00:03:36.880says mankind is obviously divided into God-informed men and lower human creatures.
00:03:42.820This problematic text goes on and it's despicable.
00:03:46.840And I don't want to give that old colonial putrescence much airtime,
00:03:50.720but I also don't want to leave it stenched till the end of the episode,
00:03:54.020like a clickbait article putting its facts in the third paragraph.
00:03:57.920Scholar of religion Olav Hammer wrote that on rare occasions Blavatsky's writings are overtly racist.
00:04:04.300And he added that she has this kind of anti-Semitism in particular that derives from this position of Judaism as the origin of Christianity
00:04:13.020because she had an intense dislike for Christianity.
00:04:17.220The darkest unfolding of all of this is that her ideas about root races are picked up by actual practicing fascists0.98
00:04:24.480and cobbled together and passed around and end up spouted by occult nazis just crazy evil nonsense0.98
00:04:32.080bullshit no mistake part of me wants to kind of stop here and be like that's a wrap because i0.99
00:04:38.960don't want to watch movies made by rapists or listen to music by r kelly and i don't want to0.99
00:04:44.720learn from the ideas of racists but on deeper reading of blavatsky i do think there's room
00:04:49.540for context here and I'll tell you why and if I'm wrong let's talk about it because at the absolute
00:04:55.720core of her philosophy her repeated goal and I mean repeated over and over is to form quote a
00:05:03.840nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race creed sex caste or
00:05:11.940color Arian as she used it and its general definition at the time refers to a vast cross
00:05:17.880section of humanity that share a language root and specifically include Jews, Arabs, Indians,
00:05:23.800and other people of color. Without dismissing the times when she is clearly a Victorian racist,
00:05:29.160the overwhelming body of her writing and thought is less like that footnote and more like this0.67
00:05:34.920piece from The Moat and the Beam where she wrote, the whites of England and America act worse than0.64
00:05:40.300cane towards their black subjects and citizens. They torture them mentally when not physically,0.98
00:05:46.140from their cradle to their tomb, refusing them every privilege they have a right to,0.97
00:05:51.020and then turning around and spitting on them as if they were so many toads.
00:05:55.080As her fairest-minded biographer, Gary Lackman, writes,
00:05:58.460HPB was undoubtedly a child of her time, and race was an idea central to much 19th century thought,
00:06:05.600hers included. It's not surprising that some of her remarks about sub-races elicit a cringe,
00:06:11.440but she can't be held responsible for how some outright racially oriented occultists misused
00:06:17.960some of her ideas. These ideas themselves form only a very small part of her total worldview
00:06:23.780and appeared in their more extreme form long after her death. I have no doubt that had Blavatsky been
00:06:29.840alive she would have fought fiercely to disassociate theosophy from this abuse just as she did from
00:06:35.260any other. And then this also from Lachman. Gandhi first came into contact with Theosophy in London
00:06:43.340in 1889, when he was studying law and generally trying to adapt himself to Western, specifically
00:06:49.240British ways. He believed, as many educated young Indians did at the time, that his people should
00:06:54.680give up their old ways and strive to be like the English. He met the Keatleys, who he refers to as
00:07:01.120two theosophist brothers, they were really uncle and nephew, and they introduced him to the Bhagavad
00:07:06.500Gita. They were reading the popular Edwin Arnold English translation and suggested to the young
00:07:11.380student that they might read it in its original together. Gandhi was ashamed to admit that he had
00:07:15.760never read it in the original or any other language, but he was determined to, and the
00:07:21.240Bhagavad Gita became the most important book in his life. He later said that his doctrine of ahimsa,
00:07:26.520non-violence was rooted in it. In November 1889, the Keatleys took Gandhi to meet HPB.
00:07:34.580On the same visit, he also met Annie Besant, whose recent conversion to theosophy was something of a
00:07:39.500scandal. Gandhi didn't join the society then, but a year and a half later, in March 1891, he became
00:07:46.040an associate member of the Blavatsky Lodge. Reading Blavatsky inspired Gandhi to study Hinduism
00:07:51.820and to reject the notion taught by Christian missionaries
00:07:55.020that his nation's religion was mere superstition.
00:07:58.840It was this belief in the value of his own tradition
00:08:01.100that sustained him throughout his career.
00:08:05.480And if you think these contradictions are enough
00:08:07.940to extend another couple more minutes of curiosity,
00:08:11.060then I thank you for your time and patience.
00:08:14.040But I guess just to bracket this thought and make it really clear,
00:08:17.820I don't know if we're doing the right thing to include this story in our podcast.0.63
00:08:21.140I want to say that I know and accept that all white people, myself included, are racist.0.95
00:08:27.860Like it's shitty, but it helps to admit it.0.95
00:08:31.380When we benefit from systemic racism, it distorts our perspective0.93
00:08:35.220and puts blinders on us in ways we're not fully aware of.
