Theos-Talk Archives (March 2005 Message tt00331)

March 18 2005

Re: WHAT IS THEOSOPHY? By H P Blavatsky  
THEOSOPHIST, Oct. 1979, Vol. I, # 1

Friends:

This is one of the foundation article written by H P B in THEOSOPHIST when
in Oct. 1879 it was first issued.

It is reprinted because of misconceptions that a Mr A. Gholap appears to
entertain. In order to provide him with key and basic information
concerning the foundation of the THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY this is reprinted.

Best wishes, 

Dallas
-------------------------------


WHAT IS THEOSOPHY?

Article by H. P. Blavatsky


This question has been so often asked, and misconception so widely prevails,
that the editors of a journal devoted to an exposition of the world's
Theosophy would be remiss were its first number issued without coming to a
full understanding with their readers. But our heading involves two further
queries: What is the Theosophical Society; and what are the Theosophists? To
each an answer will be given. 

According to lexicographers, the term theosophia is composed of two Greek
words--theos, "god," and sophos, "wise." 

So far, correct. But the explanations that follow are far from giving a
clear idea of Theosophy. Webster defines it most originally as "a supposed
intercourse with God and superior spirits, and consequent attainment of
superhuman knowledge, by physical processes, as by the theurgic operations
of some ancient Platonists, or by the chemical processes of the German
fire-philosophers." 

This, to say the least, is a poor and flippant explanation. To attribute
such ideas to men like Ammonius Saccas, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Porphyry,
Proclus--shows either intentional misrepresentation, or Mr. Webster's
ignorance of the philosophy and motives of the greatest geniuses of the
later Alexandrian School. To impute to those whom their contemporaries as
well as posterity styled "theodidaktoi," god-taught--a purpose to develop
their psychological, spiritual perceptions by "physical processes," is to
describe them as materialists. As to the concluding fling at the
fire-philosophers, it rebounds from them to fall home among our most eminent
modern men of science; those, in whose mouths the Rev. James Martineau
places the following boast: "matter is all we want; give us atoms alone, and
we will explain the universe." 

Vaughan offers a far better, more philosophical definition. "A Theosophist,"
he says--"is one who gives you a theory of God or the works of God, which
has not revelation, but an inspiration of his own for its basis." 

In this view every great thinker and philosopher, especially every founder
of a new religion, school of philosophy, or sect, is necessarily a
Theosophist. Hence, Theosophy and Theosophists have existed ever since the
first glimmering of nascent thought made man seek instinctively for the
means of expressing his own independent opinions. 

There were Theosophists before the Christian era, notwithstanding that the
Christian writers ascribe the development of the Eclectic theosophical
system to the early part of the third century of their Era. Diogenes
Laertius traces Theosophy to an epoch antedating the dynasty of the
Ptolemies; and names as its founder an Egyptian Hierophant called Pot-Amun,
the name being Coptic and signifying a priest consecrated to Amun, the god
of Wisdom. But history shows it revived by Ammonius Saccas, the founder of
the Neo-Platonic School. He and his disciples called themselves
"Philalethians"--lovers of the truth; while others termed them the
"Analogists," on account of their method of interpreting all sacred legends,
symbolical myths and mysteries, by a rule of analogy or correspondence, so
that events which had occurred in the external world were regarded as
expressing operations and experiences of the human soul. It was the aim and
purpose of Ammonius to reconcile all sects, peoples and nations under one
common faith--a belief in one Supreme Eternal, Unknown, and Unnamed Power,
governing the Universe by immutable and eternal laws. 

His object was to prove a primitive system of Theosophy, which at the
beginning was essentially alike in all countries; to induce all men to lay
aside their strifes and quarrels, and unite in purpose and thought as the
children of one common mother; to purify the ancient religions, by degrees
corrupted and obscured, from all dross of human element, by uniting and
expounding them upon pure philosophical principles. 

