Theos-Talk Archives (November 2000 Message tt00223)

Brendan French wrote:

"Blavatsky attempted to remythify a universe she believed had 
been denuded of its numinosity.   Neither Church nor Academy 
offered sustenance to a world whose protective divinities were 
being undermined by materialist science and Positivist 
philosophy.   Indeed, Blavatsky felt that the Churches and 
secularist philosophers more or less cancelled each other out: 
Biblical criticism and comparative mythology had dispelled 
Christianity1s assertion of uniqueness and dogmatic truth, while 
the mute and mechanistic cosmos, as proposed by materialism 
and naturalistic evolutionism, left the world bereft of purpose, 
design, and contingency.   In order to reconsecrate the cosmos - 
for that was her intention - Blavatsky required a new mythos, but 
one which would be acceptable to a society grown wary of deity.   
The aspirational figure she sought would not be able to occupy 
the undifferentiated mesocosm of myth, but would be required to 
tread the ground of fact." 

Thank you Dr. French for clothing in words what I have sensed 
for years about the contribution of Madame Blavatskaya. The 
power of Myth is beginning to be recognised through the writings 
of Campbell and others, but it was Madame Blavatskaya who in 
many ways pioneered in this direction.  

Her own genius is to be appreciated aside from the "masters" to 
whom she attributed so much. I also suspect that the "masters" 
were a literary device on her part and another expression of her 
resourcefulness and genius, if you will.

Enjoyed your perspective!

My own slant is seeing theosophy as a movement in social 
terms and what I sense is that it can still make great 
contributions if it disavows the rhetoric of religious dogma and 
proceeds to make inquiry and findings in spiritual science. So 
using a scientific attitude in exploring the supersensual realm 
more contributions can benefit humanity.

Have a good holiday!

