Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England

Preface

xi Preface This project had its beginnings in a paper I wrote many years ago as a postgraduate at the University of Sussex. I was working on a study of representations of the women’s suffrage movement in the popular press, tracking down caricatures of the “shrieking sisterhood” in magazines like Punch and in comic novels. Much of what I found was predictable: the suffragette (according to the comic novelists at least) was a woman of a certain age, sexually frustrated, resolutely unfashionable, and possibly hysterical. But there were other, more surprising elements in the picture: the typical suffragette was also (again according to the comic novelists) a vegetarian, an animal rights activist, and a devotee of the Higher Thought, Cosmic Consciousness, or the Masters of the Wisdom . Turning to the classified advertisements in suffrage newspapers, I discovered a feminist culture that had been largely ignored by historians . Central to that culture was a self-conscious attempt to create a feminist spirituality. There were advertisements for women’s spiritualist seances, lectures on the Divine Feminine, and prayer circles that met to offer intercessory prayer on behalf of women imprisoned for suffrage militancy. In the midst of all of this activity, one organization occupied a prominent place: the Theosophical Society, which had its headquarters in India and had been founded by one woman (Helena Petrovna Blavatsky) and led by another (Annie Besant). Since that discovery, I have been preoccupied with the effort to understand the place of spirituality in general, and theosophy in particular , in the English feminist movement. This book is the result of that preoccupation. Part I, “Domesticating the Occult,” traces the process by which both eastern mysticism and women’s spirituality were created and consolidated , focusing on the ways in which gendered understandings of eastern spirituality were shaped by the contingencies of the historical moments in which they emerged. On the most obvious level, to domesticate is to tame, and there were many efforts to tame the power of the occult, to assimilate it into existing religious and scientific systems, or xii preface to force it to accommodate itself to class and social hierarchies. At the same time, “eastern” occultism was an exotic import—a product of colonial trade which arrived in England along with cashmere shawls and Benares ware. But to domesticate occultism was also to locate it in the home, to make it the peculiar province of women and a “feminine ” spirituality. The process of domestication was erratic. Chapter 1, “The Undomesticated Occult,” lays out the challenge that H. P. Blavatsky and her mysterious trans-Himalayan Mahatmas posed to those who wished to assimilate this new eastern wisdom into European culture, and especially into the rational and masculine language of late Victorian science . It also explores the contradictions inherent in the founding of the Theosophical Society, which were never fully resolved. These contradictions were reflected in the differences between the two founders: Henry Steel Olcott, the organizer and practical man of business who envisioned the society as a kind of religious and philosophical debating club, versus Blavatsky, the mystic, occultist, and seer who emphasized the society’s function as a school of occult development and who bolstered her claims with impressive displays of “phenomena.” The differences between Blavatsky and Olcott were reflected in the society’s peculiar sense of its own mission: to proclaim publicly occult or esoteric truths, truths that by definition are secret, hidden, and known only to the initiated. After this early phase (which ended in 1885, when the Society for Psychical Research published a damning report on Blavatsky and her followers), members of the Theosophical Society turned to new strategies . Chapter 2, “The Mahatmas in Clubland: Manliness and Scientific Spirituality,” explores another effort to domesticate the occult, this time by distancing the society from scandal and sensation. During this period the Theosophical Society in England was dominated by upper- or uppermiddle -class men; it was an eminently “clubable” creed. The Theosophical Society in the 1880s and 1890s was a quasi-public/quasi-private organization in the tradition of more mainstream late Victorian voluntary associations. As such, it was dominated and controlled by respectable gentlemen who stamped their impress on the society and its teaching. These men emphasized theosophy’s scientific claims and its celebration of the “manly” virtues of rationality and independent judgment. There were various efforts to maintain this version of theosophy, as part of a public culture of rational discussion implicitly and explicitly...