Book Reviews

By Carolyn Wayland reviewed by David Bruce
Ojai, Calif.: Shakti Press, 2021. 96 pp., hardcover, $32.

The word painting in the title of this book is no metaphor or fanciful figure of speech. Carolyn Wayland’s book Painting the Cosmos is a visual delight containing thirty-three color plates of vibrant and dynamic works of art illustrating concepts from The Secret Doctrine. Her original paintings were done with acrylic on canvas, ranging in size from 12 x 12 to 36 x 36 inches. Having seen some of the originals while the artist and I were at the Krotona Institute of Theosophy, I can attest that the full-color reproductions in this book, which appear on high-gloss paper, are remarkably faithful reproductions of the originals.

The genesis of this book was “a week-long class on service at the Krotona Institute of Theosophy” in 2016. For at least thirty years, the author had studied metaphysics, Buddhism, and Eastern thought; this class provided an opportunity to demonstrate her belief that abstract painting has a unique potential to convey abstract truths. Wayland’s mentor throughout this project was Pablo Sender, who introduced her to The Secret Doctrine and also assisted with the writing of the text.

In many books, pictorial illustrations are meant to support the text. In this case, the text plays a subordinate role to the art. In other words, the main reason to have this book in one’s library would be to admire and contemplate the visual masterpieces contained therein. I use the word contemplate purposefully, for the author views painting as a form of meditation both for the viewer and the artist.

Imagine that you are an artist working with oil or acrylic on canvas. Whether your subject is a portrait, a scene from nature, or an historical event, you have a starting point even before the first stroke of the brush sweeps the canvas. From that starting point, you may replicate, interpret, or weave a narrative. But what if your subject is something abstract, say, justice or innocence? Human figures have been used quite effectively to illustrate those qualities or principles, as, for example a blindfolded lady holding the scales of justice in her hand, or the newborn babe swathed in a soft blanket.

But what if your subject is a metaphysical abstraction? Many people have difficulty in relating to metaphysical ideas, such as those found in The Secret Doctrine. Now imagine the immense challenge confronting the artist who would dare portray those nontangible and elusive realities on a two-dimensional surface. Imagine an artist who aspires to put ideas such as cyclicity, Fohat, pralaya, maya, karma, and akasha in visual form on a canvas. Carolyn Wayland has not only met that steep challenge, but she has done so with originality and flair.

One cannot do justice to her art with mere words. It has to be seen with the eye to be fully appreciated. That is why I recommend purchasing a copy of her book. If you take the time to contemplate the visual gems in Painting the Cosmos, you may begin to feel that you are not isolated from the cosmos and that you are truly part of something bigger and more enduring than your temporal self.

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David Bruce

David Bruce is national secretary of the Theosophical Society in America.

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Lightbringers of the North: Secrets of the Occult Tradition of Finland

Perttu Häkkinen and Vesa Iitti. reviewed by Antti Savinainen
Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2022.
448 pp., paper, $29.99

There is an emerging interest in Western esotericism in Finnish academia. Scholarly research has focused particularly interest in Finnish artists who were inspired by esotericism.

The authors of Lightbringers of the North have an ambitious goal of providing a thorough account of Finnish esotericism, mainly through individual histories. While this is virtually impossible within one book, the authors offer an impressive contribution to the discourse on esotericism and New Age movements in Finland. Although the book is aimed at a general audience, it is also likely to be useful for scholarly researchers.

Theosophical readers might be intrigued by the citation from H.P. Blavatsky on the cover: “The light will come from Finland.” This quotation cannot be found in any of HPB’s written texts. Its source is Blavatsky’s friend the Countess Constance Wachtmeister (1838–1910), who met Pekka Ervast (1875–1934), a pioneer of the Finnish Theosophical movement. According to Ervast’s memoirs, she told him about HPB’s prediction that there will be light coming from Finland in difficult times.