- Arthur Gregory


--- In theos-talk@egroups.com, Dr Gregory Tillett <gregory@z...> 
wrote:
> Recent discussion in this group has devolved upon the 
physical existence of the Theosophical Masters. Arthur Gregory, 
Peter Merriott, Daniel (Caldwell?), Nick Weeks, Bart Lidofsky, 
and Dallas have each made contributions. Although I have not 
previously taken part in any exchanges on this site, I thought in 
this matter I might add one or two thoughts of my own.
> 
> In the first place I should note that I have recently completed a 
Ph.D on the subject of the Masters. The thesis (2 vols; 850 pp) 
is entitled: 'The Theosophical Masters: An Investigation into the 
Conceptual Domains of H. P. Blavatsky and C. W. Leadbeater'.  
Thus it is that you can intuit my interest in your discussion. I 
should note further that I am not a member of the Theosophical 
Society but a scholar with a longstanding interest in esotericism 
and methodologies for the study of religionist belief.
> 
> Early in my researches it became clear that all discourse 
related to the Masters was predicated on their physical ontology; 
that is, their existence in time and space. Predictably, perhaps, 
claims such as those made by Blavatsky and Leadbeater (and 
their numerous disciples and continuators) have almost without 
exception been dismissed by commentators on the basis of 
evidential facticity. Unless the doubting Didymuses can put their 
Œhands in the side1 of the Masters, then the latter ipso facto 
cannot be considered to exist. Such an epistemological attitude 
tends to establish opposing camps of those who believe and 
those who do not, with any ground in between considered a "No 
Man1s Land". This position (which amounts to an academic 
"stand-off") has led to a deep divide which I would consider to be 
a species of the religionist versus reductionist duel which 
characterises much religious discussion.
> 
> Inevitably, then, the terrain of Theosophical studies has been 
made barren for generations of scholars because of faulty 
methodology. It is simply the case that meta-empirical faith 
claims are beyond the purview of the scholar, who possesses 
no methodological tools with which to falsify (or, indeed, prove) 
such assertions. A study of the Masters, after all, is a study of 
religious belief. As such, the data may be examined 
phenomenologically, but the meta-empirical truth claims which 
inhere in such belief are beyond enquiry. Yet the nostrum that 
religious credal formulae can be dispelled by the glare of 
science, philosophy, or even phenomenology persists to some 
degree in the Academy, and it has been this attitude which has 
stultified the study of Theosophy - and relegated it to a most 
unsatisfactory context: the sociology of deviance (or 3flight from 
reason2).
> 
> For my own work I adopted an empirical methodology 
predicated upon a perspective of informed agnosticism. There 
was never any hope - nor any desire - on my part to prove or to 
disprove the historical existence of beings identified by 
Theosophists as Masters. This statement should not be taken 
as an early capitulation or as courteous even-handedness.  
Rather, it is crucial to recognise that the Masters may or may not 
exist, but for any author to present a thesis as an attempt to 
demonstrate 3scientifically2 a personal metaphysic (an 
approach which entirely belies his scholarly capacity) would be 
to pan knowingly for fool1s gold. It is my contention that the 
Œreality1 of the Masters and their function within the discourse 
of Theosophy remain separate concerns, and the latter question 
(in my opinion) is by far the more interesting enquiry. Here are 
some of my conclusions.
> 
> The Masters are a prime phenomenon of the occult. This latter 
has tended to be dismissed by scholars as a function of the 
sociology of irrationalism or, at best, a reactionary revolt against 
modernity. Yet close observation reveals that occultism is by no 
means a retreat from modernist paradigms, but a close 
engagement with the new epistemologies. Occultism, it seems, 
is a special form of critique in which the motifs of esotericism 
are deliberately refracted through the prism of secularism. Both 
Blavatsky and Leadbeater provide paradigmatic examples of the 
rhetoric of occultism; in their individual ways they each 
enthusiastically adopted the discourses of modernity in order to 
argue against what they perceived to be its more pernicious 
qualities.
> 
> Blavatsky attempted to remythify a universe she believed had 
been denuded of its numinosity. Neither Church nor Academy 
offered sustenance to a world whose protective divinities were 
being undermined by materialist science and Positivist 
philosophy. Indeed, Blavatsky felt that the Churches and 
secularist philosophers more or less cancelled each other out: 
Biblical criticism and comparative mythology had dispelled 
Christianity1s assertion of uniqueness and dogmatic truth, while 
the mute and mechanistic cosmos, as proposed by materialism 
and naturalistic evolutionism, left the world bereft of purpose, 
design, and contingency. In order to reconsecrate the cosmos - 
for that was her intention - Blavatsky required a new mythos, but 
one which would be acceptable to a society grown wary of deity.  
The aspirational figure she sought would not be able to occupy 
the undifferentiated mesocosm of myth, but would be required to 
tread the ground of fact.
> 
> The Theosophical Master was Blavatsky1s riposte to the 
successive philosophical and scientific exorcisms which had 
removed divinity from its hallows and, as an unexpected if 
ironical consequence, led to the 3deanthropomorphisation2 of 
the world. The Master as a living man could indicate that human 
life - even human evolution - need not be under the authority of a 
blind determinism. The possibility of attaining physical, spiritual, 
moral, and sapiential perfection - which had grown dim in the 
years since the Enlightenment - was literally newly incarnated in 
the person of the Master, whose position of evolutionary 
preeminence was entirely won through individual effort. The 
anthropos, in danger of being relegated to accidental status in 
the universal processus, became in Blavatsky1s vision the 
centrepiece of the great cosmic telos; indeed, he was installed 
once more as the spiritual axis mundi.
> 
> From esotericism Blavatsky absorbed the idea of an 
hierarchised cosmos leading from the mundane sphere to the 
supracelestial. As part of her occult dynamic, she reconstrued 
this hierarchy as a schematised progressivist evolutionism.  
Thus it was that she could co-opt much of the evolutionist idiom 
of her day, and reconfigure an otherwise teleologically bereft 
material dynamic as a divine cosmic process. Such 
progressivism also underscored the gnosticism of her system, 
