Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Fall 2020  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "From the Editor's Desk" Quest 108:4, pg 2

Cherry Gilchrist’s image of a ruined city on a riverbank in this issue reminds me of some thoughts I put into my book How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying about God and the Bible.

In his play Our Town, Thornton Wilder writes, “Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”

When I think about this “something eternal,” one image that comes to me is that of a water table. I would say that this something eternal is like a water table underlying everything that we call reality. It is a vibrant, moving presence, and it is there whether we know it or not. The world of the five senses is simply a crust that floats on this eternal presence. And it is this presence that gives life to this crust that we call reality, which would not exist without it.

What name shall we give this underlying presence? Some have called it the Ground of Being. Another common term is Spirit. Yet another is God.

Let us take the metaphor further. There are areas where it does not rain. If people live there, they have to rely on the water table for their water supply. Let’s say that our earthly reality is like a region of this kind. It has no life, no energy of its own. All the life it has is drawn from this Ground of Being, this Spirit.

To live, in any true sense, is to have a connection with this Spirit. We can imagine this process as involving wells, or springs, that connect the two levels of being. At certain points the water of the Spirit breaks through the crust, forming wells. These “wells,” shall we say, are moments of encounter with the sacred.

To take this analogy a step further, let’s say that there are places where the water arises more often. People are attracted to these places. They come repeatedly. Hotels and other accommodations are built for them. Someone notices that this water seems to surface more often at certain times, so the place attracts even more people then. These become regular occurrences, and, like all other forms of human activity, they become formalized.

This groundwater does not belong to anybody. It comes and goes as it will, sometimes in a predictable pattern, often unexpectedly. But the land around the spots where the water comes up can be owned; it is real estate just like anything else. The property is bought up by the devout and by the shrewd, and they start to limit people’s access to the water.

These owners set themselves on high. They say the water rises because of certain things that they themselves do. They will let others take part—if these others will do as they say and pay them a price for the privilege.

Say also that this groundwater of the Spirit erupts in an especially powerful way at a particular place and time. These are the revelations known to world history. Those who experience them have not only seen—and seen in a very powerful way—but often believe that they are inspired to guide humanity in the right path. Usually one individual encounters this eruption most directly and powerfully. He becomes the founder, the lawgiver. He gives commandments about how to pray and how to live with our fellow humans.

This eruption of the groundwater of the Spirit revives and nourishes the land around it for many years. Life becomes possible there. The water continues to bubble up in varying quantities—sometimes enough for a group, sometimes for an individual only. Over the centuries, it bubbles up less often. Soon the land is dry again; only the tiniest trickles appear from time to time. But people still live there, remembering when the water was abundant. Some even eat dirt and tell themselves they are drinking water.

We could also liken the Ancient Wisdom to this groundwater. It does not belong to anybody; no one can claim it, though plenty of people try. The impulse comes with great force, then over the centuries it weakens. Its truths are diluted, its ideas are subtly changed, until it has only the faintest resemblance to what it originally was.

It would be foolish to mistake one of the dry wells for the living water underneath, yet people do this regularly. The water itself becomes a matter of memory and legend. Scoffers deny that there was ever such a thing.

Those of us who devote ourselves to the Ancient Wisdom should, I believe, reflect on these ideas. Every form that embodies this wisdom can dry up. At the very least we ought to avoid mistaking the wells for the water. Perhaps their ultimate value is as reminders to dig our own wells for ourselves.

Richard Smoley

Printed in the  Fall 2020  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Clewell, Andre , "How Do We Teach about the Root Races?" Quest 108:4, pg 24-25, 30

By Andre Clewell

I earned a PhD in evolutionary biology at a major Midwestern university. Later I was introduced to Theosophy. I was distraught to learn that some evolutionary concepts as understood by Theosophy differed widely from contemporary scientific fact and theory. This contentious material was prominently featured in The Secret Doctrine. I was particularly concerned with the elaborate narratives concerning human evolution in earlier Root Races, which read like children’s stories. The chasm separating evolution as understood by biology and anthropology and that in The Secret Doctrine continues to widen, and the two versions seem irreconcilable.

I was chastened by the realization that Theosophy otherwise presented a cogent and compelling case for spirituality and that The Secret Doctrine was written under the unassailable tutelage of Masters Morya and Koot Hoomi. Perhaps, I reasoned, extenuating circumstances would eventually come to light and resolve some of the differences between these incompatible evolutionary accounts.

Uneasily, I shelved my concerns as I continued studying Theosophy. However, I was concerned that other novice spiritual seekers would summarily reject Theosophy on the basis of The Secret Doctrine’s fantastic and contentious evolutionary narrative. As I began to teach Theosophy, I tried to avoid going into any detail that would raise the concerns that my initial Theosophical instructors in Theosophy mentors had raised in me.

This article explores the short-circuited nexus between science and Theosophy and how we can approach this topic when giving Theosophical instruction to newcomers. My concerns begin with teachings in The Secret Doctrine insisting that human evolution represents an evolutionary lineage distinct from that of all other mammals. H.P. Blavatsky repeatedly expresses this opinion. Yet all scientific evidence, including that from DNA investigations, converges upon a different, and indeed incompatible, explanation of human evolution.