Hence, the Buddhistic, Vedantic and Magian, or Zoroastrian, systems were
taught in the Eclectic Theosophical School along with all the philosophies
of Greece. Hence also, the preeminently Buddhistic and Indian feature among
the ancient Theosophists and Alexandria, of due reverence for parents and
aged persons; a fraternal affection for the whole human race; and a
compassionate feeling for even the dumb animals. 

While seeking to establish a system of moral discipline which enforced upon
people the duty to live according to the laws of their respective countries;
to exalt their minds by the research and contemplation of the one Absolute
Truth; his chief object in order, as he believed, to achieve all others, was
to extract from the various religious teachings, as from a many-chorded
instrument, one full and harmonious melody, which would find response in
every truth-loving heart. 
Theosophy is, then, the archaic Wisdom-Religion, the esoteric doctrine once
known in every ancient country having claims to civilization. 

This "Wisdom" all the old writings show us as an emanation of the divine
Principle; and the clear comprehension of it is typified in such names as
the Indian Buddh, the Babylonian Nebo, the Thoth of Memphis, the Hermes of
Greece; in the appellations, also, of some goddesses--Metis, Neitha, Athena,
the Gnostic Sophia, and finally the Vedas, from the word "to know." 

Under this designation, all the ancient philosophers of the East and West,
the Hierophants of old Egypt, the Rishis of Aryavart, the Theodidaktoi of
Greece, included all knowledge of things occult and essentially divine. 

The Mercavah of the Hebrew Rabbis, the secular and popular series, were thus
designated as only the vehicle, the outward shell which contained the higher
esoteric knowledge. The Magi of Zoroaster received instruction and were
initiated in the caves and secret lodges of Bactria; the Egyptian and
Grecian hierophants had their apporrheta, or secret discourses, during which
the Mysta became an Epopta--a Seer. 

The central idea of the Eclectic Theosophy was that of a simple Supreme
Essence, Unknown and Unknowable--for--"How could one know the knower?" as
enquires Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. Their system was characterized by three
distinct features: the theory of the above-named Essence; the doctrine of
the human soul--an emanation from the latter, hence of the same nature; and
its theurgy. 

It is this last science which has led the Neo-Platonists to be so
misrepresented in our era of materialistic science. Theurgy being
essentially the art of applying the divine powers of man to the
subordination of the blind forces of nature, its votaries were first termed
magicians--a corruption of the word "Magh," signifying a wise, or learned
man, and--derided. Skeptics of a century ago would have been as wide of the
mark if they had laughed at the idea of a phonograph or telegraph. The
ridiculed and the "infidels" of one generation generally become the wise men
and saints of the next. 

As regards the Divine essence and the nature of the soul and spirit, modern
Theosophy believes now as ancient Theosophy did. The popular Diu of the
Aryan nations was identical with the Iao of the Chaldeans, and even with the
Jupiter of the less learned and philosophical among the Romans; and it was
just as identical with the Jahve of the Samaritans, the Tiu or "Tiusco" of
the Northmen, the Duw of the Britains, and the Zeus of the Thracians. 

As to the Absolute Essence, the One and all--whether we accept the Greek
Pythagorean, the Chaldean Kabalistic, or the Aryan philosophy in regard to
it, it will lead to one and the same result. 

The Primeval Monad of the Pythagorean system, which retires into darkness
and is itself Darkness (for human intellect) was made the basis of all
things; and we can find the idea in all its integrity in the philosophical
systems of Leibnitz and Spinoza. Therefore, whether a Theosophist agrees
with the Kabala which, speaking of En-Soph propounds the query: "Who, then,
can comprehend It since It is formless, and Non-existent?"--or, remembering
that magnificent hymn from the Rig-Veda (Hymn 129th, Book 10th)--enquires: 

