Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America

by Peter Washington

A history of spiritualism in America discusses the development of Theosophy; the religious beliefs of Madame Blavatsky, Steiner, Krishnamurti, and other gurus; and the evolution of their ideas into the world of New Age thinking.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography, Religion, Occult, New Age, Spirituality

470 pages, Hardcover

First published April 15, 1993

Reviews

[Lena · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book traces the origins of the modern New Age movement through examining the lives and philosophies of its charismatic founders. Theosophy founder Madame Blavatsky was just the first of many who garnered spiritual street cred by claiming to be in contact with a secret brotherhood of ascended masters. Though there is ample evidence that Blavatsky was nothing more than a highly creative fakir, her attempt to build a new spirituality based on the common thread within all religions struck such a chord with the world-weary sophisticates of her day that she succeeded in founding an enormous spiritual legacy.

Washington spends a great deal of time in this book detailing the various infights, outfights, scandals and shenanigans that plagued this movement from its beginnings, and there is plenty of comedy to had in this history. My enjoyment of the book was tempered, however, by the fact that this spiritual soap opera has a cast of characters that is so vast, it’s sometimes hard to keep track of them all. What Washington’s extensive coverage of the various players and their very human failings makes clear, however, is that the history of charismatic individuals abusing their self-proclaimed spiritual power is a long one. Those interested in cults will find his portrayal of the dynamics between these early teachers and their students particularly insightful.

Though Washington does discuss in broad terms the spiritual philosophies behind Theosophy, Anthroposophy, the Work of Gurdjieff and the teachings of J. Krishnamurti, those who are looking for an in-depth analysis of these systems will likely be disappointed. Those who are interested in reviewing a fascinating portrait of human nature as it relates to spirituality and the development of new religions, however, will be amply rewarded by the expansive, clear-eyed perspective Washington brings to a subject that is usually shrouded in hazy myth.

[Carmen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every once in a while I read a book that makes me wish I could sit down the the with the writer over coffee in some kind of setting which included lots of comfy couches and no distractions and have a conversation about people, history and human nature. Peter Washington writes with such a charming combination of humor, warmth and cynicism that he seems like he would be fun to hang out with.

Madame Blavatsky's Baboon covers the history of spiritualism from the early 19th century through the 20th. His treatment is especially fascinating because he is not pushing any particular religion. Most of what I have heard or read about the characters he describes comes from their own hagiographies. Its impossible not to wander down a main street in Santa Cruz, Mountain View, San Francisco or Healdsburg and not read the posters touting some black-haired swami as the answer to the human race's problems, to know survivors from 1970s era "encounter groups," or people who escaped from cults. Washington includes short biographies, summaries of teachings, influences of some of great granddaddies and grandmommas of New Age. His incredulity is refreshing, his anecdotes are copiously referenced and he provides a huge bibliography and fantastic notes.

The only drawback is the organization of the book. Some chapters will follow individuals over a number of decades and then bounce back in time in the following chapter to a different person which I found to be a little disconcerting. In spite of that, it was a completely addicting book and I didn't want to put it down until I was done.

One of the bonuses of the book is that it totally cured me from ever wanted to start a cult of my own. Every once in a while I think that if I sat down and applied myself I could start my own cult and become rich and famous, like many other people. But as history shows cults always fall into similar patterns, they become creaky with old age, they get isolated and totally crazy or they just become catholic.

[Guttersnipe Das · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the moment, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon is out of print -- which seems unfathomable, since this tremendously entertaining book is also one of very few resources if you wish to puzzle out the cast of characters that launched the “New Age” in America. If you despair of ever untangling the Rosicrucians from the Vedantists, Gurdjieff from Ouspensky, or St Germain from the Secret Masters, here is your book.

As a prospective reader, the most important thing to know about this book is that it is NOT primarily about Madame Blavatsky. She is dead on page 100. The primary pleasure and benefit of this book is Peter Washington’s ability to sketch out compelling life sketches of the main characters who brought spiritualism to America. These include: Helena Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Charles Leadbeater, Krishnamurti, Rudolf Steiner, Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, J.G. Bennett, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and Idries Shah.

Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon is packed with rollicking jaw-dropping good stories and tremendously fun to read. At the same time, it also presents a painfully bare view of human nature. As you may have already discovered, our capacity for self-delusion turns out to be entirely perfectly limitless. There is nothing so ludicrous, so obviously wrong, or so thoroughly debunked that we cannot believe it and go on believing it as long as we live. If a belief makes us feel special or part of a group, we will sign on to absolutely utterly anything. This book proves that on nearly every page.

For example, how fascinating it is to learn how much of Helena Blavatsky’s worldview and philosophy is based, not on the teachings of disembodied Tibetan masters, but on the novels of Edward Bulwer Lytton. In other words, a good part of what you’ll find in your local New Age bookstore originates from the man who wrote “It was a dark and stormy night.”

As a lifelong student of alternative spiritual traditions, I know that scandals are part of the territory. Still, it is sobering to learn that the tradition of “renouncing the teacher but keeping the tradition” goes right back to the beginning. In fact, it is very nearly universally practiced. Almost every one of the teachers profiled here knew that their own teacher was painfully duplicitous, if not downright fraudulent. The most charming teachers wore their own fraudulence lightly. As Peter Washington writes, “Much of HPB’s life is a glorious comedy, as the tone of her letters often tacitly recognizes, but it could have tragic consequences for those who trusted her”. (86) This turns out to be even more true of Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti than of Madame Blavatsky.

The life sketches Peter Washington paints are generally but not always well-rounded. It is jarring to move from his scathing depiction of Charles Leadbeater to his almost reverential portrait of Rudolf Steiner. (Peter Washington is not entirely to be blamed for this: Leadbeater the proselytizing pedophile is a remarkably despicable character.) Washington is at his best when he tells the story of Krishnamurti, who comes across as a gifted spiritual teacher, a pathetic prisoner, and an aristocratic spoiled brat. I wished to bow to him, to embrace him, and to slap him across the face.

I hope very much that this book will one day be re-issued in a revised expanded version. It often seems to me that the names of Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, and Krishnamurti are revered by people who often don’t know the first thing about who they actually were. Or even wish to know. What passes for respect is often just laziness and the desire to have an empty slate for our own projections. It’s much easier to revere Ouspensky and Gurdjieff if you can forget that they loathed each other. Both proclaimed the other to be a fraud. (Ouspensky even came out at the end of his life and proclaimed himself to be a fraud, which his students reverently ignored.)

Ask your local mystic, intoning about the enneagram, who Gurdjieff actually was, and you’ll likely be offered a soy chai latte and told to listen to your own inner wisdom. Don’t be bought off. The truth is complicated, and not infrequently pathetic, but it is also fascinating. It is necessary, too, to be reminded of the high cost of delusion. Everyone who professes to be “a deeply spiritual person” should swap their rose-tinted lenses for reading glasses and sit down with this book.

[Katharine Kerr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Washington crams an awful lot of information into this survey, which at times gives it a cursory feel. It is, however, a good introduction to the subject, especially for readers who go on to do more research on the people he discusses. It should be read together with Ronald Hutton's THE TRIUMPH OF THE MOON, which discusses the British material from the same period of occult history.

[Robert Nolin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This odd duck of a book fairly cries out for a Monty Pythonesque review, to wit:
Customer: Right, I'd like to lodge a complaint.
Shopkeeper: What seems to be the problem?
C: It's this book, this bloody Baboon book. It says right here on the cover (points) that it's about the mystics, mediums, and misfits who brought Spiritualism to America.
S: So it does. (nods pleasantly)
C: (opens book) But then on page ten, it states clearly that Spiritualism was born in America and was imported to Europe.
S: Perhaps a minor typo.
C: (Incredulous) A typo? A bleeding TYPO?? Then how do you explain that the rest of the book has nothing whatever to do with American Spiritualism?
S: A small oversight, I suppose...

[Bill Eichman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't let the title's emphasis on theosophy distract you; Washington covers dozens of influences on American "spiritual" culture in the 20th century. Theosophy was a huge influence, despite now being half forgotten, and much of our current baseline of ideas and images - auras, astral travel, hidden masters, and much more - were introduced by the theosophists, so it's natural to start there. But there is so much more...

