PART I

 

This provocatively titled post is an “appendix” of sorts, for the cross-cultural story “The Agonized Womb of Consciousness.” Rather than shy way from the unavoidable themes/terminology in the series like “aryan” and “swastika,” we will explore their origins, and the etiology of their valence. To avoid the disruption in the narrative flow of the series, I’m “front-loading” the dreaded exposition for context and reference. As this series will focus primarily on Charley Johnston’s experience as a Theosophist in the Bengal Civil Service, when able, I use the writings of Charley and Blavatsky as sources.

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In October 1888, the eminent Sanskritist, Max Müller told Olcott that the Theosophical Society risked sacrificing “all the good opinion which scholars have of […] legitimate work for Sanskrit revival” by “pandering to the superstitious fancies of the Hindus,” and by telling them that there is an esoteric meaning in their Shastras. “I know the language perfectly,” Müller would say, “there is no such thing as a Secret Doctrine in it.” In 1860 Müller, “the father of religious studies,” was passed over for the position of Oxford University’s Boden Professor of Sanskrit. Though he was the most suitable candidate for the position,  it was said that his German birth, his Lutheranism, and his lack of actual fieldwork in India spoke against him. “There is this difference between us,” Blavatsky would say, “I write from personal experience—and they write upon information and belief.”  Her authorities were her “eyes and ears,” she would say, while the authorities of the orientalist’s were “obsolete works of reference.”

 

Max Müller.

 

What exactly does Müller mean when he says “legitimate work”? He is presumably referring to university-trained scholars. The question still remains, what grants the university system a monopoly on truth and legitmacy?

 

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PART II: AUTHORITY

Imagine two piles of paper money. One is a pile of American dollars, the other pile is that which you might find in a board game. Let us say, ontologically speaking, that both sets of “currency” in this exercise are made of the same material. Why, then, do we collectively believe that one has greater value than the other? In its beginning, the U.S. Dollar was a commodity-backed currency, meaning it could be exchanged for a specific commodity; in the case of the dollar, this commodity was gold, or the gold-standard. In the 1970s the U.S. Dollar became a fiat-currency, that is, a currency not anchored to a physical commodity (i.e. gold.) The U.S. Dollar has value because the U.S. Government says it has value (fiat meaning “it shall be” in Latin,) and it maintains its value by the people’s confidence and faith in the issuing government. In other words, if the people stopped using the Dollar, the Dollar will lose value. Imagine this same experiment with a university diploma and a sheet of paper. Is the diploma commodity-backed? If so, then what is its “gold-standard”? Is it fiat? If so, what earned your faith in the issuing body? Let us examine the origins of universities to better answer the question.

Western Universities trace their origin back to the twelfth-century Cathedral Schools of Medieval Europe, when Christian scholars formed themselves into semi-autonomous, self-governing guilds. Like other such guilds/lodges this system was hierarchical (think apprentice, journeyman, master.) In this scholar-guild the ranking was bachelor (from the humblest species of French knight, the chevalier bachelier,) and two higher grades, masters and doctors. Like the craft and merchant guilds, years of training was required to reach greater degrees of mastery in the scholar-guild, and adjudication was based on an examination system whereby candidates underwent a public trial of their ability. If the candidate was successful completion, they were recognized in a formal ceremony. By the early-half of the thirteenth century, these scholar-guilds of learning were sanctioned by the Catholic Church, which recognized them as forming a connected and organized body known as “the university of the masters and scholars.” The pope alone could validate degrees (beyond the confines of conferring universities) and grant them authority throughout Christendom. Naturally, the confirmation of the popes was sought whenever a new university was founded.  As for the name “university,” that came from the language of civil law which referred to all corporations as universitates, or “one whole out of many individuals.” Being the sole academic corporate body, the appellation of university, in time, was used exclusively in its scholastic application.

At the close of the thirteenth century, a social scaffolding emerged that was predicated on the three pillars of fides, sapientia, and militia, (university, papacy, and empire) and mirrored the three-fold office of Christ, (teacher, priest, and king.)

This social order was re-arranged with the advent of the Renaissance in fifteenth century Europe. This period marked a divorce from the established order of things, “an upheaval and departure from the ideas and ideal of that long epoch of Roman supremacy which is broadly described as the Middle Ages,” Charley writes. The three main causes for this, according to Charley, were:—

 

First, the concentration of the religious forces which had long struggled against the domination of the Papacy.

Secondly, the spread of Greek scholars and Greek learning through Europe, consequent on the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, and the resulting dispersion of the Greek culture from that ancient capital of the Eastern Empire. The spread of Greek learning, and the power to read the Greek MSS. of the Bible, and thus to return to the well-spring of the Christian Church, and to distinguish its pure ideal from the actual realisation of the Church of Rome, gave direction, illumination, and concentration to the already growing struggle against Rome.

The third cause of the breaking away from the old order, was the discovery of America in 1492, and the new world thus opening up, and strongly modifying old world ideas […]

 

The effect of Greek manuscripts flooding Western Europe was many-layered. It produced a renewed  impulse for language study and translation. This, in turn, had an effect on the modern literature of Europe. It also introduced a magical texts known as the Corpus Hermeticum, and with it the seeds for what would become the European occult revival.

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In 1502 the University of Wittenberg was founded without papal approval. It began when a few scholars, with access to a printing press, began teaching Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Soon after, an Augustinian friar in Wittenberg named Martin Luther urged Christendom to return to re-examine the foundational texts of the Christian faith, and study them in their original languages of Greek and Hebrew. For Luther this was his “calling,” which, as it was understood by medieval theologians, was a state of life mandated by Heaven, and therefore impious to rebel against. Luther ultimately protested the sacerdotal administration of the Church in 1517 with his 95 Theses, and called for the dismantling of the highly ritualistic praxis of the Church, as well as emphasizing sola scriptura (scripture alone) thus sparking the Protestant Reformation.

One of the first works Luther published was his Small Catechism (1529.) Catechisms being manuals for Christian religious instruction (catechesis,) which appeared in the Late Middle Ages. Luther’s catechism implemented a question and answer format, as he wanted students (catechumens) to comprehend and assimilate what they were learning. Two parties to participated, a master and a student, and after each section of the catechism (Decalogue, Lord’s Prayer, and Apostles’ Creed) the question was asked: “What does this mean?” 

In 1530 John Calvin, a French lawyer-turned-theologian, broke from the Catholic Church. When religious upheavals targeted Protestants in France, Calvin fled to Switzerland. For Calvin a “calling” was not a condition under which an individual was born, but rather a strenuous enterprise chosen by the individual himself, and pursued with religious responsibility. In Geneva Calvin published an innovative exegesis of Christian theology titled Institutes of the Christian Religion, in which he outlined a comprehensive system which, among other topics, expounded on the doctrines of predestination. He also seized upon the concept of the threefold office of Christ (teacher, priest, king,) to provide the divine sanction for ordering of the relationship among Academy, Church, and State. To protect the Academy and Church from encroachments on the part of the State, Calvin reaffirmed the sovereignty of Christ over mind, body, and soul, when he established his new cultural ethic.

A conflict between Protestants and Catholics would be waged in many European kingdoms, known broadly as the “The European Wars of Religion” between sixteenth century and eighteenth century. One such conflict was The English Civil War between the Royalists (conservative Protestants and some Catholics) and the Parliamentarians (Puritans i.e. strict Calvinists.) Some English migrants fled the religious conflict to settle in North American colonies, as both Protestants and Catholics alike, maintained that religious uniformity was a necessary requirement for a peaceful society. Roughly mirroring the geographical demarcation of their homeland, the Puritans settled in the North, in New England, the Anglicans settled in South, while the Catholics, Lutherans, Jews, Quakers, etc. settled in the Middle colonies. As the Anglophone colonies of North America were being established, the conflicts of Europe were cooling down. The “Peace of Westphalia” of 1648 brought about the emergence of the modern nation state under a new political reality known as “Westphalian Sovereignty.”

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Let us return to the question of authority of knowledge. In a letter written to James Ralston Skinner in 1887 (from which derives the title of this article) Blavatsky explains the source of her authority for writing The Secret Doctrine:

 

Where [do] I get “my authority from”? From the Book of Dzyan, or Wisdom! & Masters in whom you have hitherto declined to believe, only, perhaps, because They are living & mortal men. I am curious to know what you make of [Swastika in circle,] the Swastika within the circle which became the “sacred sign” with the Atlanteans, & by being transformed into (minus its circle) thus became the first phallic sign of the accursed materialistic Race—the Fourth & of our own—the Fifth.

