Theosophy and Race V – Some general observations
I began this series on the relationship between the Theosophical movement and race in order to contest the popular view that it is through the writings of Theosophical authors – Madame Blavatsky in particular – that the concept of the ‘Aryan’ passed into Nazi ideology. In the first post in this series, I outlined the ‘birth’ of this concept in the work of Sir William Jones and Max Muller. In the second post, I discussed how the concept of the Aryan was entangled with nineteenth-century racial science. The third post outlined how the notion of the Aryan was taken up in India, and the fourth, how Blavatsky and Olcott’s notion of India’s shared Aryan roots led to a brief alliance with the Ārya Samāj until both organizations discovered that their notions of who could be ‘Aryan’ were quite distinct.
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