Quest Magazine

Walking the Path With William Wordsworth

By George M. Young

Originally printed in the NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2008 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Young, George M. "Walking the Path With William Wordsworth." Quest 96.6 (NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2008):213-216.

Theosophical Society - George M. Young is a Fellow at the Center for Global Humanities at the University of New England.

THE FIRST TIME I READ MORE THAN A FEW lines of Wordsworth, it was because I had to, for sophomore college English. I liked some of the short poems, the "Lucy" series, and some of the memorable lines and verses from the longer poems, but overall I thought he was pretty boring—after Shakespeare and Milton, a bit trite. Why did he deserve such a thick green book? All the way through The Prelude, I kept flipping to the end to see how many pages were left.

Now, forty years later, he is, for quiet, personal reading, my favorite English poet. And I am not the only one. C. S. Lewis wrote that he was not much impressed with Wordsworth as a young man, but came back to him after fifty years and was surprised by the joys he had been missing. Wordsworth is one of those masters who will wait for us until we are ready.

Born into comfortable but not particularly prominent circumstances in 1770 in the scenic Lake District in the north of England, the area now known as Wordsworth Country, he attended Cambridge University, took summer walking tours through the Alps, and in 1791 visited revolutionary France. He was caught up in the ferment of the new republic and fell in love with a Frenchwoman, with whom he fathered a child. As the Reign of Terror began and tensions with England mounted, Wordsworth returned to England, and did not see his child and her mother again for many years.

He published his first poems in his early twenties, but it was in 1798, in collaboration with his new, but soon-to-be everlasting friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that he published Lyrical Ballads, the work that introduced a new way of seeing and writing, established his reputation as a major poet, and launched the Romantic movement in English literature. Periodic awards and a modest inheritance allowed him, his sister Dorothy, and later his wife Mary, to devote all their energies and attention to literary activities, writing, conversing, rambling through the countryside, living simply and frugally without need of outside employment. Eventually, he was named poet laureate, and unlike his younger fellow Romantics Keats, Shelley, and Byron, Wordsworth lived a long, outwardly contented life, and from revolutionary beginnings gradually became a symbol of the English literary and political establishment.

The critics who chide him for turning away from the real world, for abandoning his youthful radicalism for comfortable, conservative royalism and Anglicanism, who accuse him of looking to nature as an escape, of writing about clouds and daffodils while ignoring the dire poverty and inequality all up and down the very hills and valleys he strolled through—these critics all miss what Wordsworth was really about. They analyze the exoteric to death, and ignore or misread the esoteric.

I think he was, and is, for English poetry, along with Blake, Yeats, and Eliot, one of the great voices of theosophy in its root sense of divine wisdom. As other esoteric writers have so often noted, the most difficult thing is to find the right words to communicate not simply the abstract idea, but the living experience of gnosis. What does it actually feel like to be face to face with the divine? How can one share, not just repeat, abstractions—not just toss around the Greek or Hebrew or Sanskrit terminology, but actually share, in ordinary words, extraordinary truths? How can one speak convincingly to mortals about immortality? What could Plato's man who returned to the mythical cave say to those who had never left? This is precisely what Wordsworth was able to do—supremely well.

Some academic scholars write about the Lyrical Ballads as if all Wordsworth wanted to do was to make a place for himself in literary history, to create something new and interesting for scholars to write about. And, to be fair, Wordsworth was certainly aware, and keen to make others aware, of what he was contributing to the tradition of English poetry. But to have a place in the literary pantheon was far from his main purpose. Wordsworth turned to nature, to everyday language, and to the lives of simple people not simply in order to do some-thing new in English poetry, but because this would best allow him to express in fresh, accessible, straightforward terms his sense of sat, of whatever is truest and most real. He would put the world's oldest wisdom into the everyday language of his time and place; give the highest truths humble attire, not so much because he wished to exotericize the esoteric, but simply because this seemed to him the natural language and subject for a poet. In Christian England, he was certainly not the first, but was probably the clearest one to state certain ancient truths:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

In a note dictated late in life to his young friend Isabella Fenwick, Wordsworth worried that the "presumptive evidence of a prior state of existence contained in these lines might have misled good and pious people to conclude that I meant to inculcate such a belief." He does not, of course, wish to preach heresy, but goes on to say that although the idea of previous existence is not explicitly Christian, "not advanced in revelation, there is nothing there to contradict it, and the fall of Man presents an analogy in its favor." Furthermore, he adds, "a pre-existent state has entered into the popular creeds of many nations; and, among all persons acquainted with classic literature, is known as an ingredient in Platonic philosophy."

We know that he was familiar with both Plato and Plotinus through the translations of the proto-Theosophist Thomas Taylor. But his best source for preexistence and other ingredients of ancient wisdom was his profound self-knowledge, his acute sense of instinct and early memory, his ability to see the glow of divinity in nature—in dreamlike vividness and splendor. The books of the great philosophers could stimulate and guide, but it was the experience of deep dreaming while awake, the long meditative walks, and the visionary gaze that made the world transparent to him and enabled him to share those intimations with us. He told Miss Fenwick that the "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" began to come to him as he walked away from the abbey ruins, and continued on for two or three days up through the Wye Valley. He had the entire poem in his mind by the time he walked into Bristol, and was able to write it down immediately and publish it soon after without changing a word.

His close friend and admirer, the great poet, critic, thinker, and conversationalist Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose best known works include "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan," was also a visionary, but of a different kind. Coleridge sought and found his Gnostic truths in exotic, far-flung places, where great winged birds make breezes blow, sacred rivers run, and caverns are measureless to man. Wordsworth was able to detect the aura of divinity in the small, humble, and near; in cottages among untrodden ways; in hedgerows hardly hedgerows; in little lines of sportive wood run wild; in fountains, meadows, hills, and groves; in fields of daffodils.

