Theosophy: Cult of the Occult

In the days when student dissent took milder forms than it does now and the Death of God had not yet been widely announced, small groups of seminarians from fundamentalist Wheaton College used to appear at the edge of a 40-acre estate on the outskirts of Wheaton, Ill. They would kneel briefly in prayer and then scurry nervously away. Thirty years ago, it was an act that took courage: the estate had become headquarters of the Theosophical Society in America, a mysterious non-Christian movement often suspected of being more occult than cult. Praying for the souls of the benighted Theosophists, the seminarians feared that both they and the town would be hexed by the Devil.

Nothing ever happened to substantiate their fears. The Theosophists gradually became accepted by the community. They even joined the Chamber of Commerce. Last week, when leaders of the society’s 4,500 U.S. members met in Wheaton for their annual national convention, theosophy was once again under some suspicion. The scarcely adequate reason is that Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy’s accused assassin, had asked for and received a copy of the society’s most sacred book, The Secret Doctrine. Its author: Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-91), the Russian-born founder and high priestess of the movement.

Ancient Practice. Among Madame Blavatsky’s teachings, charged Author Truman Capote on television appearance, “was a theory of how you could undermine the morale of a country and create a vacuum for revolution by systematically assassinating a series of prominent people.” Not so, replied Theosophical Society President Joy Mills, a former schoolteacher, when the convention opened last week. “Mr. Capote is in complete confusion or abysmally ignorant of the society, its aims and teachings.”

By definition, theosophy is a cross between theology and philosophy. In practice, it is a religion—although its 34,000 practitioners in 45 countries maintain that it is not. Theosophists have always claimed divine insight, revealed in some cases on shafts of mystical “astral light.”

Their practice is an ancient one. Theosophy was taught by the sun-worshiping Egyptians, the oracular Greeks, the fire burners of Zarathustra. To one degree or another, its tenets are alive today among the Brahmans, Buddhists and Hindus of India, not to mention all the world’s hippies. In the West, however, theosophical thought had been all but dead since the 7th century, when Moslem armies swept out of Arabia and disrupted communications between Europe and the East. Then, in the 19th century, came Madame Blavatsky.

H.P.B.—as she is known to her followers—was a large and lusty adventuress who rolled her own cigarettes, gave birth to at least one illegitimate son, and stage-managed seances to “prove” her claims to supernatural powers. Granddaughter of a Russian princess, she was married off to a czarist general at the age of 16, but deserted him after three months and eventually showed up in Cairo as a psychic medium. After immigrating to the U.S. in 1874, she took up with a former Civil War staff colonel named Henry Steel Olcott, persuaded him to help her found the theosophist society the following year—and spent the rest of her life writing the society’s doctrine. Controversial wherever she went, she was accused in 1885 by the Society for Psychical Research in London of fraud, forgery and even of spying for the czar.

Madame Blavatsky’s doctrine is a very strange and stringent creed, highly moral despite her own aberrations, bizarre but engrossing as a compendium of comparative religion. Although H.P.B. quoted knowingly and relevantly from such ancient tracts as the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Chaldean Kabalah, her main sources turned out to be 1) revelations from a secret inner circle of Eastern arahats (“masters of esoteric philosophy”), with whom she may have communicated by telepathy, and 2) “secret portions of the Book of Dzyan,” a work so highly classified that only Madame Blavatsky ever heard of it. Also included in her Secret Doctrine is an ancient Greek incantation-“Aski -ka-taski -haix -tetrax -damname neus-aision”—supposedly powerful enough to cleanse a person possessed by devils.

Shadows of the Shadow. Madame Blavatsky proclaimed that all men are brothers—not only to one another but to all other animals, and to vegetables and minerals as well. Carried to its logical extreme, her doctrine would make a cannibal out of everyone who eats lunch, and many Theosophists have become vegetarians, presumably on the theory that cows are more brotherly than spinach.

H.P.B. divided the earth’s inhabitants into seven successive “root races,” each more immoral than the one before. The first two races, she proclaimed, were semi-spiritual “shadows of the shadow of God.” The third was a race of fourarmed men who inhabited a lost continent named Lemuria and were doomed 60 million years ago when they discovered sex. The fourth, recognizably human, went down with Atlantis 12,000 years ago, sunk by sex plus power. Our own race, which got off to a bad start with Adam, is the fifth, and it too may be about to expire—or perhaps find strange new powers. In her magically mystical prose, H.P.B. forecast that “occultism must win the day, before the present era reaches Saturn’s triple septenary of the present cycle in Europe—in other words, before the end of the 21st century A.D.”