In addition, HPB said that atmospheric gases were stable over geologic time (Secret Doctrine 2:159). That notion has been thoroughly and universally discredited. In general, The Secret Doctrine displays a lack of a fundamental understanding of ecology and its formative roles in evolutionary processes. Genetic mechanisms were unknown when it was written, and Mme. Blavatsky’s writings exhibit a profound misunderstanding of the role of sexual reproduction in evolutionary processes.

More importantly, from a contemporary perspective the alleged emergence of protohumans in the Third, Lemurian, Root Race and the early Fourth, Atlantean, Root Race seems fantastic. Others before me have questioned this material. The late TSA president Joy Mills wrote, “The subject of lost continents, both Atlantis and Lemuria, remains a topic of speculation for many people” (Mills, 365). Discussions of the Stanzas of Dzyan 6 through 9 (Secret Doctrine 2:131–226) are especially disconcerting from a modern scientific perspective, particularly the descriptions of sweat-born beings, giants, androgynes, and narrow-brained beings. The gradual solidification of bodies in these beings from a transparent etheric state seems incongruous with modern knowledge about biochemistry, cell biology, and physiology. It would be much easier to accept the accounts of these fantastic beings if they had been presented as human prototypes that were developed by pitris or other demiurges entirely on nonphysical planes of existence.

Notions about these beings and the solidification of bodies appear in the Stanzas. Although Mme. Blavatsky discussed them at length in The Secret Doctrine, she only mentioned these earlier Root Races briefly without elaboration in her Collected Writings, and I have not seen them discussed in other nineteenth-century Theosophical literature, including the Mahatma Letters. At one point, though, HPB suggested that these teachings contain “more or less transparent allegories” and that the portrayal of the sweat-born race “concealed a psycho-physiological phenomenon, and one of the greatest mysteries of Nature” (Secret Doctrine 2:148). Unfortunately she did not elaborate on this assertion.

In his monograph on how The Secret Doctrine was written, Theosophical scholar Boris de Zirkoff explains that the Masters reviewed the manuscript each night as Blavatsky wrote it. Could the Masters have suggested that these topics were indeed allegorical, and could HPB have dutifully added a paragraph to that effect? Her only other recourse would have been to rewrite many completed pages of manuscript for The Secret Doctrine at a time when subscribers for her long-overdue magnum opus were clamoring for its publication.

The Stanzas of Dzyan reduced to writing knowledge that oral tradition had passed down for innumerable generations. Were these teachings garbled from countless oral retellings by elders of what actually happened in Lemuria and Atlantis? Is this why they may be allegorical? Did the Masters decide that HPB was too ill and too burdened by other responsibilities to demand an extensive rewrite, so they allowed her one suggestion of allegory to suffice? We don’t know. We don’t even know if the Masters reviewed all of the nearly 1500 pages of The Secret Doctrine with equal care. Their principal interest was that the spiritual paradigm that we call Theosophy be made publicly available. Mme. Blavatsky’s numerous detours into related Victorian science and scholarship were of less concern to them.

According to de Zirkoff, other Theosophists suggested edits and prepared texts that were incorporated into The Secret Doctrine. We don’t know which passages were contributed by others, although they are unlikely to have concerned the contentious material. Furthermore, other hands made major rearrangements of the text just before the manuscript was typeset. We don’t know for sure if these changes affected HPB’s narrative or if the Masters reviewed the results of this last-minute exercise.

The Masters only imparted information which humanity was ready to absorb and integrate from cultural, historical, and philosophical perspectives. They presented new information within the intellectual context of the times. For example, when The Secret Doctrine was written, the structure of the atom was unknown to science, and the Masters could not explain atomic behavior in terms of subatomic particles and quantum mechanics. Likewise, they were not at liberty to explain the evolution of species in terms of mutation and genetic isolation. They were addressing an audience preoccupied by considerations of biological classification rather than ecosystems, so they did not discuss ecological dynamics in evolutionary processes. They largely limited their instruction to answering questions that were put directly to them, and they did not venture into side issues.

Even so, why did the Masters feel that information in The Secret Doctrine could be effectively presented in the form of fables and fairy tales? Why did they allow HPB to promote an evolutionary lineage for humans that diverged from all other mammalian evolution?

These topics raise more questions than answers, and we have reached a quandary. A reconciliation of the ever-widening gap between The Secret Doctrine with modern biology and anthropology seems highly unlikely.

Yet we are loath to reject the content of The Secret Doctrine, which was overseen by Masters who also provided us with spiritual theory that unites the wisdom traditions of the ages. The Masters know more than we do. They have much better access to knowledge on the higher mental and intuitional planes than we do. Who are we to doubt them? Unfortunately, they are no longer precipitating letters with answers to our questions. Our only alternative is to have patience and trust that explanations will eventually be forthcoming.

In the meantime, how do we teach Theosophy to novices without affronting their intelligence and scaring them off with seemingly preposterous fairy tales? How do we give instruction about The Secret Doctrine? I recommend that we consider its contentious chapters on Root Race development as outdated scholarship. We should downplay the literal importance of these chapters and admit that we do not know how to interpret this material in light of our present state of knowledge. In so doing, we set these ideas aside for interpretation by future generations in light of new revelations. As an added benefit, we can avoid having to address several passages of Victorian snobbery that are tucked into these contentious chapters. This material would insult modern readers, who would rightfully consider it as racially biased.