Wordsworth knows the sadness of innocence lost, but he also knows the serene joy that comes with wisdom and experience. He loves the riot of youth, but also loves the steadfast calm of maturity. Life for Words-worth is a rambling, strolling meditation: a walk along a path with flashes of ecstatic vision, then distraction and gradual loss of that experience, then, as if returning to a mantra, a return and ascent to an even higher level of vision. Nature is the mantra that keeps bringing him—and us with him—back into the real world, into our real selves, and toward God. In "Tintern Abbey," Wordsworth senses in his beloved sister, Dorothy, who accompanies him, a living image of the person he himself was when he visited the site five years earlier. He literally senses himself in another person, and senses her in an earlier version of himself. Here, shared experience of nature overcomes the passage of time, turns temporality into eternity, and allows the elimination of the boundaries between two human consciousnesses. This is truly the "I" and "Thou" as one, just as when he wanders "lonely as a cloud," he literally experiences himself in nature and nature in himself. Wordsworth, probably more than any other English poet, allows us to sense our natural kinship with, and refresh our distant memories of, the mineral, vegetable, and animal worlds. He is the poet of both prehuman memories and posthuman intimations, of what we have been and what, through many lives, we may become.

Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind,

In the soothing thoughts that spring

Out of human suffering . . .

Wordsworth neither ignores human suffering and loss nor morbidly dwells on it, but rather looks forward to the power and serenity that we gain through the pains and struggles that mark our human existences. We grow, develop, and evolve by falling and rising again, by forgetting and then remembering, by wandering off and returning again and again to nature, to God, who is our home. Wordsworth constantly reminds us that who we really are is what some translations of the Bhagavad Gita call the embedded self, the child that is the father of the man, the babe of Nature.

Blest the Babe,

Nursed in his Mother's arms, who sinks to sleep

Rocked on his Mother's breast; who with his soul

Drinks in the feelings of his Mother's eye!

For him, in one dear Presence, there exists

A virtue which irradiates and exalts

Objects through widest intercourse of sense;

No outcast he, bewildered and depressed:

Along his infant veins are interfused

The gravitation and the filial bond

Of nature that connect him with the world.

Our connectedness, then, rather than our alienation, is Wordsworth's great theme: the connectedness of man and nature, man and man, God and nature, man and God. For like us, we learn in Book Fifth of The Prelude, nature too has a "self, which is the breath of God." And the theme of the entire Book Eighth is "Love of Nature Leading to the Love of Man." For Wordsworth, who witnessed the events of the French Revolution in person, the key to the brotherhood of mankind was not mass political action, but the man-by-man realization of our inner divine connectedness through nature. Wordsworth knew frustration, disappointment, and depression in his dealings with men and the world, but at the very depths of negativity, he remembers:

There are in our existence spots of time,

That with distinct pre-eminence retain

A renovating virtue, whence—depressed

By false opinion and contentious thought,

Or ought of heavier or more deadly weight,

In trivial occupations, and the round

Of ordinary intercourse—our minds

Are nourished and invisibly repaired;

A virtue by which pleasure is enhanced,

That penetrates, enables us to mount,

When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.

Wordsworth is the bard of a self-mending life, of repairs that go on when we are least aware of them, the healing spots of time. He reminds us again and again in a thousand ways that there is much more to us, and to our lives, than we are aware of. Indeed, the most important things about us may be those for which our conscious intentions can take least credit. In "Tintern Abbey," he lets us see how in times of wearying drudgery, memories of pleasant views—"spots of time"—from past rambles can quietly refresh us. He remembers the little cottages he saw in the valley.

These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind,

With tranquil restoration: feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On the best portion of a good man's life,

His little nameless, unremembered, acts

Of kindness and of love.

This is Wordsworth's sense of karma—every little thing we do matters, even the smallest acts that we do almost without thinking and without remembering that we have done them—everything counts, and all the good little things that a person does naturally add up to a good life, and will come back to us, unbidden, when needed.

In the lines that immediately follow, Wordsworth shares his experience of deep meditation, in which the breathing slows, the pulse drops, and something similar to what is sometimes called the third eye opens:

That blessed mood

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,—

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things.

One of the earliest and still one of the most sensitive and appreciative readers of Wordsworth, was the late nineteenth-century English aesthete and critic Walter Pater, who wrote, in an essay from the 1890s:

This sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, is with Wordsworth the assertion of what for him is almost literal fact. To him every natural object seemed to possess more or less of a moral or spiritual life, to be capable of a companionship with man, full of expression, of inexplicable affinities and delicacies of intercourse. An emanation, a particular spirit, belonged, not to the moving leaves or water only, but to the distant peak of the hills arising suddenly, by some change of perspective, above the nearer horizon, to the passing space of light across the plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even, for a certain weird fellowship in it with the moods of men. It was like a "survival," in the peculiar intellectual temperament of a man of letters at the end of the eighteenth century, of that primitive condition, which some philosophers have traced in the general history of human culture, wherein all outward objects alike, including even the works of men's hands, were believed to be endowed with animation, and the world was "full of souls"—that mood in which the old Greek gods were first begotten, and which had many strange aftergrowths.

Although he published his works openly and wanted to be widely read, Wordsworth realized that many if not most readers would skim over the deeper levels of his lines. To most, he would be as he seemed to me in my sophomore year, a poet who wrote good descriptions of nature and the simple life. He was called by certain of his contemporaries "Wordswords" and "Worstwords," and the reigning literary tastemaker of the previous generation, Dr. Samuel Johnson, wrote a famous savage parody, not of Wordsworth himself but of the newly popular ballad form, which Wordsworth, who was supposed not to have much of a sense of humor, cheerfully reprinted in the Preface of 1800:

I put my hat upon my head

And walked into the Strand,

And there I met another man

Whose hat was in his hand.

But Coleridge, then and now regarded as the best English literary critic of the early nineteenth century, was Wordsworth's ideal and actual best reader. Fellow seer, lifelong friend, collaborator, brother through marriage, avid student of the esoteric, Coleridge was one of the three people (Wordsworth's wife Mary and sister Dorothy the other two) that the poet trusted to grasp every nuance. He addressed The Prelude to Coleridge, referred to through most of the body of the poem as Friend. In the last book of the poem, after showing us the growth of the poet's spiritual awareness from childhood through his schooling and university education, through his time in France during the Revolution, his return to England, his work in London, his travels in Switzerland, and later his moving to the Lake District, each book pyramiding upon the previous, the whole builds at last to a capstone description of an ascent of Mount Snowden. As the poet emerges from the fog he has been climbing through, he finds a clear and glorious view, a summit of outlook and insight, in which he experiences full spiritual love and a power of imagination from which the poet has drawn

Faith in life endless, the sustaining thought

Of human Being, Eternity, and God.

