What Theosophy did for us – II: Places of Power – i
In this essay, I will examine the three countries which, for Blavatsky and her followers were particularly associated with occult wisdom – be it a secret tradition, or the home of spiritual masters: namely, Egypt, India, and Tibet. For each of these “places of power” I will try and examine the Theosophical relationship with them, and, with respect to India and Tibet, the legacies of that relationship. This first post will deal with issues related to racial theories, and I will examine the Theosophical relationship with India, Egypt, and Tibet in the second part.
As I mentioned in the previous post one of the core beliefs of the Theosophical Society was that the secret ‘spiritual science’ known to the ‘ancients’ had become lost to the modern world except for the merest glimmers of it which could be seen in the teachings of the world’s great religions (all of which originated in this ‘secret doctrine’). Moreover, Theosophists believed there is also a secret brotherhood of adepts who transmit this secret knowledge to select individuals – according to Mme. Blavatsky these notables included Jesus, the Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed, and (of course) – herself. She claimed that she was in frequent communication with these ascended masters through trance and that it was in such trance states that she was frequently inspired to write:
“Night and day the images of the past are marshaled before my inner eyes. Slowly, and gliding silently like images in an enchanted panorama, centuries after centuries appear before me. … I certainly refuse point-blank to attribute it to my own knowledge or memory. I tell you seriously I am helped. And he who helps me is my Guru.” 1
First, though, I want to address how Theosophical notions such as the “secret doctrine” or the “root-races” were a reflection of issues that were present in 19th-century European culture.
The Lost ‘purity’ of religions
The notion, expounded by Blavatsky and her followers of a ‘secret doctrine’ mirrored a 19th-century concern with the textual ‘purity’ of religions and their subsequent degeneration. The Protestant Reformation in Europe placed a great deal of emphasis on the written word of scripture as the key to understanding Christianity and the individual’s relationship with God. The process of ‘textualisation’, from the 18th century onwards, has led to a particularly ‘text-oriented’ approach to knowledge in the modern West. In the 18th & 19th century, this text-based approach was a major influence on the emerging field of comparative religion.
Early exponents of Comparative Religion held that not only was Christianity the most ‘evolved’ religion but that Europeans were more advanced than other races – particularly the peoples encountered through colonial expansion.
Theosophy and race
Blavatsky rejected Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and presented her own schema. She wrote of seven continents, four of which had already risen and sunk, the fifth exists today, and two are yet to come. Each of the preceding continents was inhabited by a race – and as each continent sank, a few survivors became the root ‘stock’ of the next race. For example, Blavatsky identified Lemuria as the third continent, stretching from India to Australasia, and the race that inhabited were human in appearance. After the destruction of Lemuria, its survivors founded Atlantis and after Atlantis sank – about 850,000 years ago, according to Blavatsky, the Fifth Root-Race, the fifth Root-Race: the Aryans, appeared. She believed that some of the Atlanteans (who had electrical power and aircraft) had taken refuge in the Himalayas and that they had formed the nucleus of the hidden adepts she was in communication with.
The Aryan question
In 1808, Friedrich Schlegel’s Essay On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians was published in Germany. One of the major themes of this work is the notion that a Sanskrit-speaking people, ruled by warriors or priests, left their Himalayan homeland and spread into India, Egypt, and Europe. In 1819, Schlegel began to use the term ‘Arya’ to denote these bearers of civilization, drawing on the philological theories of William Jones, and the term Aryan entered the scholarly (and popular) consciousness of the era. Schlegel’s theories were enthusiastically supported by Hegel, and by Jacob Grimm (better-known for the compilation of fairy tales he wrote with his brother, Wilhelm). Other advocates of Schlegel’s work proposed that the ‘original’ home of the Aryans was Northern Europe, and still further, that they displayed a Northern European physiotype.
The popular belief of the so-called Aryan Invasion Theory is that ‘Hinduism’ is a result of the incursions of the ‘Aryans’ — an ancient Indo-European people who originated from Central Asia, invaded Northern India in the period 1800-1500BCE and subjugated/displaced (& eventually assimilated) the indigenous ‘Dravidian’ people and their culture. This theory has, to a large extent, become an accepted ‘fact’ and is commonly found in popular texts on Indian history.
This theory emerged from the work of Eighteenth & Nineteenth-century orientalists, who proposed that the linguistic similarities between Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Iranian and European languages was evidence of a common racial heritage and by extension, a common geographical origin. They proposed that what was originally an Ur-tongue — Proto-Indo-European — developed later into the Indo-European language group.
The development of the popular notion of the ‘Aryan Invasion’ is largely laid at the door of Professor F. Max Müller (1823 – 1900). Müller is well-known for his translations of the Rg Veda and Upanisads, and as one of the founders of the academic disciplines of comparative religion and comparative mythology. Müller, like many of his contemporaries, believed that the British colonization of India was a benevolent rule which benefited both the colonizer and the colonized.
For Müller, the Vedas are important only insofar as they shed light on the common ancestors of Europeans and Hindus — the Aryans. Müller argued that there was a period of human history which he referred to as the “mythopoetic age” in which human beings did not possess an adequate language for expressing abstract thoughts, and it was during this age that humanity’s earliest gods were ‘born’ — out of human encounters with the forces of Nature — earthquakes, fire, etc., and in particular, the Sun. Müller’s “mythopoetic age” represents an Eden-like primal state of humanity, out of which religions develop, culminating in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as the perfect representation of mature human thought. Müller places the Vedas within this evolutionary ladder as “the utterances of beings who have just broken their shells and were wonderingly looking out for the first time upon this strange world”. For Müller, the Rg Veda is only of interest as a historical document, not for its content in its own right, and whilst he acknowledged that the Vedas did contain some noble thoughts, he also wrote that much of their content was “childish in the extreme”.
