The Blavatsky Trust
Modern Theosophy Origins and Intentions
THE ORIGINS OF MODERN THEOSOPHICAL LITERATURE AND THE INTENTIONS BEHIND THE FOUNDING OF THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
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G.A. Farthing
ISIS UNVEILED
THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF ITS WRITING
About a year after the founding of the Theosophical Society in 1875 in New York, H.P.B. began writing her first major work. It is very difficult to describe to anyone who has not read this book what a vast amount and diversity of knowledge is contained in it. It goes way beyond what even the most erudite scholar could possibly have known about in its entirety. It is important to note this because it raises the question of its authorship. Could it possibly have been H.P.B's own work? She had had no formal education and she was not fluent in English, especially the written word. The answer is in statements made in Old Diary Leaves by H.S. Olcott, her collaborator in founding the Society, and in some of H.P.B's letters and articles: a number of Masters had a hand in the writing of it and in the most extraordinary way.
Her manuscript demonstrates a number of variations in style and handwriting. Olcott has this to say:
The 'copy' turned off by H.P.B. presented the most marked dissemblances at different times. While the handwriting bore one peculiar character throughout, so that one familiar with her writing would always be able to detect any given page as H.P.B's, yet when examined carefully one discovered at least three or four variations of the one style, and each of these persistent for pages together, when it would give place to some other of the calligraphic variants.... One of these H.P.B. handwritings was very small but plain; one bold and free; another plain, of medium size and very legible; and one scratchy and hard to read, with its queer foreign-shaped a's and x's and e's. There was also the greatest possible difference in the English of these various styles. Sometimes I would have to make several corrections in each line, while at others I could pass many pages with scarcely a fault of idiom or spelling to correct. Most perfect of all were the manuscripts which were written for her while she was sleeping. The beginning of the chapter on the civilisation of ancient Egypt is an illustration. We had stopped at about 2 a.m. as usual, both too tired to wait for our usual smoke and chat before parting. The next morning when I came to breakfast she showed me a pile of at least thirty or forty pages of beautifully written H.P.B. manuscript, which, she said, she had had written for her by - well, a Master whose name has never been degraded like some others. It was perfect in every respect, and went to the printers without revision.
Olcott describes how to do his 'stint' of writing a Master would actually take possession of H.P.B's body. She would be conscious of having been 'evicted' but remain quite conscious thereafter and be completely aware of what was going on. The following references to the Masters who took over H.P.B's body is interesting:
Then there was another Somebody who disliked English so much that he never willingly talked with me in anything but French; he had a fine artistic talent and a passionate fondness for mechanical invention. Another would now and then sit there, scrawling something with a pencil and reeling off for me dozens of poetical stanzas which embodied, now sublime, now humorous, ideas. So each of the several Somebodies had his peculiarities, as recognizable as those of any of our ordinary acquaintances or friends. One was jovial, fond of good stories, and witty to a degree; another, all dignity, reserve and erudition. One would be calm, patient and benevolently helpful; another testy and sometimes exasperating. One Somebody would always be willing to emphasize his philosophical or scientific explanation of the subjects I was to write upon, by doing phenomena for my edification; while to another Somebody I dared not even mention them.
Now when either of these Somebodies was 'on guard', as I used to term it, the H.P.B. manuscript would present the identical peculiarities that it had on the last occasion when he had taken his turn at the literary work. He would by preference write about the class of subjects that were to his taste; and instead of H.P.B. playing the part of amanuensis, she would then have become for the time being that other person. If you had given me in those days any page of Isis manuscript, I could almost certainly have told you by which Somebody it had been written.
It will be noticed from the description of the Somebodies taking over H.P.B's body that six or seven can be identified by their characteristics and when it is considered that latterly all these 'correspondents' came to be known as Masters of the Wisdom, the vast learning in that book is easily explained. As has often been noted before, some 1,300 other works from remotest antiquity through mediaeval times to the modern, are quoted from. It would be fairly safe to say that there is no other work in the English language to compare with it. It is however, as the manner of its writing would suggest, a series of a large number of articles with no connective progressive narrative, for which reason it has received adverse literary criticism. It is obviously intended to be informative and not a story with a beginning and an end.
She had another collaborator; although not a Master of the Wisdom, he was in fact one who had died and become earthbound. Here is Olcott's description:
We worked in collaboration with at least one disincarnate entity - the pure soul of one of the wisest philosophers of modern times.... He was a great Platonist; and I was told that, so absorbed was he in his life-study that he had become earth-bound, i.e., he could not snap the ties which held him to earth, but sat in an astral library of his own mental creation, plunged in his philosophical reflections.... There he was, willing and eager to work with H.P.B. on this epoch-making book, toward the philosophical portions of which he contributed much. He did not materialize and sit with us, nor obsess H.P.B. medium-fashion; he would simply talk with her psychically by the hour together, dictating copy, telling her what references to hunt up, answering my questions about details, instructing me as to principles, and playing the part of a third person in our literary symposium....
