Theosophical Whitman

Walt Whitman, America's greatest poet, was also a theosophist, even though his greatest poem, "Song of Myself," was published twenty years before the Theosophical Society was founded in New York in 1875. The principles of Theosophy underlie all the central images and themes of the poem, and the lack of awareness of these principles has led critics astray in their attempt to elucidate Whitman's meanings. In particular, the concept of the "self" in "Song of Myself" can be fully understood only from a Theosophical standpoint. Throughout the poem, every use of the words "I," "Soul," "Self," and "Body" is consistent with the ideas brought forth in the writings of Helena P. Blavatsky, A. P. Sinnett, and William Q. Judge, three Theosophical contemporaries of Whitman's.

Whitman certainly drew on his own mystical experiences when creating this poem and indeed all the poems that comprised his one, ever-expanding volume of poetry, Leaves of Grass. However, in attempting to understand these experiences, he drew upon his readings in Hindu scriptures and the writings of Western mystics such as Swedenborg and Whitman's own contemporary, Emerson. The result was an astonishing body of work, which I believe is the nineteenth century's most important literary expression of "cosmic consciousness." At the heart of Whitman's achievement is the longest, most remarkable poem he ever wrote, "Song of Myself."

In Theosophy, the self is composed of seven levels. As Judge (30) remarks, "This conviction that man is a septenary and not merely a duad, was held long ago and very plainly taught to everyone with accompanying demonstrations, but like other philosophical tenets it disappeared from sight." In Sanskrit, the trinity of the essential man is called atma, buddhi, and manas. Atma is pure spirit, a spark of the Absolute, buddhi is its vehicle for manifestation, and manas is mind. Actually, manas is conceived as having a higher and lower aspect: the former is pure intuition and a direct link to buddhi and atma, while the latter is centered on intellectual thought and merges with the lower quaternity of the septenary self: desire and emotion, physical life energy, the astral body (the ethereal model of the outer body), and the physical body itself.

This overview of Theosophical psychology helps to identify the layers of Whitman's self in the poem.

In "Song of Myself," the speaker of the poem is lower manas, what modern psychology would call the ego. At times the ego addresses his Soul--higher manas, buddhi, and atma--while at other times he refers to his Body--the lower quaternity. The Soul is also referred to as the "Me myself." After listing a series of historical and personal influences ("People I met, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation"), the speaker declares:

These come to me days and nights and go from me again,

But they are not the Me myself.

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,

Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary...

Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.

["Song," sec. 4]

Here Whitman is making a clear distinction between the speaker and the "Me," or the higher self. The ego (lower manas) is influenced by heredity and environment, but the "Me myself" is not.

The speaker never addresses his body because lower manas recognizes a union with the physical man which is more immediate than his connection to the "Me." However, in moments of inspiration ("I am afoot with my vision") lower manas becomes a "channel" for the spiritual insights that higher manas contains because of its union with buddhi and atma.

Despite Whitman's celebration of the body ("Through me forbidden voices, / Voices of sexes and lusts" [24]), he is at the same time aware that desires are only a portion of what he is himself: "and am not contained between my hat and boots" [7]). These declarations are not paradoxical when one realizes that this is a song of a multilayered self and that Whitman's psychology understands the body as the only way the Soul can function in nature.

But what of the speaker's identification with the emotions and desires of others, which characterizes many sections of the poem? At these points does the speaker become a cosmic "I" that is no longer directly related to the personal Walt Whitman? I think not. What we have here are examples of the perfect compassion that is achievable when lower manas unites with higher manas. As Blavatsky (79) says about Buddha and Christ, two "Masters" who achieved this union permanently, "The teachings of both are boundless love for humanity, charity, forgiveness of injury, forgetfulness of self...[They] both...make no difference between meum and tuum."

In "Song of Myself," after citing "boatmen" and "clam diggers," the speaker describes the marriage of a trapper to an Indian girl and the predicament of a runaway slave, and then lists a wide range of American types in section 15. At the end of this section the speaker says:

And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,

And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,

And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.

The speaker is not proclaiming an identity with others, whom he still refers to as "them." Yet the "song of myself" contains "one and all." The highest reaches of spiritual intuition break down the barriers between individual selves; love of neighbor creates the feeling of oneness that the speaker describes. His compassion for all the people who populate the poem brings them within the compass of the multilayered self he is: "And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral dressed in his shroud" (48).

