The Tantrists do not seem to go higher than the six visible and known plexuses, with each of which they connect the tattvas; and the great stress they place on the chief of these, the Muladhara Chakra (the sacral plexus) shows the material and selfish bent of their efforts towards the acquisition of powers.The Mahatma Letters (Letter CXIV, p480)

In the last post I reviewed how the notion of the “left-hand path” and much of the themes which relate to it emerged out of nineteenth century Indology. I will now turn to how the concept of the left-hand path” was used by Madame Blavatsky and other early Theosophists.

Blavatsky was certainly familiar with the work of scholars such as Ward, Wilson, and Monier-Williams (see previous post), and crossed swords with Max Muller (first holder of the Chair for Comparative Philology at Oxford, 1868) on matters of interpretation on more than one occasion. Throughout her writings she equates tantra with sorcery and black magic. She may have been influenced in this attitude by her contact with Dayananda Saraswati and his reformist Arya Samaj movement. One of the aims of the Arya Samaj was the reconstitution of the Vedas as scientific and the sole authority for all aspects of daily life. Astrology, for example, was viewed as superstition – and caused dependency on priests and other “professional hoodwinkers.” The Samaj also produced pamphlets lampooning the puranic myths. The alliance between Blavatsky and Saraswati had been initially promising – she and Olcott had named Saraswati as the titular head of the “Theosophical Society of the Arya Samaj of India” – and both had moved to India in 1879. The alliance did much to help popularise the TS in India. On his arrival in India, Olcott gave several lectures in Bombay where his open criticism of western culture and Christianity – and his praise of Indian culture won him some acclaim. However, by 1881, Dayananda Saraswati had broken away from Theosophy, publishing a pamphlet entitled Humbuggery of the Theosophists (1882). He particularly objected to Blavatsky’s championing of “Hidden Masters” and would only accept Indians as Aryans – as opposed to Americans & Europeans. Relations between the TS and the Arya Samaj were acrimonious from that point on.

Blavatsky seems to have been well aware of anti-tantric feeling in India. In a letter to The Deccan Star in 1879, whilst refuting and discussing a letter from a member of the Arya Samaj who accused the TS of embracing “people who believe in magic” she mentions the Hindû Mahârâjahs of that shameless sect known as the Vallabhâchâryas… This is a reference to a libel case heard in the High Court in Bombay, 1862, whereby a newspaper editor had printed accusations that A Maharaja of the Vaishnava Vallabhacharya sect had abused his authority as a guru – specifically of having “indulged” himself (sexually) with the wives and daughters of devotees. The Maharaja filed a libel suit, but the High Court ruled that the charge of libel was unfounded, and and the Vallabhacharyas received wide publicity, and there was a great deal of adverse comment from both both Indian and western observers.

Terms such as the “left path” and the “Brothers of the left”, “Left Hand” and “Right Hand Adepts” are scattered throughout Blavatsky’s magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine and her many articles in journals such as Lucifer and The Theosophist. The picture which emerges in The Secret Doctrine is that of a long struggle between Right and Left Hand adepts – with the Right Hand Adepts transmitting and seeking to preserve the ancient wisdom tradition, and the Left Hand Adepts seeking to pervert and corrupt it. This feud or war, she asserts, has been going on since the close of the period of the “Fourth Race” – the Atlanteans, who apparently, through the misuse of sex were responsible for the “worship of the human body and finally of the sex-principle itself”. Giving the initiated interpretation, Blavatsky shows how the record of this war has been allegorised in texts such as the Bible and the Ramayana. Central to her schema of the evolution of humanity (she was opposed to the Darwinian view that man was descended from apes) is the concept that our antedeluvian ancestors descended from a purely spiritual existence into matter, over the course of vast epochs of time. These early races reproduced themselves by a variety of spiritual means as they gradually became less spiritual and more material. Needless to say, in order for contemporary mankind (the Fifth race) to evolve, the lower emotions or “animal passions” must be discarded.