We should not let ourselves be held hostage to the past by considering The Secret Doctrine as presenting a static dogma like the Christian Bible. The Masters intimated that more spiritual knowledge would be revealed as humanity advances and is ready for it. In that regard, the paradigm of Theosophy is and should be regarded as dynamic and open to new thought. Otherwise we will become stuck in the past like religious fundamentalists. From that perspective, outdated scholarship may well prove to be the only viable explanation for contentious science in The Secret Doctrine.

Sources

Blavatsky, H.P. The Secret Doctrine. 2 vols. Wheaton: Quest, 1993.

Mills, Joy. Reflections on an Ageless Wisdom: A Commentary on the Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett. Wheaton: Quest, 2010.

Zirkoff, Boris de. Rebirth of the Occult Tradition: How the Secret Doctrine of H.P. Blavatsky Was Written. Adyar, India: Theosophical Publishing House, 1977.

Andre Clewell investigates mechanisms of plant species evolution. He is a founder of the new discipline of ecological restoration, which recovers degraded ecosystems to their historic, natural condition. He is a Life Member of the TSA and past president of the MidSouth Federation.

Printed in the  Fall 2020  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Johnson, Zane, "The Tragic Consciousness in Literature and Tradition" Quest 108:4, pg 26-30

By Zane Johnson

Many seekers today set out on their paths to find something that society is not giving them. In the face of ecological destruction, unflinching individualism, and a general sense of separation and desperation, people are looking for something not quite so tragic as what is currently on the table. Religion and its close cousin, literature, are the great resources in the human search for dignity and meaning. Myth, poetry, and drama can be powerful pathfinders out of this seemingly modern malaise, because they tell us that this search for something more is not ours alone but is woven into the fabric of human existence.

In his article “The Comic Mode,” literary critic Joseph W. Meeker defines the primary value of tragic drama as “avoiding or transcending the necessary in order to accomplish the impossible.” In distinction to comedy, which, like ecology, is a system “designed to accommodate necessity and encourage acceptance of it” (Meeker, 163), tragedy presents a version of reality based on power, struggle, pain, ambition, and commitment to an impossible ideal that leads the tragic hero to his (and it is usually his) ultimate end in death. One thinks of Shakespeare’s Brutus or Macbeth, feeling put upon by the cosmos or history to prove that “men at sometime were masters of their fates” (Julius Caesar, 1.2.139). Tragedies like Hamlet begin with the rupture of communal and familial bonds and proceed to the all-too-familiar end. Nature is cruel, as in King Lear, and serves only as an organic parallel to his court’s possession by dark psychological forces that seek to punish him. It is a staggered path into dissolution, from whence we only see a few hints of renewal at the end.

Comedies, on the other hand, usually follow a dialectical pattern, which sees a cast of characters move from an initial stage of uneasy stability to disorder as unruly passions are sorted out, and finally to renewal and restoration of order. In Shakespeare, this renewal often occurs in a “green world”—one thinks of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the chaos of human affections that is eventually tamed within an enchanted forest. Such a mode of literature extols the biological and communal over the ideal and individual and tends to highly value the bonds of human relationship and community. In As You Like It, this comfort in community extends, surely enough, to the natural world, where one “finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything” (2.1.16–17).

Everybody gets what they want in the end, and some primordial inkling that life is in fact good is fulfilled.         

What does the foregoing have to do with those inner traditions, those ancient springs of wisdom to which people are turning for an alternative to tragic reality? My suspicion is, sadly, that the language of some these traditions, particularly the Western mystery traditions (with which I am the most familiar), often reproduce a tragic vision of reality, or what I call “tragic consciousness.” Wisdom is not immune from accreting elements from the surrounding culture.

	The ghost of Caesar taunts Brutus about his imminent defeat. (Engraving by Edward Scriven, from a painting by Richard Westall based on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, act 4, scene 3, London, 1802. Wikipedia.)

Part of the dilemma could be the enduring legacy of the nineteenth-century occult revival, which came upon the heels of the Romantic movement. In his article in The Church Times, which details the astonishing involvement of Anglo-Catholic clergy in Theosophy and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Richard Yoder argues that both at the exoteric and esoteric levels, religious life was engaged in “a defense of the supernatural in the face of modern materialism.” This was, of course, an extension of Romantic values: a defense of the imagination against reason, nature against the despoliations of industrial capitalism, the individual against oblivion. Romantic closet dramas reveled in tragic consciousness, and it comes as no surprise that writers such as P.B. Shelley and Lord Byron constituted a “satanic school” of literature of their own to their contemporary critics. Prometheus Unbound and Cain characteristically reevaluate traditional satanic antiheroes as misunderstood revolutionaries, contained by powers of social and religious tyranny.

Of course, some of these values are fraught with a volatile self-against-the-world dualism. It is now a commonplace to suggest the direct influence of Romantic values—left unchecked and unbalanced—on twentieth-century fascist ideology. Many an occult personality of this same period also had fascist leanings. One need not scour too long the works of Aleister Crowley before coming up against repulsive statements about women, Jews, and the wretched of the earth, coupled with visions of a genetically engineered superrace that manipulates the ignorant masses towards the achievement of their True Wills. In a comment on chapter 3 of his channeled text Liber AL vel Legis, for example, he asks, “Should we not rather breed humanity for quality by killing off any tainted stock, as we do with other cattle?”

