Blavatsky Stripped Bare by a Buddhologist, Even.

I just finished reading this splendid new book by the Swiss scholar Urs App (I already knew him from a previous book about The Birth of Orientalism). Finally, somebody has done all the hard historical-philological work that is required to uncover the true foundations of Helena P. Blavatsky’s Theosophy, one of the most influential esoteric movements of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century. App’s method rests on some simple and quite traditional but essential foundations. (1) Take the time to carefully study all the relevant primary sources, i.e. not just some part of what HPB wrote, but really everything she wrote; (2) consistently place those sources in a strict chronological order, if possible even on a day-to-day basis, so that you can see exactly how her thinking develops over time; (3) don’t be satisfied by just scanning “the discourse” in general terms, as is common in academia today, but analyze her ideas; and finally (4) do whatever you can to identify the exact written sources from which she drew those ideas at any moment in that chronological sequence.

This empirical-historical method - bottom-up historiography and textual criticism - allows Urs App to establish beyond a shadow of doubt that Blavatsky did not have any first-hand familiarity with Tibetan Buddhism, as she famously claimed; that she invented her famous Mahatmas and those mysterious occult orders in which she said she had been initiated; that her ideas about Oriental Wisdom were based not on the Indian or more specifically Buddhist traditions she encountered in India but on Western Spiritualist and Orientalist literature about those traditions; and that her entire oeuvre is based on one single obsession - to prove the existence of a primordial wisdom tradition, “the mother of all religions,” which she imagined as a kind of Buddhism prior to and independent of historical Buddhism. Of course, most modern scholars of Theosophy already assumed or suspected most of these things (pioneering work having been done by specialists such as Joscelyn Godwin, Michael Gomes, or Pat Deveney), but the difference is that App succeeds in demonstrating them so completely and so conclusively that these debates can now be considered settled once and for all. It is not just a question of countless and usually unacknowledged borrowings, plagiarisms, or paraphrases from whatever book Blavatsky happened to have in front of her at the time she was writing. At least as important is her reliance on dictionaries of Oriental languages to build up a Theosophical vocabulary that, unfortunately, shows again and again that she did not know those languages and made countless elementary mistakes (in sharp contrast, of course, with her own claims of having “translated” many textual passages from mysterious Oriental sources). None of this is speculation on App's part. Again, he does not just suggest it but demonstrates it, at a great many instances, by precise comparisons between HPB’s statements and what you actually find in those dictionaries and other sources if you just take the trouble to look them up - and of course, if you actually know something about Buddhism and its history, and can read the languages.

The result is a thrilling piece of historical detective work, beginning with Blavatsky’s early exposure to Allen Kardec in 1858 (a neglected topic, for while HPB was fluent in French, many modern scholars are not), from there to the crucial years 1874-1875, when she began creating her system in New York, and then all the way up to her period in India and her return to Europe and finally her death. Devastating as the conclusions may be to true believers in Theosophy, it would be mistaken to think of this book as just another exercise in “debunking Blavatsky” by exposing her as a fraud. On the contrary, App is doing the work that historians of religion are supposed to do, quite similar to how the discipline of biblical criticism inevitably undermines traditional Christian doctrine - not out of some desire to destroy religious or esoteric beliefs but simply out of a commitment to truth. Certainly, Blavatsky was continually deceiving her readers, and probably herself as well, and yet there’s little doubt that she believed sincerely in her primordial wisdom tradition. Her sources might be fabricated and she might have been manipulating her readers and everybody around her; but she seems to have believed that this ultimately did not matter, because the doctrine itself was true, her intentions were good, and the results of her “pious deceptions” would ultimately benefit humanity. The end justified the means. Be that as it may, App is perfectly right to finish his book by reminding his readers of a basic Theosophical tenet: no religion higher than truth.