This book was pivotal for me, and is one of the fairly few books that triggered a mental revolution, a leap to a new paradigm. It may not do this for you, because you are unlikely to have the breadth and depth of reading and experience I did when I read it long ago. (Francis Yates being a key author, I was reading her at the same time.)

Why did it transform me so? It's important to know that every esoteric system or group carries with it a fictional story that purports to be a true history, and in that is an origin story for the group itself, also fictional, or more accurately, semi-fictional. These fictions are usually not intentional deceptions, they are more like the sanitized stories a family shares about "the fight that happened at Aunt Jane's wedding". But, when it's forgotten that they are fictions, the result is a particular disconnect with truth and reality that corrupts the possibility of progress and innovation.

Then all you have left is religion, belief without results, the end of movement forward.

[Bill Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent account of Theosophy and its numerous offshoots still somehow lingering in the 3rd millennium, a testament, I suppose, to how unsatisfactory mainstream metaphysics are. By far my favorite chapter of this rich account is the one dealing with World War I, with Theosophists on the Allied side, Anthroposophists on the German, and Gurdjieff wandering around among the horrors of the Russian Civil War with his collection of strange disciples. In general, the author does a terrific job of setting the sprawling cults of revealed divinity in the context of the greater history and the culture of their times. The only real criticism I have of the book is that I don't find Washington's humor as amusing as he apparently does and his jokes sometimes undercut his points, but on the whole this is essential reading for anyone with an interest in stranger episodes in the quest for higher meaning that followed in The Beagle's wake and that still continues today.

[Jose Manuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muy buena descripción de los orígenes y de las calumnias que fundamentan la creación de la Teosofía. De referencia para la formación del espíritu escéptico. Describe claramente la formación de un movimiento sectario.

[Lisa Huston · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. It cleared a lot of sticky beliefs out of my head.

[Michael Connolly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was an immigrant from Russia. Her father was Baron von Hahn, of German-Russian nobility. Her mother was a novelist. Colonel Henry Steel Olcott was a soldier who converted to Buddhism. In 1874 Blavatsky and Olcott met at the farm of brothers William and Horatio Eddy near Chittenden, Vermont. The brothers claimed to be psychics and they held seances. Blavatsky and Olcott founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. Eventually, the Theosophical Society has many lodges in India and Sri Lanka.
Blavatsky claimed to be in contact with the Brotherhood of Himalayan Masters. She held seances and and claimed to receive mystical communications from these past masters. Past masters are a feature of Sufism. Blavatsky's belief system was similar to that of George Gurdjieff, the Greek-Armenian mystic who claimed to have contacted the esoteric Sufi masters of the Sarmoung Brotherhood located somewhere near Bukhara.
In Britain, the main leader of the Theosophical Society after the death of Blavatsky in 1891 was Annie Besant. Annie Besant was also one of the leaders of the Fabian Society and a feminist.
Blavatsky dressed up a baboon to look like Charles Darwin, because she disliked his theory of evolution. Blavatsky actually had her own theory of evolution, which involved seven "root races". Blavatsky believed that Adam and Eve lived on Lemuria, a home of one of the root races. Lemuria, she wrote, was a lost continent in the southern Pacific Ocean or the Indian Ocean, that had sunk into the sea, similarly to Atlantis, a home of one of the other root races.
Theosophy is still worthy of interest, because it was one of the roots of the New Age movement, which was popular during the twentieth century. Many people who did not care for traditional religion embraced New Age mysticism. Why, I don't know, but I suspect that it may have been because it provided an alternative to the spiritually empty clockwork universe of the scientists, the harsh moralism of traditional Judaism and Christianity, and the hateful rhetoric of the political left.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is written by a skeptic who does his research well and exposes Blavatsky, Gurdjieff and others, although he has a sneaking admiration for Steiner. I happen to believe a lot of gurus and spiritual leaders are half real and half con, no matter if they believe everything they say or not. One of my favorite books ever, because one of the bookstores I used to work for was Open Center Books, that had the sublime through the ridiculous and everything in between. What is the difference between spiritualism and spirituality? This book helps with just that distinction.

