Quest Magazine

The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky

abridged and annotated by Michael Gomes
New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2009. 355 pages, paper, $17.95.

This new abridgment of The Secret Doctrine, the major work of H. P. Blavatsky, will be welcomed by students of Theosophy, whether beginners or advanced. The former will find here a manageable version of a book that can at first seem overwhelming and discouraging. Michael Gomes, librarian at the New York lodge of the Theosophical Society, has attained this goal by selecting key passages and characteristic essays so that The Secret Doctrine's basic structure and argument become readily apparent. Those who already have some familiarity with the text, on the other hand, will welcome the insightful introduction. They will also find in this version a useful inventory of the main points in the original work's awesome but sometimes mind-boggling account of the inner development of the universe and humanity.

Gomes's skill in the condensation of Theosophical classics was previously tested in his popular abridgment of Isis Unveiled, published by Quest Books in 1997. With its greater scope and amplitude, The Secret Doctrine presented an even more daunting challenge. Much had to be left out. Entire sections are reduced to a few concise lines, most quotations from other authors are dropped, and as Gomes states, "the sections on Science, dealing as they do with the concerns of nineteenth-century science, proved to be unsalvageable for this abridgment and they have been omitted."

What is left are a "Proem," which draws on lines from Blavatsky's preface, introduction, and proem alike, then the seven stanzas of the Book of Dzyan reproduced in the first volume of the original (entitled Cosmogenesis) with abbreviated commentary for each, plus the twelve stanzas reproduced in the second, Anthropogenesis volume, with further commentary. These are followed by Gomes's part three, which he calls "The Mystery Language of the Initiates." This includes short versions of most of the chapters in part two of the original volume one—which Blavatsky entitled "The Evolution of Symbolism in Its Approximate Order"—plus three comparable pieces from parts two and three of the original volume two, "The Archaic Symbolism of the World-Religions" and "Addenda." Finally, there is material from the very useful "Summing Up" section from the end of volume one, part one, of the original. Gomes has also provided an index, offering helpful identifications of unfamiliar names and terms.

It is always easy to quibble over the selection in books like this. I miss the dramatic and familiar opening lines of the original proem: "An Archaic Manuscript—a collection of palm leaves made impermeable to water, fire, and air, by some unknown process—is before the writer's eye." But Gomes has done the work and made the choices. By and large they are good, and I respect them.

I would like to suggest two possibilities for future editions of this work, which I am confident will long remain in print and go through many editions. One is that the selections be precisely identified by original part and chapter name and number, and preferably also by page numbers in the standard Theosophical Publishing House edition, so that students intrigued by a particular passage and wanting to read more, but not totally at home in the original, can easily find it in the source. This is particularly important since the material is not always in the original order or under the original heading.

Second, I think it would be helpful if, in addition to his excellent introduction, Gomes were to provide concise paragraph introductions to some if not all the selections, summarizing them in accessible contemporary language and in terms of current ideas. This might be particularly important in the case of some of the more challenging Anthropogenesis material. This would make Gomes's valuable work even more engaging to present-day seekers. The clean, easy to read appearance of the present pages, with Blavatsky's often lengthy notes, notorious digressions, and other apparatus deleted, is admirable, but just a little more support for readers would add to their usefulness.

Gomes is to be commended for doing this job in the elegant, painstaking way one would expect from him. His is a book every Theosophist and spiritual explorer ought to have at hand, to pick up for adventures in occult knowledge at odd moments, which will often turn into hours. Reading Gomes's abridgment of The Secret Doctrine will add to the student's store of wisdom and to his or her appreciation of the original. Many will eventually be led back to the original by way of this introduction.

Robert Ellwood

The reviewer 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.

Thriving in the Crosscurrent: Clarity and Hope in a Time of Cultural Sea Change

Jim Kenney
Wheaton: Quest, 2010. 253 pages, paper, $16.95.

In this book, Jim Kenney outlines the shift of values and structures as humanity moves into the Age of Aquarius. “We live in a time of transition from mechanistic and reductionist models of experience to models that may be characterized as holistic,” he tells us.