00:08:39.260And the best we can do is try to claw the filters off.
00:08:42.980Be honest, get educated, and do better.
00:08:47.520Here at Missing Witches, we don't want to shy away from hard conversations.
00:08:51.140we're going looking behind the love and light to name and shame the hate and find the stories we've
00:08:57.940been missing. A white noblewoman in the 19th century may have been groundbreaking in her ideas
00:09:03.400about the universe and space and time and religion and the races and sexes and what was interesting0.93
00:09:09.280to read about and where was safe for her to go and still have carried the weight and been distorted
00:09:14.600like gravity by the intensely racist discourse she moved through. Male philosophers over time
00:09:21.160certainly were, and we don't disregard them utterly. Carl Jung tells a horrible story that
00:09:25.980begins, a bushman had a little son whom he loved with the tender monkey love characteristic of
00:09:31.300primitives. Tolstoy, Marx, Darwin, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Gandhi, all said problematic things
00:09:38.900about race, to put it mildly, and have all been challenged and largely lovingly redeemed.0.59
00:09:44.600The 19th century was dominated by European powers that needed above all else to justify
00:09:49.640slavery and colonialism. This was the air they breathed. This is a weight so heavy that even0.96
00:09:56.560when it's anathema to you, it can eke its nasty way out in your language and behavior. We live
00:10:02.760in a world where that violence still reverberates and where capitalism presses down in the same way0.94
00:10:08.440and where the goal of a universal brotherhood, sisterhood, non-binary witchhood is a more0.94
00:10:17.080glowing and imperative goal than ever. So I want to see what I can learn and keep from the HPB who0.65
00:10:24.280wrote, hast thou attuned thyself to the suffering of humanity, oh candidate for light, oh candidates
00:10:32.880for light. DT Suzuki, who brought Zen Buddhism to the West, said of HPB's writing, here is the real
00:10:40.640Mahayana Buddhism, and remarked that HPB had in some way been initiated into the deeper side of
00:10:46.880Mahayana teachings, and then gave out what she deemed wise to the Western world. Oh, and she
00:10:52.000moved things with her mind. So I'm curious about her, and maybe just more curious now that I've
00:10:58.580read a bunch for this episode and i want to do the work to include her in the word witch for this
00:11:05.460episode i should say i owe a great debt to gary lackman in his book madame blavatsky the mother
00:11:10.880of modern spirituality and if you're like wait gary lackman from blondie then one you're way
00:11:16.340cooler than me and two you are correct gary lackman from blondie is one of the most trusted
00:11:22.420and prolific and fair-minded but still fully witchy historians of the occult surprise the
00:11:29.260world is infinite and weird and glorious and so are the stories that seem to surround hpb
00:11:35.460she is deeply divisive with some intense and passionate followers and some justifiably
00:11:41.360concerned and also some deeply snarky and darkly motivated detractors lackman aims to find a
00:11:48.400middle way, and I think he mostly succeeds triumphantly, aside from some unfortunate
00:11:54.300repeated references to her, quote, more than ample bosom and massively stout stature. I'll get into
00:12:02.180how her size gets talked about later. Lachman starts by sketching the scope of her impact as
00:12:07.580a thinker. As early as 1970, in an article from McCall's magazine, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut
00:12:14.000dubbed Blavatsky the founding mother of the occult in America. Yet she's mostly remembered
00:12:19.940now as a charlatan. So it goes. Those who are aware of her and of her contribution to Western
00:12:25.900thought have a different view. Like the historian of esotericism, Christopher Bamford, they wonder
00:12:33.180why she is not, as Bamford believes she should be, counted with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as one of
00:12:39.600the creators of the 20th century. By the time of Blavatsky's death in London, 1891, the theosophical
00:12:45.860movement which she had started had spread from New York to India, Europe, and beyond, and included
00:12:50.980among its devotees some important names such as Thomas Edison. And by the early years of the 20th
00:12:55.960century, it was a force to be reckoned with, informing major developments not only in spirituality
00:13:01.160and esotericism, but in politics, art, religion, and much more. Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first
00:13:08.160Prime Minister, who was initiated into the Theosophical Society by Annie Besant, the
00:13:12.880socialist and freethinker who converted after meeting Blavatsky and who, as president of
00:13:17.240the Society, helped India win its independence. Even Einstein is said to have kept a well-thumbed
00:13:22.900copy of Blavatsky's magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, on his desk. And some Theosophists
00:13:28.820have gone so far as to infer that the inspiration for Einstein's most famous formula, E equals MC
00:13:35.100Square came from that dense and weighty tome. In her beautiful book, Waking the Witch, Pam Grossman
00:13:41.920traces another line of HPB's impact, starting with The Wizard of Oz. She writes, The Wizard of Oz is
00:13:48.480a spectacular story, not only as a parable about friendship and truth-seeking, but also due to its
00:13:53.980exceptional originality. The Emerald City, the Yellow Brick Road, Magical Slippers, a brave farm
00:13:59.700girl protagonists and of course the good and bad witches are all now seemingly timeless icons from
00:14:05.140what some have called the first american fairy tale but several of these ideas were not invented
00:14:09.980by a bomb out of whole cloth in fact a great many of them can be traced to the influence of his
00:14:15.380mother-in-law the suffragist and equal rights pioneer matilda jocelyn gage gage was a follower
00:14:22.060of theosophy the 19th century gnostic religious movement that brought eastern mystical thought to
00:14:28.660the West. She would have been familiar with the ideas that one can go on a spiritual journey
00:14:33.020up 13 golden stairs to find enlightenment at the temple of divine wisdom, and that one can
00:14:38.660reveal the ultimate truth behind all world religions by metaphorically lifting the veil
00:14:43.260of illusion, or peering behind a curtain perhaps. Interestingly, the Theosophical Society was
00:14:49.020started by another mighty woman, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, one of the few female spiritual
00:14:56.200leaders of the age, who was often slandered and called a fraud by the press during her life.
