Blavatsky

A reprint of Mme Blavatsky s edition of Bacstrom s translation, first published in 1891... 

From some Chinese alchemists [extracts made by H. P. Blavatsky], Lucifer 18, no. 107 (Jul 1896) 400-403. 

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. Alchemy in the nineteenth century. Theosoph Movement 26 81-. 

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. Informative interchange electro-magnetism. Extracts from Madame H. P. Blavatsky s book, "Isis Unveiled". . . About Paracelsus. Parachemy 5, no. 4 (Fall 1977) 492-. 

Minot, V. Paracelsus and other leading thinkers alluded to in H. P. Blavatsky s works. Theosoph Path 34, no. 3 (Mar 1928) 268-269. 

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna.Alchemy and the secret doctrine, by H. P. Blavatsky, compiled and edited, with an appendix, by Alexander Home. Edited by Alexander Home. Wheaton (IL) Theosophical P, 1927. 204p. 

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. Isis unveiled a master key to the mysteries of ancient modern science and theology. Pasadena (CA) Theosophical Univ P, 1972. 2 vols (628, 721p.)... 

Washington, Peter. Madame Blavatsky s baboon a history of the mystics, mediums and misfits who brought spiritualism to America.. ... 

Verbatim reports of five lectures given in the Blavatsky lodge, London, at the headquarters of the European section of the Theosophical society, during August, 1895. Contents Purification.—Thought control.—The building of character.—Spiritual alchemy.--On the threshold. 

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. The secret doctrine the synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy. rhttp //www. sacred-texts.com/the/sd/index.html. 

In 1875, spiritualist circles in New York helped launch the Theosophical Society, another major component of the occult revival. The Society was founded by H. P. Blavatsky (1831-1891) and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907). Blavatsky, who was born in the Russian Ukraine, claimed to have studied for seven years under Hindu mahatmas and even to have traveled in Tibet at a time when few Westerners were permitted into the country. Olcott had worked in the Navy Department during the Civil War he had even been one of three members of the special commission to investigate the assassination... 

In the early years of Theosophy during Blavatsky s lifetime, the modem science that most occupied the movement was, without doubt, the theory of evolution rather than Victorian discoveries in physics and chemistry.4 While Blavatksy in Isis Unveiled and Secret Doctrine grappled in a limited way with modem physics and chemistry, she engaged much more fully with the work of alchemists, especially that of Paracelsus. Her defense of alchemical transmutation was based not upon contemporary science—though she asked of transmutation, Is the idea so absurd as to be totally unworthy of consideration in this age of chemical discovery (Isis 1 503)—but rather upon the exalted reputation of medieval and early modem scientists and alchemists who claimed to have witnessed transmutation (1 503-504). Moreover, the major events that launched modem particle physics—the discoveries of X-rays, the electron, radiation, radium, and radioactive decay—all occurred after Blavatsky died in 1891. 

If Blavatsky meant to make Theosophy a science whose ultimate goal was spiritual wisdom, her methods of scientific engagement were beginning to show their limitations within a few years after her death. Her oracular style in... 

Leadbeater and Besant both emphasized in their writings that these worlds were co-extensive with one another, that they were merely composed of different, increasingly rarified, forms of matter. And as Besant emphasized in The Ancient Wisdom (1897), her major contribution to making a working system from the vast sprawl of Blavatsky s tomes, humans have existences in these other planes. Each person possesses, for instance, an astral body that coexists with the physical one. The senses appropriate to these other states of matter, however, were largely underdeveloped. 

Blavatsky s main polemical purpose in Isis Unveiled was to undermine the materialist nature of Darwinian evolution and to build a spiritual system based upon an evolutionary theory revamped to include the life force and spiritual goals. She defined the terms of her argument by articulating an emana-tionist perspective against an orthodox evolutionist interpretation ... 

Across her work from Isis Unveiled through The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky posited a scheme of spiritual evolution not only of mankind but also of the inanimate world and the animal and vegetable kingdoms, all of which are pervaded by a life force. She chose a Tibetan word, Fohat, to name this life... 

Such a gendering and polarization of the subatomic world confirmed major Theosophical tenets about the physical and spiritual nature of man. As Joy Dixon has shown, Blavatsky envisioned the highest Deity as without sex or form, but it did embrace polarities As this Absolute Spirit manifested itself in the universe, it created itself as a series of oppositions positive versus... 

Stories of past lives actually strengthened, even as they subverted, the power of the binary oppositions of man and woman, masculine and feminine. These binary oppositions were central to the theosophical cosmogony. As Blavatsky had argued in The Secret Doctrine, all manifestation involved duality, and the opposition between masculine and feminine was among the most basic of dualities. Theos-... 

Yet it is on the issues of reproducibility and instrumentation that Occult Chemistry failed to persuade, at least outside of Theosophical circles and the small group of scientists in recent years who have been willing to work entirely at the level of theory. Besant and Leadbeater could move beyond older models of science, which based themselves upon deductions from revealed principles (alchemical or scientific deductions from the writings of the Hermetic tradition, for instance, or from the revelations of H. P. Blavatsky), by turning to experimentation. Not surprisingly, their form of experimentation did not admit of reproducibility. In spite of efforts by Stephen Phillips to conduct blind trials using a Buddhist clairvoyant to confirm Besant and Lead-beater s micro-psi visions (1996,48), direct experience is neither convincingly verifiable nor falsifiable. 

After falling back on Blavatsky s creation story, he also speaks to the aesthetic and spiritual power of the UPA as Besant and Leadbeater experienced it ... 

---