 Statements in Crowley’s Liber AL, particularly in the third chapter, are also remarkably similar to sentiments expressed in Shakespearean tragedy (Crowley is notorious for literary appropriation in his inspired works). Compare Liber AL’s “Lurk! Withdraw! Upon them!” (Crowley, 314) to Julius Caesar’s “Revenge! About! Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay!” (3.2.200).

Occult fascism may be the outer extreme of the tragic mode, and we may affirm with Traditionalist esotericists like René Guénon that such occult currents represent a counterinitiation. But even within the Traditionalist framework, tragic consciousness predominates. In Defending Ancient Springs, Kathleen Raine, poet and founder of London’s Temenos Academy, states plainly that “genius is not democratic” (46).

Tragic consciousness affects those of us engaged in plumbing the depths of the traditions we’ve inherited in a more routine way. The hangover from the nineteenth-century occult revival and its historical and philosophical baggage affects how we conceive the spiritual life at a fundamental level.

Our language often seems to present the initiate as special in some way and can foster a sense that we have raised ourselves up from the ranks of the unenlightened masses. I believe this is mostly an error in language, but it can become potent as our unenlightened ego seeks a foothold. (The contemporary British Kabbalist Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi indicates that the initial zealotry and self-aggrandizement that can develop when one begins on a spiritual path can be corrected through a rule of silence: Halevi, 274.)

The esoteric is not for everyone, nor is everyone seeking it. And that’s fine. In her classic Esoteric Christianity, Annie Besant describes secret Christian teaching as just that—something secret, not intended for everyone. She further suggests that it is only for those that can rise above the general intellectual torpor of their contemporaries and be admitted into the temple. One might be forgiven for feeling unnecessarily excluded. Even worse, it could inflame the pride of the curious and encourage a sense of superiority.

Besant describes the qualities that the candidate for the mysteries must develop to be admitted: first discrimination, then disgust, then on to other, less threatening-sounding virtues, such as control of thoughts and endurance. Disgust is the one I want to focus on now. To be fair, she describes it not as disgust with creation or with human beings per se, but rather with “the unreal and the fleeting” (Besant, 174). Yet this can be a major stumbling block to anyone seeking the way and, in my opinion, should eventually be transcended.

When I first began a meditation practice early on in my spiritual inquiry, I was working at a kitchen. I remember discovering at the end of the night shift a maggot that had made a home for itself underneath the soda fountain, feeding on the syrup that fell beneath the grate. And I remember thinking: that’s it. That’s what we are, always too content to suck our sugar cubes in blissful ignorance. I felt disgust.

 Of course, I was all too eager to point my finger at those around me and not at myself. But I did experience a sudden, profound aversion to reckless, aimless pleasure-seeking at the expense of the planet and other human beings. Admittedly, it did have an unwelcome effect on my relationships. As Jesus reminds us, “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16). This idea had outlived its usefulness to me as an impetus to deeper inquiry into Reality, and I struggled to let go of it.

When describing the higher meanings of atonement and sacrifice in the Christian mysteries, Besant affirms the basic truth that walking the spiritual path is fundamentally not for ourselves, but for the world (a “comic” as much as a cosmic truth). For the real, suffering, flesh-and-blood people and other sentient beings in our lives. This is “the life of love,” which is always other-oriented, and which is summed up beautifully as the Fruit of the Holy Spirit of St. Paul (Besant, 187).

There is an allure to taking too seriously the thought that we have some knowledge that the world does not and which makes us important. It is bewitching in a way, a thought that enchants us when the weird sisters of our imagination talk us into accepting a kind of spiritual viciousness towards others through which our imagined kingship should be gained. And the usual results follow.

Oftentimes the impulse to “conversion,” to begin our own spiritual inquiries, comes at the behest of a voice within us that tells us that things are not as they seem. There is more to this life of grasping after recognition and ephemeral pleasures, this life of sorrow and loss, than we have been led to believe. And this should be a cause for joy! Yet often it only seems to reaffirm the attitudes that we sought to escape in the beginning: that this world and creation are fallen, that pleasure is bad, that there is something wrong with our lives because they never seem to measure up to the impossible tragic ideals that we have somehow absorbed along the way. People and nature become merely instrumental to us as we retreat into our own spiritual ambition.

This is not to say that we should start from scratch and invent other lateral paths of spiritual seeking (though this too has its place). Nor does it mean that we can’t benefit from looking to other paths whose teleology is more horizontal and inclusive. There are a number of means to experience more comic consciousness in our spiritual lives.

 The wisdom of the Kabbalah tells us that the Pillar of Severity is just as important to the divine plan for creation as is the Pillar of Mercy. There is a place for the tragic mode in our seeking too, and it can often be a great impetus to us early in our paths. In Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths certainly express tragic consciousness but are mediated by other compassionate teachings like those of the Brahmaviharas.

In my academic work, which helped inspire this reflection, I have lately focused on the intersections between literature, ecology, and religion in the English Renaissance. I have been delighted to encounter Renaissance Hermetic texts anew and read reflections on them from literary writers of the time that seem to affirm the intuitions found in comic literature.