 

This note, found in the archives of the Harvard Divinity School, as far as I can determine, is the first recorded reference to an encircled swastika indicating the “Aryan race.” (More on that below.) But what of this authority? A book of secret knowledge, preserved, and passed down through the ages seems absurd, and hardly the serious basis for authority, right? Consider for a moment Harvard, the institution where this letter is housed.

 

Farlow Library (Formerly Divinity School Library)

 

Harvard College, both the oldest corporation and oldest institute of higher learning in the United States. It was founded in 1636 by Puritans of New England’s Plymouth Colony. The schools early directors, who adhered to Biblical literalism, recognized the anti-intellectualism inherent in their faith. Edenic exile, after all, was the result of Adam eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge. The colony, nevertheless, needed a place to train theologians if it was going to survive.

Puritan leaders found a solution, of all place, in a Jewish mystical tradition that commented on “the book of the generations of Adam,” mentioned in Genesis 5:1. According to the Zohar, this passage indicated a “Secret Doctrine,” which “expounded the holy mystery of wisdom and the efficiency resident in the Divine Name of seventy-two letters.” (read more here.) This Secret Doctrine was allegedly given to the biblical Adam for safekeeping by Raziel, the Angel of Mysteries. The gift elevated Adam to a position greater than most celestial beings (with the exception of the messenger.) The celestial choirs descended to be present when Adam read the book, and warned him to conceal it, as he “studied it in silence with recollection of the heart.” When Adam and Eve were cast from Eden, the sacred book vanished, and for “long and long [Adam] lamented the loss of his treasure.” The book was ultimately returned to Adam in answer to his tearful prayers by the angel Raphael. Adam continued his study, and bequeathed it to his son Seth, who in turn entrusted the secret knowledge to successive generations of messengers, understood as the “School of Prophets” alluded to in 1 Samuel 19:18–24 & 2 Kings 2 and 4:38–44 It was the belief of the New England Puritans that they were now the chosen vessels of sacred knowledge in this pedagogical chain which linked directly to God. It was in this arrangement that Harvard could defend its existence.

It seems to me that in matters of intellectual-economy, university diplomas look a lot like fiat-currency. In matters of spiritual-economy? It would seem that Blavatsky and the early Harvard directors were both investing in some “sacerdotal-crypto-currency.”

 

Blavatsky’s letter to Skinner.

 

 

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PART III: PROGRESS

 

In the November 24, 1888 issue of the London Graphic an article was published that described the newly-completed Victoria Terminus Railway Station in Bombay. The symbolic vocabulary of the structure, known as Indo-Gothic, was an example of 19th century eclecticism, and married design elements from European gothic and imperial Mughal. The article stated that the apex of the dome was “crowned by a colossal figure in stone of ‘Progress.’” The statue which crowned the terminus was very much religious. As the name clearly stated, it was a symbol of “progress.” What is progress? It is a doctrinal innovation in Christianity presupposed the truth of a linear time, with a beginning, middle, and end. In other words, it was the process by which humanity would reach the Eschaton, the Christian End of Days.

 

Victoria Terminus.

 

Classical thought insisted that human nature was unchangeable. The historical process was almost invariably regarded as cyclical (as observed in nature) and no fundamental change in the order of reality was sought.

Christian scholars, having little interest (or confidence) in the hopes of temporal improvement, subjected everything to the will of God. The cyclical conception of history broke down in three stages of development throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and paved the way for the theory of progress. First was the Reformation’s challenge to ancient authority, second was the greater value placed on secular life, and third was the elevation of empirical science to explain the laws of nature.

We turn, now, to secular life, remembering Calvin’s interpretation of a “calling” as being an enterprise pursued by an individual. This new conception of religion changed the moral standard. The pursuit of wealth was a responsibility; an economic virtue expressed in the praxis of capitalism, the social counterpart of Calvinist theology. Whereas earlier generations regarded the covetous world of business as perilous to salvation, following Calvin, mercantilism became sanctified, and it was one’s duty to embark on profitable occupations. Those who were successful in the business world were seen to possess the virtues of “diligence, thrift, sobriety, prudence,” while those who were in poverty were seen to exhibit the vice of sloth or laziness. How did this practically manifest? International trade and empire. Charley writes:

 

The English went to India not at all as soldiers or conquerors, but simply as a “company of merchants of London trading to the East Indies.” England was then in the full flow of a splendidly creative epoch. Englishmen had been heartened by the defeat of the great Spanish Armada twelve years before. Sir Francis Drake’s voyages up the coast of California and across the Pacific and Indian oceans had kindled the imagination of his country; Sir Walter Raleigh had explored the marvelous forests of Guiana; English merchants were beginning to find their way overland to India […] The East India Company, the London Company trading to Virginia, the Plymouth Company, were all a part of the same out flowing tide. The forces that led Captain John Smith to found Jamestown, on the fringe of the Virginia forest, in 1607, at the same time carried Captain Hawkins to Surat in Western India, with a letter from James I to the Emperor of Delhi. So close is the relation between the two movements that we find the same adventurous spirits appearing now in the factories of the East India Company, now in the settlements on the American coast. And we have just been reminded that Elihu Yale served as Governor of the Council at Fort George in Madras before he came to Connecticut as Governor and founder of a great university.

For the century and a half from 1600 to 1750, the English took no part in Indian politics, and occupied no territory but the ground on which their warehouses were built. This century and a half saw a splendid contest between the most virile nations of the West throughout the seven seas. Italy, Portugal, Spain, France, England, and at a later date Germany and Scandinavia, all entered the lists. But so far as India was concerned, their rivalry was commercial only. At many of the Indian trading towns Dutch, Portuguese, French and English merchants had their warehouses side by side.

 

Another effect of Calvinism was the “globalization” of Christianity. As the American progressive-philosopher, John Dewey, states:

 

With the early Christians, and perpetuated in Catholicism, [religion] was a matter of membership in the organized Church…The most significant and essential thing in the Protestant movement […] was the raising of its concept of God to universality. God was no longer the God of the Church alone, or even of Christendom, or of man, or of the whole world; but was actually cosmic and universal and absolute.

 

One could say that this was a “monopoly” on morality. The Protestant missionaries were a crucial part of European colonialism, and provided “a sense of justice and moral authority,”  as they “civilized” native communities. One of the few ways in which indigenous traditions could be defended and survive, was if “they were modified according to progressive values in contemporary Western societies.” Confronted with this reality, the Bengali religious reformer, Ram Mohun Roy, established the Brahmo Samaj, (a progressive monotheistic Hinduism) the early nineteenth. In December 1888, the Indologist, Sir William Wilson Hunter, delivered a lecture at the London Institution, where he made a prediction regarding the operation of “new forces at work India,” and “the effect [of] the new forces upon the religious conceptions of the people.” Hunter believed that a new religion would soon arise in India, but “did not think that new religion would be our modern Christianity,” although he admitted that the Christian Missions were among the most powerful factors in the Sub Continent. “It would be interesting,” stated The Pall Mall Gazette, “if our prophet would condescend upon particulars, and tell us what now religion is likely to be. Are we to regard Ram Mohan Roy, or Madame Blavatsky, Commissioner Tucker as the John Baptist of new faith, must we look for one who is still to come?”

 

 

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PART IV: EMPIRIC

 

1662 saw the foundation of the Royal Society, or as Charley Johnston calls it, “the great invasion of Nature’s realms,” which has continued for three centuries “with unabated zeal.” But what is “nature”?  In antiquity, the conception of nature was something like a vita ex chao monism; the ecosystem of gods, humans, animals, plants, minerals, etc., which emerged from Chaos was “Nature.” For the Greeks, this hylomorphic (form-matter/thought-action) conception of Nature was eternal, self-generating, unchangeable in character, and  repetitive in cycle.

The medieval Christian philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, re-contextualized Greek hylomorphism with the Biblical narrative as the motive of creation, descent into sin, and redemption through Christ. By the time the cathedral schools emerged in the twelfth-century, hylomorphic Nature, formed the basis for supernatural grace and Biblical revelation. These Medieval philosophers still referred to the Platonic “great chain of being,” of which God formed the first link.

