Mitch Horowitz: H. P. Blavatsky, Manly P. Hall, and the Secret Teachings of all Ages

thank you thank you very much it is really a great privilege to be here with you this weekend I have been a member a proud member of the Theosophical society for several years but I have never visited Wheaton and it is so extraordinary to see this beautiful beautiful campus the historic buildings the grounds the shrines the statuary the labyrinth and to realize that not only is the link unbroken in terms of ideas and study and search but there is this beautiful physical legacy that all of you in this room and others watching contribute to and maintain and to drive up this long drive way and see the expansive lawn and the beautiful Gothic architecture one is filled with a feeling frankly of love that it is love that maintains these grounds and this campus and makes it possible for us to be here so a deep thanks to all of you this is also a bit of a strange opportunity for me because never before have I addressed a room full of Theosophists in the space of just one hour that's extraordinary to me at Pumpkin Hollow the retreat center in upstate New York we have these vagnie Rhian epic presentations where we speak for six hours and then we break for a light lunch and come back for another eight hours and so I'm not sure how I'm going to handle this quite frankly it's a very new experience for me my topic this morning is Madame HP Blavatsky and the secret teachings specifically the secret teachings of all ages the wonderful Magisterial compare daeum of esoteric and occult knowledge written by Manley P hall an American author yes an American author who passed on in 1990 but who was impacted very very deeply by Madame Blavatsky and whose own influence is actually being felt today more than in his own lifetime manley halls book the secret teachings of all ages now appears in many editions digitally and physically it is being widely read i had the privilege about 15 years ago to publish what I call the readers edition of the secret teachings of all ages in which we took this vast tabletop sized book people speak of coffee table books but the original secret teachings of all ages was the coffee table and transformed it into a read early manuscript now last night at the opening ceremonies Tim Boyd was saying that when HPB arrived in London with her work the secret doctrine in progress the manuscript stood at three feet high now I can't say that man Lee's manuscript when I transformed it into a traditional manuscript stood at three feet high it was slightly under two feet so if we want to evaluate our intellectual forebears on voluminous nough sub output we have to bow to Madame Blavatsky but still it was remarkable and my friends and colleagues thought I was losing my mind you know the secret what the what the you know here I was taking this massive massive book and transforming it unabridged into what would become a standard trade paperback this was in fall of 2003 the fact is today almost 15 years later that book alone alone has sold over a hundred thousand copies probably more copies than were sold of the secret teachings of all ages during manly halls entire lifetime and this is wonderful and there are other editions as well so this work really truly is reaching people and I would have to say that manly halls work is a vital vital branch that grew from the influence of Madame Blavatsky and I think he would have agreed with that he admired her very very deeply she was one of the few modern figures to whom manly devoted a whole series of lectures many articles chapters essays he venerated Madame Blavatsky he sculpted a bust of Madame Blavatsky quite beautiful in lifelike extraordinary that can be found in the library of the philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles she was one of the few modern figures who he held in absolute veneration and I think he would have agreed that his career really never would have commenced had it not been for the foundation laid by Madame Blavatsky and they were different people with different approaches born at different times he in 1901 in Canada ten years after Madame Blavatsky's death in London and they each responded to the crisis of their time with great effectiveness and I want to be very clear about that the crisis that Madame Blavatsky faced in her time to which she responded was that there was this prevailing blindness in the Western world to the wisdom traditions of the east there were exceptions to that of course here in the United States we had the transcendentalist philosophers we had offshoots from transcendentalism we had people who were heroically struggling to try to understand the traditions of the East with very limited resources it's very important to remember that many of the books that we rely upon today as basic source material were completely unavailable to Americans of the mid to late 19th century many of whom were living in agrarian circumstances they might have had one book in their household which would be the King James Bible and there were no universities libraries teaching hospitals you might have had a local free Masonic branch but there weren't a lot of places to really go and experience ideas in 1841 when Ralph Waldo Emerson published his first series of essays there were four copies that we know of of the bhagavad-gita in English here in the United States one was in Emerson's private library and he would loan it out to throw and some other friends one was in the library at Harvard and two were in private hands can you