 “Sure! there’s a tie of bodies,” as poet Henry Vaughan put it: a pulsing vitality that binds all sentient and nonsentient beings and valorizes life, matter, and embodiment (Di Cesare, 152). The world is infused with the anima mundi, and as the great martyr for wisdom Giordano Bruno put it, “that one and same thing . . . fills everything, illuminates the universe, and directs Nature to produce her various species suitably” (in Borlik, 57). This is surely esotericism in the comic mode.

The esoteric tradition of Renaissance Hermeticism and alchemy appears to express a comic rather than tragic consciousness, intuiting in nature and human life a vital force that sanctifies embodiment and materiality. Emphasis is on unity rather than division. Reaching its peak in the early days of the Reformation, when communal, sacramental rites were discontinued overnight, Renaissance esotericism also helped ameliorate the rift between humans and between humanity and nature.

In a time when forces of disintegration and isolation in the social and natural spheres are rapidly gaining speed, the older tradition can again come to our aid. As pointed out in their manifesto Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology, Peter Lamborn Wilson and his colleagues claim that there is an opportunity in these sacred sciences for ecological renewal, to help us “explore the riches contained in the magical confluence of our present time and consciousness with the divine gifts now available to all through Nature” (Wilson, Kindle position 134).

The other way that I have been able to integrate the comic mode in my own spiritual life has been to reembrace exoteric religion as a supplement to esoteric study. This will certainly not be a popular position, and indeed it took a lot of time for me to come to it, but I must admit, along with the Traditionalists, that the exoteric is inseparable from the esoteric. They inform and balance one another. Certain esoteric concepts or symbols within the Western traditions are incomprehensible without a thorough familiarity with Judeo-Christian scripture and tradition.

This is also a lesson we can take from the Renaissance esoteric stream of tradition, from whose fonts the conventionally religious—even the Puritanical—freely drew. Think of Anglican priests John Donne or George Herbert. In his poem “Man” Herbert presents a worldview grounded in relationship, analogy, and entanglement, in which

            Man is all symmetrie,
            Full of proportions, one limbe to another,
            And all to all the world besides.

This vision of humanity in the cosmos is a supremely beneficent one, one of belonging, in which “all things unto our flesh are kinde” (Hutchinson, 90).

I think this general optimism about life is common to more conventional forms of religion but is harder to come by in esoteric circles. Anglo-Catholic spirituality has been very important for me lately in living the values of community, companionship, and service that isolated study and practice could not. And yet the meat of the tradition is still to be discovered in private contemplation. It is not either/or—a choice made by all tragic heroes—but both/and. Believe the good news!

In this time in history, when we are becoming increasingly aware of our need for new structures, new ways of expressing communal bonds, and new ways of thinking about inherited tradition, it can be helpful to look back to the vast stretch of human history in which people relied on one another and on their natural environment for spiritual and physical nourishment.

To return to Meeker’s piece quoted at the beginning of this article, he makes the interesting observation that “whole cultures have lived and died without producing tragedy or the philosophical views that tragedy depends on” (Meeker, 157). Perhaps it is time to reevaluate why tragic consciousness has taken such preponderance in Western initiatory streams and whether the time might be ripe to smooth down our edges as seekers and, along with Prospero at The Tempest’s end, commit our all-powerful wands to the sea and walk free from our self-imposed isolation from deeper springs of tradition, history, and community.

Sources

Besant, Annie. Esoteric Christianity. New York: Bodley Head, 1902.

Borlik, Todd Andrew, ed. Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance: An Ecocritical Anthology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Crowley, Aleister. Liber AL vel Legis, 1904. OTO Library (website), accessed June 29, 2020: https://lib.oto-usa.org/libri/liber0220.html.

Crowley, Aleister. The New and Old Commentaries to Liber AL vel Legis, The Book of the Law, 1920. Hermetic Library (website), accessed June 30, 2020: https://hermetic.com/legis/new-comment/index.

Di Cesare, Mario A., ed. George Herbert and the Seventeenth Century Religious Poets: Authoritative Texts and Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978.

Halevi, Z’ev ben Shimon. Adam and the Kabbalistic Tree. York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1974.

Hutchinson, F.E., ed. The Works of George Herbert. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959.

Meeker, Joseph A. “The Comic Mode.” In The Ecocriticism Reader, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1996: 155–69.

Raine, Kathleen. Defending Ancient Springs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Wilson, Peter Lamborn, et al. Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology. Great Barrington, Mass.: Lindisfarne, 2007.

Wells, Stanley et al., ed. The Complete Oxford Shakespeare: Comedies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Citations from Shakespeare refer to this volume and the one below.

———. The Complete Oxford Shakespeare: Tragedies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. 

Yoder, Richard. “On the Wings of the Dawn: The Lure of the Occult.” Church Times, Dec. 14, 2018: https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2018/14-december/features/features/on-the-wings-of-the-dawn-the-lure-of-the-occult.

Zane Johnson is a poet, translator, and student of the mysteries. Recent work has appeared in Asymptote, No Man’s Land, Anatolios Magazine, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. He currently studies literature, translation, and the environmental humanities at the University of Munich.