Müller’s theories fitted neatly existing European conceptions of India. It was generally assumed by Orientalists that India was a ‘primitive’ culture and all the achievements of ancient India were due to the influence of the descendants of the Aryans, who were described in terms of them being ‘noble, virile, aggressive, patriarchal, and rational’, whereas the Dravidians were described as ‘passive, effeminate, weak, and dominated by idolatry’. Thus anything of ‘value’ in India came originally from outside it.
Moreover, by creating this notion of a common kinship between Indian-Aryans and European-Aryans, the colonisation of India became effectively – a ‘rescue mission’ whereby a ‘healthy’ Aryan civilization; one which was still strong, virile, and forceful — i.e. the British – could ‘reform’ an India which, due to the progressive contamination of Dravidian paganism (and Muslim influences) had become ‘corrupt’ and ‘effeminate’. So the Aryan Invasion Theory, as an Orientalist narrative, provided a justification for British rule in India, in much the same way that the doctrine of Manifest Destiny provided a ‘moral’ justification for American incursions into Mexico. The notion that Indian ‘culture’ came from outside the country also served to legitimate the British presence.
Aryan Invasion Theory and the Nazis
The identification of ‘Aryan’ with purity and the ‘white’ race has had far-reaching repercussions, not only with respect to India and other colonized countries but Aryan ‘purity’ became the keystone of Nazi race theories.
“The Aryan gave up the purity of his blood and, therefore, lost his sojourn in the paradise which he had made for himself. He became submerged in the racial mixture, and gradually, more and more, lost his cultural capacity, until at last, not only mentally but also physically, he began to resemble the subjected aborigines more than his own ancestors…. Thus cultures and empires collapsed to make a place for new formations. Blood mixture and the resultant drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is contained only in pure blood. All who are not of good race in this world are chaff.”
(Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf p.296)
Authors such as James Webb and Nicholas Goodrich-Clarke have traced the extensive connections between Hitler and other prominent Nazis to a variety of shadowy right-wing occult groups, and there seems to be a common tendency (at least on many occult/conspiracy websites) to point the finger of ‘blame’ in the direction of Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society as providing a major source of ‘inspiration’ for Hitler’s notions of Aryan superiority – in particular, her notion of ‘root races’. There appears to be a wide consensus of belief that Hitler encountered Blavatsky’s ideas through the work of German Ariosophists such as Guido von List, Franz Hartmann, and Lanz von Leibenfels. Hitler also drew on the racial superiority theories of Alfred Grotjahn — an exponent of ‘social hygiene’ with the 1934 Heredity Disease Progeny Act which legalized the compulsory sterilization of persons deemed to be suffering from ‘hereditary illnesses’. In 1935 the law for the protection of German blood and Honour was passed, forbidding Jews (or any other ‘racial type’) from marrying ‘pure-blooded’ Germans — possibly reflecting an influence on Hitler’s racial ideas from Arthur D. Gobineau. Gobineau asserted that all ‘high cultures’ were the work of Aryans. He believed that if Aryans interbred with races of lesser value, this would weaken the Aryan ruling class and the Aryan culture would be lost.
Whilst the writings of Blavatsky and other Theosophists does show distinct Eurocentric biases, I feel it is unfair to entirely ‘blame’ Hitler’s notions of Aryan superiority on Blavastky’s work. For one thing, she is sharply critical in various essays of Max Müller’s theories. In Isis Unveiled, for example, she dismisses Müller’s assertion that the Vedas (with the exception of the Rg Veda) are merely “theological twaddle.”
By overly focusing on the alleged Theosophical (and other ‘occult’ and ‘pseudo-scientific’) influences on Hitler, the wider history of Aryan Invasion Theory and its service to colonial dominance is ignored. Moreover, the fact that theories of “white” racial superiority were a prominent element of nineteenth-century ‘science’ also tends to get forgotten.
Sources
Bishop, Peter, Dreams of Power: Tibetan Buddhism and the Western Imagination The Athlone Press, 1993
Faivre, Atoine & Needleman, Jacob (eds) Modern Esoteric Spirituality, SCM Press, 1993
Ryan, Charles. J, H.P. Blavatsky and the Theosophical Movement, Theosophical University Press, 1975
Owen, Alex, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England, University of Chicago Press, 1989
Owen, Alex, The Place of Enchantment, British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern, University of Chicago Press, 2004
King, Richard, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and the Mystic East, Routledge, 1999
Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas (ed), Helena Blavatsky, North Atlantic Books, 2004
Noll, Richard, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement, Princeton University Press, 1994
Hornung, Erik, The Secret Lore of Egypt: It’s Impact on the West, Cornell University Press, 2001
Wilson, A.N., The Victorians, Arrow Books, 2003
Godwin, Jocelyn, The Theosophical Enlightenment, SUNY, 1994
Tillett, Gregory, The Elder Brother: A biography of Charles Webster Leadbeater, RKP, 1982
Sugirtharajah, Sharada, Imagining Hinduism, A Postcolonial Perspective, Routledge, 2003
Dodin, Thierry & Rather, Heinz (eds), Imagining Tibet, Perceptions, Projections, Fantasies, Wisdom Publications, 2001
Notes:
- HPB on writing Isis Unveiled (cited in Noll, 1994, p66) ↩