[Frederick Heimbach · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned a lot about the Golden Age of Spiritual Fruitcakery and enjoyed the whole trip. The author strikes what I felt was the appropriate amount of sympathy and sarcasm, which is probably another way of saying he struck my amount of sympathy and sarcasm.

Memorable lessons: Blavatsky's lame-o attempts to pull of very rudimentary conjuror's tricks, and the mental gymnastics her followers were willing to undergo to salvage her reputation in the face of proof of such skullduggery ... the astonishing number of pedophiles in the upper echelons of Theosophy ... the enormous piles of cash available to hucksters and the naivete of bored rich people ... the sad cases of genuine spiritual longing and the disasters in wasted lives due to a stubborn refusal to seek the transcendent in institutional religion.

On that last point, the hero of this very unheroic cast of characters has to be J.G. Bennet, who after a lifetime of falling for one liar and abuser after another, finally, at the very end of his life, concludes that maybe, just maybe, God is to be found in Christianity after all. The author observes: "He died a good Catholic," which in four ironic words encapsulates all the tragedy and hilarity and surprise of a happy ending unearned, got by grace alone. Well done, Peter Washington.

[Teresa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am reading this book as part of research on a project of my own, or I would never have finished it.

While it's a fascinating topic, the book is an awful bore. Washington's work was poorly served by a grandiose scope with a cast of hundreds of characters and not enough time spent developing them. New historical figures showed up constantly, often several in a paragraph, complete with truncated back stories for each. Thist left me intrigued and wanting more, or, alternatively, frustrated and overwhelmed with too much information. He could have either limited his scope to one book that dealt with the essentials, or expanded to a series of works that would have left the reader more satisfied. We would have had a better overview of what happened and an idea of the heirs to Blavatsky's charlatanry. I had to read it with wikipedia open on my lap in my iPad to even make sense of the many figures he tries to tie together.

[Nina · Rating 3 out of 5]

"America" is in the subtitle, but there's very little of America in the book. Spiritualism is and was a worldwide phenomena, although California was certainly a ripe place to receive it. The book demonsrates the gullibility of mankind in searching for answers and describes all the charlatans who have been playing on that quest over the years. I had read an article in Smithsonian about Blavatsky and Olcott and hoped the book would provide some insights on how Olcott could have been so duped. It did.

[Marianne Nowottny · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author went to great lengths to comprise a chronology of the new age movement. This book richly outlines Madame Blavatsky's foibles, triumphs, and failures. Chock full of facts and no filler, I found myself cross-referencing the other players of the story, it will make you view the new age culture and our folk heroes associated with it quite differently.

[Devon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Madam Blavatsky’s Baboon A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America by Peter Washington is an unwieldy title which aptly foretells the direction of the book. This book is filled with numerous different studies and a cast of characters simply bursting at the seams; every time a teacher pops up, heres comes two or three disciples who will split off and form their own group, with additional disciples who will split off or return or take over until everything is a jumbled, tangled mess.

I take specific umbrage to this book on two parts. One: for implying a look at America with regards to spiritualism, mysticism, and cranks, almost zero of the action either takes place in America or features Americans. Most of the action is in Europe or Asian countries. Second: why even mention spiritualism, honestly? The book almost opens with two girls who are said to channel spirits and communicate with them with knocking, and then it’s basically never touched on again. I picked up the book thinking it would be a heavy presence, but it’s about three pages of a 401 page book (and more pages still, if you account for sources and notes).

I see that there’s a different edition apparently that’s listed on here as “Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: Theosophy and the Emergence of the Western Guru”, and I wish to GOD this one I picked up had that title because I NEVER would have gotten it. This is basically ALL the book is about. Forget about spiritualism—it’s just gurus as far as the eye can see as well as theosophy. Philosophy bores me straight to tears and theosophy is apparently a step worse where it’s just a bunch of mumbo jumbo proposed by a group of people who crave power and the subjugation of others.

This book was chockfull of either wilful women with weak subservient men at their beck and call or men who delighted in both verbally and physically brutalising broken and/or completely stupid people into giving up their worldly possessions—including huge sprawling estates!!!—as well as money and performing backbreaking work while they—as teachers—lived in luxury.

