themselves passed away thus forming the next Root-Race, the “Imperishable Sacred Land” remained, not geographically but in an occult way! The second habitation extended south-westward from Greenland to Kamchatka in a horse-shoe shape. These creatures were androgynous and not quite in full human form: they exhibited material nature’s first efforts to fashion the human form. They perished in a great cataclysm as Greenland and the rest of the northern lands (“Edens of eternal spring”) were through the shift of waters transformed into a horrible “hyperborean Hades”.
c) The third Race, produced by the remnants of the second, lived on the third continent of Lemuria, which stretched from the Indian Ocean to Australia. This was the Golden Age when the “gods walked the earth and mixed freely with the mortals”. This occurred about 18 million years ago. In this period the androgynous creatures divided into distinct human beings, men and women, giving mammalian birth through copulation. When this separation of sexes occurred a class of higher beings, the Dhyanis (from dhyāna, again?), Sons of Wisdom, also incarnated as humans to help new-born mankind ascend in consciousness and spirituality. This stream of humans would provide future Adepts. A second stream incarnated later and became the ancestors of common humans. A third incarnated even later, with the fourth Race, the Atlantean, and, since some humans had copulated with animals and produced bestial humans, they too joined this category of iniquitous creatures. The remnants of Cyclopean constructions were products of the work of this Race but the first large communities were formed in the region that is now Madagascar (!).
d) When Lemuria had sunk into the oceans, the survivors in its northern region became the fourth Race and inhabited the continent of Atlantis in today’s Atlantic Ocean (while a different ocean occupied the area of Africa). Blavatsky says little about this Race. They had knowledge of flying vehicles, of meteorology and meteorography, of alchemy and precious stones. Sorcery was practiced and this was the real cause of the destruction of that civilisation as the malevolent magicians fought against the “Initiates of the Sacred Island”, which became the cradle of the 5th Race. But the primordial wisdom, imparted by the “Divine Ones” to the third Race before it was divided into two sexes and then to the sages of the Atlanteans, has remained in a particular Brotherhood of Wisdom within the 5th Race – not specified.
e) We modern humans constitute the fifth Race (Aryan and brown-white) and our first ancestors lived in Asia after the destruction of Atlantis. Plato was an initiate and knew all this history but was allowed to divulge only the very last event (!), the presence of an advanced culture located on a small island in mid-Atlantic and its eventual sinking into the ocean.
A 6th and a 7th Race will follow showing spiritual advancement!
4. Godwin, then, following his sources, relates all this to the sketchy anthropogony in the Book of Genesis (Old Testament) but this is not convincing at all, especially as he equates the expulsion from Eden (which corresponds to the Third Race in Lemuria where the sexes are divided §3, c, above) with the exit from Lemuria or at least the Polar region and not the Hyperborean.
Then comes (pp20-21) the Śveta-Dvīpa (“White Island”) of the Puranic texts of India which is equated with the Hyperborean region and has at its centre mount Meru. Much has been written about this mythical mountain both by theosophists and other authors. But the fact that it has a height of 672,000 miles rules out any material and geographical entity on Earth.
We are now expected to accept all this on the basis of Madame Blavatsky’s word alone and her supposed occult powers and of her acquaintance with a book that nobody else has ever mentioned and of some “Masters” who spoke to Madame Blavatsky only! Well, a lot of theosophists, of course, did swallow all this “anthropogony” and a lot continue to do so!
Note, moreover, that although the Egyptian priest states that the story of Atlantis and a war with Athens, in which the Athenians emerged victorious, is written down (Timaeus 24D), no Egyptian text whatever mentions Atlantis, a war of the Atlanteans with the Athenians and the final submergence of Atlantis in the ocean. However, all theosophists, most occultists and other pseudo-esotericists (and Madame Blavatsky, of course) take all this for real.
5. We should also note that Blavatsky herself does confess that she introduces drama in her writings “for full artistic effect”. For when she was first in India, she sent some articles that were published in Russian newspapers and later re-issued in London in 1892 in the volume, From the caves and Jungles in Hindustan. In the preface she admits: “Broadly speaking, the facts and incidents are true, but I have fully availed myself of an author’s privilege to group, colour and dramatise them whenever this seemed necessary to full artistic effect.” So, we must not take anything written by her at face value but expect some “artistic effect”! (See Webb, pp. 84 and 107, note 13.)