In the concluding passages, he addresses Coleridge, at last, by name and acknowledges Coleridge's contribution to the sense of life and body of work called "Wordsworth." "No wonder," Carlos Baker tells us, in his fine introduction to my well-thumbed 1961 edition of the Selected Poems, "that Coleridge, having heard this poem read aloud, rose up at the end to find himself 'in prayer.'" On that day, for that poet and that listener, the reading of a poem about the growth of spiritual awareness became itself a spiritual experience. Even for us who were or are sophomores in literature, the exo-teric Wordsworth offers much to appreciate. But regardless of how much or little we gain from early exposure to him, the deeper, esoteric Wordsworth will still be there, where he has been for two and a half centuries, steadfast, calm, waiting to speak to us when we are ready.

George M. Young, Ph.D., is a Slavicist who has taught Russian and comparative literature at Grinnell and Dartmouth colleges, although for many years he ran a fine arts and auction business. He is the author of many articles and books on Russian literature and religious philosophy including the translation of Elena Pisareva's journal called The Light of the Russian Soul: A Personal Memoir of Early Russian Theosophy, (Quest Books, 2008). Young currently teaches English literature at the University of New England.

Oz as Myth and Mysticism

Originally printed in the November-December 2000 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Algeo, John. "Oz as Myth and Mysticism." Quest 88.6 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2000): pg 219-222.

By John Algeo

Theosophical Society - John Algeo was a Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Georgia. He was a Theosophist and a Freemason He was the Vice President of the Theosophical Society Adyar. One hundred years ago, a children's book was published which has attained the status of a classic, not for children only but for many adults as well: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by the Theosophist Lyman Frank Baum. That book is a phenomenon in its appeal, its popularity, and its character.

Appeal. The phenomenon of a book written ostensibly for children having an appeal for adults is not unique. Lewis Carroll's stories Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are well known examples, as also are Kenneth Grahame's fable The Wind in the Willows, A. A. Milne's books about Winnie the Pooh, J. R. R. Tolkien's fairy story The Hobbit, and most recently J. K. Rowling's magical stories about Harry Potter. The Wizard of Oz is in that company.

Adults may adopt a "children's book" as their own for many reasons, of which the most obvious is nostalgia for childhood. But other reasons are stronger. Personal nostalgia is, in fact, a weak explanation because many persons first encounter these books in adulthood. Of course, it may be argued that such books represent a generalized nostalgia for the state of childhood, the condition of lost innocence, the condition described by Wordsworth:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From God, who is our home.

If that is the reason certain children's books appeal to adults, a reductionist theory of nostalgia for childhood is irrelevant, for it is not a personal memory of one's own child state that those books appeal to, but a different sort of memory of a different sort of state. The state is one of spiritual wholeness and simplicity, which is quite different from the complexities of biological childhood, and the memory is a transcendental one of the realm of the clouds of glory.

Popularity. Related to its appeal across age levels is the continuing popularity of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The best-selling children's book of Christmas 1900, it has never been out of print since, and the story has acquired a life of its own. Although its author, Frank Baum, wanted to turn his attention in other directions, and tried several times to do so, the popularity of the story repeatedly forced him back to Oz. Between 1900 and his death in 1919, Baum wrote fourteen Oz books and produced a number of spin-offs.

The series was continued after Baum's death in twenty-two books by Ruth Plumly Thompson and in eighteen other books by eight other writers. Oz stories in various genres continue to be produced right down to our own time, often explicitly for adults. Sean Connery's film Zardoz, the black musical The Wiz, and the novel Was, by Geoff Ryman, are examples of adult-focused Oz productions.

The Judy Garland movie of 1939 was a major impetus in continuing the popularity of the Oz story. Its release to television in 1956 and subsequent annual broadcast kept the story alive in the collective consciousness and drummed it into the collective unconscious. Today, themes, lines, and allusions to the story and its characters are rife in popular culture, and their reference is almost invariably to the MGM movie version.

Character. The story of Oz is not just an adventure in an imaginary land, however; it is also a myth. Myths are works that embody the ethos of a people and at the same time deal with concerns that are common to all human beings. They explain us to ourselves in a way uniquely suited to a time and place. Oz is an archetypically American myth; it is also a spiritual allegory of the journey that all of us, as strangers in a strange land, find ourselves engaged in.

Like all true myths, the story of Oz can be told in many ways, according to the perception of the teller and the interest of the audience. The character of Oz is multifaceted: an amusing and entertaining story on the surface, it has depths of interpretation. We may say about it what has also been said of Theosophy: it has shallows in which a little child may safely wade and depths in which even a giant must swim. The comparison of Oz and Theosophy is appropriate, for Frank Baum was a member of the Theosophical Society, and The Wizard of Oz can be read as a Theosophical allegory.

The six books that are the focus of this essay are evidence at century's end of the wide appeal, enduring popularity, and multifaceted meanings of L. Frank Baum's "modernized fairy tale," as he called it in his introduction of April 1900. They envision the story of Oz, the American myth of the twentieth century, from several viewpoints.

In Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum, Michael Riley, a teacher of children's literature at Castleton State College, Vermont, surveys the evolution of the Oz myth during Baum's lifetime. He is concerned exclusively with Frank Baum's work, the fourteen Oz books and some related publications and productions. Post-Baum children's stories are briefly treated in an epilog, but the movie and adult spin-offs not at all.

In tracing the stages by which the Oz fantasyland developed and evolved in Baum's writings, Riley notes a reversal in value of the Land of Oz. In the first book, the 1900 Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Land of Oz is a wonderland, but like the traditional land of FaÃ«rie, it is a place to escape from, not to get to. Dorothy has been carried willy-nilly to Oz, and her one desire while she is there is to find her way back home to Kansas. In the later books, Dorothy's quest is to get to and remain in Oz.

Oz was originally a world of illusion. As Riley (88) says: "Illusion--whether interior (as in the self-deceptions of the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Lion) or exterior (as in the tricks of the Wizard)--plays a part in all of Baum's fantasies . . . almost no character is what he appears to be or what he thinks himself to be." Oz, like our own world, is mayavic. The original contrast between Kansas and Oz is between permanent Reality and fluctuating illusion.

