Quest Magazine

Theosophy and the Study of Religion
Edited by Charles M. Stang and Jason Ananda Josephson Storm
Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2024. 364 pp., hardcover, $191.

Scholars of Western esotericism have increasingly been exploring Theosophy as a source of cultural influence. Although much of this work is uneven and characterized by a certain academic myopia, on the whole they treat Theosophy and its leading figures thoughtfully and respectfully.

The latest entry in this category is Theosophy and the Study of Religion, a collection of academic essays. Themes discussed are “Theosophy, Early Christianity, and the Question of Origins,” “Theosophy and Race,” “Theosophy and Asian Religions,” and “Theosophy and Language.”

As expected, “Theosophy and Race” is the weakest section. One could summarize its conclusions thus: “We just know that there is racism in Theosophy, although we can’t exactly put our finger on where.” Theosophical works are blamed for fueling racist discourse in the early twentieth century, although this had any number of sources and influences, of which Theosophy was far from the strongest. By this view, the central goal of the Theosophical Society—the universal brotherhood of humanity “without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color”—is mere window dressing.

The section on Christianity displays a certain obliviousness, sometimes suggesting that the early Theosophists were more original than they were or claimed to be. Denise Kimber Buell’s “Modern Theosophy’s Legacy in New Testament and Early Christian Studies” says, “This formulation, ‘Christ in you,’ is crucial for theosophists,” citing Annie Besant’s Esoteric Christianity and Anna Kingsford’s Perfect Way. Buell makes it sound as if Besant and Kingsford had come up with this idea, but (as they themselves contended) it has been central to Christian mysticism from the beginning.

Similarly, in “A Theosophical History of Religions,” Olav Hammer writes, “Every religion, in Blavatsky’s view, presents an exoteric version of teachings to ordinary believers, and another, esoteric, aspect to a spiritually advanced elite”—as if she had cooked up this idea, which goes at least as far back as classical antiquity.

Probably the most astounding omission is in Charles M. Stang’s “H.P. Blavatsky and Origen of Alexandria,” a comparison of HPB’s views with those of the third-century church father. In regard to reincarnation, Stang points out, correctly, that “Origen did espouse some sort of doctrine of rebirth, as part of a grand, cosmic evolution of fallen minds on their way back to the embrace of their divine source.” But Stang fails to mention that Origen emphatically distinguished the Christian concept of resurrection from reincarnation: in fact he repeatedly denies and mocks “the foolish doctrine of reincarnation” (Contra Celsum 3.75)—a fact that is surely relevant to the discussion. Of course Blavatsky does not mention it either. No doubt Stang is right in saying that “Blavatsky’s knowledge of Origen and his writings was rather limited,” but one might have hoped for better from Stang.

Arthur Versluis’s “Theosophies and Asian Religions” discusses the connection of the theosophy of the seventeenth-century mystic Jacob Boehme with that of the Theosophical Society. Versluis cites Joscelyn Godwin’s view, expressed in his Theosophical Enlightenment, to the effect that “between Blavatskyan theosophy and its Christian offshoots and Böhmean theosophy there is virtually no continuity. Godwin is right about that,” Versluis concludes, without further explanation. One wonders why he bothered to write the article.

Two of the more valuable pieces vindicate certain claims about religious origins made by early Theosophists that were repudiated by the academics of their day. Wouter Hanegraaff discusses G.R.S. Mead’s contention in Thrice-Greatest Hermes that the Corpus Hermeticum reflected a genuine Egyptian inspiration rather than being, as scholarly opinion of the day held, a mishmash of Greek, Jewish, and Christian ideas. Scholars have come to agree with Mead (although, as Hanegraaff indicates, without crediting him). Even so, a reader goes away astonished by the amount of academic energy that has been expended to determine that, after all, the Hermetic texts were exactly what they claimed to be: a codification of Egyptian esoteric concepts in the language of the Greeks.

Michael Gomes’ article “Max Müller, Blavatsky, and the Esoteric Buddhism Debate” discusses the fraught relationship between Blavatsky and Müller, the most admired scholar of Indian religions of the late nineteenth century. Blavatsky declared the existence of an “esoteric Buddhism” (made famous by A.P. Sinnett’s 1883 book of that title), which Müller vehemently denied. According to Gomes, time has circled round to vindicate Blavatsky: “By the beginning of the twenty-first century Esoteric Buddhism was now a fixture in the Buddhist narrative.” Gomes concludes, “How well has Müller’s verdict on esoteric Buddhism held up? . . . Not well, at all.” But Gomes does not mention that this esoteric Buddhism—chiefly the Tibetan Vajrayana—bears little resemblance to the esoteric Buddhism of Blavatsky.