Blavatsky throughout much of her writings, is keen to distinguish true Occultism from magic (sorcery, hypnotism, etc.) and also from Spiritualism. She makes a distinction throughout her writings between “true occultism” and “magic”. The latter, which can easily become “black magic” or sorcery – that is to say, used for selfish ends (such as acquiring money or influence). In an article titled Lodges of magic for example, which appeared in the Theosophical journal Lucifer in 1888 she asserts:

“those kabbalists who dabble in ceremonial magic as described and taught by Eliphas Levi, are as full blown Tantrikas as those of Bengal.”

In the same article, she says:

To gain the divine knowledge, like the prize in a classical tripos, by a system of coaching and cramming, is the ideal of the average beginner in occult study. The refusal of the originators of the Theosophical Society to encourage such false hopes, has led to the formation of bogus Brotherhoods of Luxor and (and Armley Jail ?) as speculations on human credulity. … If rumour be true, some of the English rural districts, especially Yorkshire, are overrun with fraudulent astrologers and fortune-tellers, who pretend to be Theosophists, the better to swindle a higher class of patrons than their legitimate prey, the servant-maid and callow youth.

This is an obvious dig at the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, founded in 1884 by Thomas Burgoyne and Peter Davidson. Burgoyne had been convicted of mail fraud, and Blavatsky was keen to point this out as proof that the HBL – no relation to her own “Brotherhood of Luxor” – was an immoral organisation.

For some theosophists, “ceremonial magic” was inexorably linked to black magic: “The entrance into real black magic may be made by ceremony. Into white magic, never.” (Josef B Widen, Lucifer 1889).

Blavatsky’s Occultism was emimently rational and scientific (although it was naturally superior to mere materialistic science). In a letter to a Mrs. Corson (1878) HPB says:

“…we go dead against idolatry in every shape and colour, whether in the heathen or Christian religions. You must admit, dear friend, that the saints of the Greek and Latin Churches are all as much idols as those of the Indian Pantheon.” Some Unpublished Letters of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, By Helene Petrovna Blavatsky, Eugene Rollin Corson, (Kessinger Publishing Co 2003, p201)

So Blavatsky is generally opposed to what she views as the worship of idols, to ritual (either religious or ceremonial magic) and to any magical act which appears to be used for self-serving ends – although she qualifies this latter point by insisting, repeatedly, that for virtually anyone in the modern world, it is impossible for them not to act in such a way. Blavatsky makes it very clear that she considers it almost impossible for any contemporary person to become a “true” occult adept – which requires a superhuman cultivation of selflessness which is incompatible with modern life – certainly one can not even aspire to becoming an adept whilst one has a family, is married, or has “material interests”. Sexual intercourse is of course, forbidden to students of practical Occultism. In her papers written for the Esoteric Section of the TS, Blavatsky says:

“it is quite true that ever since the days of Pythagarus and Plato the exoteric cults began to deteriorate, until they debased the symbolism into the most
shameful practices of our worship. Hence the horror and contempt with which every true Occultist regards the so-called “personal God,” and the exoteric ritualistic worship of the Churches – be they heathen or Christian.

And even in the days of Plato it was so. It was the persecution of the true Hierophants and the final supression of those mysteries which alone purified man’s thoughts, and led to Tantrike (sexual worship) and through the forgetting of Divine Truth, to Black Magic, whether conscious or otherwise.”

Although Blavatsky seems to have been familiar with the writings of Payne Knight and Hargrave Jennings on phallic religion – she most definitely disagrees with their conclusions. In a review entitled Buddhism, Christianity And Phallicism she writes:

Later on, when mankind fell, in the natural course of its evolution “into generation,” i.e., into human creation and procreation, and carrying down the subjective process of Nature from the plane of spirituality to that of matter–made in its selfish and animal adoration of self a God of the human organism, and worshipped self in this objective personal Deity, then was black magic initiated. This magic or sorcery is based upon, springs from, and has the very life and soul of selfish impulse; and thus was gradually developed the idea of a personal God. … Anthropomorphism in religion is the direct generator of and stimulus to the exercise of black, left-hand magic.