Kenney calls this period of transition a “sea change”—that rare time when old values and beliefs withdraw and a new wave of values and beliefs arise. He uses the image of two waves on the ocean of life. “Imagine an ocean moment: two waves converging in the same time and space. One is powerful but subsiding, the other just gathering momentum and presence but not yet cresting. At the moment of their meeting they are nearly equal in amplitude and influence. As they cross, who can say which is rising, which descending? In that moment only the chaos of wave interference exists. . . . What we are experiencing today is the seemingly chaotic complexity of a genuine sea change.”

As Kenney argues, it is necessary for leaders to discern the differences between the incoming and the outgoing waves. The newer wave has momentum and direction on its side. As Ewert Cousins, an observer of religious trends, writes, “Forces which have been at work for centuries, have in our day reached a crescendo that has the power to draw the human race into a global network and the religions of the world into a global spiritual community.”

The New Age wave has cumulative power, as countless independent variations in thought and action begin to converge. “As activists around the world have learned, the paths that lead to peace, justice and ecological sustainability are intimately intertwined.” The New Age draws much of its energy from its emphasis on synergy—parts working together for the common good. As the anthropologist Gregory Bateson has written, our task is to discover “the pattern that connects,” the wholeness underlying the diversity. This implies thinking in terms of patterns and wholeness, of interconnections and reawakening.

There are four clusters of attitudes and practices that are the marks of the new wave: nonviolent conflict resolution, universal human rights, social and economic justice, and ecological sustainability. As these continue to gain power, Kenney writes, negative aspects of the old wave will lose amplitude; these include the legitimacy of war and imperialism, racism and patriarchy, the exploitation of the majority for the benefit of a powerful minority, and pollution and the exploitation of nature.

The new values and practices thus threaten established structures of power. The opposition to the new wave is centered in the determination of the old holders of power to preserve the structures of wealth and influence that have served them so well. Thus, Kenney observes, “militants are to be found at every point of resistance to real cultural evolutionary advance. Their world view is simplistic but powerfully motivating. It takes shape in antipathy, in the creation of lists of enemies responsible for the cultural disempowerment and disorientation that poison their lives.”

Nonetheless, Kenney says, the defenders of the old age are on “the wrong side of history.” There is an ever-growing network of groups, nongovernmental organizations, intergovernmental agencies, and committed individuals who are striving every day to build a better world on the basis of cooperation, fairness, solidarity, and creativity. New forms of society are being assembled.

As Kenney has written, “in the context of human cultural advance, we can predict the emergence of progressive new values in every key sector but not their precise shape. Sufficient indicators are already in place, for example, to argue for the likely emergence of evolved human attitudes toward war and peace, injustice and justice, ecological degradation and stewardship. We cannot predict the precise forms these new values will take. We can, however, persuasively argue that they will involve new levels of creative complexity, awareness of interdependence, and— most important—integration of the principle fields of human inquiry and endeavour.” Jim Kenney has written a clear guide to this coming new wave.

René Wadlow

The reviewer is editor of the online journal Transnational Perspectives, which focuses on world politics and social policy.

The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe

Richard Smoley
Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2009. 214 pages, paper, $14.95.

Somewhere the Hindu sage Sri Ramana Maharshi challenges us with the following paradox:

Atman and the world are illusion.
Only Brahman is real.
Atman and Brahman are one.

The challenge of nondualism is venerable, even perennial. It is to demonstrate a unity that underlies the apparent duality of the universe. The word demonstrate is meant to appeal to a sense of higher reason, an awakened intelligence sensitive to the difference between the manifest and unmanifest, as well as to the pivot on which both turn. Such reason is an attainment, gradual or sudden, that opens our human perception of duality to the core reality, ineffable in the vigor of its energies.

In a sweeping survey, generously presented in both idea and language, Richard Smoley stakes out a position somewhat short of nondualism. I say "somewhat short" because The Dice Game of Shiva contains a subtle vacillation between the classical locus of dualism—the Indian darshana or "view" known as Samkhya—and the more "modern" Advaita Vedanta, which espouses a distinctly nondualist viewpoint. Smoley has the good grace of leaving it to the reader to decide whether the apparent duality of mind and matter—or as he says, consciousness and experience—is ultimately true or only an aspect of one and the same dream.

The title of the book refers to the Hindu myth of Shiva and his consort Parvati. In the not yet manifest universe, the two are locked in amorous union, only to be interrupted by Narada, portrayed as a sinister yogi who entices them away with a dice game. Here is the mythomeme of difference. Separation is differential manifestation, since it embodies a subtle negation of primordial unity into a one and an other.