This same intense compassion accounts for the speaker's ability to empathize with historical figures as well, to transcend the barriers of time: "I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never will be measured" (46). In describing the rescue of the passengers on a wrecked steamship by a courageous skipper, the speaker claims, "I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there" (33). After picturing the capture of a runaway slave, the speaker says, "I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person" (33). Again, this identification depends on Whitman's conception of the self: through genuine love--the charity of Christ or the compassion of Buddha--this self comes to include all others. Psychologically this state is achieved by uniting higher and lower manas and seeing the world through the visionary perspective that results.

Thus an understanding of the speaker's supreme compassion enables us to see that the "I" who claims he is "A Southerner soon as a Northerner . . . a Yankee bound my own way ready for trade . . . a Kentuckian walking the vale of Elkhorn in my deerskin leggings" (35) is also "Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son" (41). The speaker explicitly claims that "Song of Myself" is the product of a "vision," of a psychological moment--symbolized by the famous erotic encounter between the speaker and the soul in section 5--when the seven layers of the self are all operative: at such times the speaker can communicate a range of experiences inaccessible to the mere ego, although they are all communicated through the ego, the thinking, language-using aspect of the self.

One of the themes of the poem is the ability of the multilayered self to survive physical death. Theosophy, of course, teaches the concepts of karma and reincarnation. At death the physical body is discarded, the astral (or emotional) body subsists for some time on a somewhat higher plane of existence until it too has exhausted its residue of desire, and the trinity of atma-buddhi-manas enters the state of heaven or "devachan," a realm of rest and regeneration. Eventually the higher trinity is reincarnated in a new physical vehicle, and manas is again divided into higher and lower aspects. The soul never dies; it is continually evolving; and the discarded matter of the physical body is integrated into the ongoing physical processes of nature.

Whitman shares the Theosophists' view of an ever unfolding cosmos, of an ongoing development of life that is not interrupted by physical death:

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,

And if ever there was it led forward life, and did not wait at the end to arrest it,

And ceas'd the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. [6]

Within this conception of a progressive universe, the soul is seen by Whitman as a particular entity that is also evolving, similar to the Theosophical idea of the "Monad," that "immortal part of man which incarnating in the lower kingdoms and gradually progressing through them to Man, finds thence way to the final goal--Nirvana" (Blavatsky 351). Thus the Monad unfolds its latent powers through the centuries as spiritual evolution progresses:

This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at the crowded heaven,

And I said to my spirit "When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we be fill'd and satisfied then?"

And my spirit said"No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond." [46]

That Whitman believed in reincarnation is clear from some of the poem's most powerful declarations: "And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths, / (No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before)" (49); "Births have brought us richness and variety, / and other births will bring us richness and variety" (44); "I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I am an encloser of things to be. . . . On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps, / All below duly travel'd, and still I mount and mount" (44).

Clearly Whitman believes in the constant evolution of the soul, on earth and in spiritual realms, an evolution that began long before he actually became a human being: "Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there, / I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist, / and took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon" (66). This idea accords well with the Theosophists' notion that the Monad unfolds its powers starting from the spiritual and physical energy of the smallest atom until through successive reincarnations it manifests as a human being. However, once the human stage is reached, there can be no regressing to lower forms of life. The essence of the cosmic vision of both "Song of Myself" and Theosophy is this continuous unfolding of the potential of lifeC"Urge and urge and urge, / Always the procreant urge of the world" (3)Con both physical and spiritual planes.

As to the fate of the physical body at "death," Whitman always celebrates the ongoing chemical processes of life in some of the poem's most famous lines: "And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me, / I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing"(49); "I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles" (52). All aspects of the septenary self continue to fructify and grow as the cosmic evolution proceeds.

Whitman's vision was clearly genuine and intensely personal, yet he communicates it by using ideas from a wide variety of spiritual traditions, the same ones the Theosophists cite as containing the same basic elements of the universal religion. In addition to the references to the Shastas and Vedas, the Koran and the Gospels, Whitman alludes to Osiris, Isis, Brahma, and Buddha (41). Like Theosophy, Whitman's theology claims to include every faith, to reveal that the same truth is contained in all. And at its core is the septenary self that is the subject of Whitman's "Song," his own contribution to the great sacred texts of the world.

References

• Blavatsky, H. P. The Key to Theosophy. Pasadena: Theosophical University Press, 1987.
• Judge, William Q. The Ocean of Theosophy. Los Angeles: Theosophy Co., 1987.
• Whitman, Walt. Poetry and Prose. New York: Library of America, 1982.

Walter Raubicheck is a Professor of English at Pace University in New York. He has published articles on education, popular culture, and American literature.