An incident which exemplifies and supplements our view of the very unusual setting in which Theosophy came to be presented to the world, but which is not relevant to the writing of Isis, is the following:
One evening in New York, after bidding H.P.B. good-night, I sat in my bedroom finishing a cigar and thinking. Suddenly there stood my Chohan beside me. The door had made no noise in opening, if it had opened, but at any rate there he was. He sat down and conversed with me in subdued tones for some time, and as he seemed in an excellent humour towards me, I asked him a favour. I said I wanted some tangible proof that he had actually been there, and that I had not been seeing a mere illusion or maya conjured up by H.P.B. He laughed, unwound the embroidered Indian cotton fehta (still to be seen at the T.S. headquarters, Adyar) he wore on his head, flung it to me, and - was gone. That cloth I still possess, and it bears in one corner the initial ... M of my Chohan in thread-work.
Not all of Isis was the direct work of these 'visiting' Masters. Olcott records that H.P.B. herself was a very competent author, as follows:
I have spoken of the part of Isis that was done by H.P.B. in propria persona which was inferior to that done for her by the Somebodies. This is perfectly comprehensible, for how could H.P.B., who had no previous knowledge of this sort, write correctly about the multifarious subjects treated in her book? In her (seemingly) normal state, she would read a book, mark the portions that struck her, write about them, make mistakes, correct them, discuss them with me, set me to writing, help my intuitions, get friends to supply materials, and go on thus as best she might, so long as there were none of the teachers within call of her psychic appeals. And they were not with us always, by any means.
She did a vast deal of splendid writing, for she was endowed with a marvellous natural literary capacity; she was never dull or uninteresting; and she was equally brilliant in three languages, when the full power was upon her. She writes to her Aunt that when her Master was busy elsewhere, he left his substitute with her, and then it was her 'Luminous Self', her Augoeides, which thought and wrote for her. About this I cannot venture an opinion, for I never observed her in this state:...
H.P.B. writes of another form of assistance that she received when she was writing Isis, as follows:
When I wrote Isis, I wrote it so easily that it was actually no labour, but a real pleasure. Why should I be praised for it? Whenever I am told to write, I sit down and obey, and then I can write easily upon almost anything - metaphysics, psychology, philosophy, ancient religions, zoology, natural sciences, or what not. I never put myself the question: 'Can I write on this subject?' or 'Am I equal to the task?' but I simply sit down and write. Why? Because somebody who knows all dictates to me.... My Master and occasionally others whom I knew in my travels years ago.... Please do not imagine that I have lost my senses. I have hinted to you before now about Them ... and I tell you candidly, that whenever I write upon a subject I know little or nothing of, I address myself to Them, and one of Them inspires me, i.e., He allows me to simply copy what I write from manuscripts, and even printed matter that passes before my eyes in the air, during which process I have never been unconscious one single instant.... It is that knowledge of His protection and faith in His power, that have enabled me to become mentally and spiritually so strong ... and even He (the Master) is not always required; for, during His absence on some other occupation, He awakens in me His substitute in knowledge.... At such times it is no more I who write, but my inner Ego, my 'luminous self', who thinks and writes for me.
In another letter ... whether you believe me or not, something miraculous is happening to me. You cannot imagine in what a charmed world of pictures and visions I live. I am writing Isis, not writing, rather copying out and drawing what she personally shows to me. Upon my word, sometimes it seems to me that the ancient Goddess of Beauty in person leads me through all the countries of past centuries which I have to describe. I sit with my eyes open, and to all appearances see and hear everything real and actual around me, and yet at the same time I see and hear that which I write. I feel short of breath; I am afraid to make the slightest movement, for fear the spell might be broken. Slowly, century after century, image after image, float out of the distance and pass before me, as if in magic panorama; and meanwhile I put them together in my mind, fitting in epochs and dates, and know for sure that there can be no mistake. Races and nations, countries and cities, which have for long disappeared in the darkness of the prehistoric past, emerge and then vanish, giving place to others, and then I am told the consecutive dates.
Hoary antiquity makes way for historical periods; myths are explained to me with events and people who have really existed; and every event which is at all remarkable, every newly turned page of this many-coloured book of life, impresses itself on my brain with photographic exactitude. My own reckonings and calculations appear to me later on as separate coloured pieces of different shapes in the game which is called casse-tête (jigsaw puzzles). I gather them together and try to match them one after the other, assuredly it is not I who do it all, but my ego, the highest principle which lives in me. And even this with the help of my Guru and Teacher who helps me in everything. If I happen to forget something, I have just to address him, or another of the same kind in my thought, and what I have forgotten rises once more before my eyes - sometimes whole tables of numbers passing before me, long inventories of events. They remember everything. They know everything. Without Them, from whence could I gather my knowledge?