00:15:01.820Still, Theosophy had many adherents, and it still does today. Encouraged by Gage, Baum and his wife,
00:15:08.000Maude Gage Baum, became members of the Theosophical Society's Chicago chapter on September 4th, 1892.
00:15:14.700He also began writing his stories down on paper at his mother-in-law's behest. Like many suffragists,
00:15:20.280Gage was also an abolitionist, and her childhood home in Fayetteville, New York, was part of the
00:15:25.160Underground Railroad. I think I was born with a hatred of oppression, Gage is quoted as saying
00:15:30.080in the 1888 International Council of Women, before recounting her memories of sheltering slaves
00:15:35.940and attending anti-slavery gatherings. HPB was born with a hatred of oppression too,
00:15:41.780as her history of working with resistance movements attests, including a network of
00:15:45.720Sikh and Hindu Maharajas in a secret coalition opposing Christian missionaries during the years
00:15:50.420she lived in India and while she is problematic and her story holds more twists and turns than
00:15:56.500we can totally do justice to here I want us to see at least this in the second half of the 1800s
00:16:02.960a young woman who has heard the world sing to her across unseen plains her whole life
00:16:10.000and set inanimate objects humming and bumping and rattling and sought out spiritual teachers
00:16:17.140in unlikely places. A sassy magical child with a beloved novelist for a mother, a teenager
00:16:23.500basically, runs away from a marriage to a much older man and travels the world alone seeking
00:16:29.860spiritual knowledge for 10 years. After a childhood introduction to Tibetan Buddhism and shamanism
00:16:36.840and Freemason secrets through her grandfather and others, she reads and photo-memorizes thousands
00:16:42.220of obscure spiritual texts and learns enough to get by in many languages which she will then quote
00:16:48.500off the top of her head without reference to the original sort material when writing her books
00:16:52.920later. She then experiences a sickness of the soul like we've seen with other witches and like them
00:16:58.940it honed her power. She learned secrets from masters of many faiths and was a medium who
00:17:04.540offered the world something like but utterly unlike religion. She broke through heavy programming to
00:17:10.680share the belief that the narrowness of Victorian thinking, the bombast and blinker triumphalism
00:17:15.720of colonialism, was just the childhood of an age in a series of ages, that greater knowledge and
00:17:22.360much wider perspective had emerged before and would again. She is the forgotten and discarded
00:17:28.440mother of the quote-unquote new age, who fiercely defended her reputation for never having had sex1.00
00:17:34.880or kids, often wore men's clothes, lived unbound by the rules of her gender, and used her body as1.00
00:17:41.180she pleased, as a strength, as a disguise. Where other witches, including Marjorie Cameron, in0.98
00:17:47.180another episode of this season, and other sex magic makers we'll talk about next season, used0.87
00:17:52.000sex as a conduit for power, HPB used celibacy. And I hope you'll feel empowered to find yourself
00:18:00.020at home anywhere you fucking like in that spectrum and with whomever makes you feel magical.0.92
00:18:06.140In Henry Still Alcott, she had a friend who believed in her. He had served in the U.S. Army0.97
00:18:11.480during the American Civil War, was promoted to the rank of colonel, and in 1865, following the
00:18:18.400assassination of Abraham Lincoln, assisted in the investigation of the assassination.
