Helena Blavatsky: The Secret Doctrine

Context

The members of Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, all of whom were upper-middle-class professionals from New York City, were searching for answers: How did our world come to be? Where do we go after we die? Are there unseen forces that control human action? The answers that Theosophists formulated to these age-old questions cannot be understood apart from their particular historical period and place.

The occult has a long history in the West, having developed alongside Christianity and provided another way to view the world and our place in it. Occult groups often had secret societies, brotherhoods, and complicated initiations, and adherents to occultism believed in mystical beings that populated the earth. Medieval European societies, like the Rosicrucians and Freemasons, were imported to and flourished in the United States. A mid-nineteenth-century U.S. movement called Spiritualism was influenced by these earlier groups but was also more widely popular. Spiritualists believed that spirits of the dead returned and spoke with the living, generally through a medium at a séance. This concept permeated American culture after the 1848 “Hydesville Rappings,” when two young girls allegedly communicated through a series of knocks—much like the newly invented Morse code—with a man they called Mr. Splithoof (the Devil). The case caused a sensation, and séances were soon being held across the northeastern United States—even Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of President Abraham Lincoln, held one in the White House in order to contact her deceased son. Spiritualism remained popular through the American Civil War (1861–1865) but began to lose credibility in the late 1860s, when a number of mediums were exposed as frauds.

The Theosophical Society arose directly out of the context of Spiritualism. It was fostered through collaboration between Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, a New York lawyer descended of Puritans. A believer in Spiritualism and the occult, Olcott was contracted by newspapers in 1874 to write a series of articles about séances in Vermont. It was there that he met Blavatsky, a recent immigrant to the United States who had already distinguished herself as a medium of extraordinary ability. She was charismatic and exotic—telling of travels and spiritual encounters all over the world, particularly in Egypt and Tibet. Blavatsky told Olcott that the messages she received were not just from spirits but of a more unusual sort: She said she spoke with Masters (or Adepts), people so spiritually evolved that they were invisible.

In 1875 these Masters also began to speak to Olcott, through Blavatsky. In letters addressed to Olcott as “Brother Neophyte,” the Masters are said to have commanded him to get Blavatsky an apartment in New York City and to learn from her. Olcott did so, and together they began to hold a series of philosophical gatherings in her new apartment that brought together Spiritualists and occultists from across New York City. As Spiritualism waned in popularity, Blavatsky and her circle sought new ways to explain mysterious happenings. Thus, they formed the Theosophical Society in order to tap into ancient sources of wisdom. Although Theosophists’ ultimate goal was to become one with the Ultimate Truth, they did not engage in ritual, prayer, or other facets of religion, strictly speaking. Rather, they gave speeches to one another, held forums for discussion, and made intellectual links with occultists in Europe. They believed that Spiritualism and other occult phenomena could be investigated, discussed, and understood.

Besides the occult, Theosophy arose out of a series of societal shifts that, to many upper-middle-class white Americans, seemed profoundly disruptive: the Industrial Revolution, the influx of millions of new immigrants to the United States, the Civil War, and the rise of Darwinian science. Large numbers of immigrants were poor Catholics and Jews who settled in overcrowded city tenements; many wealthy Protestants felt that they lacked moral fiber, which resulted in the spread of disease and vice. Immorality and chaos seemed to have infiltrated the United States during the Civil War: Americans killed each other on an unprecedented scale, and many observers felt that the Apocalypse might be at hand. Just as destabilizing were new intellectual trends coming out of Europe: German biblical criticism and Darwinian evolution. Biblical critics maintained that the Bible was not the literal word of God, as most Christians at that time believed, but should be read allegorically and as a product of its own historical time.

Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) offered a new explanation for how humans came to be: They were not created by God but were evolved from monkeys. For many Christians, it seemed dangerous to say that nature’s law was “survival of the fittest.” What, then, was there to stop men from killing those weaker than they or committing more atrocities like those perpetrated during the Civil War? Pressure mounted to harmonize these new sciences—biblical criticism and evolution—with religion. At the same time, Victorian-era Protestants embraced new trends, such as the expansion of American missions to foreign lands. To many Americans, it seemed as if Christian progress and civilization could save the world. Missionaries’ writings were popular readings and introduced American audiences to the Eastern religions of Hinduism and Buddhism. For Americans who were unhappy in Christian denominations and dabbled in the occult, these exotic faiths seem to have offered new possibilities.

Theosophists were on the cutting edge of these trends in Victorian society. Blavatsky developed the most coherent (and complicated) system of beliefs related to the occult, casting aside Spiritualism when it was no longer credible and proposing her own system as a substitute. Within Theosophy, Blavatsky and her group were able to bring together contemporary ideas about evolutionary science and the new interest in Eastern religions, as is evident in the excerpt reprinted here. Theosophy focused on the individual soul’s journey, proposing that we each have the power to improve our own spiritual circumstances. Consequently, it appealed to a U.S. culture based on individualism, free will, and progress. By harnessing these various strands, Theosophy succeeded in neutralizing the fear and discomfort that new ideas caused, while also appealing to the sense of exotic mystery that occultists craved. It is within this context that one can understand how a tome as dense as The Secret Doctrine has had such long-lasting impact.