imagine the doubt a Ching the first English translation of the doubt a Chiang and it was partial at that did not appear until 1838 so for example today I write and think a lot about the the new thought movement the so called positive thinking movement about which I'll say more on Monday and people are always coming up to me and saying well you know they call it new thought but it's really old because you can find all this in the Vedas and the hermetic literature and so forth and of course that's true but the progenitors of that movement had no access to that material you could just roll down to the public library in Waltham Massachusetts and say I'd like to check out the hermetica please they would cart you off you know there was nowhere to gain access to this material well I won't say nowhere but for the vast majority of people that was the case and here comes Madame Blavatsky this extraordinary comet across the sky of Western civilization who at the age of eighteen has herself smuggled to Constantinople so she could begin her career and her search you know today we keep stumbling upon articles about kids who are in their 30s who won't leave their home and you know at 18 you know here she is its climate we're probably only a handful of people even speak her language she gathered her knowledge she gathered her understanding in a way that is so rarely done today and that was through experience she had to she had to they were there was nowhere else for a westerner to really go to begin to gather some of these insights and ideas than to the source that crisis presented her with the opportunity of her lifetime and an opportunity for all of us as well her travels her studies her encounters her mentors she gathers it all together becoming almost this walking archive of Eastern ideas and references and knowledge and information and what does she do she comes to America where you go when you want to spread the word about something when you want to have a springboard when you want to disseminate something she's told a reporter I wanted to come to America because it was the birthplace of spiritualism whatever she felt about spiritualism she believed quite rightly that it reflected a healthful hunger for understanding an impulse on the part of Americans and other Westerners to look beyond what they had been told was the given and she comes to America and almost right away she attains celebrity everyone's talking about her there's articles in the tabloid press she divides opinion people love her people hate her she's venerated she's scandalized and so forth and so on and the same remains true today in the 21st century every time I talk to a reporter about Madame Blavatsky you know they hate her you know and why you know what could this Victorian aged woman possibly have done that would make contemporary current journalists and there are exceptions to this which I will talk about feel the need once again to participate in this now more than 125 year old ritual of saying you know we have to watch out you know for this figure how many figures who haven't been with us since 1891 inspires such passion and this was the case back then as well people loved and hated her she was polarizing but to a wonderful purpose which was that because Madame Blavatsky was the object of such intense scrutiny interest and division she her voice was able to ring out in the newspapers and the pamphlets and the popular media of the day sounding a wake-up call to the Western world a successful wake-up call that the eastern world is not just a world shrouded in mist filled with strange and exotic figures all of whom can be looked at like some bird under a bell jar or some kind of victorian-era bauble but rather that the eastern world had its own extraordinary cosmology and wisdom tradition that had so much to offer the West and we had caught only fleeting glimpses of it in transcendentalism in the few strands of Eastern literature that had penetrated the Western world yes of course Emerson and his contemporaries made numerous references to the east but that didn't reach the public in the way that this colorful extraordinary force of Madame Blavatsky was able to convey her celebrity her renowned the scandals that surrounded her they they served a purpose they served a purpose because people who didn't read Emerson sure did read the New York Sun and they would want to hear about what is going on at this crazy lamasery with the stuffed apes and so forth in this you know young not Thomas Edison who thinks you can light a room with something called a light bulb you know what what's going on there people were interested and through their interest through their interest she was able to introduce for the first time to the popular master Western mindset not only the fact that the eastern world contained its own cosmology religious traditions ideas that could be of help to the Western individual but she was able to communicate to the Western mind the idea of the man of wisdom the figure of wisdom yes the robed seeking learning figure of wisdom the a depth the Mahatma and that way for example when swami vivekananda came to america in the early 1890s here to the chicago area people could digest who this man was they could understand something about who this man was generations later for example to cite one example when the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi the founder of Transcendental Meditation came to Hawaii and then San Francisco in 1959 again Americans post-war Americans had a context for understanding who