At the end of his detailed, informative, and perceptive account of the historical development of the Oz theme in Baum's writings, Riley addresses the important question of why the Oz stories have had such appeal and been so popular:

The question is: Why Oz? Why did Oz capture the imaginations of his readers? . . . The most generally accepted answer is that the uniqueness and appeal of Oz lie in its American quality. . . . Oz is an authentic American fairyland, . . . a place--unlike the German forests of the Brothers Grimm or the English Wonderland of Lewis Carroll--that can be just over the hill or beyond the prairie in this land of limitless possibilities. [228-9]

Baum's Oz also has another quality. It is "an authentic and recognizable Other-world." Just as Arthur Conan Doyle (another author with Theosophical connections) created in Sherlock Holmes a character with a life apart from Doyle's books, so Baum created a land with a history of its own:

The "existence" that these creations have outside the narratives in which they figure is what makes them such real, living entities that actually seem to have a life apart from their creators. Sherlock Holmes is still solving cases long after Doyle's death; every year sees the publication of new Holmes stories by various writers. The same is true with Oz; that marvelous fairyland continues to be explored and mapped in new books and stories. Baum's Other-world did not die with him. [229]

Oz is typically American, and it is authentic with a life of its own. But those qualities, important as they are, do not fully explain the appeal of Oz. For that fuller explanation, one needs to look in another direction.

In Secrets of the Yellow Brick Road: A Map for the Modern Spiritual Journey Based on The Wizard of Oz, Jesse Stewart blends the 1900 book and the 1939 movie in an interpretation of their archetypal symbols. His reading is highly suggestive of the spiritual depths of the story.

Dorothy is an orphan; humanity is "the great Orphan," according to Kuthumi Lal Singh, one of the early Theosophical teachers. Dorothy is brought into the world of illusion by a cyclone, the cycle of birth and death; she begins her journey home by following the Yellow Brick Road, which is an unwinding spiral, thus complementing the cyclone by reversing the path of her involution. Her three companions represent both three aspects of the human personality (thinking, feeling, and will) and the three paths of Yoga: knowledge, devotion, and action.

Dorothy and her companions wander off the Path, however, and come to a broad river; they try to cross to the other side (shades of Buddhist metaphor), but find themselves in deep water, drifting out of control. Eventually they get to land and enter a field of soporific poppies; the flowers are like those in the Hall of Learning of The Voice of the Silence: "the blossoms of life, but under every flower a serpent coiled."

In the Emerald City, Dorothy meets the Wizard, who finally turns out to be an impostor. He is the ego-self within us, "just a common man." When Dorothy says, "I think you are a very bad man," the Wizard replies, "Oh, no, my dear; I'm really a very good man; but I'm a very bad Wizard." The ego-self is very good at what it is, but if we try to make it more than that, we make a humbug out of it. When the Wizard has given Dorothy's three companions illusory substitutes of what they long for, he muses: "How can I help being a humbug . . . when all these people make me do things that everybody knows can't be done?" It is we who make the ego-self a humbug wizard by expecting it to do what it can't.

The Zen of Oz: Ten Spiritual Lessons from Over the Rainbow is based on the movie. In it Joey Green analyzes the story in terms of ten Eastern qualities: karma; the inner spark (atma); the Yellow Brick Road, "a path paved with the promise of golden opportunity" (marga); spiritual essence, pure consciousness, or intelligence (buddhi); doing good for others (altruism); courage (virya); self-surrender (vairagya or nishkama karma); energy (prana); the guru; and Enlightenment. In this reading, Glinda is a Zen Master, Dorothy a chela, and "Follow the Yellow Brick Road" her mantra.

Not all recent interpretations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz are general symbolic readings like the two books mentioned above. Some are more personal. The latter sort is exemplified by The Wisdom of Oz, whose author is a great-granddaughter of Frank Baum, Gita Dorothy Morena. Her given name was "Dorothy," but in the course of her own journey through Oz, she adopted the name "Gita" or "song." The combination of the two names, Eastern and Western, together signifying "The song that is the gift of God," is a sign of the linkage of Eastern and Western wisdom in Oz that would surely have pleased Frank Baum.

Gita Dorothy reads the Oz story as a psychological allegory with special reference to the challenges in her own life and the path she followed on her own Yellow Brick Road of personal discovery. She is a psychological counselor who uses the Oz myth in her practice. The story, as reflected in her life, thus becomes a model for her readers. The book also contains photographs of four generations of the Baums and a final note from the author's mother, Ozma Baum Mantele, named for the Princess of Oz.

Another work that treats the Oz myth primarily not as a story, but as a framework for psychological exploration is Golden Wizdom beyond the Emerald City: A Conscious Journey to Wholeness by Ilene Kimsey. In it, eight characters from the story articulate what they have discovered about themselves in Oz. They are Dorothy, Toto, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Lion, the "Witch of Celebration" (a.k.a. the Good Witch of the North), the "Witch of Transformation" (a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West), and the Wizard. These characters are roles we all fill, members of an inner Emerald Council that can serve as mentors to our outer selves. The book also includes fifty Golden Touchstones, or aphorisms for contemplation and internalization.

What, then, is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz--a fairy tale for children, a fantasy world for adults, an allegory of spiritual archetypes, or a guidebook for therapeutic techniques? It is, to be sure, all of those, and more. But how did Frank Baum come to write a book that appears to be all things to all readers? That question is addressed in admirable detail by Nancy Tystad Koupal in Baum's Road to Oz: The Dakota Years.

Frank Baum spent only a few years in Aberdeen, Dakota Territory, arriving there on September 20, 1888 (just one month to the day before the first volume of H. P. Blavatsky's most important book, The Secret Doctrine, came off the press), and leaving in the spring of 1891, about the time of Blavatsky's death. Baum's two and a half or so years in Aberdeen were, however, important times for him and presaged his future. In the Aberdeen weekly newspaper he edited for fourteen months, he acknowledged his familiarity with Theosophy and alienated some of his readers and neighbors with his unconventional views.