It just boggles the mind at how naive (at best) or just how utterly moronic (at worst) these people were. Sure I’ll believe you’re communicating with masters beyond my reach and writing down what they’re saying. Of course messages just materialise out of nowhere. Obviously what they want perfectly aligns with what you want. Yes naturally I shouldn’t question the many glaring and obvious contradictions in your teachings. Certainly you can fix them with a quick trance.

If you really like reading about people who take gullible crowds of people on a ride with page after page of philosophical text, then boy howdy have I got just the never ending book for you!

Additional note: I didn’t like how much the author went on about Blavatsky’s weight. I get she’s fat—MOVE ON! Also to talk about her weight as though she had to be rolled around like a wheel of cheese when at her heaviest she appeared to be 245 pounds was certainly A Choice. I did not like in addition the use of slurs to describe what Krishnamurti faced as an Indian. You don’t need to list some slurs he may have been called; I think we could probably manage imagining some on our own. And, finally, I really didn’t like when the author decided to describe one woman in the text as a “bitch”; you don’t know the woman and you’re not supposed to insert yourself into the writing. It felt like a slap in the face as a reader; even if the woman is unpleasant and did bad things, it doesn’t jive with this sort of text. I as a historian would not, for example, write a book about, say, Hitler and call him a piece of shit. It’s true, sure, but it doesn’t come off as professional.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A FASCINATING, THOUGH HIGHLY CRITICAL ACCOUNT OF MADAME BLAVATSKY AND RELATED MOVEMENTS AND TEACHERS

At the time this book was published in 1993, Peter Washington was "the general editor of Everyman's Library and a professor of English and European Literature at Middlesex University in Great Britain." He wrote in the Introduction, "why do people turn in ever-increasing numbers to such teachers rather than to the established churches? ...

[T]his book... [tells] the curious story of how Eastern Wisdom was brought to America by a renegade Russian aristocrat with a weakness for the works of a popular British novelist. It describes the invention of the Western guru by the divorced wife of an Anglican clergyman and a pederastic bishop... it traces down to the present a saga that began in a New York apartment on September 7, 1875, when the Tibetan Masters of Wisdom began their spectacular career in the West." (Pg. 3)

He notes that "Others were more sceptical. The Russian journalist V.S. Solovieff claimed to have caught her red-handed with the silver bells which produced astral music. He also found in her desk drawer a pile of the (unused) envelopes in which the Masters delivered their letters... as she so often did, when carried away by the need to confide or boast, Blavatsky confessed to Solovieff quite bluntly that the phenomena were fraudulent, adding that one must deceive men in order to rule them." (Pg. 90)

He recounts Charles Leadbeater's sexually abusive relationship with several young boys, "under cover of occult training." (Pg. 121) He notes that "Theosophy attracted many rich women who made large contributions to its funds... Not all these women were strong-minded, but they were all strong-willed and often argued over [Krishnamurti's] education and domestic routine... it must have been a miserable existence for a young man plucked out of obscurity to head a world religion in a strange continent. It is hardly surprising that he often lamented, 'Why on earth did they choose me?' to anyone who would listen." (Pg. 137)

He observes, "More perplexing is the [Theosophical] Society's relationship with the Old Catholic Church---a confusing institution in itself. This tiny church, established in 1870 by Catholic dissenters from the doctrine of papal infallibility promulgated in that year... claimed both autonomy and apostolic succession and engaged in a flirtation with Theosophy when the head of the church... agreed to consider Wedgwood for ordination... [Archbishop] Matthew... decided in 1915 that membership of the Society and Old Catholicism were perhaps incompatible after all, upon which Wedgwood staged a coup d'etat, leading most of the clergy and congregation of the Old Catholic Church ... into a new body, the Liberal Catholic Church." (Pg. 141)

He writes of Krishnamurti, "The final parting of the ways came on 3 August 1929... in front of three thousand people in a talk which was also broadcast, Krishnamurti announced his belief that 'truth is a pathless land' and rejected study of the occult, acceptance of authority and religious ceremonial ways to spiritual growth. Acknowledging that many of his followers would be upset, he urged them to confront the absolute necessity of freedom. In future, he said, he would accept no pupils or followers, and he urged them to join no sect or church... All he wished to do was to set himself and others free from bondage... This was quite literally the end of the Path." (Pg. 278-279)

This is a very informative and engagingly-written book, although it will not be popular with followers of teachers such as Mme. Blavatsky.