he was they they realized people all across the country whatever their outlook or interests realized yes yes there is a lineage of learning wisdom religious seeking in the East we get it let's see what this one has to say let's see what this teacher has to say today we take it for granted every American virtually knows who the Dalai Lama is for example and a little something about his background almost every American I hope knows who Gandhi is another student of Madame Blavatsky when he was young and something about his background our view of the world whether we're searchers are not is informed by the idea that there is a family tree and great depth of wisdom in the east and we are blessed to have figures who represent that tradition in contemporary life that was not part of the Western mindset in the Victorian age you could not talk about that people would think you were referring to some kind of a carnival sideshow or a traveling mesmerist who wore a turban just for show or a showman like the great occult catalogue publisher lwd Lawrence who lived here in the Chicago area published his catalogue of potions and roots and so forth people thought yeah that's carnival stuff if they heard of it at all but Madame Blavatsky responded and successfully responded to this gap this crisis in Western understanding by disseminating for the very first time the idea that the eastern world contained very very deep waters very clean good healthful waters that Western men and women could and must drink from to expand their own lives and knowledge and ideas and she succeeded she succeeded by the time the Beatles visited Rishikesh India in the late 1960s everyone got it everyone understood it was so part of our culture it was almost like second nature that we realized you could make a sojourn to the east in search of wisdom a complete turnaround a complete turnaround from the situation that existed less than a hundred years earlier when Madame Blavatsky first came to the United States in the early 1870s she succeeded she also succeeded in inspiring a young man named Manley P Hall who was born in a provincial Canadian city of Peterborough in the province of Ontario in 1901 ten years after her death he too was such a wonderful anomaly whose education like hers was based on experience he was born in what at the time was a very rural City his parents separated before he was born he was taken under the wing of his grandmother and due to family ties she brought him to live eventually in the American West in South Dakota she would occasionally take him for trips to museums here in Chicago and in New York City he had very little formal schooling he bopped around the country a lot with his grandmother they would live in proximity to relatives for financial purposes he spent a short period of time I think I suspect mercifully short as a teenager at a military academy in New York City there's a photograph that exists of him standing in his uniform displaying his ceremonial sword I suspect he was probably quite relieved that experience lasted only a few months he was not a conformist I don't he was a he was a person who tended I think towards great privacy and Manley Hall had this wonderful instinct for what Madame Blavatsky a woman who died 10 years before his birth was attempting to accomplish and he faced a crisis in his time it was a different crisis to the one that Madame Blavatsky had faced and successfully addressed but it was similar and it was this at this point as manly as coming-of-age in the era of the first world war in the years immediately following yes America had come other Western nations had come to an understanding that the East was in possession of a vast ancient wisdom tradition the idea of a man of wisdom a figure of wisdom was accepted in the West translations of great works of the Vedic tradition the Buddhist tradition even the Hermetic tradition were becoming widely available in the West the great public libraries were opening the New York Public Library in midtown Manhattan the British Library in London other libraries however however what was going on within the academic world was moving in an opposite direction now that Eastern wisdom was reasonably available to the Western Enquirer many many many figures in the academic world still tended to view the eastern tradition as an eccentricity more than a fount of wisdom living wisdom from which the individual could benefit in the here and now there was an attitude of deep deep post Victorian dismissiveness towards many of the primeval cultures words like savage were still being used magic was referred to disparagingly commonly will we today call shamanism would be referred to as the witch doctor and these images were seeping into media there was an ugliness to it there was an implied inferiority and the academic was studying the eastern world somewhat adept at gathering facts but treating Eastern wisdom almost like this bizarre museum piece the way we today might regard phrenology you know the one time science of testing the bumps on your head to see what your personality will be and so forth it was viewed as something that was worthy of a museum case but not as possessing a wisdom that had a command or a pull on serious people and manly as a young person saw this he witnessed the brazen dismissiveness of Eastern traditions within the Academy and he said there must be a preservation and a doorway in English to some of these ideas before they are rendered lifeless by the academic and he felt certain that these ideas were not things that