Theos-Talk Archives (January 2002 Message tt00321)

Brigitte:

I have been thinking about your question, what to make
of the SD as a rewrite of Isis. Here is a hypothesis
for interpreting the historical record. Notice it is
not far from the orthodox Theosophical view.

Circa 1858 Blavatsky goes to India and possibly Tibet.
Truth be told she probably does not know where the
political boundaries are and may believe she has gone
to Tibet when she actually only got as far as
Darjeeling. But she honestly believes she has been to
Tibet. She has the wanderlust and does not stay there
long, but while there she searches out people with an
interest in philosophy and yoga. She makes contact
with a small organization in northern India, makes
some friends, then moves on.

Years later she goes to the US because she is now a
spiritualist and New York State is the modern
birthplace of spiritualism as of 1848. Once she
arrives in 1874 she makes a good faith statement that
she has been to Tibet, even though as I said she may
not have made it that far north. She becomes
convinced that the "phenomena" of spiritualism are
real (whether or not she was right has no bearing on
the historical fact that she believed this.) But
there is no theory to explain these phenomena. The
SPR collects insipid stories ad nauseum, but makes no
scientific enquiry worthy of the name. Ditto with the
spiritualists themselves. She decides she will
formulate one.

To that end she reads various books, including those
by Higgins, Jacolliot, and Wallace. The task then
broadens. In addition to formulating a theory for
explaining spiritualistic phenomena, she becomes
interested in developing an alternative to Darwin's
formulation of evolutionary theory.

She decides to write the SD, but for lack of adequate
source material ends up with Isis instead. She is
aware that this book falls short of what she wanted to
achieve. She keeps making changes, then the publisher
insists it be published as is. She is not satisfied
with it.

She remembers that the organization she contacted in
northern India was working along the lines which are
currently of interest to her. Because of her
footloose nature, she did not spend enough time with
them to get a comprehensive idea of what conclusions
they had reached. In fact there are some very serious
gaps in her knowledge of them. She does not know, for
example, that they teach reincarnation. But she does
know they have some of the missing materials required
to produce the SD. They publish nothing, but share
manscripts among themselves, similar to the way the GD
did in England, only with better control. Some of
these manuscripts have titles which were eventually
given out in the SD. One of the members has a
manuscript lending library in his cellar, which in her
imagination becomes a vast cavern with all the
treasures of ancient Alexandria. This is a gross
exaggeration, but the library does exist.

While completing Isis she reestablishes contact with
this Eastern society (as she told her sister.) 
Members of the group visit her in the US, but they
will not mail their manuscripts to her. In order to
study with them at any depth, she must go to them. In
due course she makes the decision to go back to India.

She goes to India, surreptitiously collects
information from the secret society, spends a few
years there, then heads back for Europe. While she is
in India, there are manuscripts scattered everywhere
and visitors do not know whether they are looking at
hers or the brotherhood's. Once in Germany she pens a
new version of Isis, the first MS of the SD. Subba
Rao says it is crap, refuses to endorse it. She comes
to disdain it herself, the way she does Isis. The MS
gets dumped.

She goes to London, does a new manuscript of the SD,
which is in a sense a rewrite of Isis since it is the
book Isis was intended to be in the first place. This
time she is far better informed about this Indian
group than she was in 1876. The SD is therefore of a
very different character. The book is hers, but most
of the underlying ideas are the brotherhood's.

Some credit is given to the northern Indian society,
but it is not called by its real name. Just as
Randolph's Rosicrucian Brotherhood became The
Brotherhood of Luxor, so the northern Indian group
becomes The Trans Himalayan Arhat Esoteric School. 
Among insiders it is called the White Brotherhood. 
Blavatsky keeps this name secret, but Mabel Collins
puts it in print. Shortly afterward there is a split
between Collins and Blavatsky which is made to appear
unrelated to this indiscretion on the part of Collins.

Had the SD received acclaim from the academic
community, the mahatmas would have shed their
pseudonyms and come out into the open to take a bow. 
But the SD is regarded as nonsense in the scientific
world. So the WB and its hidden members remain
discreet. I can't say that I blame them. All the egg
is on Blavatsky's face and not theirs.

After Blavatsky dies and the Theosophical Society
becomes more and more irrelevant the alliance between
the TS and the WB is dissolved. All the TS now has is
preposterous charlatans like Leadbeater. He becomes a
one man replacement for the WB until he is exposed as
a homosexual pederast. He was a priest after all
before becoming a Theosophist. After that he becomes
an embarrassment and gets kicked out of the way. 
Unfortunately the Adyar organization still publishes
his books, embarrassing everybody.

That broad outline connects all the dots, and accepts
all of Blavatsky's statements which are not impossible
to accept. By accepting as much as one reasonably can
it minimizes the number of assumptions that must be
made, thereby honoring the law of parsimony, whereas
accepting the historical record when it serves
someone's thesis, and rejecting it when it does not
serve someone's thesis, as others have done (including
hostile critics) does not. It is probably not a
perfect approximation to the truth, but I would bet it
is close. Your thoughts? Especially are there any
historical facts which would force this to be altered
that you know of?

Steve


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