Quest Magazine

H.P.B.: The Extraordinary Life and Influence of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the Founder of the Modem Theosophical Movement

by Sylvia Cranston
Jeremy TarcherlPutnam,1992; hardbound.

The late and great American spiritual philosopher Manly P. Hall wrote in The Phoenix: “Occultism in the Western world owes all that it is to the pioneering of H. P. Blavatsky. Her tireless efforts are responsible in no small measure for the freedom and tolerance accorded to metaphysical speculations in this century. Remove H. P. Blavatsky and the structure of modern occultism falls like a house of cards.”

Time has a way of putting truly great people in a sense ahead of us rather than in the darkening past. As a result, those who are regarded as great in their lifetime, without truly deserving such regard, tend to diminish once dead, while the truly great continue to increase in stature with the passage of the years and decades. This increase of stature is what has happened to Blavatsky, who died 101 years ago. The books in which she poured forth the quintessence of the alternative spiritual tradition of several cultures are still sold and read by discerning persons on all five continents. She is widely regard ed as the “grandmother” of the New Age, although she would have numerous bones to pick with many New Age teachers and their followers. Concepts such as reincarnation, karma, self-directed evolution of the soul, and many more that she introduced into the ambiance of our culture have lost their elitist associations and are part of our everyday reservoir of ideas.

Over the last 101 years many have asked what her greatness consists of, and some have answered this question by writing biographies of her. The latest and one of the most detailed of such works has just been published and –we are told - is the subject of a $50,000 national advertising campaign. The author, Sylvia Cranston, has previously coauthored four books on reincarnation. The book is advertised as “the definitive biography” of its subject, and in many ways one is inclined to agree. Extensively illustrated, well indexed and running to 640 pages, this is a serious work which no one with an interest in the late “high priestess of the Occult…can afford to bypass.

Strange and heroic was the life of this amazing woman. Born in 1831 in Russia from a noble Russo-German family, and married at seventeen to an elderly man, she fled from husband, family, and high society, and spent most of her life as a traveler and recorder of little-known truths and traditions. In America and Europe she took advantage of the then young and flourishing spiritualist movement in order to expand further the mental horizons of those who were attracted to spirit manifestations. She told spiritualists that they might modify their devotion to “revelations” from spirits and pay attention to the fact that they themselves are also spirits, albeit of an incarnate order. She called attention to the powers latent or only partially manifest within living humans, and wished to motivate men and women to discover their own spiritual nature which in turn would lead to the discovery of ultimate deific Reality. Even more boldly she proceeded to duplicate (at times openly) various phenomena of the spiritualists, while proclaiming that she had no need for spirits in manifesting the supernormal powers of her own spirit. In the course of such activities she ran afoul of an investigator associated with the prestigious Society for Psychical Research and was condemned publicly by that organization, which only recently got around to rescinding its judgment and exonerating the maligned H. P. Blavatsky.

Madame Blavatsky, or “HPB” as she preferred to be known. Performed some apparently miraculous deeds, but all such were superseded by her greatest “miracles,” her books. With such large tomes as The Secret Doctrine and Isis Unveiled, and with many smaller books, including the timeless spiritual classic, The Voice of the Silence, she left an abiding and unique legacy, and also laid the foundation for a distinguished school of thought, usually called the Theosophical Movement which today encompasses several active organized bodies, each with a worldwide membership. Besides such organizations directly connected to her teachings, there exist a large number of others which have more remotely benefited from her inspiration.

The major portion of Cranston's work is devoted to HPB's biography, but all along we find insightfully interwoven with the data of the subject's life various aspects of her teaching s. A most valuable portion of the book is Part 7, entitled “The Century After,” in which the author extensively catalogues areas of HPB's influence in many different facets of culture over the last 100 years. Literature, the Visual Arts, Religion, Mythology, Psychology, the Physical Sciences all receive their due in terms of the often prophetic, always creative and stimulating insights and inspirations proceeding from the person and message of the Russian wise woman.

What Madame Blavatsky really and truly was the world may someday know, or alternatively, such a full view may never be available. In many ways she still appears as a riddle, an enigma, not unlike some magi of the past, the Comte de St. Germain, Cagliostro, and others. One of her ongoing afflictions is that virtually all her biographies are flawed in some manner, Some, like Marion Mead's Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth ( 1980), are of fine literary quality but hostile to their subject. Of hers, like When Daylight Comes by Howard Murphet (1975), and Blavatsky and Her Teachers by Jean Overton Fuller (1988), are quite simply unremarkable both as to content and style. Sylvia Cranston is a fine researcher and thus her book is replete with highly useful, well-organized data, some of which are taken from Russian sources only recently made available. At the same time it is also apparent that her talents as a writer do not match her scholarship and research. It is sad to see an exciting subject become unexciting reading, yet such is the case. In addition, it is all too apparent that the author views HPB as little short of a major saint. All information that does not agree with this hagiographical emphasis is either ignored or is minimized to become virtually invisible. It is doubtful that the redoubtable Madame would have enjoyed being placed into a stained glass window, yet such now has become her lot. A completely balanced, excitingly written, kindly irreverent, and above all, humorous biography of the astonishing mystery woman still needs to be written. Fellow men and women of letters, please take heed!