just belonged in a museum case but they were things that were practical philosophies that offered a path to the contemporary individual Western Eastern what-have-you and in his early 20s he grew determined that there had to be a great vast source book that would treat esoteric ideas of antiquity with seriousness with accessibility with veneration and he began working on the earliest stirrings of what his admirers would later call the great book which came to be known colloquially as the secret teachings of all ages he lived for a time in New York City where he was employed at a Wall Street bank and he would spend as much of his free time as he possibly could in the vast reading room of the newly opened New York Public Library taking out books on Kabbalah hermeticism Pythagorean mathematics Buddhist tradition Hindu and Vedic tradition Native American mythology Egyptian symbolism the Shakespearean dramas which he believed were imbued with a thread of esotericism ciphers codes all kinds of topics that were under recognized in the Academy and someone told me that he never had any problem getting any of these books from the great reading room because nobody else ever wanted them he would walk in and you know the librarians would roll his eyes here comes that guy again with the long hair and the penetrating gaze big hulking kid very strong sturdy there was a reporter in the 1920s in the Los Angeles Times who seemed to fall in love with him she was writing you know he has a feminine appearance but he has broad shoulders football shoulders on top which sits his head with a full head of hair and a feminine gaze and it's like the reporter was writing a love letter to him he did have a striking appearance he really did he had the air of a kind of movie star but a very private person very private person off and would he work sitting day after day after day at a table in the library you know probably just taking a short break to eat his lunch outside poring over these works and here this is a person still in his early 20s he was on fire with a mission he was on fire with a mission you know people often wonder how did this young man with no university background produce a book like the secret teachings of all ages when the book finally came out in 1928 Manley was all of 27 years old 27 years old and people often wonder this it was extraordinary it was not an ordinary undertaking now Michael Gomes was saying earlier that years ago he lived in the lamasery in New York this is a man who really believes in field research you know it is no visiting for him I must live here and and when he was working on his abridgement of Isis unveiled which is very wonderful it sort of wrote itself it wrote itself I've had that experience and I suspect that manly on an epic scale had that experience he was so impatient for the material it just poured through his faculties and if you read the secret teachings today and I really do recommend reading it you can read the whole thing you know we have this foolish notion in our culture that certain books are unreadable and I'm hearing this all the time the secret doctrine is unreadable gur Jeep's Beelzebub's tales to his grandson unreadable secret teachings unreadable and I often tell young people if you can go like this you can read it I assure you you know and Michael was making another very important point when reading these books as when stubbing your toe on the beach you don't just stop and stand there like narcissus until you just wither away you keep going yes you'll reach a point where you don't fully grasp something you don't understand something I have a bit of secret wisdom for people who have reached that point you know what you do you go like that you keep going when I turned the secret teachings of all ages into this two-foot-high manuscript the philosopher Jacob Needleman who's a friend said to me um well you now may be a one of only one and a half people in the United States who have read all the secret teachings of all ages but I can assure you it's a very readable book and people are reading it people will quibble with it you know there are passages that may have been outstripped by by certain archaeological discoveries and frankly there are also patches passages that at the time were considered to have been outmoded that have actually stood up to the test of contemporary archaeology for example when Manley Hall wrote about the Oracle at Delphi he described a situation of a female Oracle sitting atop a tripod like chair imbibing fumes growing intoxicated on the fumes and prognosticating foretelling prophesizing now when manley was writing the secret teachings of all ages in the 1920s that image was on the outs with most archaeologists they regarded that as a fanciful myth created by Herodotus in his histories that image was on the outs but recent discoveries at the site of Delphi have actually revalidated that image it was found at Delphi that there were crevices out of which gaseous vapors emerged which could very well be intoxicating to the medium who would then prognosticate so in 1925 if you told a department chair in archeology that this young nut over at the New York Public Library was writing this description of Delphi he would shake his head and say well the kid is just he's intoxicated it's a dream it's mythology didn't happen it was made up like Icarus well it turns out Manley was correct Manley was correct contemporary archaeology has found physical evidence that's entirely supportive of that description so I caution people move very slowly