When Luther and Calvin emerged, they stressed the uncreated God’s sovereignty and complete independence; He stood apart from the universe “infinite, eternal, unchangeable in His being.” Whereas Medieval Christians focused their attention on the appearance of God in the after life, and to look upon their temporal position as being unworthy of attention, the Protestants, as we’ve seen, renewed their interest in the living world. In Calvinism, the deification of nature of antiquity gave way to the Biblical secularization of nature.  According to Calvin, God not some “immanent principle,” rather He was a personal ruler who created the world ex nihilo (out of nothing) according to His own sovereign will. Form and matter were both creations of a God who continually ordered, upheld, and governed creation by the secret power of His Holy Spirit. Calvin maintained that everything operates in accordance to the divine laws which God endowed nature with, and only on rare occasions (special revelation/redemptive action,) did God directly interfere. For Calvin, the order of the whole of the universe operated without mistake. This secularization of nature, or “disenchantment,” marked the first stage in development for modern science. It was understood that humans were given the responsibility of developing a material and social culture which would manifest the benevolence and power of God, and thereby provide humanity with the material conditions for living “the good life.” Calvin held that God placed humans on earth to subdue and use it. Humanity, after all, was given the mandate at creation “to be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it and have dominion over it.” Instead of avoiding human culture, it was to be conquered “for Christ’s sake.”

The revelations of empirical science created the conditions for The Industrial Revolution (1760-1840,) which saw rapid technological advances in the West, mechanized production of goods, and mass migrations from the fields to cities. Empirical science, did not, however, prove the literal truth of the Bible. William Herschel expanded the boundaries of the Solar System in 1781 with the discovery of Uranus. In 1819 William Buckland discovered fossils from ancient “giants” (later classified as “dinosaurs”) and cast doubt on the age of the earth. Philology, or the science of language, would complicate the biblical narrative even further.

 

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PART V: ARYANATION

 

In November/December 1888, Max Müller delivered a series of twenty lectures on Natural Religion at the University of Glasgow known as the Gifford Lectures. During these lectures, Müller stated that the Rig Veda was “the most ancient document of Aryan thought within our reach.” Regarding the definition of religion, Müller remarks on the “new” religion called “Buddhism,” stating:

 

Most people, whatever their opinions might be on other points, would probably hold that religion must always have something to do with God or the gods. But even that is not the case. Buddhism for instance is a creed professed by the largest number of human beings recognizes, as taught by Buddha […], no god or at all events no creator of the universe and it has been held in consequence that Buddhism could not be called religion. Now it is quite true we may so define religion that the name could not be applied to Buddhism; but the question is who has the right to narrow the definition of the word “religion” that it should cease to be applicable to the creed of the majority of mankind?

 

Let us explore what Müller means by “Aryan,” and what I mean by Buddhism being a “new religion.” We’ll start with Blavatsky’s definition:

 

Âryan. Lit., “the holy.” Those who had mastered the “noble truths ” (ârya-satyâni) and entered the noble path (ârya-mârga) to nirvana or moksha, the great “four-fold” path. They were originally known as Rishis; but now the name has become the epithet of a race, and our Orientalists, depriving the Hindû Brâhmans of their birthright, have made Aryans of all Europeans. Since, in esotericism, the four paths or stages can only be entered through great spiritual development and “growth in holiness” they are called the ârya-mârga. The degrees of arhatship, called respectively srotâpatti, sakridâgâmin, anâgâmin, and arhat or the four classes of Âryas, correspond to the four paths and truths. (Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. The Key to Theosophy)

 

To make sense of this, we return to the British East India Company (EIC,) who, after their success in the Battle of Plassey in 1757, assumed administrative functions over large parts of India. Warren Hastings, the EIC Governor-General of India, arranged for the compilation of a digest of “Hindu Law” to adjudicate the Hindu population under the company’s control. This task was given to William Jones, a gifted linguist, who landed in India in September, 1783. After consulting with local Brahmins, Jones translated the Laws of Manu, and used it as the basis for the Hindu-Indian legal system. Jones states:

 

The legislature of Britain having […] an intention to leave the natives of these Indian provinces in possession of their own Laws, at least on the titles of contracts and inheritances […] Whatever opinion in short may be formed of Manu and his laws in a country happily enlightened by sound philosophy, and the only true revelation, it must be remembered that those laws are actually revered as the word of the Most High by nations of great importance to the political and commercial interests of Europe, and particularly by many millions of Hindu subjects whose well-directed industry would add largely to the wealth of Britain, and who ask no more in return than protection.

 

William Jones.

 

The “methodical study of Oriental subjects was formally inaugurated,” when William Jones founded The Asiatic Society, “for the purpose of enquiring into the history, civil and natural, the antiquities, arts, sciences, and literature of Asia.” It was at the third anniversary meeting on February 2, 1786, that he delivered a discourse on the Hindus, in which he pointed out the wide scope of Sanskrit culture and civilization, and the great beauty of its literature:

 

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious [having more cases] than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of the grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason […]for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic […] had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same Family.

 

The opinion among most people of the West was that Hebrew was the original language of mankind, and that all European languages were to be traced back to Japheth. It was therefore, something of a revelation, when William Jones delivered an address in 1792 that suggested that Hebrew was not the original language:

 

It seems to follow, that the only human family after the flood established themselves in the northern parts of Iran; that, as they multiplied, they were divided into three distinct branches, each retaining little at first, and losing the whole by degrees, of their common primary language; but agreeing severally on new expressions for new ideas; that the branch of [Japheth] was enlarged in many scattered shoots over the north of Europe and Asia, diffusing themselves as far as the western and eastern seas, and, at length in the infancy of navigation, beyond them both.

 

Haileybury College.

 

In 1806 the EIC established Haileybury College, where they would train select administrators in the various languages of the colonies. Charley writes:

 

Each one of the old religions represents not only an attempt to explain the riddle of the world, but also a system of domestic and social life, entering into minute details of sentiment, of habit, of social and personal feeling. The English in India, recognizing this […] followed the lines of natural and age-long growth, and have given to the devotees of each of these different faiths a government in harmony with their particular genius. [Johnston, Charles. “The English In India.”]

The greatest epoch in Comparative Philology followed, beginning with was the publication of Franz Bopp’s A Comparative Grammar. Certain “industrious Teutons” began to explore the relationship between Sanskrit, and classical European languages. Once convinced of Sanskrit’s consanguinity with Latin, Greek, Celtic, old Teutonic, Lithuanian, and Slavonic languages with the ancient [Persian/Iranian] language of the Avesta. The philologist, Friedrich von Schlegel, soon declared that the “Indo-European” family of Europe originated in India. Schlegel and other like-minded scholars began to envision a great mythic past “the fruitful home of the great progenitor” of the people they called the “Indo-Germans.” The proponents of the “Indo-Germanic” theory made their appearance “with unfailing regularity,” Charley writes, “in every work that pretended to be up to date.”

 

(From left to right) Franz Bopp, Friedrich Von Schlegel, Jacob Grimm.

 

In the midst of these philological pursuits, a chain of events were underway in Nepal which would mark a pivot in the West’s understanding of “world religions.” In 1837, Brian Hodgson, an employee of the EIC residing in Kathmandu, obtained copies of ancient Tibetan texts based on old Sanskrit writings from Bihar, India, where Prince Siddhartha Gautama achieved enlightenment under the “Bodhi Tree.” Realizing the potential significance of these texts, Hodgson forwarded them to authorities that he believed were better equipped at deciphering their meaning, The Royal Asiatic Society (London,) and La Société Asiatique (Paris.) The Paris shipment found its way to the French Orientalist, Eugène Burnouf, who spent the next several years producing a translation. The result was Burnouf’s Introduction à l’histoire du Bouddhisme Indien (1844,) the single most important work in the subject of “Buddhism” up to that time.

“Buddhism” was invented in the nineteenth century. That is to say, it was when Europeans recognized the various traditions (divinatory, devotional, contemplative, mourning, etc.) which existed throughout Asia as belonging to the same tradition. Before the development of the “science of religion” in the nineteenth century, Europeans classified religion using a four-part division. There were the big three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam,) and there were pagans/heathens. And what are pagans and heathens? Well, in their original sense, pagans and heathens were not unlike the modern pejoratives of “hillbilly,” “redneck,” or “yokel,” that is, they were monikers for “unsophisticated” country-dwellers. We get pagan from the Latin word pagus, meaning “rustic” or “villager,” with the implication being an opposition to the “intellectual” or “cosmopolitan” city dweller. Heathen is of Germanic origin, and carried the same implications; it meant one who lived in “open country” among the heath trees. The traditions which would later be known as “Buddhism,” fell under the pagan/heathen category.

 

Brian Hodgson.

