Volume 43, Number 15 · October 3, 1996
The Consolation of Theosophy II
By Frederick C. Crews
AMONG THE BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology; The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1890-1935
by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
New York University Press, 293 pp., $15.95 (paper)
The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement
by Richard Noll
Princeton University Press, 387 pp., $27.95
Remembering Anna O.: A Century of Mystification
by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, translated by Kirby Olson, in collaboration with Xavier Callahan
Routledge, 144 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America
by Peter Washington
Schocken Books, 470 pp., $14.00
With the publication in 1995 of Peter Washington's admirable study Madame Blavatsky's Baboon,[1] readers now at last have access to a judicious as well as an entertaining account of Theosophy, a late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century movement that conjoined religious syncretism to esotericism on the one hand and liberal idealism on the other. The Theosophical Society was created in 1875 by Henry Steel Olcott and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who exerted a charismatic sway over converts until her death in 1891. In England, the United States, and India as well as elsewhere, Washington shows, Theosophy generated much bizarre metaphysics, absurd pomp, and petty factionalism, but it also exerted a surprisingly invigorating effect within the lives of many adherents. And its political influence, too, appears to have been largely benign; Theosophy allied itself not just with moralizing personal betterment but also with pacific internationalism and the self-determination of colonized 'natives.'
Review, 6742 words
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