EVERY generation manufactures its cults, gurus and devotees; what is interesting is the pattern of recurrence rather than the antics of the dotty and fraudulent. Peter Washington's chatty and populist book stresses the latter, but takes an occasional cool look at the underlying repetitions. It is based on an impressive quantity of appalling stuff: as Mark Twain remarked, what was miraculous about the Mormon sacred books was not Joseph Smith having written them, but the fact that he stayed awake to do so.
Meeting the needs of the credulous in America and Britain from the 1870s, theosophy 'reconciled' all the leading world religions, and rationalised doubt by means of secret languages, levels of initiation and lurches towards the occult. The founders, Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, set the tone for alternative religion in the new age: Secret Knowledge from 'Masters' to whom only the gurus had access; esoteric or 'hermetic' traditions, loftily invoking Neo- Platonism and Rosicrucianism; rejection of 'rational' logic while preaching a reconciliation of science and mysticism: a smorgasbord approach to other revealed religions and 'teachers'; and a final opt-out to the 'inner self' when the going got sticky. [clickum to read full article at 'The Independant', circa 1993]
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| Tographical feature on planet Mars, high-resolution image, 2001 |
Around the turn of the century, renegade Russian aristocrat Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky declared herself the chosen vessel of the wisdom of the East through her reputed contact with a dematerializing Tibetan master, who unveiled a Hidden Brotherhood located in the Himalayas and Egypt. The Theosophical Society, which she cofounded in 1875 in New York City with Civil War veteran Col. Henry Olcott, attracted a wide following with its amalgam of Hinduism, Buddhism and occultism. In this enormously entertaining, witheringly skeptical, highly colorful chronicle, British journalist Washington deflates the self-mythologizing and woolly philosophizing of theosophists and rival schools and gurus, including flamboyant Armenian-Greek mystic George Gurdjieff, Austrian philosopher/holistic healer Rudolf Steiner and Jiddu Krishnamurti, Indian ex-theosophist turned California sage. Those who came under their influence include Aldous Huxley, Katherine Mansfield, Christopher Isherwood, W.B. Yeats and Frank Lloyd Wright, making this a heady intellectual adventure as well as a clear-sighted saga of human foibles, charlatanry, bizarre antics and genuine spiritual hunger extending to New Age cults from the 1950s to the present.
It is a marvellous ensemble. Blavatsky, a wisecracking mixture of Russian grande dame and country-cute Kalmuck; her 'chum', the lugubrious old soldier Colonel Olcott, straight from Anthony Powell; the unspeakable C W Leadbeater, writing hectic letters to small boys encouraging masturbation as a path to spirituality; James Wedgwood, the same but more so (caught cottaging by the police - 18 lavatories in two hours - he said with hauteur that he was searching for a friend known in a previous life); the elusive Krishnamurti, man made god; the brilliant spoofer Gurdjieff, inventor of the ashram as high-fashion labour camp; the literal- minded Ouspensky, dervish-dancing to a 'higher' plane of consciousness; A R Orage, coiner of the 'New Age' slogan.
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