Smoley acknowledges the difficulty in speaking a state before difference. As the Rig Veda puts it:

Then there was neither death nor no-death
no sign of night or day.
The One breathed, breathless
though its own impulsion
and there was no Other of any kind.

Smoley wishes to show how Shiva, identified with Self, purusha, "I am," or consciousness, necessarily takes an other. Parvati, prakriti is the manifest universe, the object (or objects) of consciousness, which he refers to as "experience" in all its forms. In that sense, separation or differentiation is apparently built into consciousness. Smoley, like much of twentieth-century thought, tends to side with phenomenology, which maintains that consciousness is necessarily consciousness of something.

Whether it makes sense to speak of consciousness "in itself" or only in conjunction with an object is in fact only part of Smoley's concern. Another major emphasis of his work involves praxis. Here he shows a certain allegiance to Samkhya precepts, at least those espoused by the guru of the Swiss seeker Lizelle Reymond, whose teacher Sri Anirvan provides her with an outline of a course in liberation (described in her memoir To Live Within). The practice involves isolation or kaivalya, which is, as Smoley puts it, "the detachment of purusha, or primordial mind, from its experience." Purusha, or the Self, is without attributes, names, or form. The approach to it, that is, to objectless experience (or the experience of nonexperience) is through a repeated negation of what is presented, neti neti. In more contemporary terms, the bracketing of experienced reality leads one to the transcendental Ego, a residuum of the "I am."

A chief virtue of The Dice Game is the breadth of Smoley's thought. He is equally comfortable in the mainstream of Western metaphysics (Parmenides, Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, down to the contemporary Daniel Dennett) and the Indian darshanas. The Indian philosopher Shankara makes an appearance in a mention of Advaita Vedanta. There are frequent appeals to Ramana Maharshi as well as to Tibetan sages. Perhaps the riddle of two as one finds a repetition in whatever world wisdom tradition one seeks. Yet in a not too disguised way, the major motif lies closer to home, in Christianity. This should come as no surprise: Smoley is the author of Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition. There he argues for an identity of atman, rigpa, or Buddha nature, with God. God then would be the One without qualities, like Eckhart's Gottheit, so destitute that he is altogether without appearance, since he has given away even his divine being.

The Dice Game is much more than the sum of its parts. Driven by the paradox, Smoley's thought follows a winding itinerary that, as it turns out, has no single destination. In its open acceptance of what it comes across—spiritual anguish, the contemporary problem of community, or the place of psychoanalysis in religion—it communicates the adventure of the undertaking. In the very multiplicity of its pathways lies the main challenge for the reader: to maintain a supple receptivity that alone may be able to discern a unitary heartbeat within the body of duality.

Smoley's own inner predilections are disclosed in an anecdotal prologue and help orient the task of reading. A classicist by academic training, he fell under the influence first of the Kabbalah, then of the teaching of G. I. Gurdjieff. The latter functions as a touchstone to his thinking and has enabled him to resolve a cluster of difficult issues.

The Dice Game contains no solution to the problems it raises, no panacea for spiritual illness. It does, however, supply a much-needed tonic for a contemporary individual's search for reality. It does not cater to the weak-minded, but offers hope for those who are willing to think the issues through to the end. This is very good news for religion. Smoley draws together several strands of thought when he says: "If religion is to continue as anything more than a mere simulacrum, it must be guided by those who are willing to 'go in themselves,' by those who are at least comparatively awake, rather than by those who are merely well trained in theological jargon." This is a call to which all motivated readers must respond.

David Appelbaum

The reviewer is professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at New Paltz and former editor of Parabola.

Crystal and Arabesque: Claude Bragdon, Ornament, and Modern Architecture

Jonathan Massey
Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. xi + 336 pages, hardcover, $59.95.

Claude Bragdon (1866—1946) was an architect, graphic artist, theatrical designer, and Theosophist. He is considered to be a member of the Prairie School of architecture, which arose in Chicago from the ideas of Louis Sullivan and is best known through the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Burley Griffin, and Dwight H. Perkins. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, Bragdon was among the leaders of the modernist movement in architecture, but since then his work has largely been neglected by critics, who have preferred a stark, industrial functionality.