when you say well that's not true you know that chapter is outdated that chapter is outdated a quick story about the Oracle at Delphi many of us come to esoteric movements and ideas because maybe our first attraction to some of these ideas might come in the form of a person of an individual you know for Michael he asked who is this Madame Blavatsky and he had nowhere to go so he lives at the lamasery he practically recreates the entire situation so he could answer his own question for me that figure was manly Hall years and years ago I was sitting at lunch with a couple of friends and my interest in esoterica was just arising it was in the mid 1990s about five years after Manley's death and there was a young woman seated at the table with me named Pythia pay and Pythia mentioned the name Manley P Hall and it was as if suddenly I felt this electrical current going through me this stately name slightly mysterious and the book the secret teachings of all ages I felt something in me say I must I must know about this now Pythia was a disciple of a great great sufi teacher named pierre Vilayet pierre Vilayet in iuck on the anniversary of piers death is tomorrow he was a lovely lovely man and as he did with some of his students he gave Pythia her name it was an initiative a an initiate Snape I later learned from Manley's chapter on the Oracle of Delphi in the secret teachings of all ages that the literal translation of her name is she who grows intoxicated on the fumes of decaying reptile matter when you love that for your initiative describing the process of what happened at at Delphi where the the fumes may have actually been from the decayed matter of serpents that were intoxicating the medium but I thought that's a name you know that's much better than you know Mike or something so that's wonderful so there's a great deal in the secret teachings of all ages that stands up very well historically wonderful chapter on Pythagorean mathematics if you have a kid who's bored with math exposed him or her to the chapter on Pythagorean mathematics it's terrific this kid will never be bored with math again many many wonderful wonderful chapters on just topics that if I were to name them it could take up the rest of our time this morning this is why people felt there was a kind of a mystery about Manley how could he have produced such an epic prodigious work at the age of 27 with the benefit of course of none of the modern technology that we have today and Manly's work also succeeded it also succeeded when I was writing my first book occult America which originally came out in 2009 I was confident in saying at that time that the secret teachings of all ages was invisible within academia and it was it was but we right now right now are living through a wonderful reopening of interest within academia of the esoteric the occult the mystical the mythical Michael earlier held up the new Cambridge handbook of esoteric studies there are wonderful scholars today who were writing some of their most potent work that is deeply searching and respectful of esoteric traditions they include my friend Jeffrey J who until recently was the chair of the Religious Studies department at Rice and now holds an endowed chair there he is one of the most important scholars of esoteric material and let me tell you he would be very comfortable here among us today very comfortable he's a deeply searching man this is true of the scholar Katherine Albany's who wrote a wonderful book on metaphysical traditions in America this is true of this Schuyler and Brody who wrote a wonderful book on the conjoined birth of spiritualism and the suffragists movement the women's rights movement this is true of many many others Walter Hana Graf Jacob Needleman the most potent material that is being written within the religious studies field today is focused on esoteric and mystical traditions the material that is going to gain the latest the greatest posterity today is coming from some of the people that I've just mentioned this is not prognostication you find these names and these works within bibliographies everywhere the same is true of the work of many people in this room Stefan Heller Michael Gomes at Abdul Richards smoly others you will find citations to their work moving like this going on the increase conversely conversely and this is not a prediction this is happening this hour the age of the cynical academician the cynical religious studies scholar who continues to look at esoteric traditions as something that belongs under a bell jar it's over it's over they're not producing work of posterity they're not producing work that is in circulation being read being discussed being cited in bibliographies all this stuff about Madame Blavatsky's baboon and you know the treatment of Madame Blavatsky as some sort of charlatan fail medium it's over it's over Madame Blavatsky has entered the firmament of religious history religious studies you will still find academics young and old who have that kind of cynical observer approach but their work is without posterity we're past that now we've had that all the biographies all the scandals all the hooting and hollering they've had their say and those books are not discussed argued over cited or widely found now as a case in point about two years ago Michael and I did an evening on Madame Blavatsky at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York which is a very wonderful museum focused chiefly though not exclusively on the Buddhist tradition Buddhist artwork they have a beautiful