for the trajectory of evolution was deemed to ascend from the 
material to the spiritual, with absorption into Absolute Spirit 
(whence the human Monad came in the first place) as the 
ultimate eschatological objective.
> 
> The Master enfleshes Theosophical cosmology in so far as he 
stands on the cusp of reintegration with Spirit. Indeed, he 
occupies a unique position within the system as he alone 
inhabits the space which is situated at the end of human 
ontology and at the beginning of the infinite unknowable.  
Consequently, he is the ideal figure to enact a dialectical 
interchange between the discourses of transcendence and 
immanence. For the Theosophist, then, the Master is proof of 
the penetration of the divine into the human sphere, and an 
augury of the possibility of humanity transcending its physical 
limitations and communing fully with the divine presence. Thus 
it is that the Master stands at the interstices of the 
ascent/descent figuration which resides at the centre of the 
Blavatskian vision.
> 
> Blavatsky presented her Theosophical synthesis not as 
mythology, but as fact. This approach has caused even 
sympathetic scholars to suspect that her esotericism was 
diminished by contact with rationalist paradigms. Yet in an era 
characterised by an emphasis on facticity, Blavatsky was simply 
playing Hermesian games by exploring the transformative 
potential of mythic facts and factual myths. For in order to attract 
the attentions of a physical Master, the aspiring chela needed to 
be prepared by achieving a comprehensive knowledge of 
Theosophy via the Theosophical canon (Isis Unveiled, the 
Mahatma letters, and The Secret Doctrine). Yet in a classical 
artifice, such preparation itself enacted a form of initiatory 
transformation which would obviate the necessity for a Master.  
Thus it was that fact bred mythology, and mythology bred fact.
> 
> Based on the Masters1 teachings, Blavatsky posited an 
endless reticulating process of human Monads engaging in 
matter and then becoming progressively more spiritualised until 
they reintegrated with the Absolute. Such a cyclic process, 
although presented in the vocabulary of Hindu kalpa theory, is in 
fact an instantiation of a classic gnostic telos of a fall into matter 
and a concomitant ascent to Spirit. The adoption of this favourite 
leitmotif of esotericism allowed Blavatsky to incorporate into her 
macrohistorical programme sufficient of the world1s 
mythologems to present her Theosophy as both a pansophic 
synthesis and as the undiluted prisca theologia. Of prime 
importance, it also enabled her to absorb the new temporalities 
sponsored by palæoanthropology and geology. Thus it was that 
she could suggest not only that there had been Œchapters1 
before Genesis (as Darwin1s theory so challengingly implied), 
but that there were whole Œbibles1 with self-contained 
eschatons and regenerations. Blavatsky1s cosmology - 
apparently unlike that of her nemesis, the Churches - could thus 
comfortably contend with the immensity of prehistory, and the 
apparent fact that primordial homo was more simian than 
sapiens.
> 
> Following Blavatsky1s death, access to the Masters - and the 
charismatic authority such access implied - caused the 
Theosophical Society to fracture into competing factions. With 
Blavatsky gone, the revelatory and oracular power guaranteed by 
her position as mediator of the Masters1 teachings 
disappeared. Soon, however, Leadbeater rose to prominence in 
the Adyar Society, in part because the confidence of his 
assertions of contact with the Masters, and the clairvoyant 
method by which such communication was vouchsafed, 
seemed unassailable. His claims of being in constant psychic 
association with the Brotherhood calmed the collective fear that 
the Masters had abandoned the Society or, worse, that they had 
never been present in the first place.
> 
> Leadbeater1s clairvoyant revelations remained for the most 
part within the pre-mapped Theosophical cosmos, thus 
bolstering the edifice from the inside. Yet he soon set about 
superimposing his own structure upon the Blavatskian model.  
He drastically truncated her cosmo-historical vision and, in so 
doing, exaggerated the incline of its progressivist dynamic. Thus 
it was that rather than taking many lifetimes of labour, 
Mastership was attainable in a very few. To further speed the 
process he introduced various forms of theurgy which he 
considered to be evolutionary accelerants. Masonic initiation 
and Christian sacrament were reconstrued as conduits of 
perfecting power, able to advance the Monad closer to the 
ultimate goal: transformation into a Master.
> 
> In sum, then, the Master is the ideal and the template for 
Theosophists. Nevertheless, it should be stressed that his 
physical ontology is ultimately of less value than the profundity of 
the gnosis which he 3conferred2 upon the aspiring chelas.  
Blavatsky, of course, remains the key mediator of the Masters1 
illuminated gnosticism, and it is from her that the Master gained 
his rich semiotic potential. Consequently, the Master operates 
on several hermeneutical levels simultaneously, and as such 
creates of Blavatskian Theosophy something akin to a grand 
polyphony. It was my task to discern some of the grand 
associations which Blavatsky consciously invested in her 
depiction of the Masters. Some examples of my conclusions 
can be ascertained from the following quotation from my thesis:
> 
> ŒThe Master is the Oriental sage who brings revelatory 
authority in his wake; he is also the monastic elder whose 
austerities and 3prayerfulness2 have earned him God1s ear.  
He is the personification of Enlightenment perfectibilism, and the 
ideal of human progress and evolution; he is also the inspired 
pædagogue who encourages his charges to penetrate through 
the text and thereby ascend to divinity. He is the Rosicrucian 
hero, the embodiment of the Ideal and the Real; he is also 
Enoch-Metatron, God1s angelic lieutenant who once was 
human, and Melchizedek, Œhaving neither beginning of days, 
nor end of life; but made like unto a Son of God1. Perhaps most 
clearly - and yet characteristically elusively - he is Hermes, the 
daimon of both antithesis and synthesis1.
> 
> It is my hope that an empirical and comparative examination of 
the Masters will furnish further examples of Blavatsky1s genius 
for synthesis. Such researches must acknowledge, though, that 
the physical historical existence of the Brotherhood lies beyond 
their expertise. Crucially, one suspects that reducing the vast 
potentialities of the Master topos to such limited (and banal) 
questions as 3Did they appear physically at such and such a 
time?2 will only serve to deny Theosophy its proper place as a 
roaring tributary to the great stream of the history of ideas.
> 
> 
> Brendan French
> Sydney, Australia.