Widespread dissatisfaction with the hegemony of science in
Western culture and its preoccupation
with the concrete, the factual, and the substantive interacted with a
lack of confidence in traditional Christianity, itself undermined by the very progress
of scientific explanation. Theosophy, in the strict meaning of the movement founded
by H.P. Blavatsky, addressed these concerns in a progressive way. Adapting contemporary
scientific ideas to posit the idea of spiritual evolution through countless worlds
and time-eras, Theosophy supplied dignity and purpose to man’s earthly life
within a cosmic context. While spiritualism (a major movement from the
mid-1950s) alleged survival after death, Theosophy located human destiny in an
emanationist cosmology and anthropology that have their roots in both
Neo-Platonism and Oriental religions. (pp.1-2)
Theosophy’s particular achievement lay in combining the
modern scientific idea of evolution, rephrased traditionally as emanation and
return, with ideas taken from Oriental religions. (p. 15)
In the West, Theosophy was perhaps the single most important
factor in the modern occult revival. It redirected the fashionable interest in spiritualism
towards a coherent doctrine combining cosmology, modern anthropology, and the
theory of evolution with man’s spiritual development. It drew on the
traditional sources of Western esotericism, globalizing them through
restatements in terms of the Asian religions, with which the West had come into
colonial contact. Here Theosophy paved the way for the study of comparative religion,
first exemplified by the World Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893. (pp.
17-18)
Blavatsky’s cosmology presents the prime characteristics of
Western esotericism as defined by Antoine Faivre’s pioneering studies (Antoine
Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany, New York: State
University of new York Press, 1994), pp. 10-15). These characteristics comprise
(a) correspondences between all parts of the universe, the macrocosm and
microcosm; (b) living nature as a complex, plural, hierarchical and animate
whole; (c) imagination and mediations in the form of intermediary spirits,
symbols, and mandalas; and (d) the experience of transmutation of the soul
through purification and ascent. (p.141)
Blavatskyan Theosophy thereby combines features of Western
esotericism familiar from the Hermetic, kabbalistic, and theosophical
traditions of the Renaissance and early modern periods with the nineteenth-century
interest in Eastern religions in the West. This syncretism demonstrates the
modern development of Western esotericism in terms of its capacity to absorb
new ideas and influences. Blavatsky’s universal wisdom-tradition of Theosophy
involving both Western and Eastern sources gave an important impetus to a new
global esotericism. (p. 142)
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