Nancy Koupal recognizes Theosophy's seminal importance for Baum:

Baum had not formed his ideas about religion within the local community but under the longstanding influence of his mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage of Fayetteville, New York. A well-known supporter of woman suffrage, . . . Gage, who became a member of the Theosophical Society in 1885, had long been sharing its magazine, the Path, among family and friends. Sending a recent issue to her son T. Clarkson Gage in Aberdeen in 1887, for example, she reported that Baum's wife Maud and other members of his family, who then resided in Syracuse, New York, were reading Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled (1877) and other texts on Esoteric Buddhism and eagerly anticipating Blavatsky's forthcoming book The Secret Doctrine (1888). [66]

The "Editor's Musings" [in Baum's newspaper] began as a weekly feature, occupying a prominent place on the editorial page. . . . He began with a topic that would become increasingly important to him through the year and in the rest of his life--Theosophy. . . . In ways small and large, the ideas of Theosophy permeate most of Baum's "Editor's Musings" columns [which are reprinted on pages 107-33 of Koupal's book]. [62 -63]

Evidence also supports the fact that Baum's interest in the East and its religions was operating strongly at the time that he was creating The Wizard of Oz. He and his wife joined the Theosophical Society in 1892. . . . [Mabel] Collins was another of the modern authors that Baum mentions. . . . In 1896 or 1897, Gage, who was living with the Baums in Chicago, recorded that Frank had acquired the book The Astral Plane by C. W. Leadbeater. [72-3]

It is clear that, whatever else it may be, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is an expression in archetypal symbols of the Theosophical ideas that occupied Frank Baum's attention during the ten years before the publication of the book. That thesis is explored elsewhere: John Algeo, "A Notable Theosophist: L. Frank Baum," American Theosophist 74 (1986): 270 -3, and "The Wizard of Oz: The Perilous Journey," American Theosophist 74 (1986): 291 -7, reprinted in Quest 6.2 (Summer 1993): 48 -55; both are on the Web site www.theosophical.org under "The Wizard of Oz: Archetypes and Metaphysics."

John Algeo is Professor Emeritus of English from the University of Georgia and National President of the Theosophical Society in America.

Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum. By Michael O. Riley. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. Hardback, $29.95; paperback, $15.95, xiv + 286 pages.

Secrets of the Yellow Brick Road: A Map for the Modern Spiritual Journey Based on The Wizard of Oz. By Jesse Stewart. Hygiene, CO: SunShine Press, 1997. Paperback, $14.00, 175 pages.

The Zen of Oz: Ten Spiritual Lessons from Over the Rainbow. By Joey Green. Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1998. Hardback, $16.95. 140 pages.

The Wisdom of Oz. By Gita Dorothy Morena. San Diego: Inner Connections Press, 1998. Paperback, $15.95, 232 pages.

Golden Wizdom beyond the Emerald City: A Conscious Journey to Wholeness. By Ilene Kimsey. Loveland, CO: Toto-ly Ozsome Publishing, 2000. Paperback, $21.95, 239 pages.

Baum's Road to Oz: The Dakota Years. Ed. Nancy Tystad Koupal. Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2000. Hardback, $29.95; paperback, 15.95, [vi] + 182 pages.

The Wizard of Oz on Theosophy

Originally printed in the November-December 2000 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Baum, Frank. "The Wizard of Oz on Theosophy." Quest 88.6 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2000): pg 223.

By L. Frank Baum

Lyman Frank Baum (1851-1919), author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and prototype of the Wizard himself, joined the Theosophical Society along with his wife, Maud Gage, on September 4, 1892. Their membership records are in the archives of the Theosophical Society with headquarters in Pasadena, California (kindly made available by Grace F. Knoche and Kirby Van Mater).

The Baums joined the Society while they were living in Chicago, about eight years before he published what was to become the best-known American children's book. But Frank knew about Theosophy earlier than that, doubtless first learning of it from his mother-in-law, the noted feminist, Matilda Joslyn Gage, who herself had joined the Society on March 26, 1885. Not only did Frank Baum know about Theosophy, but he also wrote about it more than two years before he joined the Society and ten years before he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

For fourteen months (January 25, 1890, to March 21, 1891), Baum published and edited a South Dakota weekly newspaper called The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. Baum frequently contributed to the paper a feature he called "The Editor's Musings." The following is that feature from the very first issue of the newspaper under his editorship. It shows, not only his knowledge of Theosophy, but the Theosophical frame of mind with which he viewed the world.

The Editor's Musings

The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, January 25, 1890]

The age of Faith is sinking slowly into the past; the age of Unfaith becomes an important problem of to-day. Is there in this a menace to Christianity? This unfaith is not the atheism of the last century. It is rather an eager longing to penetrate the secrets of Nature--an aspiration for knowledge we have been taught is forbidden.

* * *

Many ages ago Budda came to enlighten the civilization of the East.

The pure and beautiful doctrines he taught made ready converts, and to-day his followers outnumber those of any other religion.

To the fierce and warlike tribes of Arabia, Mohammed appeared. His gentleness and bravery tamed their fierce natures. They followed him implicitly, as millions of their descendants follow him still.

Confucius with ready sophistry promulgated a "religion of reason."

His works are to this day the marvel of all intelligent people; his myriads of disciples have never wavered in their faith.

The sweet and tender teachings of Christ, together with the touching story of his life, have sunk deeply into the hearts of those nations which rank highest in modern civilization.

In their separate domains all these religions flourish to day. Their converts are firm and unflinching, their temples cover the land, and each in its own way sends praises to a common Creator--a Universal God.

* *

Yet in every nation there is a certain element in society which acknowledges no religion and is bound by no faith.

* *

Amongst the various sects so numerous in America today who find their fundamental basis in occultism, the Theosophist stand pre-eminent both in intelligence and point of numbers.

The recent erection of their new temple in New York City has called forth the curiosity of the many, the uneasiness of the few. Theosophy is not a religion. Its followers are simply "searchers after Truth." Not for the ignorant are the tenets they hold, neither for the worldly in any sense. Enrolled within their ranks are some of the grandest intellects of the Eastern and Western worlds.

Purity in all things, even to asceticism is absolutely required to fit them to enter the avenues of knowledge, and the only inducement they offer to neophites is the privilege of "searching for the Truth" in their company.

As interpreted by themselves they accept the teachings of Christ, Budda and Mohammed, acknowledging them Masters or Mehetmas, true prophets each in his generation, and well versed in the secrets of Nature. But the truth so earnestly sought is not yet found in its entirety, or if it be, is known only to the privileged few.

* * *

The Theosophists, in fact, are the dissatisfied of the world, the dissenters from all creeds. They owe their origin to the wise men of India, and are numerous, not only in the far famed mystic East, but in England, France, Germany and Russia. They admit the existence of a God--not necessarily a personal God. To them God is Nature and Nature God.

We have mentioned their high morality; they are also quiet and unobtrusive, seeking no notoriety, yet daily growing so numerous that even in America they may be counted by thousands. But, despite this, if Christianity is Truth, as our education has taught us to believe, there can be no menace to it in Theosophy.