In Practical Occultism (Lucifer, 1888) she states:

Occultism is not magic. It is comparatively easy to learn the trick of spells and the methods of using the subtler, but still material, forces of physical nature; the powers of the animal soul in man are soon awakened; the forces which his love, his hate, his passion, can call into operation, are readily developed. But this is Black Magic – Sorcery. For it is the motive, and the motive alone, which makes any exercise of power become black, malignant, or white, beneficent Magic. It is impossible to employ spiritual forces if there is the slightest tinge of selfishness remaining in the operator. For, unless the intention is entirely unalloyed, the spiritual will transform itself into the psychic, act on the astral plane, and dire results may be produced by it. The powers and forces of animal nature can equally be used by the selfish and revengeful, as by the unselfish and the all-forgiving; the powers and forces of spirit lend themselves only to the perfectly pure in heart–and this is DIVINE MAGIC .

For Blavatsky, the practice of magic is “fraught with dangers and perils” – and, whilst it can bring results of various kinds, it is fairly clear from her writings that she is concerned with the “moral dangers” of practice – one of which is the inability for the unprepared to distinguish between the Right and the Left path.

Blavatsky’s negative view of magical activity was not unusual for the period. Edward Burnett Tylor, viewed the “occult arts” (witchcraft, etc.) as barbarous survivals from man’s primitive past – at best a kind of pseudo-science and one of the most pernicious delusions that ever vexed mankind.

It’s clear, I think, that within Blavatsky’s writings there is a distinct strain of what might be termed somatophobia – fear of the body. Self-control, discipline and moral probity were of course highly thought of in the period. There was a strong link made between health and the necessity of moral restraint. There was a common belief that “respectable people” (in particular, the urban middle classes) should be able restrain their passions and desires – particularly through the exercise of willpower. There is a strong emphasis on the necessity of the will in Blavatsky’s writing – and at least one element of her disdain for spiritualist mediums was the idea that mediums allowed themselves to become “passive” (see Alex Owen’s The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England for further discussion of mediums & passivity). As I noted earlier, in Blavatsky’s evolutionary schema, humanity spiritual evolution is related to a movement upwards towards the planes of spirit – and away from the body, worldly commitments, and “lower appetites”. Given this, its understandable that she, like many of her contemporaries – both Indian and European – viewed “tantrika” with disgust .She equated Hatha Yoga with tantra too – and occasionally gave anecdotal warnings about those who had “fallen” by unwisely practising it, as she did for those who turned to “black magic”.

Whilst providing an alternative history of the evolution of humanity, Blavatsky’s “ancient wisdom tradition” (or philosophia perennis) can be seen to draw on orientalist tropes of the period – in particular the idea that contemporary culture (India, for example) had degenerated from its pristine beginnings, and a “corrective” interpretation of ancient texts (such as the Vedas) was required. The social Darwinism of orientalist scholars such as Monier-Williams is still present in The Secret Doctrine, albeit stretched out over aeons of time. Although her “affirmative orientalism” (and openly anti-Christian polemics) initially played well in India (and Sri Lanka) the tendency to privilege Theosophical interpretations of the Vedas and other sacred texts over any others soon led to to a parting of the ways between Theosophists and Indian reformists:

But we may find worse opponents than even the Western Scientists and Orientalists. If, on the question of figures, Brahmins may agree with our teaching, we are not so sure that some of them, orthodox conservatives, may not raise objections to the modes of procreation attributed to their Pitar Devatas. We shall be called upon to produce the works from which we quote, while they will be invited by us to read their own Puranas a little more carefully and with an eye to the esoteric meaning. And then, we repeat again, they will find, under the veil of more or less transparent allegories, every statement made herein corroborated by their own works. The Secret Doctrine Vol 2 p148