A passage which tells us more about the extraordinary personality of H.P.B. comes from a Charles Lazenby who tells us of the impression she made on Professor Corson of Cornell University with whom she stayed:
In connection with Isis Unveiled, I may quote from an interview I had with Professor Hiram Corson, now Regius Professor of English at Cornell University, New York State, and the recognized authority on Browning.
In talking to him about the great men and women of the nineteenth century whom he had met intimately, I asked him whom, of them all, he considered the most striking and remarkable. He at once replied, by all means Madame Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society, and after her, Walt Whitman.
This was a line of interesting conversation I little expected, and I urged him to tell me more of this outstanding figure in his memory.
He said, "She wrote a considerable part of Isis Unveiled in my house at Ithaca, and living constantly with her for those weeks, she continually filled me with amazement and curiosity as to what was coming next. She had a profound knowledge of everything apparently, and her method of work was most unusual.
"She would write in bed, from nine o'clock in the morning till two o'clock the following morning, smoking innumerable cigarettes, quoting long verbatim paragraphs from dozens of books of which I am perfectly certain there were no copies at that time in America, translating easily from several languages, and occasionally calling out to me, in my study, to know how to turn some old-world idiom into literary English, for at that time she had not attained the fluency of diction which distinguished The Secret Doctrine."
I asked him how he accounted for her quotations in full from these very rare and curious volumes.
He smiled reminiscently, and said - "She herself told me that she wrote them down as they appeared in her eyes on another plane of objective existence, that she clearly saw the page of the book and the quotation she needed, and simply translated what she actually saw into English."
I asked him whether he believed this.
He replied: "The woman was so marvellous and had such mysterious funds of definite knowledge, that I find it much easier to believe her statement than to account for her quotations by any ordinary explanation of memory.
"The hundreds of books she quoted from were certainly not in my library, many of them not in America, some of them very rare and difficult to get in Europe, and if her quotations were from memory, then it was an even more startling feat than writing them from the ether. The facts are marvellous, and the explanation must necessarily bewilder those whose consciousness is of a more ordinary type."
[The Path, Vol.I, No.1, July 1910]
Then again we have from Olcott:
In her whole life she had not done a tithe of ... literary labour, yet I never knew even a managing daily journalist who could be compared with her for dogged endurance or tireless working capacity. From morning till night she would be at her desk, and it was seldom that either of us got to bed before 2 o'clock a.m.... She worked on no fixed plan, but ideas came streaming through her mind like a perennial spring which is overflowing its brim. Now she would be writing upon Brahma, anon upon Babinet's electrical "meteor-cat"; one moment she would be reverentially quoting Porphyrios, the next from a daily newspaper or some modern pamphlet that I had just brought home....
Her own manuscript was often a sight to behold; cut and patched, re-cut and re-pasted, until if one held a page of it to the light, it would be seen to consist of, perhaps, six or eight or ten slips cut from other pages, pasted together, and the text joined by interlined words or sentences....
One might fancy, upon seeing the numerous quotations in Isis Unveiled that she had written it in an alcove of the British Museum or of the Astor Library in New York. The fact is, however, that our whole working library scarcely comprised one hundred books of reference. Now and again single volumes would be brought her by Mr. Sotheran, Mr. Marble or other friends, and, latterly, she borrowed a few from Mr. Bouton. Of some books she made great use ... yet not to exceed the hundred, I should say. Then what books did she consult and what library had she access to?...
To watch her at work was a rare and never-to-be-forgotten experience. We sat at opposite ends of one big table usually, and I could see her every movement. Her pen would be flying over the page, when she would suddenly stop, look into space with the vacant eye of a clair-voyant seer, shorten her vision as though to look at something held invisibly in the air before her, and begin copying on her paper what she saw. The quotation finished, her eyes would resume their natural expression, and she would go on writing until again stopped by a similar interruption.... [Old Diary Leaves, 1, 203-9]
The above are a few examples of the marvellous story that unfolds as
we attempt to discover the beginnings of the Theosophical Society and
the knowledge of the inner workings of Nature, Theosophy as it came to
be called, which the Masters intended the Society to promulgate. The story
has never been written up fully in this way, but it can be pieced together
from the various historical accounts, articles and notebooks in which
it is preserved. Taken together these all form a vast mass of material
which unfortunately has come to be largely neglected, both within and
outside of the Society.
Against a background of these historical views and recorded stories the
whole theosophical movement with its magnificent teaching takes on an
aspect and a flavour very different from that which it now possesses.
Let us hope it is not too late to resuscitate it and by this means to
rejuvenate the Movement, setting it going again along the lines so clearly
indicated in its beginnings.
A Trilogy > Next - The Secret Doctrine
Bibliography
References: :-
C.W. The Collected Writings of H.P. Blavatsky, 14 volumes
S.D. The Secret Doctrine
I.U. Isis Unveiled
KEY The Key to Theosophy
V.S. The Voice of the Silence
M.L. The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett - chronological edition
The Blavatsky Trust 2003
reproduced from 'A Trilogy' by G.A Farthing
