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From Spiritualism to Theosophy: “Uplifting” a Democratic Tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Stephen Prothero
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Extract

The status reversal ritual that American religious historiography has undergone in the last two decades has done much to “mainstream” previously taboo topics within the field. Many religious groups once dismissed as odd and insignificant “cults” are now seen as “new religious movements” worthy of serious scrutiny. One subject that has benefited from this reversal of fortunes is theosophy. Thanks to the work of scholars such as Robert Ellwood and Carl Jackson, theosophists are now part of the story of American religion. Exactly what part they are to play in that story remains, however, unclear.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , Summer 1993 , pp. 197 - 216
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1993

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References

Notes

1. The bibliography of scholarly works on the history of theosophy has expanded considerably since Ernest R. Sandeen and Frederick Hale found only a handful of largely unhelpful texts to include in their American Religion and Philosophy: A Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1978). The most useful are chapters within larger books: “Theosophy” in Jackson, Carl T., The Oriental Religions and American Thought: Nineteenth-Century Explorations (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 157-77;Google Scholar and “Olcott and Blavatsky Journey to the East,” in Ellwood, Robert S., Jr., Alternative Altars: Unconventional and Eastern Spirituality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 104-35.Google Scholar

2. Ahlstrom, Sydney E., A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 1038;Google Scholar Ellwood, Robert S., Jr., Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 42–87.Google Scholar

3. One scholar who gets this wrong is Bednarowski, Mary Farrell, New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 13–14.Google Scholar

4. Quoted in Olcott, Henry Steel, “Colonel Olcotf s Lecture at the Town Hall, Calcutta, on Theosophy and Brotherhood” Theosophist 4, no. 7 (April 1883): suppl. 4.Google Scholar This is one early formulation.

5. There are two books that address what I refer to as “early theosophy”: Gomes, Michael, The Dawning of the Theosophical Movement (Wheaton, HI.: Theosophical Publishing House, 1987);Google Scholar and Campbell, Bruce F., Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).Google Scholar Although Campbell does make some use of Weberian theories of religion, both books are, for the most part, narrative histories and neither hazards an overarching interpretation regarding the historical relationship between spiritualism and theosophy or the place of theosophy in nineteenth-century American religious history.

6. Consider Ellwood and Jackson. Ellwood argues in Alternative Altars that theosophy represents one important example of “emergent” or “excursus” (as opposed to “established”) religion in America. Drawing on anthropologist Victor Turner, Ellwood interprets Blavatsky and Olcott as “liminal” figures who fled the overly structured religions of Victorian America and sought out the sacred connectedness of “communitas” in India and Sri Lanka. He concludes that theosophy is historically important because it “established models for the excursus religion pilgrimage to the East” (134). His historical reconstruction of theosophy focuses, therefore, on the cofounders’ passage to the East in 1878-79. Jackson also emphasizes the central role played by early theosophists in the American encounter with Asian religious traditions. In Oriental Religions and American Thought, he extends Ellwood's analysis beyond the passage of Olcott and Blavatsky to Asia by discussing their contributions to the Buddhist Revival in Sri Lanka and the parallel contributions of theosophist Annie Besant to the Hindu Renaissance. Again like Ellwood, Jackson credits the theosophical movement for turning its gaze to the East. “The first Western body to proclaim its adherence to Asian thought and the most zealous Western propagandizer for the acceptance of Eastern wisdom,” he writes, “the Theosophical Society did a great deal to popularize Asian religions” (157).

7. Butler, Jon, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 255.Google Scholar

8. Braude, Ann, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 28–31;Google Scholar Saum, Lewis O., The Popular Mood of Pre-Civil War America (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 50;Google Scholar Moore, R. Laurence, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

9. Saum, The Popular Mood of Pre-Civil War America, 50.

10. On Olcott, see Stephen Prothero, “Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907) and the Construction of Trotestant Buddhism'” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1990).

11. Olcott, Henry Steel (Amherst, pseud.), “The Spiritualist's Faith,” Spiritual Telegraph 4, no. 51 (April 19,1856): 201.Google Scholar

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Bender, Thomas, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 117–262.Google Scholar I use Bender's local study here because it provides the most detailed description of Olcot's social milieu. Bender's “metropolitan gentry” is somewhat analogous to the network of social elites described in Persons, Stow, The Decline of American Gentility (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973);Google Scholar and Tomsich, John, A Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1971).Google Scholar Bender's elites, however, are decidedly more pedestrian. While Horace Greeley, for example, is an important player in Bender's gentry, he is “wholly unacceptable” to the elites Persons describes (163).