 

By the time Hodgson sent off his manuscripts, the educated classes of Europe were just beginning to recognize “Buddhism” as a distinct religion. This change came about when these scholars recognized the undeniable similarities of beliefs and practices in an expansive range of territories from Ceylon (Sri Lanka,) Burma (Myanmar,) Siam (Thailand,) to Japan, China, and the Russian frontier. Scholars traced the origins of this vast web of phenomena to sixth century B.C.E. northern India Their focus centered, increasingly, on two factors. The first was the near-mythological figure of Prince Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha; the second was the volumes of texts and lore (in various Asian languages) that were produced in the years following Gautama’s death. “Buddhism,” therefore, began as a textual construct by philologists. Owing to the Protestant character of the philologists (and the institutions which produced/sponsored them,) the project placed a premium on the alleged thoughts and deeds of Buddha, and on the texts he allegedly authorized—sola scriptura, one might say. These philologists were in the exclusive position to “grasp” the essential nature of Buddhist teaching, and saw it as their responsibility to remove the “corruptions” that occurred in the sacred Buddhist texts over the centuries, and restore them to their original “purity.” The lived-religion of actual Buddhists (i.e. “Catholic,”) was of secondary importance. Just as Luther had rejected papal authority, in this European conception of Buddhism, Prince Siddhartha Gautama was a revolutionary spiritual leader who rejected the Vedic authority of “corrupt” Brahman priests. Just as soon as the Europeans “invented” Buddhism, it would seem, a Restorationist movement for Buddhist Primitivism was underway.

Around this time the “Irresistible Impulse” theory emerged, which suggested that the peoples of Europe originally emerged from India and the East. It was an idea popularized in 1848 by the folklore-philologist, Jacob Grimm (of Grimm’s Fairy Tales,) who declared in Geschichte Der Deutschen Sprache (The History of the German Language):

 

Few will be found to question that all the nations of Europe migrated anciently from Asia; in the vanguard those related races whose destiny it was through moil and peril to struggle onwards, their forward march from east to west being prompted by an irresistible impulse whose precise cause is hidden in obscurity. The farther to the west any race has penetrated, so much the more profound will be the footprints which it impressed upon its track. (Grimm, Jacob. Geschichte Der Deutschen Sprache.)

 

A year after Grimm published Deutschen Sprache, Max Müller, a pupil of Eugène Burnouf, entered the picture. Charley writes:

 

For us the significance of his work begins in London, where, at the age of twenty-six, he published the first volume of his great edition of the Rig Veda. This was in 1849. [Müller] threw down the partition walls between peoples and tongues, making all the children of men once more akin in thought, as Darwin had shown them kindred in blood; and lifting the mists from bygone ages, showed us the community of our speech, our thought, and aspiration, with the word long hushed on lips of vanished races, of men whose name memory has ceased to whisper along the deserted corridors of time. (Johnston, Charles. “An Estimate Of Max Müller.”)

 

Müller would also champion the “out of India” theory, stating “We may learn much more of the intellectual state of the primitive and undivided family of the Aryan nations if we use the materials which Comparative Philology has placed at our disposal.” With two centuries of European “disenchantment,” many people of the West grew enthusiastic over the prospect of spiritual “re-enchantment” from the East. An expression from this time, “Ex Oriente Lux” (“out of the East, light,”) captures the sentiment. It’s probably no accident, either, that the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, introduced the word  “re-orient” (return East) in his 1850 poem, In Memoriam. As we can see, the word “Aryan” came to replaced the word “Indo-Germanic.” The process of which Charley explains:

 

When the step from the affinities of Indo-Germanic speech to the brotherhood of Indo-Germanic speakers had once been taken, these Indo-Germans began to make their appearance with unfailing regularity in every work that pretended to be up to date. Then, somewhat gradually, in the spirit of the great innovator, time, a change began to come over the new epic. For though the entire excellence of this title of Indo-German was at once perceived and fully recognized within the bounds of the Fatherland, still inchoate but full of young life and vigor in those early days, it was not so kindly received across the Rhine, or to the east of the Vistula, or on the superior side of the Channel; and the propriety of looking out for a new name began to be felt on all sides. (Johnston, Charles. “The Indo-Germanic Myth.”)

In an ironic twist, the appellation of “aryan” was used as an alternative to “Indo-Germanic” and de-center the “German” of “Indo-German.” But where did this word “aryan” originate? In the 1830s Friedrich Von Schlegel connected several words from the various languages in the “Indo-German” family. Schlegel found that the people of Persia referred to themselves as Iranians, a named derived from the Middle Persian Ērān, which itself stemmed from the Old Persian/Avestan Ariya (likely meaning “compatriot.”) Schlegel then found the unchanged variant, “Arya,” in Sanskrit, where it referred to the upper echelon of ancient Indian society. Schlegel concluded that “Arya” was the origin for the German word “Ehren” (“honor,”) and Éire/Erin (the ancient word for Ireland.) Schlegel suggested the Indo-Europeans/Germans referred to themselves as the “Aryans,” or “the honorable people.”

 

“Indo-Europeans.”

 

The “Irresistible Impulse” theory would take the Calvinistic idea of “progress” and “calling” and applied it to “race,” establishing what we might call a historiographical “translatio generis.” This theory, incidentally, proved a useful tool for validating Empire, and gained wide traction—even within the Church. In late November 1888, when the first editions of The Secret Doctrine were leaving the press, the Rev. A.R. Eagar delivered a lecture in England titled “How the English Language Was Made,” in which he stated:

 

[English] and kindred languages […] could be traced to the Aryan race who inhabited Central Asia. The several migrations of this race into India, Persia, and Europe were then detailed, showing their westward progress generally, their displacement of other races, and sometimes one of another […] The wonderful adaptation possessed by the English language, and the rapid spread of it, seemed to point to it as the universal language of the world.

 

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PART VI: MASTER RACES

 

We can get a sense of the notion of European conception of racial hierarchy by looking at Blavatsky’s comments on the British in a conversation she had with Charley in 1887:

 

India is a well-ventilated jail […] it is true [the British] do something in a material way, but it is always three for themselves and one for the natives. But what is the use of material benefits, if you are despised and trampled down morally all the time? If your ideals of national honour and glory are crushed in the mud, and you are made to feel all the time that you are an inferior race—a lower order of mortals—pigs, the English call them, and sincerely believe it. Well, just the reverse of that would be universal brotherhood. Do them less good materially—not that they do so very much, besides collecting the taxes regularly—and respect their feelings a little more. The English believe that the “inferior races” exist only to serve the ends of the English; but we [Theosophists] believe that they exist for themselves, and have a perfect right to be happy in their own way. No amount of material benefit can compensate for hurting their souls and crushing out their ideals. Besides there is another side of all that, which we as Theosophists always point out. There are really no “inferior races,” for all are one in our common humanity; and as we have all had incarnations in each of these races, we ought to be more brotherly to them

 

Following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Government of India Act 1858 led to the British Crown assuming direct control of India from the EIC, and establishing the British Raj. This coincided with the publication of Charles Darwin’s groundbreaking work, On The Origin of Species, which forever changed humanity’s understanding of itself, and its place in the world. Darwin writes:

 

The dominant species of the larger dominant groups tend to leave many modified descendants, and thus new sub-groups and groups are formed. As these are formed, the species of the less vigorous groups, from their inferiority inherited from a common progenitor, tend to become extinct together, and to leave no modified offspring on the face of the earth. But the utter extinction of a whole group of species may often be a very slow process, from the survival of a few descendants, lingering in protected and isolated situations. When a group has once wholly disappeared, it does not reappear for the link of generation has been broken. (Darwin, Charles. On The Origin of Species.)

 

With Darwin’s theory of evolution entering the marketplace of ideas, it was not long before Race Theory was used as a political tool, notably in communities where a multiplicity of identities cohabitated, such as the United States and Prussia. In 1861 George Fitzhugh, the American Race Theorist (and author of the first English-language work to use the term “Sociology,”) popularized the phrase “Master Race.” In his essay “The Message, The Constitution, and the Times,” Fitzhugh conceptualized the “Master Race” as a way of differentiating between the anglophone colonies/states of the American North and South. According to Fitzhugh, the colonies established in the Americas, and their varieties of religious expression, were continuing a conflict which stretched back to the English Civil War. “If [the Puritans] wished to worship God according to their own tenets,” Fitzhugh writes, “it was with that spirit which […] banishes freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, in all that pertains to religious toleration.” Regarding the “Master Race,” Fitzhugh states:

 

The Cavaliers, Jacobites, and Huguenots of the South naturally hate, condemn, and despise the Puritans who settled the North. The former are master races, the latter a slave race, the descendants of the Saxon serfs […] The progress and tendency of opinion [in the North] is to pure democracy, less government, anarchy, and agrarianism. Their hatred of the South will accelerate this noxious current of opinion, and anarchy will soon wind up in military despotism. There will be as many little military despots as there are now States, for no usurper will wield means sufficient to conquer or fuse into one several States. It will be a great improvement in Northern affairs, and the sooner it comes about the better. Military despotism is far preferable to Northern democracy, agrarianism, infidelity, and free love.