-STEPHAN A. HOELLER

Spring 1993

Pagan Theology: Paganism as a World Religion

By Michael York
New York: New York University Press, 2003. Hardback, x + 239 pages.

"Paganism views humankind, nature, and whatever the supernatural mayor may not be as essentially divine." So writes Michael York in this groundbreaking book, one much needed to shed light on today's evolving spirituality, York, Director and Principal Lecturer of the Sophia Centre for the Study of Cultural Astronomy and Astrology, as well as Director of the Bath Archive for Contemporary Religious Affairs, Bath Spa University College, UK, not only is an accomplished scholar but an active researcher.

At the outset, he reminds us of the correct definition of the word "pagan" which comes from the Latin word for "peasant." Christianity began in cities and country folk clung to the old-time religion, (I can vouch for this personally because 40 years ago I was studying Russian and needed to look up the word for "peasant" in my atheistic Soviet dictionary. To my amazement, one of the definitions was Kristian!) So paganism in the broadest sense is any religion that views the natural world as sacred. Further, York traces the word "cult" to its association with culture, agriculture, and cultivate. Thus he is not just writing about Wicca, Witchcraft, and magick but about the distinction between the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which are monotheistic revelations given by God through a historic individual and those religions that celebrate the holiness of the seasons, the multiple personifications of archetypal processes punctuated by the movements of the solar system, the natural elements, and the divine interplay of masculine and feminine (creative and receptive) of gods and goddesses as aspects of a hidden source of Spirit. Buddhism seems a borderline case. Though Gautama Buddha was an historical figure, he never claimed to be a messenger of God, but offered the world a wise and compassionate way out of suffering.

Michael York centers his study on his rich personal and joyous experiences in India, Nepal, China, and Japan while living and participating, as well as documenting, the fervent earthy celebrations of the ordinary population in contrast to the transcendent views and teachings of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. His accounts were riveting and brought a new perspective to many memories for me. I realized afresh that since many of us also believe in a "spirituous earth," that being a Nee-pagan is not necessarily a heretical posture but one leading us, with the help of theoretical physics, to a new appreciation of the spiritual glory and wonder of the cosmos (a Greek word meaning "beauty"). The book itself concerns paganism as religion, behavior, and theology. As one reads, one discovers the really valid aspects of the pagan approach despite the fact that the term itself is so encrusted for many by semantic prejudice and negative associations. By York's definition any dedicated environmentalist would classify as having pagan tendencies. Perhaps what many people celebrate unconsciously, more and more of us are approaching more consciously. There is a hilarious section on what the unconscious secular symptoms of paganism can produce.

Perhaps, York could have given some credit to the author of some of the Psalms, who praises the earth and its creatures, or mentioned some of the truly poetic passages in the Koran of the same nature, or even mentioned St. Francis and especially Celtic Christianity which never ever has excluded nature. Granted that these attribute creation to one God, but even in polytheistic religiosities there seems to be an underlying inference of an invisible Unity, the diversity of which is acknowledged as manifesting in aspects and relationships to be personified and worshiped. Hopefully there will be a sequel to this truly important work that will further address paganism in the West with more about the Celtic tradition which is corning to the fore.

As Jesus says in the Gospel According to Thomas, "Heaven is spread upon the earth, but men do not see it." Therein lies the wisdom of many pagans.

Michael York has laid the intellectual groundwork for a new approach to theology, one which hopefully might reconcile the appalling feuding ones of our time. We need to celebrate the earth, because though Spirit may give us Life, it is Mother Nature that gives life form, and perhaps that is a symbolic message of Incarnation.

-ALICE O. HOWELL

January/February 2004

The Fruitful Darkness: Reconnecting with the Body of the Earth

by Joan Halifax
Harper San Francisco, 1993; hardcover.

It is one of the necessary paradoxes of spiritual development that as one progressively disidentifies with the physical body and its passionate life, one exchanges or transmutes-matter for wisdom, thereby birthing a new body of authority. For Joan Halifax, noted educator, humanist, and transcultural peregrinator, that body is as big as the planet and its ethnographic myriad of peoples. Halifax's The Fruitful Darkness, a superbly wise and humble poetics of self-inquiry, transformation, and dynamic compassion, is the perfect illustration of this process. Her book is a wise-woman's account of how she discovered “new flesh in my mind,” how she found “the gold of compassion in the dark stone of suffering” - and how we all might, should we emulate her.

But that stone- that dark inchoate mass of unknowing, of the shadow, silence, woundedness, and subterranean life-is ultimately fruitful. My life is the instrument through which I might experiment with Truth, says Halifax, who artfully employs key tableaux from her life of continuous initiation and quickening to exemplify the principles of her alchemy. She draws equally from her experiences in anthropology, deep ecology, Buddhism, and indigenous shamanism, inspiring us with the breadth of their fusion in one body of understanding. At the heart of all discourses, suggests Halifax, is the wound, the unexpiated pain. But from out of the personal wound that is identical with the World Wound comes the fruit of unrestricted empathy.