00:18:22.340he was a truth seeker she called him maloney and he called her jack and from the first time they
00:18:31.320met he would write about her ability to manifest spiritual phenomena and then they lived together
00:18:36.340in a series of rented apartments in new york city which they decorated with taxidermied animals and
00:18:41.220images of spiritual figures and she taught him and encouraged by her he became celibate tito
00:18:47.060telling and vegetarian although she herself was unable to totally commit to the latter and they
00:18:52.060would found the Theosophical Society together, live and study and run the society in India
00:18:56.920together from 1879 to 1885. I'm going to keep jumping around in her timeline. I tried not to,
00:19:03.720but I gave up. There is so much more to her biography and so many scandals and betrayals
00:19:10.120that it's easy to get as overwhelmed in them as we can be in discussions of her complex ideas
00:19:15.140and in the conspiracies about who her teachers were and which of her followers were able to
00:19:19.560communicate with them. And I kind of decided to skip all that. It's really easy to get into if
00:19:25.660you're interested. Mostly what I want to ask is just, is there magic here? And if there is some
00:19:32.260kernel, then is that important to us as witches looking for our history?
00:19:40.760I'm so excited. It's like Christmas. Risa and I are opening our box from Foxglove Farm,
00:19:48.080our beautiful sponsor foxglove farm and like scrolling through her website being like i wonder
00:19:53.420what treasures will be inside so every full moon um foxglove farm sends out subscription boxes that
00:20:03.320are curated handmade items always ethically sourced so first of all like you said risa
00:20:11.000everything smells amazing amazing it's just a box full of so much excitement there's so many
00:20:17.620beautiful things so it's things that she um hand makes in her kitchen with her kids and then
00:20:23.700sometimes she also partners with other um which is to include things that are appropriate to the
00:20:29.980season oh and it's a printout that shuts out our podcast so this is a version of exactly what went
00:20:36.300out in the kit to everyone in the subscription boxes so she includes a super sweet letter and
00:20:42.080she describes the different things that are in it one of the things that i saw there that i'm so
00:20:45.660excited about is some of her teas i want to drink anxiety yeah we are going to do that oh my goodness
00:20:54.320there's so much stuff you guys so beautiful no wonder she she told us she was like i'll be honest
00:21:01.560with you guys i barely break even on these boxes and and now i see why it's oh my god there's there's
00:21:07.280little moon incense bowls and peace invoking incense there's black rose moisturizing soap
00:21:18.140oh my gosh oh my goodness there's a stone in here oh my goodness reach the touch it
00:21:22.600oh my gosh energy i love a beautiful rock oh it's so beautiful it's amethyst she says put
00:21:28.260this under your pillow sleep with it in your hand i mean it's very obvious that this is a
00:21:33.860labor of love that foxglove farm is doing here i i'm i'm gonna become a subscriber oh you can
00:21:40.160refer a friend and get discounts just send her a message and she'll send you a ten dollar gift code
00:21:45.340there's all kinds of really this the thing about sammy is she loves what she does so much you i
00:21:52.960mean all of our interactions with her it was so clear that she's putting so much of her heart
00:21:58.920into this business um because it really comes from a place of wanting to heal herself and heal
00:22:05.220her world and build a network on a coven you know like it's really coming from that place and
00:22:11.380so we were so happy to get to work with someone who works from that place and
00:22:14.920we talked to her um i mean amy's really good at having these conversations but we um you know
00:22:22.400We have people that raise concerns in the witch community about smudging being kind of taken and sold as a form of whitewashing to take a very sacred, indigenous, traditional spiritual practice and sell it.
00:22:41.440especially you know i mean it gets done in some more or less like horrific forms by you know
00:22:47.200multinational corporations who are strip farming places and then sometimes just unintentionally
00:22:54.340we're using language that we don't realize is loaded um and so we're really thankful to people
00:23:00.860who contacted us who you know indigenous people who take the time to listen to our podcast and
00:23:05.360find something of value there and also do the emotional labor to correct us really really
00:23:10.060really appreciated yes it's it's hard to find a perfect perfect perfect perfect person um but
00:23:17.980sammy is as close as i could get certainly sage isn't in all of her boxes and um everything is
00:23:25.080given with instructions she never calls it smudging because smudging is a very specific
00:23:30.420and very sacred ritual she pointed out that she actually had used that language and been corrected
00:23:37.000and like really felt that correction and felt the weight of having made that mistake and is like
00:23:42.680remove that language um and you know i think you know there's like burning things to clean and
00:23:49.520purify a space is something that we all can do and something we all can have access and it's
00:23:54.700cross-cultural if you think about catholic buddhist i mean we all have this like burning
