The Secret Doctrine: The Classic Work, Abridged and Annotated
This day in history: This day in history: Russian theosophist and scholar, Helena Blavatsky, was born on this day (August 12) in 1831. Theosophy is an esoteric doctrine founded primarily by the Russian immigrant Helena Blavatsky and drew its teachings predominantly from Blavatsky's writings. Categorized by scholars of religion as both a new religious movement and as part of the occultist stream of Western esotericism, it draws upon both older European philosophies such as Neoplatonism and Asian religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. Basically, Theosophy is supposed to be the collected wisdom of the great and wise sages of the past, so, according to this philosophy, even Jesus Christ was a Theosophist. According to Blavatsky, Jesus was the grand "philosopher and moral reformer." She considered Jesus as "The Great Teacher," an Avatar with healing and demon-exorcising abilities. An American author Joseph H. Tyson stated, "She did not view him as The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, but a Brahman Perfect Master" with clairvoyance, supernatural powers, and "fakir-like unconcern for the morrow." In Blavatsky's opinion, "Jesus, the Christ-God, is a myth concocted two centuries after the real Hebrew Jesus died." According to Theosophy, term "Christ" means the personal divinity "indwelling" each individual human.
Blavatsky wrote two great tomes on the subject of Theosophy: Isis Unveiled and the Secret Doctrine. Isis Unveiled has often been criticized as a plagiarized occult work, with scholars noting how Blavatsky extensively copied from many sources popular among occultists at the time, however, her contemporary and colleague (Civil War Officer) Henry Steel Olcott always maintained that she had quoted from books that she did not have access to. She claimed Isis Unveiled was copied (not written) with 'her hand in the astral light.'
In 1885, the Society for Psychical Research issued the following report: "For our part we regard her neither as a mouthpiece of hidden seers, nor a vulgar adventuress. We think she is one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting impostors in history."
The New York Sun would go on to write: "The ingredients of a successful charlatan are having no conscience, some brains, much courage, corrosive selfishness, vainglorious ambition, and monumental audacity. Blavatsky has all these."
Jesus Seminar scholar Robert M. Price wrote "Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who was such a crude hoaxer and confidence trickster that she actually had confederates drop folded paper notes through the air vents during séances and claimed they were messages from the Ascended Masters!"
Brent Swancer at Mysterious Universe concludes: "She has gone down as one of the more controversial figures in the history of spiritualism and psychic phenomena, attracting just as many detractors as believers, but she has had an undeniable influence on Western esotericism and the New Age movement regardless of whether she was the real deal or a fraud. There are many who accuse her stories as being pure fabrication to drum up interest and build up her own legend, but no one really knows for sure and there is very little to corroborate or dismiss any of it. Fraud, charlatan, or real, it seems that Madame Blavatsky has taken her place in history as an enigmatic individual who we will probably never fully understand."
Still, Theosophy has still influenced many people, including L. Frank Baum, William Butler Yeats, Lewis Carroll, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (no surprise there), Jack London, T. S. Eliot, Kurt Vonnegut, Alfred Russel Wallace (who rejected it in favor of Spiritualism), William James, Carl Jung, Mahler, Sibelius, Shirley MacLaine. Ghandi, Gloria Steinem, General Abner Doubleday etc.
Elvis Presley was also a follower of Blavatzky. The book. Elvis by Albert Harry Goldman, included the following about his travel library: “Elvis traveled with a portable bookcase containing over 200 volumes of his favorite books. The books most commonly associated with him were books promoting pagan religion, such as The Prophet by Kahilil Gibran; Autobiography of a Yogi by Yogananda; The Mystical Christ by Manley Palmer; The Life and Teachings of the Master of the Far East by Baird Spalding; The Inner Life by Leadbeater; The First and Last Freedom by Krishnamurti; The Urantia Book; The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception; the Book of Numbers by Cheiro; and Esoteric Healing by Alice Bailey. Elvis was a great fan of occultist Madame Blavatsky. He was so taken with Blavatsky's book The Voice of Silence, which contains the supposed translation of ancient occultic Tibetan incantations, that he "sometimes read from it onstage and was inspired by it to name his own gospel group, Voice"
On an interesting side-note, James Moffatt in his excellent Bible, uses the word "Theosophy in his translation: Col 2:8 "Beware of anyone getting hold of you by means of a theosophy which is specious make-believe, on the lines of human tradition, corresponding to the Elemental spirits of the world and not to Christ."
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