Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England

Chapter 8. Ancient Wisdom, Modern Motherhood

206 Chapter Eight Ancient Wisdom, Modern Motherhood In April 1928 Annie Besant announced the formation of a new movement , organized to herald the Coming of “a great Spiritual Being who represents the feminine side of Divinity, the Ideal Womanhood, the ‘World Mother.’” The public recognition of the World Mother, the incarnation of that Divine Feminine principle that had ever been active on a spiritual level, was intended to reflect the increased importance of women in public affairs. The World Mother, represented in the past by Isis and by Mary, the mother of Jesus, was now to be represented by Shrimati Rukmini Devi, the young Brahman wife of the theosophist George Arundale.1 The World Mother was to be the “representative of Womanhood, Womanhood in its highest function, the function of the Mother.” This World Mother, Besant explained as she announced the New Annunciation, summed up in herself all that was best and highest in womanhood. The World Mother movement was to complement, not to challenge or displace, the work of the Order of the Star in the East. As a dutiful wife, the World Mother recognized the headship and lordship of the World Teacher, the masculine aspect of God, represented in the TS by Krishnamurti: “The World-Mother speaks of the WorldTeacher as Our Lord; recognises His high place.”2 Strictly speaking, the World Mother movement can only be accounted a failure. It never gained a real following even among the most dedicated theosophists, and it suffered from a lack of commitment at the highest level. In a 1979 interview with Gregory Tillett, Rukmini Devi denied what might be described as the occult interpretation of the events of 1928 and refused to identify herself with any kind of Coming. She claimed “that she had never regarded the concept of representing the World Mother in the way in which it has come to be interpreted but thought it meant simply doing work in the arts and for humanity. . . . She denied ever being a ‘representative’ of the World Mother.”3 In England the World Mother movement had almost no following; its most prominent English exponent, Emily Lutyens, rejected many of Besant’s ancient wisdom, modern motherhood 207 claims and remained ambivalent about the implications of Besant’s vision of womanhood and motherhood for feminism. The World Mother movement, however, was only one of a much broader set of initiatives that did have a significant impact, not only in England but also in India. It was also the culmination of a process that had begun within the TS in the 1870s and 1880s—the effort to create a usable version of both eastern and feminine authority. Both images contained many conflicting possibilities. Theosophists had invoked many different visions of the East: as glamorous and exotic, as manly and rational, and as an ideal political state. Now the East, especially India, was primarily represented as the repository of the sacred, and the “Indian mother” became the best exemplar of India’s spiritual traditions . The ancient wisdom of India was to provide a blueprint for the New Age, and one of the crucial features of the New Age was that it would achieve modernity without secularization. This was not simply an antimodernist call for a return to tradition, but an effort to create a new synthesis of East and West that would be both spiritual and modern. The authority vested in India as the locus of the ancient wisdom, and in women as the mothers both of the race and of individual children , took a different shape in different historical and cultural locations . The implications of the theosophists’ synthesis of East and West therefore varied widely. In England, the combination of ancient wisdom and modern motherhood tended to collapse into one of two extremes: a eugenic concern with the future of the race or an intensely privatized understanding of the role of motherhood in individual spiritual development . In India, in contrast, Rukmini Devi used the rhetoric of the World Mother movement to claim a political role for women, especially elite women, in the Indian nationalist movement and later in an independent India. This image of Indian motherhood was then re-exported to England, where it became a crucial resource in the interventions by English theosophists in feminist and anticolonial debates. The TS in India had long been one of the society’s largest national sections; in the mid-1930s there were more lodges and more members in India than in England.4...