"Who knows from whence this great creation sprang?
Whether his will created or was mute.
He knows it--or perchance even He knows not;" [S D I 26 ]

or again, accepts the Vedantic conception of Brahma, who in the Upanishads
is represented as "without life, without mind, pure," unconscious,
for--Brahma is "Absolute Consciousness"; or, even finally, siding with the
Svabhâvikas of Nepaul, maintains that nothing exists but "Svabhâvât"
(substance or nature) which exists by itself without any creator; any one of
the above conceptions can lead but to pure and absolute Theosophy--that
Theosophy which prompted such men as Hegel, Fichte and Spinoza to take up
the labors of the old Grecian philosophers and speculate upon the One
Substance--the Deity, the Divine All proceeding from the Divine
Wisdom--incomprehensible, unknown and unnamed--by any ancient or modern
religious philosophy, with the exception of Christianity and Mohammedanism. 

Every Theosophist, then, holding to a theory of the Deity "which has not
revelation, but an inspiration of his own for its basis," may accept any of
the above definitions or belong to any of these religions, and yet remain
strictly within the boundaries of Theosophy. For the latter is belief in the
Deity as the ALL, the source of all existence, the infinite that cannot be
either comprehended or known, the universe alone revealing It, or, as some
prefer it, Him, thus giving a sex to that, to anthropomorphize which is
blasphemy. 

True, Theosophy shrinks from brutal materialization; it prefers believing
that, from eternity retired within itself, the Spirit of the Deity neither
wills nor creates; but that, from the infinite effulgency everywhere going
forth from the Great Centre, that which produces all visible and invisible
things, is but a Ray containing in itself the generative and conceptive
power, which, in its turn, produces that which the Greeks called Macrocosm,
the Kabalists Tikkun or Adam Kadmon--the archetypal man, and the Aryans
Purusha, the manifested Brahm, or the Divine Male.

Theosophy believes also in the Anastasis or continued existence, and in
transmigration (evolution) or a series of changes in the soul which can be
defended and explained on strict philosophical principles; and only by
making a distinction between Paramâtma (transcendental, supreme soul) and
Jivâtmâ (animal, or conscious soul) of the Vedantins.

To fully define Theosophy, we must consider it under all its aspects. The
interior world has not been hidden from all by impenetrable darkness. 
By that higher intuition acquired by Theosophia--or God-knowledge, which
carried the mind from the world of form into that of formless spirit, man
has been sometimes enabled in every age and every country to perceive things
in the interior or invisible world. Hence, the "Samadhi," or Dyan Yog
Samadhi, of the Hindu ascetics; the "Daimonion-photi," or spiritual
illumination of the Neo-Platonists; the "sidereal confabulation of soul," of
the Rosicrucians or Fire-philosophers; and, even the ecstatic trance of
mystics and of the modern mesmerists and spiritualists, are identical in
nature, though various as to manifestation. 

The search after man's diviner "self," so often and so erroneously
interpreted as individual communion with a personal God, was the object of
every mystic, and belief in its possibility seems to have been coeval with
the genesis of humanity, each people giving it another name. 

Thus Plato and Plotinus call "Noëtic work" that which the Yogin and the
Shrotriya term Vidya. "By reflection, self-knowledge and intellectual
discipline, the soul can be raised to the vision of eternal truth, goodness,
and beauty--that is, to the Vision of God--this is the epopteia," said the
Greeks.

"To unite one's soul to the Universal Soul," says Porphyry, "requires but a
perfectly pure mind. Through self-contemplation, perfect chastity, and
purity of body, we may approach nearer to It, and receive, in that state,
true knowledge and wonderful insight." And Swami Dayanand Saraswati, who
has read neither Porphyry nor other Greek authors, but who is a thorough
Vedic scholar, says in his Veda Bháshya (opasna prakaru ank.) -- "To obtain
Diksh (highest initiation) and Yog, one has to practise according to the
rules . . . 

