Radiance from Halcyon: A Utopian Experiment in Religion and Science

Chapter 1: Organizing Theosophy in the United States

By the mid-nineteenth century, traditional Protestant churches were steadily challenged by the rise of new immigrants in the urban environment , many of them Catholic, and by the shifts in class demographics that industrialization produced. Churches were also confronted with new scientific theories, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, published in The Origin of Species in 1859, which overarched well-worn theological stories with the vision and insights of science. Soon the Calvinist hold on Protestant seminaries began to lessen with the rise of a religious liberalism that emphasized Jesus’s humane teachings, often within a Unitarian and Universalist framework, that taught the oneness of God and universal salvation for all, against the traditional Christian doctrines of the vicarious atonement and eternal damnation.1 The1850salsowitnessedtheriseofSpiritualism,whichpromisedproof that there was more to life than biology, indeed there existed an unbroken line, like an invisible telegraph wire, between the living and the afterlife. Spiritualist churches and societies sprang up in America and Great Britain 13 1 organizing theosophy in the united states Helena Petrovna Blavatsky set the pitch and gave the rhythm to the movement. She attacked institutions, arraigned the churches, and roused opposition in every direction. William Q. Judge was a spiritual giant in truth and was set up as a hero by many of his followers and students. The future will estimate the work of both HPB and WQJ at its true value, and it will then be understood how necessary and important that work was. In the meantime, the Great Sifter is at work. —Jirah D. Buck, Artisan, 1900 01chap1_Layout 1 2/12/2013 05:32 Page 13 to study and witness psychic occurrences. One of the most important was the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882 by fellows at Trinity College, Cambridge, which accorded psychical research an intellectual foundation. The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875, emerged in this context and shared with religious liberalism a suspicion of organized Christianity, an interest in human psychic development, and an emphasis on Western esotericism, as well as Eastern religious thought earlier highlighted in Transcendentalism. Its ideals were also congruent with the Protestant and middle-class vision of self-reliant individualism and personal responsibility for spiritual progress, as its aims overlapped broader progressive tendencies . The erosion of Calvinism, the rise of theological liberalism, the challenge of evolution and other scientific theories, and a new emphasis on salvation as self-realization form an important cultural backdrop for the emergence of the modern theosophical movement. HistorianBruceF.Campbellsuggeststhatoneofthemostpotentforces out of which the Theosophical Society was formed was the centuries-old desire to integrate science and religion, particularly relevant in the culmination of the conflict between them represented by Darwin’s evolutionary theories. In addition, “spiritualists entered the debate by proclaiming that they had bridged the chasm between science and religion with empirical proof of life after death,” and maintained that their séances were evidence of their objective contribution to empirical science.2 The leader forever associated with the rise of Theosophy in the late nineteenth century is Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, known to many of her followers as HPB, who viewed science and theology as “two conflicting Titans” that created a “bewildered public” who needed a “religion that could meet the challenge of modern science.”3 She was born August 12, 1831, in the Ukraine to parents of aristocratic Russian and German ancestry. Helena followed in her mother’s footsteps as a writer, motivated by a search for a path where unseen spiritual forces become reality and for a secret knowledge over and above the claims of the material senses. She married the older Nikifor V. Blavatsky at seventeen, which freed her from her family, and then left him a year later to pursue the occult knowledge she had learned from family friends, who had spoken to her of Masonry, secret brotherhoods, Rosicrucian history, and magic. She made the pursuit of this knowledge her reason for being. She left for Istanbul and traveled between 1848and1858.By1870,inCairo,shebecameaspiritualistandheldséances. 14 Organizing Theosophy 01chap1_Layout 1 2/12/2013 05:32 Page 14 She went to New York in 1873 and continued to develop her psychic abilities . In 1874, at the Vermont home of the Eddy brothers, famous for their séances, Blavatsky met American journalist, experimental agriculturist, and attorney Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, who was then working for the New York Daily Graphic, reporting on spiritualist phenomena. Olcott was impressed with her...