Printed in the  Fall 2020  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Gomes, Michael , "Ancient Wisdom for a New Age: Theosophical Translations of Hindu Scriptures"  Quest 108:4, pg 19-23

By Michael Gomes

At its inception in 1875, the object of the Theosophical Society was “to collect and diffuse a knowledge of the laws which govern the universe.” It was not an attempt to replicate what was already being done but to investigate areas left unexplored at the time. When the headquarters of the Society was established in India in the 1880s, the Objects began to look more as they do today. Only the Second Object was markedly different from how it now stands: “To promote the study of Aryan and other Eastern literature, religions and sciences and vindicate its importance.” It remained that way during H.P. Blavatsky’s lifetime, only changing in 1896 to its current injunction to encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy, and science.

In her Key to Theosophy, Blavatsky cites the work of the library at the TS headquarters in Adyar, India, and at local branches to collect works on ancient philosophies, traditions, and legends. She also specifies the need to make available translations, original works, extracts, and commentaries based on this material in order to help realize the Second Object.

Theosophists set to work to fulfill this promise and have produced a number of original translations of Hindu scriptures. Two texts received the most attention: the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali.

The Bhagavad Gita forms part of the great Indian epic the Mahabharata. Its setting is a battlefield, as two great clans prepare for war. In its totality, the Mahabharata is the story of families torn apart, a kingdom lost at a throw of the dice, brave heroes, and a return to righteousness. The Gita appears in the sixth book, in the form of a dialogue between the warrior Arjuna, who is about to take up arms against his cousins, and his charioteer, Krishna. Extracted from the larger narrative, the text has been taken as a summation of Hindu philosophy and has gone on to become a global resource for spirituality.

The Gita was one of the first Hindu scriptures translated into English: one edition appeared in 1785. The text was familiar to the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, who commented on it. It was also known to the New England Transcendentalists: Henry David Thoreau mentions it in Walden, published in 1854. In the 1880s, Edwin Arnold produced a popular verse rendering entitled The Song Celestial.

Translations by Theosophists offered another perspective and introduced the text to a wider audience. The key had been supplied by the distinguished Indian member T. Subba Row (1856–90). In a series of lectures delivered at the annual Madras Convention of the Society in 1885 and 1886 he suggested that Arjuna represented the individual soul, “the real monad in man,” while Krishna represents the Logos, “the spirit that comes to save man.” Using this allegorical approach, Subba Row depicted the Gita as a work of practical guidance, indicating “that the human monad must fight its own battle, assisted once he begins to thread the true path by his Logos” (Subba Row, 2:391). These lectures were printed in The Theosophist and issued in book form in 1888 as Discourses on the Bhagavad Gita.  

	From left: T. Subba Row; an early disciple, known variously as Babaji, M. Krishnamachari, S. Krishnamachari, S. Krishnaswami Iyengar or Aiyangar, and Darbhagiri Nath; and HPB.

By this time Theosophists had their own translation of the Gita, by a young Bengali named Mohini Chatterji. Chatterji, who was, like HPB, a pupil of the Mahatmas, had been brought to Europe in 1884 by her. He traveled to America, where he produced his translation in 1887. It included a lengthy commentary, often assisted by numerous references to the New Testament. Chatterji said that the text illustrated the idea that “human nature is one, God is but one, and the path to salvation though many in appearance, is really but one” (Chatterji, 276).

William Q. Judge’s rendition of the Gita, published in 1890, utilized previous translations. It was an inexpensive pocket-sized book, which could be carried everywhere. Judge observed that the Gita depicted “the struggle which is inevitable as soon as any one unit in the human family resolves to allow his higher nature to govern his life” (Judge, ix).

Judge’s rendition was followed by Annie Besant’s in 1895. For Besant, the keynote of the Gita was moderation and the “harmonising of all the constituents of man, till they vibrate in perfect attunement with the One, the Supreme Self” (Besant, viii). Another version was issued by Besant and the Hindu scholar Bhagavan Das, with the Sanskrit text, a free English rendering, and a word-for-word translation, which appeared in 1905 and revised in 1926.

The translations of Judge and Besant remain in print, but other attempts by Theosophists did not receive as wide a circulation. Charles Johnston, who had served in the British Civil Service in India and had studied Sanskrit, published his translation in New York in 1908, and F. T. Brooks, best remembered as the tutor of the future statesman Jawaharlal Nehru, published his in India in 1909. Alfred E.S. Smythe, general secretary of the TS in Canada and a veteran newspaper editor, issued a “conflation” in 1937 based on previous English editions. Ernest Wood, who had worked at the Theosophical headquarters in India, published his translation in 1954.

Text encouraged context, and a wealth of commentaries by Theosophists elucidated the message of the Bhagavad Gita. Mention has already been made of the influence of T. Subba Row. In 1893 the Kumbakonam Branch in South India issued Thoughts on the Bhagavad Gita by “A Brahmin F.T.S.” (Fellow of the Theosophical Society) based on a series of lectures before the group. The author’s interpretation was based on the Puranas, the great repositories of Hindu lore, and The Secret Doctrine. “H.P.B. talked the same thing as our ancient Brahminical philosophers in a different language and from a different platform” (Brahmin F.T.S., 78). Three volumes of Studies in the Bhagavad Gita, by another Indian member, “The Dreamer,” bearing the subtitles of The Yoga of Discrimination (1902), The Yoga of Action and Occultism (1903), and The Path of Initiation (1904), appeared under the imprint of the Theosophical House in London. These followed the approach of Subba Row, with Hindu and Theosophical concepts illuminating the text.