00:23:59.960of incense white sage of course is is haute couture right now and so it's becoming a very
00:24:06.260very serious problem not only uh a cultural problem of appropriation but also an environmental
00:24:12.920problem of this being taken and exploited and then not available to the people who need it and who
00:24:20.920have cherished and protected that plant for generations so i she is using like the only
00:24:27.180sammy is foxglove farm is using the only organically farmed white sage left in north
00:24:35.020America. And I'm sure there's ways that that could be better in terms of maybe working with
00:24:40.620Indigenous people local to that area. When I looked on the farm's webpage, I couldn't find
00:24:44.760any indication of whether those farmers were themselves Indigenous. So there's areas there
00:24:51.420where, you know, if you have more emotional energy to take up, pushing that, maybe write to those
00:24:57.120people, ask those questions. And if you feel like in your life, that's not a product that you can
00:25:02.800use then you know there's ways to make your own bundles of dried herbs for things that are grown
00:25:07.760locally um it's not a smudging that's not that's not a practice that's yours unless it is from
00:25:14.240the you know community you grew up in but you can certainly burn and find a way to cleanse and use
00:25:20.540fire for cleansing and use smoke for cleansing and you can certainly use the beautiful things
00:25:25.260that are in this box that were created with love and a desire to build an ethical community
00:25:30.180yeah and again it's it's important that we keep having these conversations and keep having them
00:25:36.080and keep having them so stay tuned in the new year we're going to do a special with some
00:25:41.240beautiful guests on the subject of cultural appropriation specifically as it relates to the
00:25:47.300indigenous american community yeah and the way that that community can be specifically
00:25:53.300cannibalized by new spiritual movements as we come to the close of this season we really just
00:26:00.000want to say thank you to foxglove farm for being uh first of all a fan of the podcast
00:26:05.840and a friend and just these ethics that are so in line with what we're doing and trying to do
00:26:13.160homemade handmade ethically sourced made with love she calls herself naked in the kitchen
00:26:20.460covered in herbs and uh and that's how we wish we could all live
00:26:25.180according to her sister vera by the age of 14 hpb would dream awake and aloud sharing a near
00:26:35.220constant stream of visions vera wrote for helena all nature seemed animated with a mysterious life
00:26:41.280of its own she heard the voice of every object and form whether organic or inorganic and claimed
00:26:48.360consciousness and being in the 1850s after deciding she could return home without being married off
00:26:54.360She returns to her family for a bit and starts a business rafting logs because she notices
00:26:59.200a fungus which turns wood into spunk, a highly inflammable and used as a touchwood for fires
00:27:04.340that covered trees in her neighborhood.
00:27:07.120Things start happening around her, wraps in the walls, windows and doors, furniture moving
00:27:14.740Lackman writes, she had acquired a reputation in Tiflis and other places as a magician,
00:27:20.280a seer and what we would today call a psychic and a healer. By this time she had given up answering
00:27:26.760questions by raps which was tiring and time-consuming and taken up giving spoken or
00:27:32.660written replies. She later told A.P. Sinnott how she could read people's thoughts by seeing them
00:27:38.060emerge from their heads as a kind of spiral of luminous smoke that formed pictures and images
00:27:42.780around them and she remarked that often these thoughts find a home in the consciousness of
00:27:47.360other people. She had, it seems, begun to learn how to control the strange phenomena happening
00:27:52.980around her. In 1864, in Mingrelia, on the shore of the Black Sea, HPB was thrown from her horse.
00:28:00.820She fractured her spine and entered a coma that lasted for months. She wasted away and it was
00:28:07.120feared she would die. She could respond to questions, but most of the time she was, she later
00:28:11.740said, in a kind of dream in which she was somewhere else as someone else. Another example of the
00:28:17.940strange double life she had entered years ago. She said that while she was in this state, she had no
00:28:23.260idea who Helena Blavatsky was, and that she seemed to travel in a far-off country as a totally
00:28:29.000different individuality. Back in Tiflis, she recovered, and along with her health, she received
00:28:35.680something else. She had gained complete control of her powers. Like many other esoteric figures,
00:28:42.600Steiner, Jung, Gurdjieff, Swedenborg, HPB had passed through what the historian of psychology
00:28:49.320Henri Ellenberger calls a creative illness and had come out a changed person. Following her
00:28:55.300creative illness, HPB hit the road again, traveling in Italy, Transylvania, and Serbia.
00:29:01.280From there, her sketchy travel diary speaks of Odessa, Syria, Lebanon, Jerusalem, Egypt, Greece.
00:29:09.620She may have studied Kabbalah with a learned rabbi at some point during these travels.
00:29:13.900Sylvia Cranston records that she corresponded with him until his death, and that his picture was one of her treasures.