The authors of Lightbringers recognize that Ervast was, and probably still is, one of the key figures in Finnish esotericism in Finland and devote the first chapter to his life and work. (A brief outline on Ervast’s life is available on Theosophy.wiki.)

The book contains fifteen chapters on different personalities and themes addressing a multitude of topics, like Theosophy, a dark crime story, clairvoyance, hypnotism, UFOs, black magic, Satanism, and the left-hand path. The introduction and chapter 15 are particularly well written. The introduction provides useful explanations of key terms, such as esotericism, occultism, and occulture, whereas chapter 15 presents a competent discussion of recent Lightbringers in Finland. It seems to me that chapter 15 could also have been published in an academic journal.

Some of the personalities in Lightbringers have been familiar in Finnish mainstream culture, some are known in Theosophical circles, and a few are unknown to larger audiences. Perhaps the best-known and most notorious is Pekka Siitoin (1944–2003), who has the longest chapter in the book. His thinking was an odd mixture of politics—he was a neo-Nazi—and occultism of a dark kind, including sex magic rituals. Siitoin founded several unregistered organizations and had some followers. He was sentenced to prison for arson, although he served less than three years.

Siitoin was not the only one in Finland who mixed esotericism with politics, a theme addressed in the chapter on occultism and nationalism. Most of the personalities described here were quite harmless, but some harbored darker ideas: for instance, Yrjö von Grönhagen (1911–2003) worked for Heinrich Himmler.

Given that the book discusses several people with great interest in black magic and the left-hand path, one may question the title Lightbringers. The authors themselves provide an answer: “These lightbringers come in many colors. Some of them are dark, some light; many are serious, some less so.”

The left-hand path is, in my experience, only cursorily known in Theosophical circles. One reason for this may be that HPB emphatically rejected it, as she was a strong proponent of the altruistic right-hand path. The difference between these two paths is articulated in the chapter describing the thinking of Tapio Kotkavuori (b. 1972; Kotkavuori is a pseudonym):

In general, the term the left-hand path refers to a method that aims to achieve a kind of enlightenment, a self-deification, without caring too much for societal norms. The followers of the right-hand path seek enlightenment from humbleness, submitting to the will of the society or of God, and from all kinds of spiritual groveling. [The] aim for an individual traveling the [left-hand] path is to define oneself from this conscious, non-natural point of view, and to ennoble that self by separating it from the rest of the universe.

A Theosophist might disagree with the description of the right-hand path as “spiritual groveling,” but the difference between the paths is clear: the left-hand path seeks for the isolation from the universe, whereas the right-hand path seeks for the unity with all sentient beings.

Vesa Iitti (b. 1972) is the coauthor of Lightbringers and the translator of the English edition. In my opinion, the English edition is better in terms of language than the original Finnish work: in the English version, the language register remains quite constant throughout the text, whereas in the Finnish, neutral language is mixed with colloquial, at times even vulgar, expressions (these are not completely absent from the English version either, but they seem to be justified in the context).

The coauthor of the book, the late Perttu Häkkinen (1979–2018), was a well-known Finnish journalist, musician, and author. His podcasts often addressed spiritual or esoteric themes. Häkkinen’s way of approaching people was deeply human: he showed genuine respect for individuals from all walks of life. Lightbringers is part of his variegated legacy.

The book was a great success in Finland. It attracted a lot of attention in the press and became an instant best seller. Lightbringers inspired guided “occult walking tours” and even a theater play. Perhaps some of this success will be shared by the English edition as well.

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Antti Savinainen

The reviewer is a Finnish physics instructor with a PhD in physics. He has been a member of the Finnish Rosy Cross, a part of the Finnish Theosophical movement, for over three decades. He writes regularly on Theosophical and Anthroposophical themes, both in Finnish and English. He was on the editorial team that compiled From Death to Rebirth: Teachings of the Finnish Sage Pekka Ervast (reviewed in Quest, spring 2018).

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Rebirth: A Guide to Mind, Karma, and Cosmos in the Buddhist World
Roger R. Jackson
Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 2022. 327 pp., paper, $27.95.