The belief that there was a shadowy fraternity of Left-hand Adepts attempting to thwart the Theosophical mission became increasingly important after Blavaksky’s death – during the reign of Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater for instance, there is a continual pointing of fingers in the direction of various “enemies” both inside and outside the Theosophical movement who were said to be inspired, or working for, “the lords of the dark face” or similar epithets. This kind of accusation was even levelled against Krishnamurti at one point.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Europeans were increasingly representing India as an archaic, static culture in contract to the dynamic industrial modernity of the West. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, scholars such as William Jones (1746-94) had begun to translate ancient Indian texts such as the Laws of Manu. There was a tendency to treat ancient texts as authoritative (in the same way that the Bible was, in Europe) and texts such as the Upanisads and the Bhavagad Gita were taken as proving that an originary idealised “Hinduism” had once existed, but that contemporary Indian practices had (for various reasons) become corrupt and degenerate. The Vedas were understood as evidence that India had once had a monotheistic past. The first european scholars to mention tantra were Jones, and his contemporary, Colebrooke, who saw texts such as the Rudrayamala Tantra as representative of the antithesis of the Vedic tradition.

Although the East India Company had, for the most part, left India’s religious communities alone, in the early nineteenth century, it bowed to pressure from Evangelical and Unitarian reformers, and allowed missionaries greater latitude in India, and the government began to institute social, legal and moral reform across India. The first European stirrings of horror at tantra’s licentiousness are from missionaries, notably the French Abbe Dubois, who, in his Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies (1807) had much to say about the shameless and sexual explicitness of Hindu religion. It is from Dubois that we get the first account of Sakti-puja:

“The ceremony takes place at night with more or less secrecy. The least disgusting of these orgies are those where they confine themselves to eating and drinking everything that the custom of the country forbids and where women and men … openly and shamelessly violate the commonest laws of decency.”

(quoted in Urban, pp49-50)

Another important early chronicler was the Baptist Reverend William Ward, for whom Hinduism as a whole was a religion of “idle, effeminate and dissolute people”. Ward’s book A View of the History, Literature and Mythology of the Hindoos (1817) identified the “tuntras” as practices which involved “things too abominable to be revealed to a Christian public”. For Ward, the presence of practices such as the “Chukra circle” in India were a clear indication of Hinduisms immorality. For Ward, Hinduism is entirely corrupt and degenerate, and India requires the civilising influence of the British government and Christianity.

This linkage between tantra and sexual perversion continues throughout the early nineteenth century. Horace H. Wilson occupied the first Boden chair of Sanskrit at Oxford University (1832), prior to which he had been a surgeon for the East India Company. In the 1828 edition of Asiatick Researches he published translations of three fragmentary ms, one of which, the ashtami vrata vidhana consisted of a description of a tantric ritual. Wilson was generally dismissive of tantric texts, calling them a “nonsensical extravagance” and a sign of “all that is abominable in the present state of Hindu religion”. In the 1832 edition of Asiatick Researches he continued his essay with a short exposition of “the Saktas”. Wilson divided the Saktas into the daksinacaris (“right-hand path”) and the “extremist” vamacaris – the “followers of the left hand” – who used the ritual known as the five makaras or the pancatattva. Wilson thought that these rites were practiced only infrequently. However, in two lectures given at Oxford in 1840, he made an explicit link between Sakta worship and animal sacrifices (associated with both Kali and Durga Puja), adding that “if the Tantras are to be believed many a man who calls himself a Saiva … etc is secretly a Sakta and a brother of the left-hand fraternity” (quoted in Taylor, p123). In 1840 the Governor-General of India passed a law intending to prohibit “Vagrants within the Towns of Calcutta and of Madras, and the Islands of Bombay and Colaba, extorting Alms by offensive and disgusting exhibitions and practices” (this included public nudity and practices which were becoming identified as “tantric”).

Sir Monier-Williams, Wilson’s successor at Oxford (most famous for his Sanskrit-English Dictionary first published in 1872) was equally dismissive of tantra – again equating it with Satkism (the worship of the feminine), and characterising it as “Hinduism … at its worst and most corrupt stage of development.” Monier-Williams was the first orientalist to describe “Tantrism” as a singular, monolithic class. In particular, as Biernacki (2007) notes, it is tantra’s association with the worship of female powers that Monier-Williams finds particularly problematic – making a “natural” correlation between the presence of female divinities and sexual immorality. Similar associations were made in regard to the devadasi temple dancers (see for example, Edward Sellon’s The Oriental Epicurean, or the Delights of Hindoo Sex (1865) in which the devadasis are described as “loose sluts who are consecrated in the worship of the perverted prickly gods of Hindoostan”). The French scholar A. Barth writing in Religions of India (1881) characterised tantra as “obscene observances” and asserted that “a Cakta of the left hand is almost always a hypocrite and a superstitious debauchee.”