00:29:19.980In 1867, she was in the Balkans, Hungary, Venice, Florence, and Montana,
00:29:25.700where on November 3rd she was wounded while fighting against the French and the papal army
00:29:29.900on the side of Garibaldi. She later impressed Colonel Alcott with the musket balls still
00:29:35.220embedded in her leg and shoulder and showed him where a saber had broken her left arm in two
00:29:40.140places. She was left for dead in a ditch. The battle was a rout and Garibaldi himself was
00:29:45.200captured and as with her earlier creative illnesses, this near-death episode too helped
00:29:49.660her gain greater control of her powers. From Montana she returned to the Balkans where word
00:29:54.720came from the master to head to Constantinople. From here, she would proceed for the third time
00:30:00.580to India and Tibet. This list is jaw-dropping, but even if the only place she traveled to was
00:30:06.680Tibet, that alone would make her one of the greatest travelers of the 19th century. And there
00:30:11.380is admittedly little evidence to prove that she was there, except that she says she was,
00:30:16.940and she describes it. And the teachings she comes home with resonate for many scholars of Tibetan
00:30:22.240Buddhism, some who see their origin in the book of secret correspondences of the fourth-century
00:30:27.240Taoist Litsin, or in the tantric books of Kyutze. Lackman writes, on her third attempt, she was
00:30:34.600successful. In 1867, HPB was in the Balkans, where she got word from the master to proceed to
00:30:40.140Constantinople. From here, she would strike out once again for Tibet. Jean Overton Fuller suggests
00:30:45.620that she met Master Moria there, and with him took the short, direct, but terrible overland route
00:30:51.000across Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, India, and the Kashmir. Just to get to Tibet itself must have
00:30:57.780been grueling. The quote-unquote short direct route from Constantinople to Shigetse, where
00:31:03.500they were headed and where the Tibetan Buddhist monastery of Tashilhumpo is located, is just over
00:31:09.6203,000 miles. It is short when compared to the sea route, which would have had HPB heading west again
00:31:15.500to Marseille, where she would have boarded a ship that would have taken her around the Cape of Good
00:31:19.480hope to india fuller suggests they could have made 20 miles a day on horseback at that speed
00:31:25.160it would have taken them some five months to reach their destination once in tibet the demands of the
00:31:29.620travelers would have increased a later traveler in tibet the lama anagarika govinda writes of
00:31:36.980his own trek across the roof of the world imagine toiling for some 200 300 miles over endless
00:31:43.440mountain ranges. Through steaming hot valleys and over cold, cloud-covered passes, fording
00:31:49.520wild mountain streams, where a slip of the foot means certain death. Or crossing the
00:31:55.820thunderous abyss of a torrential river, clinging precariously to a shaky reed rope of uncertain
00:32:01.540age. Imagine, traveling through gorges where stones are falling from invisible heights
00:32:07.140and where waterfalls seem to rush down straight from the clouds. Imagine negotiating overhanging
00:32:11.980cliffs on a narrow mountain path and sharp-edged rock ledges which cut into sore and tired feet.
00:32:18.020This is Lachman continuing, the idea of a thin Madame Blavatsky, let alone a quote-unquote
00:32:24.360massively stout one, making this journey is enough to raise questions about it. But then we remember
00:32:30.120Rasputin walking from Siberia to Mount Aethos, and the Hungarian Kasoma de Koros reaching Ladakh
00:32:38.060from Eastern Europe mostly on foot, and we realize it would have been possible, even if,
00:32:44.280as HPB's critics believe, highly unlikely. Although forbidden to most outsiders, Tibet's
00:32:50.200borders, it seems, were open to people of neighboring lands, and traders and pilgrims
00:32:54.680from Ladakh, India, Bhutan, China, and Mongolia often entered undisturbed. HPB's Mongolian features,
00:33:02.320as they were described, would have helped in this case, and while HPB's critics often refer to her
00:33:07.560masters as Tibetans, the truth is they were not. Master Moria was from the beginning her, quote,
00:33:13.880tall, mysterious Indian. And another master whom she would meet and stay with on this journey was,
00:33:19.460at least according to some researchers, of Sikh and Punjabi extraction. Jean Overton Fuller,
00:33:25.320whose mother and grandfather made the journey themselves, argues that there are markets in
00:33:29.520Tibet where one can get what one needs along the way. And that unlike the British, who were scouting
00:33:35.100for secret and unknown paths through which the Russians might descend on them, HPV would most
00:33:39.700likely take the most well-traveled route, which would be the one indeed where there would be
00:33:43.900markets used by other travelers. We also know that HPV could ride a horse, and that she is thought
00:33:49.360to have learned enough Tibetan from the Tartar nomads she met during her stay at Saratov to ask
00:33:54.280questions, buy supplies, and get directions. The better question, of course, is what did she learn
00:34:00.260once she got there. Blavatsky speaks of visiting a monastery, but not being allowed to enter.
00:34:07.060Lackman continues, she was told, however, that on its altar were curious cube-shaped tablets on
00:34:12.680which verses in an unknown language, Senzar, were inscribed. She speaks of thin oblong squares and
00:34:19.080discs or plates containing these verses, which were preserved on the altars of the temples
00:34:23.560attached to centers where the so-called contemplative or Mahayana schools are established.