Depriving Death of its Victim

Originally printed in the November-December 2000 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Conwell, Allistair. "Depriving Death of its Victim." Quest 88.6 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2000): pg 234-235.

By Alistair Conwell

So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men: and Death once dead, there's no more dying then.
--William Shakespeare

When the Lord of Death beckons, will you go kicking, screaming and biting? Or will you calmly accept the fact that your sojourn on this physical plane has ended--for the time being at least? If the first scenario is more apt, take heart because the vast majority of people in the Western world harbor a grotesque fear of death. The medical profession has even coined the word thanatophobia, which is derived from the Greek word thanatos meaning "death," for this universal phobia.

Many people, when asked, may say they do not fear death at all, but instead fear the painful or frightening circumstances that may result in death. Articulating such a view, the comedian Woody Allen said, "I'm not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens." But consider this: the mind cannot easily conceive of its own mortality. Sigmund Freud believed that, in our unconscious, every one of us is convinced of our own immortality (Reanney 1995).

Psychologist Gregory Zilboorg elucidates further, "If this fear [of death] were as constantly conscious, we should not be able to function normally. It must be properly repressed to keep us living with any modicum of comfort. . . . We may take it for granted that the fear of death is always present in our mental functioning. . . . No one is free of the fear of death" (Reanney 1995).

So whether one is capable of acknowledging one's fear of death or not, arriving at some understanding of this fear is important for two reasons. Firstly, all fear, without exception, is based on ignorance; and secondly, the way we approach death is directly related with how we approach life. As Russian Orthodox bishop, Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh asserts, "Death is the touchstone of our attitude to life. . . . If we are afraid of death we will never be prepared to take ultimate risks; we will spend our life in a cowardly, careful, and timid manner. It is only if we can face death, make sense of it, determine its place and our place in regard to it, that we will be able to live in a fearless way and to the fullness of our ability" (Cohn-Sherbok and Lewis 1995).

So where does our fear of death stem from?

Some scholars contend that it is something that we are taught as children. Such a view was presented in an essay entitled "Education in Thanatology," coauthored by Gary J. Grad from Columbia University and Sir Stephen V. Gullo, who wrote, "We are not born with a fear of death; we learn it from the taboos of silence and fear transmitted by our families and society as a whole" (Rogo 1990).

This view is shared by author and parapsychologist D. Scott Rogo, who writes, "Most people in Western societies fear death with a phobic terror. This lamentable situation isn't strange since we live in a death-denying culture where death is constantly divorced from the everyday realities of life. Popular illustrations of this widespread denial don't seem difficult to find. Death is a subject most people refuse to discuss in polite conversation, while the dying are usually shunted off to hospitals or rest homes, conveniently out of sight and out of mind from the standpoint of their relatives. We even try to shield our children from the simple reality of death on the misguided premise that we're doing them a favor" (Rogo 1990).

Our fear of death may be linked with the concept we have of our selves, our ego-self. The late Darryl Reanney believed that three of our most common fears (vertigo, a fear of falling from a height; claustrophobia, a fear of closed spaces; and agoraphobia, a fear of open spaces) are all metaphors for our fear of death. Many thanatologists agree that the basis of our fear of death is a fear of losing our ego-self. Although some people may say that what they fear is the pain associated with death, or the indignity from a terminal illness, or the "final judgment," or losing their friends and relatives, or even the unknown, all these reasons involve a strong sense of ego-self.

Our fear of death and our denial of that fear are deeply rooted in the human psyche. Astronomer-physicist David Darling sums up this point when he observes, "We fear death for many reasons. We fear the possibility of pain because we see it in the faces of others, the agony and angst of terminal cancer. We fear death's unpredictability, its awesome power to bring in an instant an end to everything we have lived and worked for. We fear the death of loved ones--parents, spouses and children. But above all else we fear the loss of ourselves" (Darling 1995).

So, if the basis of our thanatophobia is a fear of losing ourselves, we need to be clear about what the self really is. And, moreover, we need to understand what it is about the self that we are so terrified to part with.

The "self" referred to here is the "little" self or I-centered awareness, which is ultimately illusory and ephemeral. It is not the deathless Great Self, or the spark of the Divine inherent in all beings. This little self, in fact, creates the biggest problems for us in terms of our spiritual progress because it is this self that succeeds in blanketing the Divine Spark in a thick, seemingly impenetrable veil of darkness born of ignorance.

"I am this. I am that," we often say. But really what is that "I"? On close reflection, we find that the "I" is really no more than a collection of attachments to the experiences of life. For it is only through this "I," functioning in the physical body with its five senses, that we can experience sensual life. The "I" becomes attached to the physical body and those pleasant experiences, which it soon begins to crave. And equally soon, the "I" is repulsed by unpleasant experiences that it has endured. But these habit-forming attachments succeed in separating us from the total cosmic experience.

We are, without doubt, creatures of habit. Just reflect for a moment on all that you have done so far today, or yesterday, and it is certain that you will find that many of the things you did, said, and thought were a result of habit. Habits dictate what we eat, what we drink, where we go, how we speak, what clothes we wear, what time we go to sleep, what time we wake up, and so on. Our habits, or our attachments, are ultimately the basis for our concept of "I." And it is these attachments that bind us to the physical body. Naturally, the prospect of losing the body at death, which we have become so attached to over the course of a lifetime, must elicit fear because we will no longer have the means to feed our entrenched habits.

Asceticism is no solution to the problem of habit. A normally functioning sense of self is necessary to perform everyday duties in our homes and workplaces. But while we perform our duties to employers, families, and friends, the challenge is not to become chained to these relationships. Once chained by the bonds of attachment, we become a slave to the ego-self. And while we remain slaves of the ego-self, we will continue to harbor a fear of death.

If we can succeed in negating the ego-self, we have the opportunity to experience consciousness as it really is--not as an individualistic, selfish experience but rather as a holistic and unified awareness of inherently interdependent spiritual entities of pure consciousness. It is with this understanding and knowing that we can begin to plumb the depths of the concept of spiritual Love.

All ancient spiritual traditions emphasize the importance of Love. In the Indian tradition Love is expressed as ahimsa, or nonviolence, not only toward other humans but also toward all other creatures we share this planet with. Similarly, Jesus' quintessential message was "Love thy neighbor." Unconditional love is perhaps the most selfless action we can perform because, while we unconditionally love something, we forget the self. And when there is no self, there is nothing that can die.

