Theos-Talk Archives (October 2004 Message tt00252)

--- In theos-talk@yahoogroups.com, Jerry Hejka-Ekins <jjhe@c...> 
wrote:
> Hello Paul,
> 
> I would be interested in knowing something about the audience the 
Indian Books Centre had in mind for The Masters Revealed.

Hi Jerry,

Unfortunately, communication isn't very good between them and SUNY 
and I've never bent sent any reviews whereas SUNY kept me informed of 
US reviews. Nor have I found good database indexing of Indian 
publications comparable to that for US scholarly journals.

snip
> historical expertise. One the other hand, I'll have to give it to 
> Dallas that there is also something to be said in favor of writing 
> about what you are already familiar. Though you may not have made 
> a study of Virginia history, I bet you know quite a lot more than 
you realize, and certainly far more than I do. Ideally, if I were to 
write about Virginia history, I would want to move there for a few 
years, get to know the people, absorb the culture, walk the streets, 
visit the monuments and sit in on the historical society meetings.

Having a local and family connection to Cayce, and being able to 
travel to his hometown in Kentucky, gave me a more solid background 
to write about him than I ever had about HPB (as did the easy access 
to tremendous primary sources, the 15,000+ readings and a comparable 
amount of correspondence.)

Working for three years now on my own family history in northeastern 
NC, I have indeed moved there, gotten to know people, absorbed 
culture, visited monuments, hooked up with local history buffs, etc. 
But this future book will focus on one small part of one county, and 
a handful of families whose destinies were intertwined during the 
Civil War, an event that lasted only 4 years. The kind of depth one 
can bring to such a study is several orders of magnitude greater than 
what one could bring to someone like HPB, who rarely settled in one 
spot for more than a few years, lived in several countries for 
significant amounts of time, on four continents, functioning in 
several languages and associating with followers of most world 
religions. A person couldn't reasonably have any one area studies 
background that would prepare him/her to produce a rounded portrait 
of HPB-- you'd need to be conversant in Russian language and history, 
American religious history, the Ottoman Empire, India, Tibet, Western 
Europe, Eastern Europe, you get the point. Someone like Maria 
Carlson who brings to bear an area speciality in Russian history and 
literature produces a "deeper" account of HPB than authors like 
Joscelyn Godwin or me. But it doesn't have much breadth. Godwin 
brings greater depth *and* breadth to bear in terms of English 
language esoteric literature of the 19th century. The ideal future 
biographer for HPB would be a tremendous polyglot and polymath 
because she touches so many different subject areas in science, 
religion, philosophy as well as so many places. But will such an 
author ever emerge and devote years to studying HPB?

It's more likely that subject specialists than area specialists will 
continue to produce future studies of HPB. I brought ten years of 
Theosophical study to the process, with simultaneous study of related 
subjects like Gurdjieff, Masonry, etc. That may pale next to some 
specialists on Theosophical history like yourself or Daniel who now 
have 30 years of study under your belt, but it compares well to 
authors like Peter Washington, Marion Meade, or Bruce Campbell who 
had considerably less depth than I as subject specialists. (Or even 
Prothero, who seems to have grasped Theosophy better than Washington 
or Meade, with more empathy, although not devoting many years to the 
subject.)

While I won't ever write about Theosophy and HPB again, I will 
continue to read new books that come out and hope that new kinds of 
expertise will illuminate corners left obscure by all the previous 
accounts.

Cheers,

Paul