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beyond representation and thus commands the use of the peculiar term or unusual phrase to better approximate the divine. That is, regardless of the occultist’s intentions, ambiguity is a better approximation of the ineffable than is accuracy or precision. Throughout her own writing, and in particular in her defensive and re®exive essays and pamphlets about her use of esoteric language and ®awed English, Blavatsky is clear about the inability of natural language—and especially English—to convey supernatural meaning. She argues: In our highly civilized West, . . . in the wake of ideas and thoughts —as happened with every tongue—the more the latter become materialized in the cold atmosphere of Western sel¤shness and its incessant chase after the goods of this world, the less was there any need felt for the production of new terms to express that which was tacitly regarded as obsolete and exploded “superstition .” Such words could answer only to ideas which a cultured man was scarcely supposed to harbor in his mind. “Magic,” a synonym for jugglery; “Sorcery,” an equivalent for crass ignorance ; and “Occultism,” the sorry relic of crack-brained, medieval Fire-Philosophers. . . . They are terms of contempt, and used generally only in reference to the dross residues of the Dark Ages. . . . Therefore we have no terms in the English tongue to de¤ne and shade the difference between such abnormal powers , or the sciences that lead to the acquisition of them, with the nicety possible in the Eastern languages—pre-eminently the Sanskrit.60 In this passage Blavatsky explicitly acknowledges her discomfort with the ¤xity of language. This ¤xity or rigidness of signi¤cation, she says, is inherently entangled with materialist worldviews insofar as the drive toward pure denotation is akin to the push toward reductive, physicalist explanations of human reality and experience. Further, although she notes a desire to get away from Western terms for magical and mystical experiences because of their negative connotations, she also seems concerned with nuance that she thinks is impossible in the dominant vocabulary. In fact, she is eventually led to admit that all languages, including Sanskrit, will fail to characterize the divine unless the user is divinely inspired. “There are no words to express the lights and shadows,” she says, to “draw the demarcation between the sublime and the true, the absurd and the ridiculous.”61 From a rhetorical perspective that would characterize the problem as epistemic, this 72 / chapter 3 inability to draw a line is the impossibility of a metalangauge that could help to adjudicate competing signi¤cations of the ineffable. Blavatsky’s frustration with the impossibility of a metalangauge, as well as with the constraints of the dominant vocabulary—reasoned English—is echoed in her defense of Isis Unveiled, which was attacked as plagiarized gibberish: What I am determined to do is to give facts, undeniable and not to be gainsaid, simply by stating the peculiar . . . circumstances under which I wrote my ¤rst English work [Isis Unveiled]. I give them seriatim. 1. When I came to America in 1873, I had not spoken English— which I had learned in my childhood colloquially—for over thirty years. I could understand [it] when I read it, but could hardly speak the language. 2. I had never been at any college, and what I knew I taught myself. . . . I then hardly read any scienti¤c European works, knew little of Western philosophy and sciences. The little which I had studied and learned of these, disgusted me with its materialism , its limitations, its narrow cut-and-dried spirit of dogmatism , and its air of superiority over the philosophies of sciences and antiquity. . . . I had not the least idea of literary rules.62 Blavatsky continues at some length. What is important to note in these defensive remarks is an implicit, offensive linking of “Western philosophy and sciences” with English grammar, a linking that implicates a dissatisfaction with the dominant, Western language game. William Covino has characterized attacks on an era’s “literary rules” as a challenge to dominant systems of “articulate power,” which are composed of the tacit rules of correct communication, inclusive of grammar and social mores.63 Failure to conform to the dominant system of articulation relegated one to a classed yet competing system of the “inarticulate,” but this does not mean one was powerless. Blavatsky appears to counter the dominant vocabulary by challenging its semiotics as materialist and by offering a competing system of terminology that required a new logic of articulation—an understanding...

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