Perhaps the most important passage in this collection is in Isaac Lubelsky’s “Grounding the Celestial,” which describes the process by which present-day academic consensus was hashed out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: “In my understanding, the modern Western worldview, with its clear borders between the legitimate scientific and the non-scientific, was born out of the period described in this essay. Therefore the story of the Theosophical Society is an excellent example to this rift that ended with the creation of two rivaling fields, the theosophical one moved aside, in order to define the established scientific field and to enable its dominance. In other words, the scholar’s voice, or the historian’s voice in my case, is bound to use the same Western set of tools when interpreting the theosophical story. This voice is therefore by no means objective, and has, perhaps unfortunately, no other choice than to be critical, as long as it keeps the same scientific tendency that was born out of this struggle.”

Lubelsky’s frankness is refreshing. One wishes that other scholars in the field were more willing to admit how their views are skewed by their academic orientation. If this bias were merely a lack of emotional affinity, it might make no difference, but it often leads to mistakes and misconceptions even from a scholarly point of view. As a result, much of this literature must be read with caution and skepticism.

Richard Smoley

Printed in the  Fall 2024  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Keene, Douglas, "The Krotona Centenary"  Quest 112:4, pg 8-9

By Douglas Keene 

On April 21 of this year, the centenary celebration for Krotona Institute of Theosophy in Ojai, California, was held. During the week leading up to the event, there were classes on the topic of “From Inner to Outer Transformation.” The public was invited to activities on Saturday and Sunday, with the formal ceremony of public addresses performed on the Sunday afternoon. Talks were given by Linda Oliveira, a prominent Theosophical Society member from Australia, Betsy Stix, mayor of Ojai, TSA archivistr Janet Kerschner, and me. Here are my remarks. 

Good afternoon.

It is my pleasure to participate in the celebration of the centenary of the Krotona School in Ojai. I’ve been coming to programs at this facility for nearly three decades and am always inspired and uplifted by being on these grounds. This is a beautiful sanctuary, nestled in the hills of Ojai Valley, which those of us who spend time here have come to love and cherish.

I have many fond memories of coming to Krotona. I recall that I would often fly out for a program on the weekend from New Hampshire. I would take a 6 a.m. cross-country flight out of Boston early on Friday morning, which required me to get up at midnight or 1 a.m. Eastern time (which, of course, is three hours earlier here). I never slept well on planes, and therefore I could be up for a twenty-four-hour cycle by the time I attended the program that evening. I remember watching Joy Mills through blurry eyes until at last it was time to fall asleep. The weekend would fly by, and suddenly I was on a red-eye flight back home on Sunday night, landing in the early morning hours of Monday. I would sometimes try to work later in the day. Even though the travel was stressful, for the hours I was in Krotona, I felt rejuvenated and uplifted.

The TSA and Krotona divided in the early 1920s for a variety of reasons, with the Theosophical Society moving to Chicago and later Wheaton, Illinois, while the Esoteric School of Theosophy established itself in this location, now a hundred years ago. The Krotona Institute of Theosophy, also located here, has helped spread the message and deeper resonance of Theosophy and its fundamental principles to thousands over the years. The KIT has shared in the mission of the Theosophical Society, which is to “encourage open-minded inquiry into world religions, philosophy, science and the arts in order to understand the wisdom of the ages, respect the unity of all life, and help people explore spiritual self-transformation.”

The Krotona Institute and the TSA have had a sibling relationship for the last century. Like many siblings, we occasionally disagree but have always been mutually supportive and encouraging and have a deep devotion to each other. I have known KIT vice president and resident head Elena Dovalsantos most of the time she’s been living here—well before each of us held our present offices—and I believe our capacity to communicate and promote harmony within our two organizations is excellent. We share a message, which is to expand the teachings of the Ageless Wisdom and promote unity and compassion within our world today.           

How can we bring a shared vision of the future? First, by education. Through a series of diverse programs, we can share our experiences and teachings with a new generation and a wide array of individuals. In this time of global crisis, many are looking for depth of experience and understanding. The desires of the body and the lower mind begin to recede as we search for something more enduring, more real. One place to find these enduring principles is within the Theosophical tradition. When the news of daily events grinds us down, when the pursuit of popularity feels empty, we crave a deeper connection, a profound sense of purpose in our lives. People are seeking light, as they do in all ages and places. Although no one can provide final answers, much can be learned and shared.

Second, the teachings engender an attitude of altruism. When we recognize our unity with other human beings and with all life, it is natural to wish to be of benefit in some way, particularly to those who may be wanting in basic necessities, but also to those who are struggling with spiritual confusion or alienation.

Krotona is an oasis, but also a way station, where we learn to take our energies and abilities out into the greater world in an empathetic and practical sense. We each have something to share, even if it is only our own humanity, letting others know that they are not alone.