Tantra was also identified with the decline of the once-noble Aryans, as I noted in the first post in this series and to the infamous so-called “cult of Thugee” and its relationship to the worship of “Kalee”.

“Happily the worst abominations of Saktism are gradually dying out in British India; and its true character is impressing itself on the convictions of the more highly educated Hindus.”

This image of tantra also found its way into popular literature. Richard Burton’s Vikram and the Vampire; or, Tales of Hindu Devilry (1870) contains references to a villanous “Tantri” who indulges in “all the pleasures of sense” and “abominable rites” – sections which, according to Hugh Urban, were creatively added by Burton himself and did not appear in the original Sanskrit source for Burton’s translation. Edward Sellon (1818-1866), like Burton, was an Indian army veteran. He is best known for his erotica, but he also wrote two papers: On the Phallic Worship of India (1863) and Sacti Puja, the Worship of the Female Powers (1866) and Annotations on the Sacred Writings of the Hindus (1865). In Sacti Puja Sellon states:

The Sacteyas are divided into two sects: the Daxin’ ácháram (or right hand), and Vámácharam (or left hand). Each sect renounces the established religion, and declares the worship of women supreme, every woman (according to them) being a Sacti, or image of the great goddess. Their rules for fasting, bathing, and prayer, are to the full as irksome as with the Brahmins themselves. The person worshipped is a woman or girl of the Brahminical caste (among the Daxin’ ácháram), who is elegantly dressed, and adorned with jewels and garlands. One, three, or nine females are to be thus adored by one or more men; but in the left hand mode, there is only one girl and one worshipper.

At the same time, tantra’s influence was also being used to explain the “degeneration” of Buddhism, by scholars such as Eugene Burnouf (1844) and later by the Tibetologist L. Austine Waddell (1889). However, these interpretations of tantra as degenerate and corrupt practice was not limited to European scholars. Indian commentators too, were keen to excoriate these practices. Some nineteenth century Indian reformers, influenced by the orientalist presentation of the golden age of the Vedas, saw tantra as responsible for India’s cultural ills. Dayananda Saraswati (1824-83), the founder of the Arya Samaj published several attacks on tantra, which he saw as something to eradicate through reform. Similarly, Rammohun Roy (1772-1833) published several attacks on the sources of decadence in Indian culture – in particular the Sakta Tantras.

Anti-tantric texts appeared, such as the Exposition of the Agamas or that portion of Hindoo Shastras, which Vamees or Left Hand Sect follow as Their Books of Revelation which was published in Ahmedabad by an anonymous author in 1874 (Rinehart, Stewart, 2000):

The object of these pages, is to hold up to light the the most filthy, infernal and obscene superstitions and pretended miraculous power of Mantra Shastris, who abound, in every town in India, especially in native states, where they find a large-patronage. … It is hoped that this publication will induce all those, who are concerned with the welfare of this great nation to unite in one common effort to put down the diabolical tenets inculcated by the “Vami” and “Kowl” sects. … It will be a grand triumph to free Hindoos from the snares of these knaves, who pass by the polite names of Mantra Shastris and Upakasas, but who deserve to be denounced as enemies to all that is decent, virtuous, and moral.

The book aimed to reveal the secret practices of groups of “Vamees” in order that they could be brought to the attention of reformers, and thereby eradicated.

This shows then, that the links between tantric practices, sexual immorality, cultural degeneration, worship of feminine powers and the left-hand path were fairly well-established well before Madame Blavatsky entered the picture.