[Neal Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

By the mid 19th century, the “weakening of Christ’s exclusive divine authority made a large enough crack of doubt to let in any number of Princes.” One of the biggest new movements was theosophy, which was part religion and part manifesto for supernatural research. Peter Washington draws a phylogeny from theosophy back to Swedenborg (as well as Hinduism and Buddhism of course) and forward to David Icke and space religions, via, for example, George Gurdjieff, Rudolf Steiner and Jiddu Krishnamurti. For me this connected some surprising dots including Katherine Mansfield, who died as Gurdjieff’s guest in a chateau near Paris, and Aldous Huxley, for whom Krishnamurti’s house in Ojai, California, “became a second home”. Perhaps the most illustrative stories are those of Krishnamurti, who was picked out age 13 and slowly grew into the spiritual leadership (World Teacher) role expected of him, and that of JG Bennett, secret agent and coal chemical engineer, who, after decades of discipleship of Gurdjieff and others, finally decided that he was a prophet himself, so could “give up the search for the Source, for he now embodied that source himself”. Overall, it’s an insightful and entertaining read, occasionally spoiled when the arch tone spills over into frank snideness.

[Donna Emerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are the sort of earthly entity that thrives on the negative vibrational energies activated internally, through gossiping about your family, neighbours, friends or workmates, and wish to find temporary relief, with the possibility of establishing a new and more enlightened spiritual path towards ascension, this book will provide you with the opportunity to begin your journey of transformation. It achieves this laudable aim by giving you ample scope for acquiring salacious and amusing anecdotes regarding theosophical shenanigans to regale your fairweather friends with, simultaneously satisfying your most toxic inner impulses, in a way that your dark side would thoroughly approve of. What a bunch of twirling twits we are presented with, here. You will not need laughing gas to knock you out, next time you need a dentist, if you only recall a few of the many amusing anecdotes presented about the mixed bag of nuts Mr. Washington skillfully details in his historical account of the Theosophists. Prepare to levitate out of your chair laughing, when you read this fantastic book, which, it turns out, isn't just gossip, but fact.

[Nor'dzin Pamo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this quite a challenging book, being both deadly dull and fascinating at the same time. The endless list of people involved in furthering their ideas on spirituality was dull and often confusing. The fact of the endless list of people who were allowed to become teachers and rule the lives of their devotees was horrifically fascinating. So much time and money expended, and often suffering endured for the sake of an idea – not even an ideal, because often material greed and outright swindling were involved. The most unnerving thing is that the story continues to this day simply with changing scenes and characters.

[Frederick Reed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book! It documents the cons and scams behind the folks that inspired a lot of the "new age" movement. It's good to finally read a book about Gurdjieff, Blavatsky, etc. that isn't written by cult members or starry eyed true believers.

I was a follower of Gurdjieff/Ouspensky and the so-called 4th way for many years. I consumed many books about them and their teachings. As I get older I realize just how gullible I and my fellow humans can be.....

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

You'd better be really, REALLY into this subject if you start this book because it'll hit you with a dense pile of information about a seemingly endless parade of fools and hucksters. I'm sad to say I didn't get much out of it, but I was not the target audience.

[Elle Hartford · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as part of a research project, and it is a nice survey for that purpose--but you have to bear in mind that this book is now over twenty years old. It gives interesting perspective, but that perspective doesn't always align with the expectations of today!

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good. Top heavy on the research on Mrs. Blavatsky; I felt his writing was a bit thin on the research when it got to the later New Age groups. If the book was only a bio of Blavatsky I would give 5 stars, but he stretched too thin on the post-Blavatsky eras.

[Cypress Butane · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a way, ladies and gentle men, whereby, your spiritual strivings and meditational meanderings, appear… as a way of seeming as if all your spiritual pursuits are you seeking an ANSWER from Heaven… and divination and supplication being a type of ‘stooping’ of the soul, to merely downgrade itself to try to receive something from its own consciousness otherwise not available to its own conscious consciousness.