Bhavani Shankar (1859–1936), a disciple of Blavatsky, lectured on the Bhagavad Gita throughout India after her death. A biographical note in one of the volumes of his talks says that “he was initiated into some of the hidden laws and secret practices of Raja-Yoga by the famous mystic, Subba Row” (Basu, ix). Shankar saw a deep longing for and devotion to Wisdom as a prerequisite for understanding the subject. Judge and Besant also wrote their own commentaries on the book. Even Rudolf Steiner lectured on it.

Theosophical renderings of the Gita are instructive in the level of interpretation that they offer. At one point, overwhelmed by what Krishna reveals to him, Arjuna seeks to understand his divine nature. Krishna responds (11.32): “I am Time, destroyer of the worlds grown ripe for death,” in Smythe’s edition. Judge gives, “I am Time matured, come hither for the destruction of these creatures,” while Besant has, “Time am I, laying desolate the world, made manifest on earth to slay mankind.” Compare a newer translation by Ravi Ravindra, published in 2017: “I am Time, the Destroyer of worlds, come forth here with the will to annihilate the nations.”

Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra

The only other Hindu scripture to receive as many Theosophical translations as the Bhagavad Gita was the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali. If the Gita offered a moral compass in times of stress, the Yoga Sutra gave practical instruction in mind control. Theosophists were among the first to bring the idea of yoga to the West.

The date of the text and its author are still debated. The general consensus for the text is between 450 and 350 BCE, but Blavatsky pushes the date for Patanjali even further back. The Theosophical Glossary gives it as “nearer to 700 than 600 B.C.” (Blavatsky, Glossary, 251).

W.Q. Judge’s 1889 version, The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali, was based on an earlier version printed in India. Like his edition of the Gita, it was issued as a pocket-sized book. Judge’s simple language offered clear instruction on the training of the mind, and its influence on the burgeoning New Thought and Mental Science movements in America should be noted.

Manilal Dvivedi’s translation, published in India a year later, aimed to be a more accurate portrayal of the text, and it was kept in print by the Theosophical Society till the 1940s. Dvivedi (1858–98), a noted Gujarati author and advocate for education and social reform, also found time to produce a number of erudite translations of Sanskrit texts.

Charles Johnston’s 1912 rendition was more free-flowing. As indicated by the subtitle, The Book of the Spiritual Man, Johnston saw the text as a call to spiritual aspiration. I.K. Taimni’s 1961 The Science of Yoga offered a translation and commentary “in the light of modern thought.”

Two Theosophically related attempts are Mabel Collins’ Transparent Jewel (1912), which was an extended rumination on the subject using Dvivedi’s translation, and Alice Bailey’s 1927 The Light of the Soul: Its Science and Effect, which described itself as a “paraphrase” of Patanjali, and looks at the book as a manual of esoteric training as interpreted through Bailey’s system of seven rays and esoteric astrology.

Yogi Ramacharaka (a pen name of the American metaphysical writer William Walker Atkinson, 1862–1932) blurred the lines between Theosophy, Yoga, and New Thought in his series of instructional books from Chicago’s Yogi Publishing Company at the beginning of the twentieth century.

To compare Theosophical versions of the Yoga Sutra: Judge gives for sloka (verse) 2.1, which distills the methodology that applies to the practitioner: “The practice of Concentration [Judge’s rendering of yoga] is, Mortification, Mutterings, and Resignation to the Supreme Soul.” Dvivedi has, “Mortification, study and resignation to Isvara [the personal God], constitute practicing Yoga.” Johnston’s version reads, “The practices which make for union with the Soul are: fervent aspiration, spiritual reading, and complete obedience to the Master.” A more recent example (though not by a Theosophist), Barbara Stoler Miller’s 1996 Yoga: Discipline of Freedom, which is now regarded as a classic, reads: “The active performance of yoga involves ascetic practice, study of sacred lore, and dedication to the Lord of Yoga.” (The terms “mortification” and “ascetic practice” are a translation of the Sanskrit tapas, a word whose Vedic origins indicate heat. It has been suggested that ardor or fervor might be truer to its meaning. “Those who practice tapas could be described as ‘ardent,’” writes Roberto Calasso, 99.)

By the 1930s, Theosophical efforts on the study of yoga were eclipsed by the arrival of a succession of yogis and swamis from India. The efforts of, first, Swami Vivekananda and then of Paramahansa Yogananda, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and others led to the emergence of homegrown adherents. The 1959 Yoga for Americans by Indra Devi (Eugenia Peterson) presented the subject as compatible with the lifestyle of the period, and Theos Bernard’s 1944 Hatha Yoga advocated for the postures as part of a fitness regime. They prepared the way for the next wave of instructors from India, such as B.K.S. Iyengar, whose 1965 Light on Yoga included over 600 photographs illustrating the asanas.

It was now possible to speak of yogas in the plural, and Ernest Wood codified seven variants: the Raja Yoga of Patanjali, the Karma and Buddhi Yogas of Sri Krishna, the Jnana Yoga of Sri Sankaracharya, Hatha Yoga, Laya (Kundalini) Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, and Mantra Yoga (Wood, 12).