Halifax's The Fruitful Darkness is a marvel of meditative reflection tempered with autobiography, a sensitive contemplation of the tenfold path by which Halifax seeks, on our behalf, “to weave my way back into the fabric of Earth.” There is gold in the darkness, she assures us, which we may mine through the ways of silence, traditions, mountains, language, story, non-duality, protectors, ancestors, and compassion. Each of these ways represents an element in her fugue of a fruitful darkness. Over the decades Halifax has traveled the inner and outer landscape with numerous lucid companions - Buddhist teachers. Huichol shamans, Native American elders, poets, scientists - whose presence and insights enrich her text. She honors all voices, puts her ear to the ground to listen to all members of the vast natural sangha of the planet, the community of biological beings, including whales, dolphins, stones, even extinct species, forests, rivers, now in the realm of planetary ancestors. “The true language of these worlds opens from the heart of a story that is being shared between species,” she says. “Earth is a community that is constantly talking to itself, a communicating universe.”

To listen you must learn the ways of silence, solitude, and emptying. Only then can you find the place where the roots of all Jiving things are tied together, that point of non-duality, the root with no end, which is the life of the Earth, “this great distributive lattice” upon which we all live. Then, grounded, rooted, in touch with the Earth, we can practice intimacy, simple communion, warmth, and mercy with the world, says Halifax. The Fruitful Darkness, comprised of “observations, notes, stories, and realizations,” is the meticulously crafted, honestly sung log book of her journey down and in.

After voyages through revelatory terrains, mountains of illumination, both actual and symbolic, through the Yucatan, Tibet, the Sahara, the Sierra Nevada, she knows: “We have greatly underestimated our true identity.” Early in her life she understood she, must spend time in the mountains, that she must be what the Shintos call yamabushi, one of those who lie down in the mountains. In 1987 she fulfilled a 25-year-Iong intention, to make the perikerama, the circumambulatory pilgrimage on foot around Tibet's awesome Mount Kailas. Even to arrive at this 22,000-foot-high giant, after weeks of jeep travel and overland walking, is a triumph. Kailas, like all majestic mountains, is so utterly daunting precisely because it mirrors our own Buddha nature, our true wild, cosmic identity: the mountain within is the more awesome.

The recognition of this staggeringly simple fact fabricates the body of authority. “Little was left of me psychically or physically after circling it,” Regrettably for the reader, because she conveys texture, tone, and ambiance of place so vividly, Halifax is assiduously spare in her autobiographical delvings and changes meditative locale long before we've drunk fully enough from each well she has bored and presented to us. But that is the mark of a mature work, a few strokes, deftly, masterfully executed, no indulgence, no superfluity, no posturing- just the bone of experience. Maybe there isn't anything else to say: being there is the revelation. “Realizing fully the true nature of place is to talk its language and hold its silence.”

Halifax, on behalf of the constituents of her body of authority –“all my relations” - urges us to reconnect with the body of Earth. We must awaken from our delusions of a separate self alienated from Nature the environment, and our fellow humans, correct the grave perceptual errors that have sealed us in a psychocultural cocoon that imperils the planet. The Earth Herself, through her polyphony of acknowledged tribal voices, will aid us. “The wisdom of elder cultures can make an important contribution to the postmodern world,” Halifax argues. This elder wisdom takes articulate living expression not as schematics, theories, and constructs, but as a direct experience of “stillness, solitude, simplicity, ceremony, and vision.”

Western culture needs a strong purification in the autochthonous sweat lodge of the native peoples' worldview, says Halifax . Our goal, in part, is the attainment of what Buddhism calls the six Natural Conditions (or Perfections) which we find in the deep, soul-making ground of fertile darkness. Let us aspire to generosity, wholesomeness, patience, enthusiasm, communion, and wisdom, says Halifax, and grow incomparable roses from the garbage of our civilization. Reconnected, our wounds make a door into the World Body, a gate through which our spirit-hand reaches in phototropic trust to what is moving towards us. The body of authority is the wisdom of “interbeing,” our unassailable identity with the world. Halifax deserves our thanks for showing us how to travel a long way to find a bit of true nature. “The yield of the journey is ex pressed by the light pouring out of the window of our interior worlds, the deep ground of our actual lives.”

-RICHARD LEVITON

Autumn 1993

Magical and Mystical Sites: Europe and the British Isles

by Elizabeth Pepper and John Wilcock
Phanes Press. 1993; paper.

My first trip to Europe was a mixture of shock and embarrassment. Like so many North Americans, I was tot ally unprepared for its inescapable wealth of sacred sites. Little do we know of the day-to-day spirituality still alive in Europe, or of its traditions of alchemical pilgrimage routes, sacred sites, special museums. Pepper and Wilcock's book is welcome for planning a meaningful trip.

What began as a personal project to research mystic sites throughout Europe has resulted in a practical guidebook. Most such books are printed in Europe, making them hard to come by in the U.S. Wonderfully illustrated, this volume includes a useful bibliography for further research.

I would have wished for a book three times this size, and one filled with local maps. At least we now have an easily obtainable guide for worthwhile pilgrimage travel planning.

-KENNETH O'NEILL

Summer 1993