The soul in human body can perform the greatest wonders by knowing the
Universal Spirit (or God) and acquainting itself with the properties and
qualities (occult) of all the things in the universe. A human being (a
Dikshit or initiate) can thus acquire a power of seeing and hearing at great
distances." 
Finally, Alfred R. Wallace, F.R.S., a spiritualist and yet a confessedly
great naturalist, says, with brave candour: "It is 'spirit' that alone
feels, and perceives, and thinks--that acquires knowledge, and reasons and
aspires . . . there not unfrequently occur individuals so constituted that
the spirit can perceive independently of the corporeal organs of sense, or
can perhaps, wholly or partially, quit the body for a time and return to it
again . . . the spirit . . . communicates with spirit easier than with
matter." 

We can now see how, after thousands of years have intervened between the age
of Gymnosophists and our own highly civilized era, notwithstanding, or,
perhaps, just because of such an enlightenment which pours its radiant light
upon the psychological as well as upon the physical realms of nature, over
twenty millions of people today believe, under a different form, in those
same spiritual powers that were believed in by the Yogins and the
Pythagoreans, nearly 3,000 years ago.
 
Thus, while the Aryan mystic claimed for himself the power of solving all
the problems of life and death, when he had once obtained the power of
acting independently of his body, through the Atmân--"self," or "soul"; and
the old Greeks went in search of Atmu--the Hidden one, or the God-Soul of
man, with the symbolical mirror of the Thesmophorian mysteries;-- so the
spiritualists of today believe in the faculty of the spirits, or the souls
of the disembodied persons, to communicate visibly and tangibly with those
they loved on earth. 

And all these, Aryan Yogins, Greek philosophers, and modern spiritualists,
affirm that possibility on the ground that the embodied soul and its never
embodied spirit--the real self, are not separated from either the Universal
Soul or other spirits by space, but merely by the differentiation of their
qualities; as in the boundless expanse of the universe there can be no
limitation. And that when this difference is once removed--according to the
Greeks and Aryans by abstract contemplation, producing the temporary
liberation of the imprisoned Soul; and according to spiritualists, through
mediumship--such an union between embodied and disembodied spiritst becomes
possible. 

Thus was it that Patanjali's Yogins and, following in their steps, Plotinus,
Porphyry and other Neo-Platonists, maintained that in their hours of
ecstasy, they had been united to, or rather become as one with God, several
times during the course of their lives. This idea, erroneous as it may seem
in its application to the Universal Spirit, was, and is, claimed by too many
great philosophers to be put aside as entirely chimerical. 

In the case of the Theodidaktoi, the only controvertible point, the dark
spot on this philosophy of extreme mysticism, was its claim to include that
which is simply ecstatic illumination, under the head of sensuous
perception. In the case of the Yogins, who maintained their ability to see
Iswara "face to face," this claim was successfully overthrown by the stern
logic of Kapila. 

As to the similar assumption made for their Greek followers, for a long
array of Christian ecstatics, and, finally, for the last two claimants to
"God-seeing" within these last hundred years--Jacob Böhme and
Swedenborg--this pretension would and should have been philosophically and
logically questioned, if a few of our great men of science who are
spiritualists had had more interest in the philosophy than in the mere
phenomenalism of spiritualism. 

The Alexandrian Theosophists were divided into neophytes, initiates, and
masters, or hierophants; and their rules were copied from the ancient
Mysteries of Orpheus, who, according to Herodotus, brought them from India.
Ammonius obligated his disciples by oath not to divulge his higher
doctrines, except to those who were proved thoroughly worthy and initiated,
and who had learned to regard the gods, the angels, and the demons of other
peoples, according to the esoteric hyponia, or under-meaning. "The gods
exist, but they are not what the hoi polloi, the uneducated multitude,
suppose them to be," says Epicurus. "He is not an atheist who denies the
existence of the gods whom the multitude worship, but he is such who fastens
on these gods the opinions of the multitude." In his turn, Aristotle
declares that of the "Divine Essence pervading the whole world of nature,
what are styled the gods are simply the first principles." 