Sources
Hugh B. Urban, Tantra: Sex Secrecy, Politics and Power in the Study of Religion (University of California Press, 2003)
Sharada Sugirtharajah, Imagining Hinduism: A Postcolonial Perspective (Routledge, 2003)
Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial India and The Mystic East (Routledge, 1999)
Loriliai Biernacki Rewnowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex, and Speech in Tantra (Oxford University Press, 2007)
Kathleen Taylor Sir John Woodroffe, Tantra and Bengal: an Indian soul in a European body? (Curzon, 2001)
R. Rhinehart and TK Stewart, The Anonymous Agama Prakasa: Preface to a Nineteenth-Century Gijarati Polemic in Tantra in Practice Edited by David Gordon White (Princeton, 2000)
Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester University Press, 1991)

Reincarnation was a central tenet of Theosophical doctrine, and many Theosophists believed that experiencing male and female bodies through reincarnation and the different lessons learned thereof, was necessary for long-term spiritual development. Some teachings took for granted the naturalness of distinctions between masculine & feminine temperaments, although they tended towards the view that any such distinctions were “temporary” in that the fully spiritualised soul was “above” sex – a divine hermaphrodite or androgyne. Some Theosophists argued that there were male and female souls, and that the physical body reflected the nature of the indwelling soul, whilst others claimed that the Higher Self was neither one nor the other, but shared the characteristics of both. These representations of the relationship between masculine & feminine temperaments were also contested and modified by women who combined esoteric beliefs with a feminist outlook.

In 1890, Susan E. Gay published a Theosophical-Feminist Manifesto in the Theosophical Journal Lucifer. Gay asserted that souls reincarnated in both male and female bodies, gaining the “noble qualities” of both sexes gradually, and that the ideal was a condition of “spiritual equilibrium” – the exemplar being Jesus. Gay asserts that “manly men” or “womanly women” were the least developed of souls, and she believed that if men realised that at some point in the future, they might find themselves incarnated in female physical bodies, then this might cause them to think twice about their assumptions that women were ‘naturally’ subordinate to men. Gay argued that men had to disabuse themselves of the notion that:

“physical manhood is a sort of freehold possession to be held here and hereafter, which marks off certain souls from certain others known as women, and confers on them all sorts of superior rights and privileges, including the possession and submission of ‘wives’”. Quoted in Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine

A much more radical feminist theology of the soul was that expounded by Frances Swiney. In The Awakening of Women (1899), Swiney asserted that all souls were essentially feminine, and although they had to progress through a “masculine” state, this was but a “kindergarten” period. Drawing on a wide array of theories, from biological arguments to Kabbalah, Swiney conceived of Christ as a woman who had sacrificed herself for humanity by taking on a “lower” form – a male. Whilst calling for an improvement in women’s economic and social conditions, Swiney also believed that men would eventually become obsolete. Woman, for Swiney, was Nature, and man’s mistake was in living “apart” from all that is “natural.”

The degeneracy we deplore lies at the door of a selfish, lustful, diseased manhood.

If this view seems somewhat extreme to modern eyes, one should recall that Darwin, in The Descent of Man had stated quite plainly that men’s superiority to women was a direct consequence of evolution, and scientists such as Gustav Le Bon and Karl Vogt had both “demonstrated” that women were closer to apes, in terms of cranial capacity. Swiney founded The League of Isis which crusaded against prostitution, incest, and sexual abuse. A strong believer in eugenics, Swiney believed that “sexual restraint” would lead to “racial improvement” by limiting the numbers of children born and ensuring that those children that were born, received better care.

The idea that the soul changed sex – in order to learn lessons and evolve – also became a key theme in Charles Webster Leadbeater’s view of reincarnation. He asserted that the soul stayed incarnated as one sex for between 3-7 lives before changing to the other, although there were exceptions where more advanced souls would be reborn into the sex and race which were best suited for the soul’s development. In 1898, Leadbeater and Annie Besant collaborated in an occult investigation of the past lives of a Miss Annie Wilson, Mrs Besant’s secretary and housekeeper. The Lives of Arcor, as this work came to be known, traced Miss Wilson’s past lives from as far back as 60,000 years before the birth of Christ. A theme that emerges in The Lives of Arcor, and recurs in other reincarnatory genealogies that Leadbeater produced, is that individuals who work together as Theosophists in their present lives have had close relationships in the past, usually involving changes of sex. It was revealed for example, that in one incarnation, Miss Wilson had been Annie Besant’s son, and in another, some 60,000 years later, in China, had been her wife. A later work of Leadbeater’s The Live of Alcyone which traced the many past lives of Krishnamurti, caused shock and outrage in Theosophical circles when it revealed that Leadbeater had, in previous incarnations, been married to Krishnamurti and his brother, and that Christ, in a previous incarnation, had been married to Julius Caesar.