 

In 1866, a year after the American Civil War, the modern nation-state of Germany emerged, beginning as the Prussian-led North German Confederation, and evolving into the German Empire in 1871. French biologist, Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages, writes at this time:

 

The Aryan race is represented in Germany (properly so-called) almost solely by its Germanic branch. Some few Celtic colonies came from Gaul, and established themselves by force of arms upon a small number of points, compensating, so to speak, for the German groups that had emigrated in a contrary direction. Finally, one sees why the French Calvinist emigrants penetrated but little into Lutheran Germany. For a still stronger reason, they had scarcely anything to do with Catholic Germany. Thus in every respect Prussia is ethnologically distinct from the peoples she now rules over through the plea of a pretended unity of race Besides her conditions of existence her surroundings her alliances have transformed the few elements which ally her to the genuine Germans Identity of language imposed.

 

By 1868, the “racial” model of “survival of the fittest” was supported by the German zoologist, Ernst Haeckel:

 

According to the law developed by Darwin, that in the struggle for life the more highly developed, the more favored and larger groups of forms, possess the positive inclination and the certain tendency to spread more and more at the expense of the lower, more backward, and smaller groups. Thus the Mediterranean species, and within it the Indo-Germanic, have by means of the higher development of their brain surpassed all the other races and species in the struggle for life, and have already spread the net of their dominion over the whole globe. (Haeckel, Ernst. The History of Creation)

 

This Race Theory was intersectional and multidisciplinary, as the anthropologist, J.W. Jackson writes in his 1869 essay, “The Aryan and the Semite”:

 

Archaeology, and the study of Oriental languages, have somewhat enlarged our ideas. We now know not only that there were colossal empires before that of Rome, but also a civilization anterior to that of Hellas […] We now know that there was a great cycle of what is perhaps not inaptly termed monumental civilization, whereof the written records have utterly perished, and which is, nevertheless, being slowly rehabilitated by the investigation of its ruins and the interpretation of its inscriptions […] In truth, the greatest wars which history narrates as having occurred within the Caucasian area, were those between the Semites and Aryan [;] the Semite struggle with the Aryan for the supremacy of civilization […] We may be quite sure that this great racial conflict has not yet terminated—in truth it has scarcely paused. The conquest of India by the English, and that terrible mutiny—which was intended to restore the effete descendant of the Great Mogul to the imperial throne of his illustrious ancestors—were but the later incidents to its continuation; while the inevitable decline of Turkey, and the insatiable ambition of Russia, may suffice to show that the material for its renewal are by no means wanting.

 

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PART VII: THE ARYAN CROSS

 

In the winter of 1874, a year before the formation of the Theosophical Society, an article titled “Ancient Troy,” appeared in The New York Tribune which explained that Heinrich Schliemann discovered the once-mythical city of Troy using little more than descriptions which Homer provided in the Iliad. Schliemann discovered among the ruins a great deal of masonry inscribed with a peculiar symbol, as the Tribune states:

 

The inhabitants of the city were certainly Aryans. This fact is illustrated in their manner of building, and also in the frequency of the earliest Aryan religious symbols, upon the terra-cotta disks—especially the two forms of the Cross: The first of these symbols refers to Fire, or rather the birth of fire, the legend of which, in the Sanskrit Rig-Veda, has such an astonishing resemblance to the outline of the Christian theology. The other appears to be a modification of the same idea.

 

Blavatsky agreed with Schliemann’s assessment, stating:

 

So ancient is the symbol, and so sacred, that there is hardly an excavation made on the sites of old cities without its being found. A number of such terra cotta discs called fusaiòlo were found by Dr. Schliemann under the ruins of ancient Troy. Both these were excavated in great abundance, their presence being one more proof that the ancient Trojans, and their ancestors, were pure Aryans.

 

Schliemann would soon find a name for his “Aryan Cross,” stating: “[I find the 卍] in Emile Burnouf’s [not to be confused with Sanskrit lexicon under the name of ‘suastika’ and with the meaning ‘εύ ἐστί,’ or as the sign of ‘good wishes.’” [Schliemann, Heinrich. Troy and Its Remains.]

 

Pottery at Troy.

PART VIII: TRANSMUTATION

 

The summer after Schliemann’s discovery […] The New York Herald remarked on the college commencement season of 1874, stating:

 

All of our colleges are sectarian. Harvard represents Broad Church Unitarianism; Yale is the exponent of the more liberal school of Calvinism; Princeton is the mouthpiece of Scotch Presbyterianism, Brown University oversees Baptist teachings and Dickinson is representative of Methodism […] But it is to be noted how little influence these sectarian schools have really had upon the young men they profess to have prepared for the struggle with the world. For all practical purposes the instruction they afford has been purely secular.

 

As the article stated, all of these institutions had, in their origin, a sectarian spiritual scaffolding, but as the article also stated, it had “little influence,” on the worldview of their students. By the close of 1874, the schism between science and religion had reached a turning point. John W. Draper states in History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874):

 

Whoever has had an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the mental condition of the intelligent classes in Europe and America must have perceived that there is a great and rapidly increasing departure from the public religious faith. So widespread and so powerful is this secession, that it can neither be treated with contempt nor with punishment […] The time is rapidly approaching when it will give rise to serious political results.

 

“The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries,” Draper added, “it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers—the expansive force of the human intellect on one side and the compression arising from faith and human interests on the other.”

But was could sectarian education ever truly be secular? Could an organism with so much D.N.A. of Western Christianity ever truly be objective? Take the word “professor” for example; though its usage had a long history, it was revived by English Puritans in the 15th to mean “one who openly professes religious faith.” Western institutions, predicated upon a Christian worldview, were met with an interesting dilemma. With the belief in Christ atrophying, Christ-ianity was becoming just “-ianity,” a Christ-less Christianity. It was becoming a Sisyphean progression without an end, an Atéleio̱ton rather than an Éskhaton.

Harvard psychologist, William James, noted that there was not “one elementary religious emotion, but only a common storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may draw.” Besides the split between science and faith, another bifurcation occurred after the “crisis of faith.” On one side there was the “spiritual but not religious,” while on the other side there was the “religious but not spiritual.” As James notes in 1874, there was an alarming trend among scientists who assumed the role of “mouthpieces of Science,” in a role more akin to a dogmatic cleric than objective pedagogue. James writes:

 

Now that an age of synthesis seems approaching, scientific men obey the current, cut loose from the old traditions of taking things piecemeal, and contentedly ignoring much, and commit themselves to vast theories which, whether true or false, stand at least as much unverified today, in the strict scientific sense of the word verification, as any of the theosophies of the past. Your correspondent “Scientist” says they have a perfect right to do so. As men, of course they have! Heaven forbid that they should not sometimes outstrip the proof, and no longer sicklied o’er with scruples about crucial experiments and adequate evidence, yield to the pleasure of taking for true what they happen vividly to conceive as possible. Only when this exhilarated, but by no means unhealthy, mood is upon them, let it be distinctly recognized for what it is the mood of Faith, not Science. And when the partisan herd girds itself up to exercise its right of following its leaders, let it be told beforehand by what route they are to pass, whether over scientific highways and bridges or by balloon. But when the leaders assume to be mouthpieces still of Science, while throwing off all that has been hitherto distinctive in that service; when like Dr. [John] Tyndall [physicist and early-climate change scientist] they “abandon disguise” and confess what presumably must have been authentically imparted to them or when like [Thomas Henry] Huxley [biologist who coined the term “agnostic,”] they propound what is merely one out of several equally unverified conceptions as if it were an established truth, and proceed to rally the faithful around them by pealing the slogan, and branding in advance all critics of this particular hypothesis as minions of “Ecclesiasticism”; why then it behooves every clear-headed guide of public opinion to insist as loudly as he can upon the truth that in these perilously recondite regions no man’s authority is worth a jot […] In “science,” as a whole, no man is expert; no man an authority; in other words, there is no such thing as an abstract “Scientist”—fearful word! And where the subject-matter is vague, and sedulously kept in abstracto (as in these questions of the potencies of matter, and the dynamics of consciousness,) no man is expert beyond his neighbor, nor can anyone, except perhaps the Pope, fall back upon his antecedent occupations for support.