15. Bender, New York Intellect, xvi.

16. There are a number of biographies of Blavatsky, all of them flawed. Given the current interest in women's history, to say nothing of psychobiography, the lack of scholarly attention to Blavatsky is surprising. Apparently, her enigmatic personality is as daunting to scholars as it was to Olcott, who noted after her death that she was to him “an insoluble riddle.” Olcott, Henry Steel, Old Diary Leaves: The History of the Theosophical Society, 6 vols. (1904; repr., Adyar, Madras, India: Theosophical Publishing House, 1972-75), 2:viii.Google Scholar Attempts to solve this riddle include Williams, Gertrude Marvin, Priestess of the Occult, Madame Blavatsky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946);Google Scholar and Meade, Marion, Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (New York: Putnam, 1980).Google Scholar The earliest in a long line of theosophical biographies is Sinnett, A. P., Incidents in the Life of Madame Blavatsky (London: Redway, 1886).Google Scholar

17. Olcott, Old Diary Leaves, 1:1.

18. Olcott, Henry Steel, “Human Spirits and Elementaries,” in Human Spirits and Elementaries and Eastern Magic and Western Spiritualism (Adyar, Madras, India: Theosophist Office, n.d.), 14;Google Scholar and Olcott, Henry Steel, “Spiritualism Rampant” New York Tribune, September 17, 1875, 3.Google Scholar “Human Spirits and Elementaries” was reprinted serially in Theosophist 28, nos. 10,11,12 (July, August, September 1907): 721-29,801-10,885-94.

19. Olcott, Henry Steel, “The Immortal Life,” New York Tribune, August 30,1875,6.Google Scholar

20. Olcott first advanced this argument in “The Immortal Life,” New York Tribune, August 30,1875, 6. See also his contemporaneous lecture, “Human Spirits and Elementaries.”

21. Olcott, “Human Spirits and Elementaries,” 40, 34. Scholars still await a persuasive critical interpretation of the complex role of women in theosophy. While the development of theosophy out of spiritualism clearly reflected a shift away from the authority of mediums, most of whom were female, to the authority of adepts, most of whom were male, Blavatsky was theosophy's leader. She did find it necessary (or convenient), however, to portray herself not as a woman but as an “androgyne.” Aware, perhaps, that Blavatsky did not even come close to the ideal female prescribed by the Victorian cult of womanhood, Olcott described Blavatsky in his diary as a “she-male” (Henry Steel Olcott, unpublished Olcott diary, entry dated June 18, 1880, Theosophical Society Archives, Adyar, Madras, India). Her closest friends called her “Jack.” However, Blavatsky did make some concessions to Victorian female virtues by describing herself as subject to male “masters” in faraway places and by seeing to it that Olcott served as the president of her society. She was decidedly adept, nonetheless, at manipulating Olcott to do her bidding, and the “masters” rarely, if ever, contradicted her.

22. Davis, Mary F., Danger Signals: The Uses and Abuses of Modern Spiritualism (New York: A. J. Davis & Company, 1875)Google Scholar, quoted in Olcott, Henry Steel, “Occultism and Its Critics,” Spiritual Scientist 3, no. 6 (October 14,1875): 63;Google Scholar S. B. Brittan, “Colonel Olcott and Spiritualism,” Banner of Light (October 16, 1875), quoted in Michael Gomes, The Dawning of the Theosophical Movement, 80-81.

23. Olcott, “Human Spirits and Elementaries,” 40,44.

24. Olcott, Henry Steel, Inaugural Address of the President of the Theosophical Society (New York: Theosophical Society, 1875), 10–11,7-9.Google Scholar

25. Ibid., 20-21.

26. Olcott, Henry Steel, “Eastern Magic and Western Spiritualism” (1875), in Applied Theosophy and Other Essays (Adyar, Madras, India: Theosophical Publishing House, 1975), 249.Google Scholar

27. R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows, 61.

28. Olcott, Old Diary Leaves, 3:22-23; 4:23; 3:11-12.

29. Olcott, Henry Steel, “Special Orders of 1885,” Theosophist 6, no. 8 (May 1885):Google Scholar suppl. 196-97; “Official Report of the Decennial Convention and Anniversary of the Theosophical Society,” Theosophist 7, no. 75 (December 1885): suppl. lxxxix.

30. Olcott to Blavatsky, March 17,1886, Add. MSS 45,288, ff.216-27, The Manuscripts Collections, British Library, London.

31. Unpublished letter from Olcott to Bertram Keightley, September 5, 1890, Theosophical Society Archives, Adyar, Madras, India.

32. Hatch, Nathan O., Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 5,195.Google Scholar

33. Following the schism of 1895 that produced out of the original Theosophical Society the new Theosophical Society in America, W. Q. Judge and Katherine Tingley steered some theosophists away from India and toward a new headquarters in Point Loma, California. In the twentieth century, Alice Bailey and Guy Ballard called members of her Arcane School and his “I Am” movement back to the esoteric inspiration of the mysterious masters whom Blavatsky had popularized. See Greenwalt, Emmett A., California Utopia: Point Loma, 1897-1942 (San Diego: Point Loma Publications, 1978);Google Scholar and Bruce Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived, 113-65.

34. Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, 199.

35. Ibid.