One Theosophist who made connections between Leadbeater’s theories of reincarnation and current developments in sexology was Charles Lazenby. Lazenby held a degree in psychology and later studied Jungian psychoanalysis, and was a close friend of both Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter. Lazenby accepted Leadbeater’s assertion that the soul ‘changes sex’ every seven incarnations, but opined that the soul has six lives which are wholly masculine or feminine, and that for the seventh life, the masculine soul “takes on the colouring of the feminine” (and presumably, vice versa) – and that the purely masculine or feminine soul is found only at the midpoint of each cycle of lives. Later in his life, Lazenby associated this transitional incarnation with the notion of the “intermediate sex” and used the term “Uranian” to denote individuals whose physical bodies belonged to one sex, yet whose thoughts and desires belonged to the other.

The term “Uranian” had been coined in the 1860s by the German Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who used “Uranian” (frequently Germanised as Urning) to signify those who experienced “a congenital reversal of sexual feeling”. “Uranian” was also a term much used in astrological and esoteric circles – usually in reference to the planet Uranus, which was associated with “awakening the soul from lethargy, and bringing it into strange conditions and hazardous enterprises”. Esoterically, at the time, the influence of Uranus was very much bound up with the idea that human culture was entering a New Age. In Theosophical writings, the term “Uranian” began to denote a new human type – unconventional, spiritually advanced, and a blend of masculine & feminine temperaments.

An underlying theme in the debates over sexuality, morality and occultism was the relationship between sexuality and religion. In the emerging sexology of the period, there was a connection between spiritual experience and sexual mania. There was also a connection being advanced between spirituality and homosexuality. Both Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter argued that there was an organic relationship between spiritual development and the “homosexual temperament”. This, according to Ellis in Sexual Inversion (1897) was reinforced by anthropological studies which confirmed the “aptitude of the invert for primitive religion, for sorcery and divination.” Carpenter went further in his 1914 book Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk, arguing that there was a direct connection between the blending of masculine and feminine temperaments which gave rise to “inverts” and the development of psychic or unusual powers. Those who were of the “intermediate sex”, Carpenter asserted, overcame the purely masculine or feminine, combining the strengths of both:

“It may also point to a further degree of evolution than usually attained and a higher order of consciousness, very imperfectly realised, but indicated.This interaction, in fact, between the masculine and the feminine, this mutual illumination of of logic and intuition, this combination of action and meditation, may not only raise and increase the power of each of these faculties, but it may give the mind a new quality … It may possibly lead to the development of that third order of perception which has been called the cosmic consciousness, and which may also be termed divination.”Carpenter, quoted in Joy Dixon, Women, gender, religion: a reader

Carpenter’s view of “inversion” as a sign of spiritual evolution rather than abberation would be taken up later by Weimar-era German publications such as Die Freundschaft which promoted same-sex love and romantic friendship in both political and spiritual terms.

Whilst some Theosophists accepted the ideal of an “intermediate sex” as part of the approaching New Age or at least the idea that humanity would be hermaphroditic, it tended to be couched in terms of human beings no longer having sex-organs or having to go through the whole sordid business of reproduction – very much in keeping with the asexual coming together of souls that permeated a good deal of theosophical writings. Theosophists, whilst apparently willing to discuss the divine hermaphrodite as an ideal, could not accept same-sex activity on the “physical” plane, as the reactions to the Leadbeater scandals from 1904 demonstrate.

Sources
Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England, Joy Dixon, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2001
Women, gender, religion: a reader, edited by Elizabeth Castelli & Rosamond Rodman, Palgrave, New York, 2001
The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England Alex Owen, University of Chicago Press, 2004
Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern Alex Owen, University of Chicago Press, 2004