00:34:29.900Mahayana, or Great Vehicle, is the form of Buddhism that by most accounts appeared around the time of Christ,
00:34:35.900and includes the notion of the Bodhisattva, an enlightened individual who rejects his own salvation or passing into nirvana until that of all sentient beings is accomplished.
00:34:47.140The verses inscribed on the oblong squares were recited to her, and she memorized them.
00:34:52.280And some of them would later be translated by her and appear as the voice of the silence.
00:34:56.780The mysterious stanzas of de Xi'an, on which her magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, is an enormous commentary, were also inscribed in the same strange tongue.
00:35:06.380Ideas about a single primeval language were popular in occult and esoteric circles going back to the late 19th century,
00:35:12.900and were linked to a similar notion of some single primal sacred revelation, the Prisia Theologica, or perennial philosophy,
00:35:20.580associated with the mythic sage and founder of all knowledge, Hermes Tris Majestus.
00:35:26.780Blavatsky herself speaks of Senzar as the mystic name for the secret sacerdotal language,
00:35:34.780the mystery speech of the initiated adepts all over the world.
00:35:39.060Along with learning Senzar and English, while in Tibet, HPB engaged in a perhaps even more
00:35:44.420difficult study, the development and control of her psychic powers.
00:35:48.760The masters Moria, Kuthumi, and others of the school were adepts, men, and one assumes
00:35:54.180also women, who possessed remarkable abilities. They could communicate at a distance through
00:35:59.400thought transference. The term telepathy would not be used until this psychical investigator,
00:36:05.700Frederick Myers, coined it in 1882. They could also read minds. They could project their astral
00:36:11.600bodies or bilocate, as the phenomenon came to be called, and seemingly appear to be in two or more
00:36:16.800places at once. They could dematerialize and rematerialize objects and transport them over
00:36:21.980distances, rather like Star Trek's transporter. They could enter and dominate another's
00:36:27.400consciousness, what in contemporary New Age speak is known as walk-ins. They were clairvoyant and
00:36:33.960clairaudient. They could perceive and command occult entities or elementals, the salamanders,
00:36:41.200undines, sylphs, and gnomes related to ancient elements of fire, water, air, and earth. They
00:36:47.900could see etheric auras and read the history of objects through the power of psychometry.
00:36:54.240They were precognitive and had other powers as well. If her being in Tibet is difficult enough
00:36:59.460for Blavatsky's critics to swallow, the idea that while there she was trained in the use of
00:37:04.040these remarkable abilities is, to put it mildly, absolutely unbelievable. Whether she was in Tibet,
00:37:10.760Tanganyika, or Timbuktu, this sort of thing they say is simply impossible. It should be pointed
00:37:16.140out, however, that other travelers in the forbidden land also encountered individuals with some
00:37:21.140unusual talents. Although Alexandra David-Neal found no traces of Blavatsky's masters, she
00:37:27.140encountered enough magic in Tibet to write a book about it. Tibet, she said, seems to offer
00:37:31.820peculiarly favorable conditions for telepathy, as well as for psychic phenomena in general.
00:37:38.240In 1912, the 13th Dalai Lama, Thupten Gyatso, told David Neal that, quote, a bodhisattva is the basis of countless magic forms.
00:37:49.880By the power generated in a state of perfect concentration of mind, he may, at one and the same time, show a phantom of himself in thousands of millions of worlds.
00:37:59.980he may create not only human forms but any forms he chooses even those of inanimate objects such
00:38:06.520as hills enclosures houses forests roads bridges etc he may produce atmospheric phenomena as well
00:38:13.920as the thirst quenching beverage of immortality there is no limit to his power of phantom creation
00:38:19.960after all her years of travel and with this immense knowledge downloaded into her being
00:38:25.580she went looking for her people, and she began working on her great books from the Theosophical
00:38:31.560Society. In 1878, H. P. Blavatsky became an American citizen, the first Russian woman ever
00:38:38.000to do so. In 1879, she and Colonel Alcott moved to India, and in 1882, they established the
00:38:45.120headquarters of the Theosophical Society at Adyar, near Madras. This remains the international
00:38:50.980headquarters for the society, which is now established in 70 countries of the world.
00:38:55.580The first major book by H.P. Blavatsky was Isis Unveiled, in two volumes.
00:38:59.960It created a sensation when published in New York City in 1877.
00:39:04.340The first edition of a thousand copies sold out in two days.
00:39:07.880Within seven months, three printings had been issued.
00:39:10.220The book has as its subtitle a master key to the mysteries of ancient and modern science and theology.
00:39:17.140Volume 1 deals with claims of infallibility for science, while Volume 2 deals with similar claims for religion.
00:39:22.480Both show that the ancients had a wisdom that has been partly forgotten in our time.
