Theos-Talk Archives (January 2002 Message tt00316)

Brigitte:

Yes, the SD was originally planned as a rewrite of
Isis, but it is clearly a completely new book, so it
apparently took on a life of its own while being
written. I am quite sure this whole line of inquiry
started with her reading AR Wallace's vooks on
evolutionary theory, Wallace having been a
spiritualist as well as an evolutionist. She started
reading his book on spiritualism, liked it, and was
motivated to read his other stuff, which had to do
with evolution. Then she took it from there. We know
she started reading Wallace in New York, so it is not
surprising that her thinking was already evolving when
she first got to India.

You might want to put Higgins' Anaclypsis on your
reading list, since you evidently have not read it. 
Be warned that this is two large volumes, each of
which is more than twice the size of a quarto volume,
and the two of them are easily as lengthy as Isis. 
The subtitle of the book is "The Unveiling of the
Saitic Isis," which is rather suggestive given that
Blavatsky's rewrite is titled Isis Unveiled. Isis is
not the same book as Anaclypsis, just as the SD is not
the same book as Isis But if you read Anaclypsis, you
will see where a lot of the ideas in Isis came from. 
I think you will agree that it makes no sense to look
far into the past, into rare books, for ideas that
Higgins laid out when we know Blavatsky read Higgins.

Fundamentalists insist that Blavatsky was beholden to
no one but got everything from "the astral light." I
think they are about half right and half wrong.

We know from Coleman's research that all of Isis came
from about 100 books, and Olcott says Blavatsky had
about 100 books on hand. The implication is that
Blavatsky was lying when she says she saw pages of
books in the "astral light." However, suppose that
she was one of those rare people who has the gift of
eidetic imagery and photographic memory. Suppose
furthermore that having read those 100 books she had
no conscious recollection of much of their content. 
Suppose also that her unconscious mind stored
photographic images of much of this material and was
able to present it to consciousness in the form of
"visions" in the "astral light." In that case, it is
reasonable to assume that she was describing her
experience accurately and that the experience could be
better explained in psychological terms than in terms
of miracles. According to the law of parsimony, that
would seemingly be more reasonable than the fraud
hypothesis of her enemies, or the "astral light"
hypothesis of her worshippers, This explanation
allows Blavatsky to be right inasmuch as her
description of her experience goes, and ditto with
Coleman, since what he said can be easily checked and
found to be true. It would be "paranormal" in the
sense that not just anyone can do it, but it would not
be "paranormal" in the sense that Daniel Caldwell uses
the word, to describe something which is miraculous
and outside the range of human potential.

The polarity here is the same as with the Ootan Liatto
story. Some insist that we have to find some
"miraculous" explanation for it, and others insist
that Olcott was lying. A better approach seems to me
to be to totally accept the statements of these people
regarding what they experienced, and ask what it
means. We allow ourselves in this case to question
their INTERPRETATION of what they experienced, but we
do not question their truthfulness. We therefore
eliminate one hypothesis (i.e., that they are lying in
certain cases when it serves our purpose to say they
were lying and not in other cases) and the argument
becomes more parsimonious.

As for the recent comment someone posted that the
truth is likely to turn newcomers away, I think that
is not a problem. There are at most a few thousand
Theosophists in a world with some five or six billion
people in it, so there is no army of newcomers to turn
away. Besides, if Theosophy can only be promoted by
concealing the truth, it is not worth saving. I am
not that cynical about it.

Steve

--- bri_mue <bri_mue@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Steve: Isis was intended as a rewrite of
> Godfrey Higgins' Anaclypsis, and Higgins has
> Blavatsky's "primitive wisdom religion" hypothesis
> in
> it in the same terms as Blavatsky wrote it later, so
> this would seem a more immediate source of
> inspiration
> than a book which would have been quite rare and
> hard
> to find. Also Wilder, who mentioned Ammonius Saccas'
> idea that the PWR existed in ancient Alexandria. 
> Higgins also wrote about the Hindu kalpa theory. It
> would be hard for me to believe that Higgins was not
> the inspiration for much of this.
> 
> I have argued that the PWR idea was resuscitated in
> the 19th century because of William Jones'
> discovery,
> published in 1785, that Sanskrit was related
> linguistically to the European languages. That
> suggests Indian and European peoples may have
> originated from one stock in ancient times, and that
> Indian and European cultures derived from a common
> source (including religions.) I am not saying Jones
> was right or wrong, but you can see how the PWR idea
> would have been resuscitated as a direct result of
> his
> theories."
> 
> I definetly think you are on to something here.
> 
> 
> 
> Brigitte
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to
> http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ 
> 
> 


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