 

The summer of 1874 in New York offered plenty of opportunities for religion and science to collide [read more here.] One such “battlefield” was the rabies outbreak among the canine population. The “gas-chamber,” one of the newest inventions introduced in 1874, was used by the city to put a “humane” end to the outbreak. “Captain Marriott, of the Pound,” The New York Herald stated, “very scientifically, and comfortably, slew 123 of the quadrupeds by one breath of carbonic acid gas, administered with the approved apparatus, which three weeks of experiments has at last brought into use.” No surprise that we again find a yearning for re-enchantment; a Western “re-orientation.” This sentiment was articulated by Max Müller later in the summer of 1874:

 

The East, formerly a land of dreams, of and fairies, has become to us a land of unmistakable reality; the curtain between the West and East has been lifted, and our old forgotten home before us again in bright colors and definite outlines. Two worlds, separated for thousands of years, have been reunited as by a magic spell, and we feel rich in a past that may well be the pride of our noble Aryan family. We say no longer vaguely and poetically Ex Oriente Lux, but we know that all the most vital elements of our knowledge and civilization—our languages, our alphabets, our figures, our weights and measures, our art, our religion, our traditions, our very nursery stories, come to us from the East; and we must confess that but for the rays of Eastern light, whether Aryan or Semitic or Hamitic, that called forth the hidden germs of the dark and dreary West, Europe, now the very light of the world, might have remained for ever a barren and forgotten promontory of the primeval Asiatic continent. We live indeed in a new world; the barrier between the West and the East, that seemed insurmountable, has vanished. The East is ours, we are its heirs, and claim by right our share in its inheritance.

 

A year earlier, in 1873, Müller coined the term “science of religion” and encouraged comparative study of mythology and rituals. “He who knows one [religion],” Müller said, “knows none.” It was in this petrie dish that the Theosophical Society was established in 1875, to heal the cleavage of science and faith, East and West, living and dead, and God and human.

 

 

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PART IX: BUDDHIST CATECHISM

 

In 1879, the year in which the Theosophical Society relocated to India, Sir Edwin Arnold published his popular and influential narrative poem about the Buddha, The Light of Asia. It was said in The Theosophist:

 

According to the Catholic Review, Buddhism is making progress in America, not as a mere philological study as in Europe amongst scholars of the present day, but we are assured as a religion. Buddhism, according to this authority, “is becoming quite fashionable, and in some circles it is considered in ‘better form’ than Ritualism.” Further proof is afforded in the very large sale that Mr. Arnold’s Light of Asia  has had, and the almost enthusiastic praise bestowed upon the character and teachings of the ‘Hindu Saviour,’ by the American press.

 

Illustration from The Light of Asia.

 

It was at this time that Olcott took a page out of Martin Luther’s playbook, and created the first Buddhist Catechism. Olcott writes:

 

Finding out the shocking ignorance of the Sinhalese about Buddhism. I began, after vainly trying to get some monk to do it, the compilation of A Buddhist Catechism on the lines of the similar elementary hand-books so effectively used among Western Christian sects, working at it at odd times as I could find leisure. To fit myself for it, I had read 10,000 pages of Buddhist books of course in English and French translations. (Olcott, Henry S. Old Diary Leaves Vol. II.)

 

A Buddhist Catechism.

 

Just about the time that Olcott finished writing his catechism, an article appeared in The New York Times, “peculiarly devoted to the interests of an orthodox Protestant public,” which stated:

 

If earnest Protestants desire to hinder the spread of the Roman Catholic Church, they should attack, not the Pope, but the argument of Rationalism. The Protestant clergy do not seem to be aware of the formidable warfare which is now waging against revealed religion. The defenses, which were effective against the noisy artillery of Paine, are useless against the noiseless and ceaseless sapping and mining with which Rationalism attacks them. Orthodox Protestantism shuts its eyes to the fact that science and literature are in the hands of its enemies. It refuses to perceive that the ground on which it stands is slipping from under its feet; that Germany, which, at the call of Luther, accepted the infallible Book in place of the self-styled infallible Church, has now rejected the Book, and that the new reformation, which reforms Christianity out of existence, is spreading all over the Protestant world. The result will be not the permanent triumph of Rationalism, but a Roman Catholic revival which will make that Church far stronger than she has been at any time since the Reformation. When men clearly see that Protestantism is a failure, they will accept the infallible Church rather than the empty sentimentalism of [Ernest] Renan.

 

Blavatsky, commenting on the article states:

 

Certainly the sudden outbreak of bigoted fervor over the pretended “miracles” in France and, more recently, Ireland, and the growing perversions of Anglican priests and laity show a decided drift in the direction indicated. Men in the mass do not think but feel, are emotional rather than rational and go by flocks and swarms to that religion which most appeals to the emotions and imagination and least to the reason. That the whole area of Protestantdom is now ready to embrace some new faith which seems more consoling than Protestantism and more reasonable than Romanism, is so palpable and undeniable that no well-informed, disinterested observer will gainsay the statement. This conviction induced the founders of our Society to organize for the quest after primitive truth. And it makes some of us believe that the auspicious hour has come for the Buddhists to begin preparing for a new propaganda of Buddhism.

 

In another article, Blavatsky would state:

 

[On] the one hand, a great portion of the educated public is running into atheism and scepticism, on the other hand, we find an evident current of mysticism forcing its way into science. It is the sign of an irrepressible need in humanity to assure itself that there is a Power Paramount over matter; an occult and mysterious law which governs the world, and which we should rather study and closely watch, trying to adapt ourselves to it, than blindly deny, and break our heads against the rock of destiny […] More than one thoughtful mind, while studying the fortunes and verses of nations and great empires, has been deeply struck by one identical feature in their history, namely, the inevitable recurrence of similar historical events reaching in turn every one of them, and after the same lapse of time. This analogy is found between the events to be substantially the same on the whole, though there may be more or less difference as to the outward form of details. Thus, the belief of the ancients in their astrologers, soothsayers and prophets might have been warranted by the verification of many of their most important predictions, without these prognostications of future events implying of necessity anything very miraculous in themselves […]

The science of today will have become an “ancient” science a thousand years hence. Free and open, scientific study now is to all, whereas it was then confined but to the few. Yet, whether ancient or modern, both may be called exact sciences; for, if the astronomer of today draws his observations from mathematical calculations, the astrologer of old also based his prognostication upon no less acute and mathematically correct observations of the ever-recurring cycles. […] Because the secret of this science is now being lost, does that give any warrant to say that it never existed, or that, to believe in it, one must be ready to swallow “magic,” “miracles” and the like stuff? […] These periods, which bring around ever-recurring events, begin from the infinitesimal small—say of ten years—rotation and reach to cycles which require 250, 500, 700 and 1000 years, to effect their revolutions around themselves, and within one another. All are contained within the Mahāyuga, the “Great Age” or Cycle of the Manu calculation […] Enough has been shown, however, to prove that neither the ideas of Pythagoras on the mysterious influence of numbers, nor the theories of ancient world-religions and philosophies are as shallow and meaningless as some too forward free-thinkers would have had the world to believe. (“The Theory of Cycles.”-HPB)

 

The word cycle experienced something of a change in the 19th century. During the height of Indo-Germanic philological inquiry,  the word came to mean an: “aggregate of the legends or traditions around some real or mythical event or character.” By the 1880s, while writing The Secret Doctrine, cycles described the “recurring series of oscillations or operations in an engine.” The latter definition might work best when envisioning the cyclical nature of Blavatskyan cosmology, a series of interconnected cogs and cycles that make up the “engine” of existence which drives from one yuga (epoch) to the next. Like Bombay’s Victoria Terminus, Blavatsky’s philosophy (which we’ll explore) might best be described as “Indo-Gothic,” that is, it weaves in elements of ancient scriptures from around the world together with the science contemporary of her time.  Her ideas of cyclical-progression of deep-time might be termed chakressive (from the Sanskrit chakra, meaning wheel.)

PART X: “THE SUPERIORITY OF THE ARYANS”

 

By the mid 1880s, the French Orientalist, Ernest Renan was making a claim for the “Aryanation” of Christianity.

 

Religions are mighty by reason of the people that adopt them. Islamism has been useful or deleterious according to the races that have accepted it. Among the debased nations of the East, Christianity is a religion of very moderate merit, inspiring very little virtue. It is among the people of the West, the Celtic, Germanic, and Latin races, that Christianity has been truly fecund…In the beginning a wholly Jewish product, Christianity has come in this way, in the process of time, to shed almost every trace of its ethnic origin, so that the contention of those who proclaim it the Aryan religion par excellence is, from many points of view, well-founded. For centuries we have been infusing into it our Aryan ways of feeling, all our aspirations, all our good qualities, and all our faults […] Each race, in adopting the moral training of the past, gives them a new mold, makes them its own. The Bible has in this way borne fruits not its own; Judaism was only the wild slip on which the Aryan race has grafted its flower.