00:39:27.620Isis Unveiled moves from ancient Greek views on matter and force, advanced by Pythagoras and Plato,
00:39:33.300to the Kabbalist religious philosophy developed by Jewish scholars from a mystical interpretation of the scriptures.
00:39:39.300Plavatsky discusses mythological stories in many religious texts, aspects of magic, ancient Egyptian writings,
00:39:45.880classical philosophies, world religions, and a multitude of other subjects.
00:39:49.560In her preface, she states that the book is a plea for recognition of the hermetic philosophy,
00:39:55.200the anciently universal wisdom religion. Blavatsky's greatest work is The Secret Doctrine.
00:40:00.640HPB made it clear that The Secret Doctrine was not written as a revelation, but is rather a
00:40:05.060collection of fragments scattered throughout thousands of volumes embodying the scriptures
00:40:09.440of the great Asian and pre-Christian European religions and philosophies. Furthermore,
00:40:14.300she strongly rejected the dogmatic interpretation of any of her work.
00:40:18.100The reader is asked to study the ideas from this or any other source only in the light of common human experience and reason.
00:40:25.940The secret doctrine outlines a vast scheme of evolution relating to the universe and to humanity and to the unseen as well as the seen worlds of manifestation in which life is said to exist in thousands of forms.
00:40:38.500It is based on three fundamental propositions, an omnipresent, eternal, boundless, and immutable
00:40:45.660principle on which all speculation is impossible since it transcends the power of human conception
00:40:51.220and which could only be dwarfed by any human expression or similitude. It is beyond the range
00:40:57.100and reach of thought, the eternity of the universe in toto as a boundless plane, periodically the
00:41:03.840playground of numberless universes, incessantly manifesting and disappearing. The fundamental
00:41:09.360identity of all souls with the universal oversoul, the latter being itself an aspect of the unknown
00:41:16.020root, and the obligatory pilgrimage for every soul, a spark of the former, through the cycle
00:41:22.880of incarnation in accordance with cyclic and karmic law. Within the Theosophical Society,
00:41:28.860Blavatsky is the leader of a core group of twelve women and twelve men who have met their
00:41:33.780shadows and overcome the surge of ego resistance that comes when starting on the kind of work that
00:41:38.960challenges the primacy of ego, who together commit themselves to the study of occult theosophy,
00:41:45.660the fluidity of mind and matter. All throughout her life, in different scenes, people tested her
00:41:51.920and she gave them the proof they wanted, or answers they seeked, and her reputation mounted,
00:41:57.360but then she would stop. She sought to spread the word of knowledge she had gained and she
00:42:03.020fought to uplift and make equal and to resist the colonizing tools of religion and violence that
00:42:08.060hampered the creation of a universal brotherhood and so she would seek visibility and use the press
00:42:12.740and her abilities to get it but then she would get frustrated with the public hunger to speak
00:42:17.400with the dead and frustrated that no one would listen when she explained that the dead were gone
00:42:21.660medium selling access to your dearly departed were at best tapping into stale energy patterns
00:42:27.000left from lives, disrupting spirits on their way to rest than reincarnation. At worst, they were
00:42:33.020often frauds. Her resistance to the popular movement of spiritualists, her attempts to
00:42:38.600explain something more subtle she saw going on instead would make her a target, as with the
00:42:43.760anger she would heap upon what she saw as the hypocrisy of the Christian church, as well as
00:42:48.420quotes like this, aimed straight at its heart. Instead of stating that God made man after his
00:42:55.080own image, we ought in truth to say that man imagines God after his image, forgetting that
00:43:01.280he has set up his own reflection for worship. And so little have the first Christians who0.61
00:43:08.100despoiled the Jews of their Bible understood the first four chapters of Genesis in their
00:43:13.040esoteric meaning, that they never perceived that not only was no sin intended in this0.81
00:43:18.080disobedience but that actually the serpent was the lord god himself who as the office the logos
00:43:25.320or the bearer of divine creative wisdom taught mankind to become creators in their turn blavatsky
00:43:31.260was repeatedly framed as a fraud by competitors and the taint of those accusations and even when
00:43:37.140they were revealed to have been blatantly orchestrated by blackmailers lingers still
00:43:42.040I guess my question is what if just as an experiment we believed her we don't have to
00:43:48.460take her words as scriptures she made clear she didn't want that and I'd suggest scripture should
00:43:53.540more often be treated less religiously and with an open language and imagination loving mind
00:43:58.420we could just try out believing what she tells us of her experience of things moving around her
00:44:05.020of vivid waking dreams of a feeling of the life and consciousness in every object
00:44:11.160of seeking and finding teachers who took her experiences seriously,
00:44:15.700of communication that exceeds what other people know to be possible.
00:44:19.940And we can enjoy her contradictions, too.