Syracuse University professor Jonathan Massey has written a new biography, Crystal and Arabesque: Claude Bragdon, Ornament, and Modern Architecture. With scrupulous scholarship and gorgeous color illustrations, he places the life and significance of Bragdon squarely into perspective. The author provides considerable detail about some of the architect's largest projects, such as the Otis Arch, the Rochester (New York) Chamber of Commerce, and the New York Central Railroad Terminal, and goes on to tell of Bragdon's innovations in graphic design and in multimedia theatrical production, all set in the context of progressive political philosophy, modern mathematics, and Theosophy.

The crystal and arabesque of the biography's title refer to the artist's effort to combine sinuous arabesques with geometric crystalline forms, merging the sensibilities of East and West. Bragdon conceived of architecture as rhythm in space and attempted to bridge societal divisions through a universal language of geometric design. The system of "projective ornament" derived two-dimensional designs from regular geometric solids and n-dimensional hypersolids, making them into flat graphics that seem to occupy space. Crystalline forms were curved and colored to add depth and naturalism to flat designs that could then be applied to surfaces such as brick, textiles, glass, grilles, lampshades, book covers, and tiles. Bragdon explained his Theosophical perspective on architecture in many books, including The Beautiful Necessity, A Primer of Higher Space, and Four-Dimensional Vistas. With a true Progressive Era sensibility, Bragdon was concerned with how individualism fits within a social order, and how to apply his art to promote brotherhood. His buildings emphasized open planning, glass, color, rooftop living, and ornamentation based on Pythagorean principles of harmony.

Bragdon was also a pioneer in multimedia theatrical production. He staged eight Festivals of Song and Light, each of which featured a large orchestra and chorus leading the audience in song while incandescent lights shone through colored geometric filters, creating a stained glass effect. These outdoor community events typified progressive attempts to reform the social order by integrating a fragmented urban culture into a democratic society based on brotherhood. In 1923, he closed his Rochester architectural practice to embrace a second career as a theatrical designer in New York City. He developed a "mobile-color" machine, the Luxorgan, to control lighting with a musical keyboard. He also created abstract film animations set to music in an exploration of "the play of imagery upon the veil of maya."

Within the Theosophical Society, Bragdon was respected and influential. L. W. Rogers, president of the American Theosophical Society (as it was known at the time), approached Bragdon in 1925 to design a new national headquarters building in Wheaton. Bragdon declined the commission because he had moved away from architecture as a profession and instead recommended his friend, Chicago architect Irving Kane Pond. When Rogers and the board of directors deadlocked over the final design, they asked Bragdon to cast a deciding vote, which favored the asymmetrical rendition that ultimately became the L. W. Rogers building. (Pond wrote about Bragdon in his fascinating book The Autobiography of Irving K. Pond: The Sons of Mary and Elihu, edited by David Swan and Terry Tatum [Oak Park, Ill.: Hyoogen Press, 2009].) In 1940, he further put his personal imprint on the headquarters by designing the distinctive entrance arch. The piers that support the wrought-iron arch are topped with Platonic solids, a tetrahedron and a dodecahedron.

Bragdon was an excellent speaker and writer, and his books are well worth reading. He and his sister May founded the Manas Press to publish Theosophical books and pamphlets. With Nicholas Bessaraboff, he did a hugely successful translation of P. D. Ouspensky's Tertium Organum. He also influenced Alfred Stieglitz, Ana's Nin, Henry Miller, Lewis Mumford, Norman Bel Geddes, and particularly R. Buckminster Fuller.

In addition to his portrait of Bragdon, Massey provides a lucid history of n-dimensional mathematics and hyperspace philosophy, including the contributions of G. F. B. Riemann, Charles Howard Hinton, Henri Poincar, Annie Besant, C. W. Leadbeater, and others. He gives equal attention to the communitarian movement, stagecraft, city planning, Theosophy, and ornamentation. For readers interested in subjects ranging from architecture, graphic arts, and mysticism to community singing and tesseracts, this exploration of Bragdon's life and art offers riches.

Janet Kerschner

The reviewer is archivist for the TS national headquarters at Olcott. She is preparing documentation to nominate the Rogers building for the National Register of Historic Places.