This is a message that has echoed through all religions and all ages. It is advice that many have heard but few have successfully assimilated. If it can be assimilated into our lives, then we will be truly liberated from the clutches of death. As David Darling aptly summarizes, "The message is clear: if we can learn to see through the illusion of self now, in this life, then the 'I' who can die no longer exists. Death is deprived of its victim, so that the basis for fear and sorrow of death is undermined. We become part of a much larger process--the totality of being--that has no start or end."

References

Cohn-Sherbok, Daniel, and Christopher Lewis, eds. 1995. Beyond Death: Theological and Philosophical Reflections on Life after Death. New York: St. Martin's.

Darling, David J. 1995. After Life: In Search of Cosmic Consciousness. London: Fourth Estate.

Reanney, Darryl C. 1995. After Death: A New Future for Human Consciousness. New York: Morrow.

Rogo, D. Scott. 1990. Beyond Reality: The Role Unseen Dimensions Play in Our Lives. San Francisco: Thorsons.

Born in India, Alistair Conwell grew up in Perth, Australia, where he lives and is writing a book on the spiritual importance of death. His articles have been published in Yoga International and several Australian journals.

Christian Ritual in Theosophical Perspective

Originally printed in the November-December 2000 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Ellwood, Robert. "Christian Ritual in Theosophical Perspective." Quest 88.6 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2000): pg 225-227.

By Robert Ellwood

Theosophical Society - Robert Ellwood is emeritus professor of religion at the University of Southern California and a former vice-president of the Theosophical Society in America. He currently resides at the Krotona School of Theosophy. Christianity, like all traditional religion, is permeated by ritual. This is the case whether one thinks of a Quaker meeting--where participants sit in silence until the Spirit moves someone to speak, and the gathering lasts for exactly one hour, after which all shake hands and rise--or a typical Protestant service--centering on hymns, scripture reading, prayer, and sermon--or worship of the Catholic sort--whether Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, or that small denomination related to Theosophy, the Liberal Catholic Church, with its colorful vestments, bells, incense, and genuflections.

In the last analysis, ritual may be thought of as any words or action done in a religious setting that have special meaning pertaining to the setting. From the Catholic sign of the cross to Pentecostal speaking in tongues, the ritual words and actions denote divine power and presence to those within the tradition, while those same religious acts appear meaningless if not absurd to those on the outside. The purpose here is to look at the words and gestures, inflections of voice and silences, of the Christian religion in its tremendous diversity from the point of view of key Theosophical ideas. First, however, we need to remind ourselves of a few background Theosophical concepts.

The Ancient Wisdom, hidden in the heart of the world's religions, speaks with many voices. For religion itself is not one thing. One form of expression is the myths and stories that make up the narratives of a religion's significant times past. Another is the initiations, rightly made much of by Theosophical writers, that can bring individuals into those changes of consciousness by which the same religion's truths can be understood on a deep level. A third is its rituals and ceremonial. These three forms are ultimately unified, for ritual can enact myth and, in so doing, initiate participants into a profounder comprehension of its eternal meaning. Ritual can make that which it enacts into timeless reality, repeated generation after generation, continuously born anew in human consciousness.

The historian of religion S. G. F. Brandon has called religion a "ritual perpetuation of the past." While I would not say that is the only function of religion, it is certainly an important part of its essence. A religion always comes to us as something out of the past, a tradition and language which may or may not totally jibe with present mundane realities, but which may seem all the more significant--or irrelevant--because it is like a powerful alternative to the values and worldviews of the present-day marketplace, academy, or community. Right or wrong, it gives life a dimension of depth by offering a second opinion, as it were, one grounded outside the one-dimensionality of the present but with roots in Shakespeare's "dark backward and abysm of time."

That is the way religion has virtually always been. From the prophets and saints of old to contemporary pulpit and altar, religion has set against the allegedly decadent world around it the ideal of an ancient truth now half-forgotten. In this, it has a key notion in common with the Theosophical idea of the Ancient Wisdom. The difference is that Theosophy sees the lost touchstone of moral and intellectual truth more or less equally distributed in the esotericism of all religions, while of those religions, each naturally favors itself as the premier bearer of the light. Specific religions, being grounded in the particular historical moments of their origin, center their tokens of remembering on that time, though often with nods to other significant events in history. So it is that the Muslim rite of pilgrimage to Mecca perpetuates through many gestures the Prophet's last visit to that holy city, and the rite most sacred in most Christian denominations, the Holy Communion, ritually perpetuates, and brings back to us, the last days of Jesus' life.

Ritual works because the past, whether in religion or the significant moments in our own individual pasts about which we feel most deeply, cannot be brought back whole and entire, but the power and poignancy of sacred moments now gone may be evoked by a simple symbol or token: a single photograph of a beloved face, a single souvenir of an unforgettable event. In the same way, for believers, what might be called "condensed symbols" of sacred times and events deep in the past can call them up into the present: a few words of scripture, the tiny bits of bread and wine used in Holy Communion. A great religious service, whether (as in Christianity) a high mass or a powerful revival meeting, may be termed an "orchestration of symbols," for it combines such tokens in many media--music, visual, even touch, taste, and smell--to create for the duration of the service a kind of religious sub-universe in which symbols in all directions support the religious worldview and make it live for those susceptible to its power.

From the point of view of orthodox interpretations of the Christian religion, however, more than just manipulation of symbols occurs in the most sacred rites and occasions of the faith. The symbols of the Eucharist, as the bread and wine are consecrated to become the Body and Blood of Christ, and the rhetoric of fervent preaching, recalling the saving words and deeds of the same Christ, are also actual means of grace. They are concrete vessels of matter and word by which the overcoming power of God reaches into the world to touch individuals and do for them what they cannot do for themselves--lose the burden of their sins and become new persons purified by divine power. While God's power cannot be limited to any particular instrument, from the orthodox perspective, word and sacrament are uniquely ordained by Christ to be the chief mediums of divine grace working at ground level, as it were, in this murky world.

The outlook of the Ancient Wisdom or Theosophy would not put it quite that way. It considers that the Wisdom has means of expressing itself in all religions, and it also takes karma into account as it contemplates and honors the possible transformation of individual human lives for the better. But it can, I believe, take a position that affirms the immense power that worship and ritual can have in the work of teaching and transforming the world and all the beings in it.