We must have eyes to look outward, to know what our place and work in the world is and will be. But we must also look inward in order to understand our inner nature, sense our unity, and see the divine path. We must know ourselves through self-reflection and self-evaluation. We must understand not only our desires and capacities, our instincts and intuition, but the deepest aspects of our nature and our links to divine aliveness. When our vision becomes clear, looking inwardly and outwardly, these two must be assimilated, working in harmony, as we unfold toward our greater potential.

Let us remember what Annie Besant has written: “Never forget that life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if you take it bravely and gallantly, as a splendid adventure in which you are setting out into an unknown country, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle.”

Krotona is about to embark on its second hundred years in Ojai. There is an enormous aptitude here for creating deep and profound programming and providing connecting experiences. It can bring understanding, harmony, and resonance to us in our often chaotic lives. These teachers can gather fellow seekers together and lift our consciousness so we can see and feel the oneness, the uniqueness, the intertwining of all of us. It is a valued treasure, a jewel, which radiates for us and beckons us to come and find the peace and stillness we seek.

Congratulations and best wishes for the next century.

Thank you very much.

Printed in the  Fall 2024  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "From the Editor's Desk"  Quest 112:4, pg 2

This issue is dedicated to Freemasonry. Since there are many articles and many points of view here, and since I am not a Mason myself, I will turn my attention to a major theme in Masonic myth: the Temple in Jerusalem. The Masons trace their legendary history to Hiram Abiff, by their account the builder of Solomon’s Temple. (The Bible says the builder was one Huram or Hiram.)

The construction of the actual Temple, under the biblical King Solomon, took place around the middle of the tenth century BC (the chronology for this period is shaky). It continued in use until it was sacked during the conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC.

After the Babylonian empire fell in turn to the Medes and the Persians, the Persian king Cyrus the Great authorized the reconstruction of the Temple, beginning in 539 BC. This time it continued in use for almost 600 years. In 23 BC, Herod the Great, king of Judea and a vassal of the Roman state, authorized a major expansion of the Temple, which took decades to finish. Its completion in AD 64—long after Herod’s death—created mass unemployment (the workmen had nothing more to work on) and social unrest, leading to a revolt against Roman rule and culminating in the Temple’s destruction in AD 70. (There must be a lesson in here somewhere.)

Herod built an enormous embankment for his Temple, supported by four massive retaining walls. The only significant remnant of this complex to survive is the western retaining wall, better known as the Wailing Wall, a focus of Jewish devotion to this day.

To the best anyone can determine, the site of the original Temple is now occupied by a Muslim shrine known as the Dome of the Rock. Hence any archaeological excavation of the site would achieve the nearly impossible feat of making tensions in that region even worse than they are.

In any case, it is not clear what an excavation would reveal. The account of the building of the first Temple under Solomon in 1 Kings 6 says that it was made of cedar and cypress covered with gold. If we assume that the Babylonians stripped off the gold and burned the wooden part afterward, there would be few remains to be seen, except perhaps for the foundations.

There might be more remains of the Second Temple, but for the same reason, these too are inaccessible. For a picture of what it was like, we have to rely on firsthand literary sources such as the Letter of Aristeas, usually dated to the second century BC. The text reveals some surprising facts: the author was particularly impressed by the elaborate plumbing system, installed “so that the blood of the sacrifices which is collected in great quantity is washed away in the twinkling of an eye.”

In his book The Temple of Jerusalem, scholar Simon Goldhill writes, “It is extremely difficult for a modern visitor to recapture . . .  the overpowering smell of the ancient Temple. It would have been a heady mixture of incense (which was burnt on a small altar), together with the distinctive odours of fresh blood, slaughtered carcasses, animal dung, roasting meat, and, no doubt, the smell of the crowd, all exacerbated by the heat of the sun in the open-air courts.” The Talmud cites as a miracle of the Temple that “no woman miscarried because of the aroma of the sacrificial meat.”

These details give a more rounded picture of a building that was, according to another source, “covered on all sides with massive plates of gold. When the sun came up, the people had to avert their eyes as if they were looking directly at the sun.”

H.P. Blavatsky gives quite a different account of the building of this Temple: “that the detailed description thereof in I Kings is purely allegorical, no serious scholar . . . can doubt. The building of the Temple of Solomon is the symbolical representation of the gradual acquirement of the secret wisdom, or magic; the erection and development of the spiritual from the earthly; the manifestation of the power and splendor of the spirit in the physical world, through the wisdom and genius of the builder.” Citing 1 Kings 6:7, she goes on: “This is the ‘Temple’ which can be reared without the sound of the hammer, or any tool of iron being heard in the house while it is ‘in building’” (Isis Unveiled 2:391, emphasis HPB’s).