At the same time, Charley began his formal language training under Robert Atkinson. The notion of “Aryan supremacy” was well established. Writing of his experience of this time, Charley states:

 

The “Aryans” enjoyed an unrivaled popularity, in every work on philology, or philosophy, or anthropology which had any pretensions at all to reflect the latest wisdom of the times. We were met on every page by eulogies on the superiority of the “Aryans,” their high culture, unrivaled civilization and inherent rights to dominate all “non-Aryan” peoples. We were even told, in all seriousness, that the “Aryan” brain was not only of greater specific capacity than the cephalic content of the “non-Aryan,” but that it further possessed the wonderful capacity of continuing to expand at an age when the “non-Aryan” brain had ceased to grow for several years. (Johnston, Charles. “The Aryans.”)

From an excerpt from one of Atkinson’s 1882 lectures, we can see a glimpse of what Charley means:

 

When, however, they compared the extremes of the present inheritors of the Aryan linguistic patrimony—the Hindoo and the Icelander—it seemed hard to conceive what basis there could be for the assumption of a common race. If this theory were maintained, some attempt should be made to remove the difficulties it involved. Of course in matters so remote history failed altogether as to the physical type of this Aryan race, so that they entered into the region of speculation through the portals of anthropology. They there learned that tracts occupied by this Indo-Germanic family constituted the chief seats of a peculiar race, and whose characteristics might be briefly stated as white, red, and blue in skin, hair, and eyes respectively, and as long-headed and large-bodied. The Indo-Romanic people, he believed, to have been this blonde race thus characterized.

 

Isaac Taylor, a non-conformist Vicar of the Church of England’s Holy Trinity Church. While an incumbent in Holy Trinity in 1869, he used his leisure time to write Etruscan Researches (1874) in which he contended the Ugrian origins of the Etruscan language. In 1875 Taylor began researching the origin of the alphabet. In Greeks and Goths: a Study on the Runes (1879,) Taylor argued that German runes were of Greek origin, which produced contention during his day. In 1883 he published The Alphabet, an Account of the Origin and Development of Letters in which he endeavored to prove that alphabetical changes were the product of evolution occurring in accordance with fixed laws, stating: “Epigraphy and paleography may claim, no less than philology or biology, to be ranked among the inductive sciences.”

 

Isaac Taylor.

 

His paper on the Origin of the Aryans delivered at the British Association (1887,) and later developed into a book, notes that by the end of the 19th century, the racial characteristics of white skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes, were associated with the “Aryans.” Taylor writes:

 

The evidence of language shows that the primitive Aryans must have inhabited forest clad country in the neighborhood of the sea, covered during prolonged winter with snow. It has also been urged that the primitive Aryan type was that of the Scandinavian and North German peoples—dolichocephalic, tall, with white skin, fair hair, and blue eyes, and that those darker and shorter races of Eastern and Southern Europe who speak Aryan languages are mainly of Iberian or Turanian blood, having acquired their Aryan speech from Aryan conquerors.

 

We return to the “swastika within a circle,” first articulated in Blavatsky’s 1887 letter to Skinner, and published in The Secret Doctrine in the autumn of 1888, and an excerpt published in The Theosophist that November.  Blavatsky writes:

 

The Buddhists maintained that there is no Creator, but an infinitude of creative powers, which collectively form the one eternal substance, the essence of which is inscrutable—hence not a subject for speculation for any true philosopher. Socrates invariably refused to argue upon the mystery of universal being, yet no one would ever have thought of charging him with atheism, except those who were bent upon his destruction.

Upon inaugurating an active period, says the Secret Doctrine, an expansion of this Divine essence from without inwardly and from within outwardly, occurs in obedience to eternal and immutable law, and the phenomenal or visible universe is the ultimate result of the long chain of cosmical forces thus progressively set in motion. In like manner, when the passive condition is resumed, a contraction of the Divine essence takes place, and the previous work of creation is gradually and progressively undone. The visible universe becomes disintegrated, its material dispersed; and ‘darkness’ solitary and alone, broods once more over the face of the deep.’ To use a metaphor from the Secret Books, which will convey the idea still more clearly, an out-breathing of the ‘unknown essence’ produces the world; and an inhalation causes it to disappear. This process has been going on from all eternity, and our present universe is but one of an infinite series, which had no beginning and will have no end.

This passage will be explained, as far as it is possible, in the present work. Though, as it now stands, it contains nothing new to the Orientalist, its esoteric interpretation may contain a good deal which has hitherto remained entirely unknown to the Western student.

 

Chapter from The Secret Doctrine.

 

The first illustration being a plain disc, the second one in the Archaic symbol shows a disc with a point in it—the first differentiation in the periodical manifestations of the ever-eternal nature, sexless and infinite “Aditi in that” (Rig Veda), the point in the disc, or potential Space within abstract Space. In its third stage the point is transformed into a diameter. It now symbolizes a divine immaculate Mother-Nature within the all-embracing absolute Infinitude.

When the diameter line is crossed by a vertical one, it becomes the mundane cross. Humanity has reached its third root-race; it is the sign for the origin of human life to begin. When the circumference disappears and leaves only the […] a sign that the fall of man into matter is accomplished, and the fourth race begins. The Cross within a circle symbolizes pure Pantheism; when the Cross was left uninscribed, it became phallic. It had the same and yet other meanings as a tau inscribed within a circle or as a “Thor’s hammer,” the Jaina cross, so-called, or simply Swastika within a circle.

 

PART XI: ARIOSOPHY

 

About fifteen years after Blavatsky’s death, an Austrian occultist named Guido Von List appropriated the symbolic vocabulary of the Secret Doctrine (namely the swastika within a circle,) to use in his neo-pagan religion known as Ariosophy. In List’s cosmology, the “Aryans,” following the model which Taylor described, were blonde-haired, blue-eyed Germans. Unlike Taylor, however, List claimed that runes were not only Germanic, but also held magical properties, an innovation he made in 1902. The tributaries which sprang from List’s Ariosophy would lead to the adoption of the “swastika within a circle” by the esoteric fascists of the 20th century.

 

---

 

AGONISED WOMB OF CONSCIOUSNESS SECTIONS.

 

INTRO: CHARLEY.

I. WITCH TALES.

II. CARELESS WHENCE COMES YOUR GOLD.

III. THE TIMES ARE CHANGED.

IV. DENIZEN OF ETERNITY.

V. DOMOVOY.

[APPENDICES]

A SWASTIKA WITHIN A CIRCLE.

THE ENGLISH IN INDIA I.

THE ENGLISH IN INDIA II.

THE ENGLISH IN INDIA III.

 

⸻

SOURCES

⸻

PT: I.

 

“The Theosophical Society: Its Mission And Its Future: As Explained by M. Emile Burnouf, The French Orientalist.” Lucifer. Vol. II, No. 12. (August 15, 1888): 421-433.

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. “A Protest.” The World. (New York, New York) April 6, 1877.

Müller, Friedrich Max. “Esoteric Buddhism.” The Nineteenth Century. Vol.XXXIII, No. 195. (May 1893): 767-788.

Müller (née Grenfell,) Georgina Adeliade (ed.) The Life And Letters Of The Right Honourable Friedrich Max Müller In Two Volumes: Vol. II. Longmans, Green, And Co. London, England. (1902): 234-294, 297-298, 333-334.

Olcott, Henry Steel. Old Diary Leaves: Volume IV. Theosophical Publishing Society. London, England. (1910): 57-60.

⸻

PART II.

 

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna to Skinner, February 17, 1887. Harvard Divinity School Library, Harvard University. Skinner. J. Ralston Papers bMS 516.

Johnston, Charles. “Sanskrit Study In The West Pt. II.” The Theosophist. Vol. X., No. 116. (May 1889): 492-496.

Waite, Arthur Edward. The Secret Doctrine of Israel. The New York Occult Research Press. New York, New York. (1900): 20-22.

Williams, George Huntston. “An Excursus: Church, Commonwealth, and College: The Religious Sources of the Idea of a University.” In The Harvard Divinity School: Its Place in Harvard University and American Culture. George Huntston Williams. Beacon Press. Boston, Massavhusetts (1954): 295-351.

⸻

PART: III.

 

“The New Great Indian Peninsular Railway Victoria Terminal Building, Bombay.” The Graphic. (London, England) November 24, 1888.

“A New Religion.” The Aberdeen Free Press. (Aberdeenshire, Scotland) December 20, 1888.