The progression - of ages… the matter of your period in time. The ratiocination of time and place, in a semi-complex equation with technology, social forces, order of societies, who’s paying attention to whom, perhaps, being dragged into an est seminar with your yuppie friends. Est-cetera. There are plenty of incidents of this type in our psycho (analytical) world.

It’s the signs of the times, man…
The reaction even to the INVENTION of psychoanalysis.. had ripples like your unconscious mind bounced off the strata of rock formations that now had to be defined.
Waves of contemplation, physical interpretation, particulate matters, we’ve got to discuss these things…

The underground held all kinds of new designs. The mythic poetry of non-mechanical reaction to industrial revolutionary minds.

Trying to reconcile silentiary motivations and just people who don’t take any time.

Check this passage from the book I just finished that talks about what people are doing in the meantime:

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‘Ermin Chikhou —himself a Nakshibendi dervish — discoursed rather puzzlingly (given his faith) on the imminent Second Coming of Christ, assuring Bennett that he had a vital role to play in this event as a sort of John the Baptist to the new Messiah. For once Bennett was sceptical; but when he returned to Syria in the following year the prophecy was repeated. Winifred Bennett, who had recently suffered a severe cerebral haemorrhage which left her more of less crazed, stayed behind at Coombe, and Bennett travelled round Syria and Iraq with close friend and future wife Elizabeth Mayall, visiting holy men as they went. One sheikh at Damascus endorsed Ermin Chikhou’s prophecy of a Second Coming, while another at Kerind told him the same thing, obligingly adding that Bennett and his fellow-traveler were destined by God to be companions. At least the second prophecy was correct. But though Bennett travelled extensively in the wilds of Turkey and northern Persia, visiting Gurdjieff’s old stamping-grounds in Central Asia, the Source obstinately refused to appear.
Disappointed by his travels and wrestling with the many volumes of The Dramatic Universe, his epic work on the history and nature of the cosmos, Bennett was then attracted by a new idea from a very different source, when he heard from Work friends about Pak Subuh (1901-1987), the Indonesian founder of Subud. Instructed by his inner boices, Bennett was introduced to the new spiritual practice in the annus mirabilis of 1956 by Husain Rofe, a north London Jewish convert to Islam. Bennett was shocked by Rofe’s vulgar claims that Subud cured the dying, virilised the impotent and made astral flying possible, but he persevered.
Subud is a form of Islamic mysticism whose name derives from three words: susila, budhi and dharma. Susila is a man’s true character, which emerges when he acts in accordance with God’s will. Budhi is the divine life force within human beings. Dharma means surrender to God’s will. Subud is thus that absolute submission to God which allows the growth of the individual’s true, i.e. spiritual, nature, usually overlaid by worldly concerns. Such growth can be initiated by means of the latihan, a Javanese word meaning ‘training’ — which in this case begins with a kind of meditative communal submission to God’s presence. The submission is referred to as ‘opening’ because it involves emptying the mind of all ordinary associations, thus preparing it to receive God. A latihan session, supervised by a Subud ordinand, may last up to half an hour, during which the participants do anything from meditating in silence to screaming and talking in tongues.
“The similarity between Subud, the Work and the SES is clear: the accretions of what Gurdjieff called ‘personality’ are being stripped away to allow ‘essence’ to appear. Pak Subuh also agreed with Gurdjieff, Bennett and MacLaren that withdrawal from the world is not the way to spiritual growth: Subud is a method, not a hermetic religion. But Subud differs radically from the Work in that its method involves surrender, not struggle. In this respect it is closer to Krishnamurti than to Gurdjieff. Nor does Subud have the sinister cult mannerisms of the SES. There is no tutorial discipline, no re-education.

- Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon - 389-390

[Marty · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you ever want to know how Spiritualism came to America, this is the work for you

Highly recommeneded.

[Henry Krinkle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book so much that I read it twice. An endlessly fascinating subject that the author exploits in a professional, intelligent manner.

[Brady Edge · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poor storytelling. Skip to the koolaid.

[Jaclyn Hogan]

Great title and not unentertaining, this is mostly a history of the people behind theosophy, not really what I was looking for.

[Erik]

Well done. Interesting to read about the chaos behind the gloss and showmanship.