Plotinus, the pupil of the "God-taught" Ammonius, tells us that the secret
gnosis or the knowledge of Theosophy, has three degrees--opinion, science,
and illumination. "The means or instrument of the first is sense, or
perception; of the second, dialectics; of the third, intuition. To the last,
reason is subordinate; it is absolute knowledge, founded on the
identification of the mind with the object known." 

Theosophy is the exact science of psychology, so to say; it stands in
relation to natural, uncultivated mediumship, as the knowledge of a Tyndall
stands to that of a school-boy in physics. It develops in man a direct
beholding; that which Schelling denominates "a realization of the identity
of subject and object in the individual"; so that under the influence and
knowledge of hyponia man thinks divine thoughts, views all things as they
really are, and, finally, "becomes recipient of the Soul of the World," to
use one of the finest expressions of Emerson. "I, the imperfect, adore my
own perfect"--he says in his superb Essay on the Oversoul. Besides this
psychological, or soul-state, Theosophy cultivated every branch of sciences
and arts. It was thoroughly familiar with what is now commonly known as
mesmerism. 

Practical theurgy or "ceremonial magic," so often resorted to in their
exorcisms by the Roman Catholic clergy--was discarded by the theosophists.
It is but Iamblichus alone who, transcending the other Eclectics, added to
Theosophy the doctrine of Theurgy. 

When ignorant of the true meaning of the esoteric divine symbols of nature,
man is apt to miscalculate the powers of his soul, and, instead of communing
spiritually and mentally with the higher, celestial beings, the good spirits
(the gods of the theurgists of the Platonic school), he will unconsciously
call forth the evil, dark powers which lurk around humanity--the undying,
grim creations of human crimes and vices--and thus fall from theurgia (white
magic) into göetia (or black magic, sorcery). 

Yet, neither white, nor black magic are what popular superstition
understands by the terms. The possibility of "raising spirits" according to
the key of Solomon, is the height of superstition and ignorance. 

Purity of deed and thought can alone raise us to an intercourse "with the
gods" and attain for us the goal we desire. Alchemy, believed by so many to
have been a spiritual philosophy as well as physical science, belonged to
the teachings of the theosophical school. 

It is a noticeable fact that neither Zoroaster, Buddha, Orpheus, Pythagoras,
Confucius, Socrates, nor Ammonius Saccas, committed anything to writing. The
reason for it is obvious. 

Theosophy is a double-edged weapon and unfit for the ignorant or the
selfish. Like every ancient philosophy it has its votaries among the
moderns; but, until late in our own days, its disciples were few in numbers,
and of the most various sects and opinions. 

"Entirely speculative, and founding no school, they have still exercised a
silent influence upon philosophy; and no doubt, when the time arrives, many
ideas thus silently propounded may yet give new directions to human
thought"--remarks Mr. Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie IXo

. . . himself a mystic and a Theosophist, in his large and valuable work,
The Royal Masonic Cycloepædia (articles Theosophical Society of New York and
Theosophy, p. 731).3 Since the days of the fire-philosophers, they had never
formed themselves into societies, for, tracked like wild beasts by the
Christian clergy, to be known as a Theosophist often amounted, hardly a
century ago, to a death-warrant. 

The statistics show that, during a period of 150 years, no less than 90,000
men and women were burned in Europe for alleged witchcraft. In Great Britain
only, from A.D. 1640 to 1660, but twenty years, 3,000 persons were put to
death for compact with the "Devil." It was but late in the present
century--in 1875--that some progressed mystics and spiritualists,
unsatisfied with the theories and explanations of Spiritualism, started by
its votaries, and finding that they were far from covering the whole ground
of the wide range of phenomena, formed at New York, America, an association
which is now widely known as the Theosophical Society. And now, having
explained what is Theosophy, we will, in a separate article, explain what is
the nature of our Society, which is also called the "Universal Brotherhood
of Humanity." 

-- H P Blavatsky	
[THEOSOPHIST Vol. I , 1879]


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