These reflections lead me to some speculations of my own. Even if there was a physical counterpart, what if the real Temple was not a material building, but an enormous thought-form in the astral realm, constructed and painstakingly elaborated—possibly over centuries—by the meditations and visualizations of sages? (The same may be true of the legendary realm of Shambhala.)

If so, this Temple must be invulnerable to the blows of time and sledgehammers. But where in the invisible realms it is to be found, who can find it, and what they would find there—even if we grant my supposition, these would remain great mysteries.

Richard Smoley

Printed in the  Summer 2024  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard  "From the Editor's Desk" Quest 112:3, pg 2

Imagine a green lion—in any shape or size you like.

 Whatever you come up with, it is obviously a creation of your imagination and nothing more: green lions do not exist.

 But say you have some talent for cartooning. You draw some sketches of your green lion, give it an adorable name, and create a comic series about your imaginary friend. It sells very well, and a major studio buys the rights to make an animated film.

 Suddenly you have become very rich from something that, as we agreed above, doesn’t exist.

 This example points to the countless questions that come up about imagination.

Perhaps the most important one has to do with imagination versus perception. The ordinary view places these in two distinct categories: perception is of something in the real world, while imagination is just a figment of the mind.

Unfortunately this tidy distinction quickly falls apart under scrutiny.

We can begin with an esoteric example, discussed by Jay Kinney and Rasoul Sorkhabi in this issue: the views of Ibn ‘Arabi, the greatest of the Islamic metaphysicians, who taught the existence of what has been called the imaginal realm. This is the exact opposite of imagination as usually understood. It is an interior vision (like ordinary imagination), yet it is not of a fictive world. Rather, it is one that exists objectively on another plane of reality, accessible (a Theosophist might speculate) through the faculty of buddhi. The Neoplatonic philosopher Iamblichus expressed a similar concept: “The imaginative faculty is divinely inspired; and since it is roused into modes of imagination that come from the Gods, not from itself, it is utterly removed from what is ordinarily human.”

This matter is abstruse and far from ordinary experience: indeed we are unlikely to attain an experience of this imaginal realm except through rigorous mystical practice and devotion.

Yet as it turns out, even ordinary imagination raises problems. We conventionally distinguish imagination from reality—the latter term applied to experience that is obtained through the five familiar senses and is more or less publicly available: if I see a chair in the room, you will too. Such things are taken to be real in some objective sense.

But perception turns out to be like imagination: it is a mental construct. We do not see the world as it is (whatever that might be) but through the filters of the five senses, which are extremely constricted. Our eyes can see only a tiny bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum; our ears can hear only another. We have expanded the bandwidth through the apparatus of science, but there is no reason to believe that this apparatus gives a complete picture either; it merely expands the narrow slit through which we perceive the world.

What do we use to fill in the rest? Mental constructs. Although sensory perceptions are commonly regarded as objective (and in some naive way literally true), they are in their way figments of the mind just as imaginary objects are. As neuroscientist Donald Hoffman showed in his recent book The Case against Reality, the five senses have evolved principally to promote survival: to find food and avoid being found as food by other creatures. That is their value, and it is a great one, but we have no reason to believe that they give a complete picture.

The matter becomes still more complicated when we consider that perception is learned: we recognize an object because we have seen it before. This faculty is, again, useful but misleading: we frequently jump to mistaken conclusions about what we are seeing. In her recent book The Rationality of Perception, Harvard philosopher Susanna Siegel uses the term “hijacked perception” to describe such distortions, which, among other repercussions, play a major role in racial prejudice.

 All of this would be reasonably simple if the five senses were all that we had. Although this is usually assumed to be the case, it is not: we do possess powers of extrasensory perception, and they are more extensive than many believe. Theosophists are familiar with clairvoyance and can see representations of clairvoyant perception of auras in books like Man Visible and Invisible. Although very few have this power, most of us possess the same faculty, but it is expressed kinesthetically. Not many people see auras, but just about everyone can feel the atmosphere of a place or person: “That guy gives me the creeps.”

We could not say that these extrasensory senses give a picture of reality in an absolute sense either, but they are an important extension of our sensory capacities. It has been ruinous for the West to sneer at the idea of their existence. This may be one cause of the pandemic of mental illness that is ravaging America: if you were to see something with your eyes but were constantly told that you could not see it because your sight does not exist, you would go mad in short order.

The implications of these ideas are endless—certainly far more than can be broached in a one-page editorial. In any event, it seems clear that the distinction between objective and subjective—between the “real” and the imaginary—is far more intricate and paradoxical than is usually believed. We could even say with Ibn ‘Arabi that just as perception is in many ways a form of imagination, imagination can be a form of perception.

Richard Smoley