Rebirth, aka reincarnation, has been a controversial philosophy since Hinduism and Buddhism were introduced to the Christian West nearly 200 years ago. Rebirth eschatology is difficult for Westerners to grasp, since many of us have been taught that we have this one life, which is finished upon death. Buddhism teaches an afterlife in various realms, including the animal and human realms, along with a whole host of hells.

According to Roger R. Jackson, professor emeritus of Asian studies and religion at Carleton College, who has fifty years of experience studying and practicing Buddhism, there were controversies over rebirth in the various sects that arose as Buddhism evolved.

Jackson gives us a thorough history of the East Indian teaching of rebirth. He begins his account with pre-Buddhist Indian rebirth theories from religious sects of the earliest Southeast Asian region and how these were adopted. Jackson also compares the teachings of the different Buddhist sects and the impact (if any) they may have had on what he terms “mainstream” Buddhist tradition.

What did the historical Buddha teach? As with many influential figures—religious and political—his exact words and deeds have become mixed with the interpretations of disciples. There are 547 stories (in the Pali collection) in which the Buddha recounts his past lives in various forms, circumstances, and realms, particularly the human realm.

As Jackson notes, the “samsaric cosmos,” consisting of suffering (samsara), karma, and moksha, is “complex.” The key to overcoming samsara is gaining “right view” as taught in the Eightfold Noble Path, through wisdom, “which requires us to understand the way things really are,” using the twelve links of dependent origination, which is linked to “right view.”

Jackson explores where rebirth happens in the various realms, noting, “All the realms of samsara, however appealing they may seem, are by their very nature shot through with suffering, since they are impermanent, and impermanence always entails either immediate or eventual mental and physical pain.” The human realm, however, is ranked among the higher realms and is “difficult to attain.”

How rebirth happens is also a complex issue, and here Jackson explores the doctrines of several teachers from differing Buddhist traditions, including the Pali Abhidharma, which defines death as “the cutting off of life faculty . . . included within the limits of a single existence” and rebirth. Jackson also covers the wide range of teachings of Buddhist sects including the five Mahayana wisdom traditions, Theravada, and Indian Tantric Buddhist views. 

While karma and rebirth are ubiquitous in Asian societies, Jackson reminds us that rebirth “is far from universally accepted, . . . the specifically Buddhist explanation of rebirth was often disputed by members of the Hindu and other schools that propounded rebirth, on the grounds that if the common Buddhist denial of self is true, then rebirth is an incoherent idea.” 

 As Buddhism spread throughout East Asia to China, Korea, Japan, and Central Asia, the teaching of karma and rebirth was adapted for those cultures. With the diaspora of Buddhism to the West, it began to be overlaid against Christianity, which typically has no idea of rebirth (resurrection as Christians see it is not “rebirth” as seen in the Eastern traditions).

Jackson looks at this teaching in the light of modern Buddhism’s movement from East to West, including the role that Theosophy played in introducing Eastern spiritual philosophies to the West, which were largely welcomed by the intellectuals of the nineteenth century. Jackson calls Theosophy a “Euro-American intellectual movement . . . that found its closest equivalents in ancient Egyptian religion, Neo-Platonism, Western esotericism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Rebirth was a cardinal doctrine of Theosophy, although there—as in many modern Western versions of the idea influenced by evolutionary theory—movement from one life to the next was seen as progressive rather than cyclical.”   

The twentieth century marked Buddhism’s grand entrance into America, and Jackson elaborates on the views of rebirth in modern Buddhism, as well as those of many Western teachers who have helped Tibetan and Zen Buddhism to grow in these countries.

As appealing as rebirth might sound to some, it is repugnant to others, especially if this life has been difficult and painful. Ultimately for Buddhists, the goal is cessation of rebirth through liberation or enlightenment. Jackson quotes Buddhist teacher Bhikkhu Bodhi: “The Buddha taught that the key to liberation was not the eradication of past kamma [karma] . . . but the elimination of the defilements. Arahants, by terminating the defilements, extinguish the potential for ripening of all their past kamma beyond the residue that might ripen in their final life.”