“The New Great Indian Peninsular Railway Victoria Terminal Building, Bombay.” Scientific American. Vol. XXVI, No. 677. (December 22, 1888): 10,815-10,816.

Arnold, Edwin. India Revisited. Trübner & Co. London, England. (1886): 54-55.

Caine, William Sproston. Picturesque India: A Handbook For European Travellers. George Routledge And Sons Limited. London, England. (1891): 6.

Higgins, Shawn F. “The Benedick.” Dewey Studies. Vol. VI, No. 2. (2022): 16-75.

Johnston, Anna. “The British Empire, Colonialism, and Missionary Activity.” Chapter in Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, England. (2003): 13-37.

Kopf, David. The Brahmo Samaj And The Shaping Of The Modern Indian Mind. S. Gupta. Calcutta, India. (1959): 14.

Wagar, W. Warren. “Modern Views of the Origins of the Idea of Progress.” Journal of the History of Ideas. Vol. XXVIII, No. 1. (January-March 1967): 55-70.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Charles Scribner’s Sons. New York, New York. (1930): 1-11 [Foreword by R.H. Tawney.]

⸻

PART: IV.

 

Johnston, Charles. “Materialistic Science.” The Theosophist. Vol. X, No. 112. (January 1889): 209-214.

Taylor, E.L. Hebden. “The Reformation and the Development of Modern Science.” The Churchman. Vol. LXXXII, No. (1968): 87-103.

Williams, George Huntston. “An Excursus: Church, Commonwealth, and College: The Religious Sources of the Idea of a University.” In The Harvard Divinity School: Its Place in Harvard University and American Culture. George Huntston Williams. Beacon Press. Boston, Massavhusetts (1954): 295-351.

⸻

PART: V.

 

“Penryn.” Lake’s Falmouth Packet and Cornwall Advertiser. (Cornwall, England) December 1, 1888.

Almond, Philip C. The British Discovery of Buddhism. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, England. (1988): 1-32.

Beard, John Relly. Self-Culture. John Heywood. Manchester, England. (1859): 363.

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. The Key to Theosophy. The Theosophical Publishing Company. New York, New York. (1896): 270.

Grimm, Jacob. Geschichte Der Deutschen Sprache. Verlag Von S. Hirzel. Leipzig, Germany. (1880): 6.

Johnston, Charles. “The Aryans.” The Madras Weekly Mail. (Madras, India) March 21, 1895.

Johnston, Charles. “Lovers of the East: Sir William Jones (1746-1794.)” The Oriental Department Papers. No. 23. (May 1895): 141-144.

Johnston, Charles. “The Indo-Germanic Myth.” The Calcutta Review. Vol. CIII, No. 205 (July, 1896): 2-10.

Johnston, Charles. “An Estimate Of Max Müller: 1823-1900.” The American Monthly Review Of Reviews. Vol. XXII., No. 6. (December, 1900): 703-706.

Johnston, Charles. “Helping To Govern India.” Proceedings of the American Political Science Association, 1906, Vol. III., Third Annual Meeting (1906): 169-179.

Johnston, Charles. “The English In India.” The North American Review. Vol. 189, No. 642 (May, 1909): 695- 707.

Johnston, Charles. “East And West: Helping To Govern India.” The Atlantic Monthly. Vol. 109, No. 3. (March 1912): 324-331.

Johnston, Charles. “From The Highlands Of Lemuria: Part III.” The Theosophical Quarterly. Vol. XV, No. 2 (October, 1917):164-168.

Johnston, Charles. “India A Dominion?” The North American Review. Vol. CCXXV., No. 842. (April 1928): 385-393.

Jones, William. Discourse the Ninth: “The Origin and Families of Nations.” Delivered February 23, 1792 at a meeting of the Asiatick Society of Bengal.

Jones, William. Institutes of Hindu Law. Rivingtons and Cochran. London, England. (1825): vii-xxii.

Lubelsky, Isaac. Celestial India. Equinox Publishing. Sheffield, England. (2012): 15.

Masuzawa, Tomoko. The Invention of World Religions. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, Illinois. (2005): 151-152.

Müller, Friedrich Max. Essays On Mythology, Traditions, and Customs. Longmans, Green, and Company. London, England. (1867): 20-21.

Müller, Friedrich Max. Natural Religion. Longmans, Green, and Company. London, England. (1889): Lectures 2 & 5.

Platner, Samuel Ball. “The Aryan Question As It Stands Today.” The New Englander and Yale Review. Vol. XVIII. No. 252. (March 1891): 205-235.

Watkins, Calvert. “Aryan.” The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) Houghton Mifflin. New York, New York. (2000): 103.

⸻

PART: VI.

 

Darwin, Charles. On The Origin of Species. D. Appleton and Company. New York, New York. (1860): 300.

Fitzhugh, George. Sociology for the South: or, The Failure of Free Society. A. Morris. Richmond, Virginia. (1854.)

Fitzhugh, George. “The Message, The Constitution, and the Times.” De Bow’s Review. Vol. V, No. 2. (February 1861): 156-167.

Fitzhugh, George. “The Puritan and the Cavalier.” De Bow’s Review. Vol. VI, No. 3. (September 1861): 209-252.

Haeckel, Ernst. The History of Creation, Vol. II.  Trübner & Co. London, England. (1899): 431-432.

Jackson, J.W. “The Aryan and the Semite.” The Anthropological Review. Vol. VII, No. 27. (October 1869): 333-365.

de Quatrefages, Armand. The Prussian Race Ethnologically Considered. Virtue and Co. London, England. (1872): 84-85.

⸻

PART: VII.

 

Johnston, Charles. “Helena Petrovna Blavatsky: Part I.” The Theosophical Forum. Vol. V., No. 12. (April, 1900): 221-225.

Schliemann, Heinrich. Troy and Its Remains. John Murray. London, England. (1875): 101.

⸻

PART: VIII.

 

“Commencement Day.” The New York Herald. (New York, New York)  June 24, 1874.

“At The Pound.” The New York Herald. (New York, New York) July 2, 1874.

Blavatsky, H.P. “A Protest.” The World. (New York, New York) April 6, 1877.

Draper, John William. History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science. Appleton’s & Co. New York, New York. (1874): i-xvi.

James, William (Ignoramus). “The Mood of Science and the Mood of Faith.” The Nation. Vol. XIX. (December 31, 1874): 437.

James, William. The Varieties Of Religious Experience. Longmans, Green, And Co. New York, New York. (1902): Lecture II.

Müller, Friedrich Max. Chips from a German Workshop: Vol. IV. Longmans, Green, and Company. London, England. (1875): 341-343.

⸻

PART: IX.

 

“Throwing Pebbles.” The New York Times. (New York, New York) May 4, 1880.

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. “The Spread of Buddhism in Western Countries.” The Theosophist. Vol. I, No. 12 (September 1880): 309.

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. “The Decadence of Protestant Christianity.” The Theosophist. Vol. I, No. 12 (September 1880): 309.

Olcott, Henry Steel. The Buddhist Catechism. Trübner & Co. London, England. (1881.)

Olcott, Henry Steel. Old Diary Leaves: Volume II. Theosophical Publishing Society. London, England. (1900): 299.

⸻

PART: X.

“Trinity College.” The Irish Times. (Dublin, Ireland) April 27, 1882.

“The Origin Of The Kelts.” The Dublin Daily Express. (Dublin, Ireland) May 22, 1882.

“Royal Zoological Society Of Ireland.” The Medical Times And Gazette. (London, England) January 13, 1883.

“The Aryans.” John Bull. (London, England) October 1, 1887.

The Encyclopedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information. 11th ed. Vol. XXVI. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, England. (1911): 469.

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. The Secret Doctrine: Vol. I. Cosmogenesis. The Theosophical Publishing Company. London, England. (1888): 34.

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. The Secret Doctrine: Vol. II. Anthropogenesis. The Theosophical Publishing Company. London, England. (1888): 101.

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. “A Chapter From ‘The Secret Doctrine.’” The Theosophist. Vol. X, No. 110. (November 1888): 69-82.

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. The Key to Theosophy. The Theosophical Publishing Company. New York, New York. (1896): 175.

Johnston, Charles. “The Aryans.” The Madras Weekly Mail. (Madras, India) March 21, 1895.

M.W.H. “Renan’s View of Christianity.” The Sun. (New York, New York) November 25, 1883.

⸻

PART: XI.

 

Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. The Occult Roots of Nazism. Tauris Parke. New York, New York. (1985): 33-48.

Pennick, Nigel. Secrets of The Runes. Thorsons. London, England. (1998): 9-40.