No other Sanskrit texts were as popular among Theosophists as the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutra. The Vivekachudamani (“The Crest Jewel of Wisdom”), once attributed to the Indian sage Shankaracharya, is still in print in Mohini Chatterji’s translation from the 1880s. Charles Johnston also produced a version, and Ernest Wood was working on one when he died (published posthumously as The Pinnacle of Indian Thought by Quest Books in 1967). Johnston also did a free rendering of the Upanishads, as did G.R.S. Mead in 1896. I.K. Taimni translated the Siva Sutras (1976), the Bhakti Sutra (1975), and the Pratyabhijnahrdayam as The Secret of Self-Realization (1974), all issued by the Theosophical Publishing House in Adyar, India. Radha Burnier and Richard Brooks also produced a Sanskrit/English version of the Pratyabhijnahrdayam.

For the early Theosophists, translations of Hindu scriptures such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutra offered access to the Ancient Wisdom discussed by Blavatsky and others. It also presented a validation for Theosophical concepts, many of which were found in these texts. But as the late TS president N. Sri Ram has noted, this Ancient Wisdom does not base its claim on mere antiquity. “The word ‘ancient’ applied to it conveys the significance of a wisdom accumulated through the ages, tested and proved by time” (Sri Ram, 186).

The ideas in texts like the Gita found resonance in Theosophical writings. Members would have related injunctions given in the Gita to that in works like Light on the Path (1885), a guide to the spiritual life that urges the pupil to “stand aside in the coming battle, and though thou fightest be not the warrior” (2.1). Theosophical interpretations, which were not moored in sectarian differences, would add their own nuances.

Mme. Blavatsky had differentiated the aspects of yoga early on. Commenting on an article on the subject that she published in The Theosophist in 1882, she utilized the terms raja and hatha yoga to distinguish her work from more mundane forms. She told her students, “He who has studied both systems, the Hatha and Raja-yogas, finds an enormous difference between the two: one is purely psycho-physiological, the other purely psycho-spiritual” (Blavatsky, Esoteric Instructions, 135). Elizabeth de Michelis, in A History of Modern Yoga, and others have pointed out that when Hindu teachers such as Vivekananda came west, they adapted their message to the already existing terminology of Theosophy.

The effects of Theosophical interest in Hindu scriptures would not remain limited to the Theosophical Society. In his Story of My Experiments with Truth, Mohandas Gandhi relates how while he was a young law student in England, he was approached by two Theosophists who were studying the Gita. They wanted him to read the original with them. He confessed that he had never read the book either in the original Sanskrit or his native Gujarati. When he studied the book with them, it revealed its worth to him, and it became an “infallible guide of conduct” and “dictionary of daily reference” (Gandhi, 323). Its principles of nonattachment and equanimity can be seen in his ideas about satyagraha, which he used to gain Indian independence, and which influenced others, including Martin Luther King Jr. and the American civil rights movement.

The diffusion of the Gita into contemporary society can be seen in the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist known as “the father of the atomic bomb.” He relates that when he witnessed the first atomic blast, Krishna’s words from the Gita came to mind, “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.” This ancient Hindu scripture had found new context and had truly entered a new age. Through their translations and commentaries, Theosophists had contributed to its becoming a part of the public discourse.

Sources

Basham, A.L. The Origins and Development of Classical Hinduism. Boston: Beacon, 1989. Basham suggests we view the Gita as “a compilation by more than one hand, with at least two main authors whose doctrines are very different” (95).

Basu, Upandranath. Foreword to Pandit Bhavani Shankar, Lectures on the Bhagavad Gita. Uttarpara, India: Uttarpara Theosophical Lodge, 1923. Bhavani Shankar’s lectures have been collected and republished as The Doctrine of the Bhagavad Gita. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Concord Grove Press, 1984.

Besant, Annie. The Bhagavad Gita, or the Lord’s Song. London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1896.

Blavatsky, H.P. Esoteric Instructions. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 2015.

———. The Theosophical Glossary. London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1891.

“A Brahmin F.T.S.” Thoughts on the Bhagavad Gita. Kumbakonam, India: Kumbakonam Branch of the Theosophical Society, 1893.

Calasso, Roberto. Ardor. Translated by Richard Dixon. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2014.

Chatterji, Mohini M. The Bhagavad Gita, or The Lord’s Lay. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887.

Gandhi, Mohandas. Gandhi’s Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1948.

Judge, W.Q. The Bhagavad Gita: The Book of Devotion. New York: The Path, 1890.

Oppenheimer, J. Robert. “Oppenheimer Bhagavad-Gita Quote,” YouTube, accessed June 29, 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqZqfTOxFhY.

Sharpe, Eric J. The Universal Gita: Western Images of the Bhagavad Gita. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1985.

Sri Ram, N. A Theosophist Looks at the World. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1950.

Steiner, Rudolf. The Occult Significance of the Bhagavad Gita. New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1968. Based on talks given in May and June 1913.

Subba Row, T. T. Subba Row: Collected Writings. 2 vols. San Diego: Point Loma Publishing, 2001.

Wood, Ernest. Seven Schools of Yoga. Wheaton: Quest Books, 1976. This is a reprint of his The Occult Training of the Hindus, published in India in 1931.

Michael Gomes is director of the Emily Sellon Memorial Library in New York. He has authored eight books and numerous articles and monographs on H.P. Blavatsky, Theosophy, and the Theosophical Society, and he is working on his ninth.