Clare Goldsberry

Clare Goldsberry’s latest book, The Illusion of Life and Death: Mind, Consciousness, and Eternal Being, was reviewed in the spring 2022 issue of Quest.

           

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Poems of Bliss
Geoffrey Hodson
Auckland, New Zealand: Theosophical Publishing House, 2021. 99 pp., paper, NZ$35 plus postage.

Poems of Contemplation
Elizabeth and John Sell
Auckland: Theosophical Publishing House, 2022. 65 pp., paper, NZ$30 plus postage.

Poetry can be defined as a type of writing that formulates a concentrated, imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response. It focuses on the expression of feelings and ideas through the use of distinctive literary styles, sounds, and rhythms.

As part of its innovative publishing program, the Theosophical Publishing House in New Zealand has recently published two outstanding books of poetry by prominent members of the Theosophical Society whose gifts of creating poetry were widely unknown: Poems of Bliss by Geoffrey Hodson (1886‒1983), one of the TS’s most respected teachers and the author of over sixty books about Theosophy, healing, yoga, and the angelic kingdom; and Poems of Contemplation by Elizabeth and John Sell, close associates of Hodson and editors of his collected articles, Sharing the Light (in three volumes).

John Sell was an innovative teacher and workshop leader and the author of Practical Spirituality, published by TPH Auckland in 2019, shortly after his passing. In addition to her editorial pursuits, Elizabeth was a modest yet tireless Theosophical worker, accomplished artist, and counselor to family and friends. As with Joy Mills, whose private poems were discovered, collected, and published after her passing (For a Wayfarer, Quest Books, 2016), few people outside of close family and friends had any idea that the literary gifts of Hodson or the Sells included poetry.

Poems of Bliss was curated by Elizabeth Sell from a trove of Hodson’s unpublished writings that were discovered more than twenty years after his passing. In addition to being the only book of Hodson’s poetry ever published, what sets this little book of thirty-six poems apart from others is that they spring from the author’s clairvoyant investigations, which afforded him direct insights into the subtle realms and served as the wellspring of his deep personal yearnings for spiritual unfoldment. The result is a powerful yet intimate book that both educates and inspires. In “A Goddess of the Indian Sea,” the author writes of his clairvoyant impressions of a sea deva, whose partial message (rendered as poetry) follows:

You see all waves as separate
Whereas in truth all waves are one;
For there is but one great all-inclusive wave
Which is all being.
Find then the secret of the waves
And you will find the secret of yourself;
For what are you too but a wave,
Part of the larger wave of being.

Poems of Contemplation was originally intended to be a small collection of poems given as a memento to close family and friends after Elizabeth’s passing in February 2022. Later it was expanded to include poems written by her husband, John. The collection includes thirty-one beautifully crafted poems on a wide variety of spiritual subjects, including the magic of nature, spiritual unfoldment, personal liberation, and the mystery of death. As a lover of trees, I am particularly fond of Elizabeth’s “Meditation on a Cherry Tree”:

 

Can we be like those leaves
Cascading in beauty and brilliance,
Before our journey to heights Unknown?
Living fully in loveliness and joy
To our last moment, when we ascend and float
Away to realms anew.

Elizabeth carefully selected dozens of color photographs, drawings, and reproductions of her own acclaimed paintings to complement the poems that appear in these lovely books. Both were printed in the United Kingdom on glossy paper as deluxe paperback editions. For those who appreciate poetry, these two literary gems will provide a wealth of enjoyment, insight, and inspiration.

Nathaniel Altman

Nathaniel Altman has been a member of the TSA since 1970. He became a student of Geoffrey Hodson while attending the Krotona Institute School in 1971 and met the Sells in Adyar in 1975.

 

 

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