That position begins with the idea of thought forms, so vividly described in the celebrated book of that title by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater. This work tells us that intense feeling and cogitation form energy patterns on the inner planes inside and around us. The etheric, astral, and mental bodies--which are as much parts of us as the physical and also represent corresponding universal planes of being--change color, form, and degree of opening to outside benign or malignant influences according to the nature of the energy within. It follows that if thought-forms themselves can be in any way shaped by corporate actions like worship, then the nature and purpose of that worship is not something to be taken lightly. It matters a great deal if an individual or a gathering let loose in the world thought forms that are expansive and open to good influxes, or twisted so as to be narrow and ugly and open only to the worst.

This was the attitude taken toward Christian belief and worship and their associated thought forms by a group of remarkable Theosophical and Christian writers in the first half of the twentieth century, above all Besant, Leadbeater, and Geoffrey Hodson. No doubt the greatest and most influential text to come from them is Leadbeater's book The Science of the Sacraments. The idea was to preserve the basic forms of traditional Christianity, but to put new wine into its old wineskins, the new wine being the new (and also immemorially old) essence of the Ancient Wisdom as transmitted by the modern Theosophical movement.

With the new doctrines came a new way of understanding the meaning of traditional Christian worship based on the concept of thought forms and all that stems from it. To these writers, traditional Christianity meant Christianity in its Catholic or Anglican form, but I believe that many of the principles they developed could be applied to its Eastern Orthodox, Protestant, and even Pentecostal versions; much interesting and important work remains to be done in this area.

These writers saw that the basic doctrines of historic Christianity are quite compatible with the fundamental principles of the Ancient Wisdom, so long as they are seen as mythological or story expressions of that which is always true, and they were willing to see those truths as manifested with particular clarity in the person and life of Jesus. This approach is often called esoteric Christianity. They emphasized that the three persons of the Christian Trinity--the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--represented the three eternal outpourings of creation in Theosophical lore: the Spirit brooding over the face of the waters in the Genesis creation myth is the first outpouring, which gives life to the unformed chaos of inert matter; the Son, who is also according to the Gospel of St. John the Logos or creative word of God, is the second outpouring, which gives pattern or form to the universe that the Spirit has quickened with life; and the Father represents the impartation of the innermost hidden spiritual principle, which finally endows all created beings with the light of supreme knowledge.

The incarnation of the Logos in Jesus the Christ is a token of the Theosophical involution and evolution of spirit within the world of matter. The crucifixion and death of Jesus on the "cross of matter" indicates the terrible limitations of matter alone. And his resurrection displays the possibility of the transformation of matter into a glorious expression of Spirit and foretells the ultimate return of the body of spirit and matter back to the Halls of Light, which are its eternal home.

Coming to Christian worship, the esoteric Christians held that the traditional forms of worship, above all those of the Eucharist, expressed the gist of ideas about the Trinity and the Incarnation in symbolic form. But they went much beyond the notion of symbolic expression to maintain also that the Christian rite, especially when well enacted and well supported by constructive thoughts on the part of all worshipers, creates thought-forms that are vessels and channels of the divine powers evoke by those exalted ideas.

The Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Communion, so much debated by theologians over the centuries, they said to be certainly true. But it is not done by magic, or by some special power that God arbitrarily assigns to one church only. Nor is the Presence of Christ in the bread and wine only a symbol of the inward faith of individual believers, as many Protestants would contend. Rather, in the esoteric Christian view, the Real Presence is made possible by the collective work of the worshipers, whose thought forms build channels by which what was in Christ is communicated to us today.

It must be acknowledged that Christianity has not always had a favorable image among Theosophists. In her writings, Helena Blavatsky not seldom castigated that faith for the narrow-mindedness and limited outlook of most of its leading lights, from the church fathers to eminent theologians of her own day. Quite justifiably, she was appalled by the brutality of religious persecution done in the name of Christianity and by the tactics of the zealous but ill-informed Christian missionaries she encountered in India and elsewhere. Frequently, she found occasion to contrast the meager intellectual resources of that faith, as she knew it, with the wisdom of Hinduism and Buddhism, which was fuller because closer to the deep wells of the Ancient Wisdom.

These sorties against Christianity had a necessary place in the Theosophical program of Blavatsky's day. It was important that Christianity, then riding high as the nominal religion of Earth's masters in the heyday of European imperialism, be made to realize it was not immune to criticism and like all other religions was, in its human form, fallible and subject to the vicissitudes of history. Christian individuals of good will had to be led to see the immense value of the Eastern faiths. They had to be brought to realize the ways in which other religions complemented their own, and in some respects probed more deeply into the mysteries of reality than did nineteenth-century versions of Christianity.

At the same time, Blavatsky always spoke well of Jesus himself, considering him at the least a great initiate, although--like most others--a misunderstood one. She also had a high regard for the ancient Gnostic version of Christianity, albeit widely regarded in her day as heretical. All this suggests there might be a way in which Christianity could be reconstructed to be compatible with the deepest insights of Theosophy, and moreover become for some people a vehicle for the transmission of those insights and the powers latent in them.

The contention of the esoteric Christian school of Theosophy has been that, once the necessary work of shearing Christianity of unwarranted pretensions and dogmatism had been done by Blavatsky and her school, a new version of the faith of Jesus--Gnostic, esoteric, close to the wisdom of Jesus, rich in myth and ritual and the right understanding thereof--could arise. I believe that is so, and that such a Christianity will appear in all its beauty before the inner eyes of those for whom it is the right spiritual path and who are prepared to see the inner side of things.

References

Besant, Annie, and C. W. Leadbeater. Thought-Forms. Abridged ed. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1969. Original ed. pub. 1901.

Leadbeater, Charles Webster. The Science of the Sacraments. Adyar, Madras, India: Theosophical Publishing House, 1988. First ed. 1920.

Robert Ellwood, Emeritus Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California, has been a member of the Theosophical Society since 1976. He is a priest in the Liberal Catholic Church and has published, among other books, The Cross and the Grail: Esoteric Christianity for the 21st Century (Quest Books, 1997).

Quest Magazine

Walking the Path With William Wordsworth

Oz as Myth and Mysticism

The Wizard of Oz on Theosophy

Depriving Death of its Victim

Christian Ritual in Theosophical Perspective

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