modern auditorium that seats at least 300 people this was just advertised as an evening dedicated to a discussion of the legacy of Madame Blavatsky there were no fireworks no music no snacks just Michael and I by ourselves sitting up on stage having an exchange not only did they sell out but they were breaking fire code they were breaking fire code there were people standing and one of the Proctor's told me they couldn't allow any body else in because the fire marshal would come and close the place down this is in the 21st century in the middle of New York City the city of commerce at this very high tone art museum and they're literally turning people away there is absolutely no question that at this hour not tomorrow we're not experiencing a Blavatsky revival the Bulova ski revival has arrived it's here so I hope you like it because this this is as sure as the stage beneath my feet in academia in public life in popular culture in books that are being widely read and circulated among an educated general readership and among scholars the name Blavatsky is now recognized as a seminal link in religious history now as for Manley P Hall the man who loved and venerated Madame Blavatsky who was inspired by Blavatsky who responded to the crisis of his age in a way that Madame Blavatsky responded to the crisis of hers he - P - is a figure of vast vast renewed influence if you tried to find a copy of the secret teachings of all ages in 1995 or so good luck you know you could find it here and there in an esoteric bookstore in the library certainly of a free Masonic Lodge Manley became a freemason in the 1950s venerated masonry as I do you could find it on the campus of the philosophical Research Society though at the time the campus was barely able to keep the lights on because there were all kinds of financial and legal battles going on crushing crushing debt from which the philosophical research society has successfully emerged and an outside of those that those small pockets of the culture you couldn't find a copy of the secret teachings of all ages today the book is everywhere it's red it's talked about academics know it's scholars know it it used to be that back in the day there was only one scholar of myth Mircea Eliade deeply respected who would acknowledge manley as an influence when manley died in his obituary there were some religious studies professors interviewed and they said they had never heard of the guy didn't know anything about the book you literally could not find an engaged successful scholar of the esoteric tradition the Western religious tradition modern religion today in the 21st century in the here-and-now who hasn't heard of Manley P Hall who hasn't heard of the secret teachings of all ages and the citations of his name are on the rise Manley succeeded as did HPB he it took a long time it took a long time it wasn't as if the secret teachings of all ages was published in 1928 and suddenly everything was just great you know and all these doors open no it took many many many many decades and I'm said and buy something in Manley's life maybe I shouldn't be maybe I'll come to a different perspective on it later but I think in his declining years he attracted particularly towards the very end of his life some con artists who tried to rip off his estate and they made all these promises to him that they were gonna spread his work all over the world and a friend of Manley's was saying to me you know he was worried as we all are that maybe his work wouldn't outlast him maybe his work wouldn't outlast him here he had spent a lifetime laboring and he wasn't so sure himself that the secret teachings of all ages had made the difference that he wanted it to he wasn't so sure that anybody really got it that there were many places to get the book and he was in a vulnerable state as many of us are at different times in our lives and he was worried about the preservation of his legacy I think that made him a vulnerable person at a delicate delicate moment of life it's true of many of us but he didn't have to worry he didn't have to worry the secret teachings of all ages and other works of Manley's are so abundantly available not only have they helped to reopen a new fresh idealistic examination of the esoteric within scholarly circles but there's a romance about the books that has inspired young people when I go around the country and I speak from time to time at Masonic lodges which is a great pleasure I am meeting younger Freemasons who are interested in the esoteric aspects of masonry specifically because of Manley P Hall because they read the lost keys of Freemasonry and other works that Manley produced on the esoteric philosophy of masonry so we are seeing a renewed interest in the esoteric within Freemasonry which is very welcome and overdue we are seeing a renewed interest in the esoteric and an idealistic study of the esoteric within academia and we are seeing young people who are reading Manley P Hall and understanding that there is this vast depth of knowledge that's worth dedicating one's life to and when you read Manley P Hall it's an entry point you don't just stop you don't just read the secret teachings of all ages and say well now back to Harry Potter you know it doesn't work that way the book gets in your bones it gets in your flesh and blood and then you want to learn about the ancient Egyptian tradition you want to learn about the Vedic world you want to learn about the mystery traditions of ancient Greece ancient Rome not in some fantasy way but for real like Manley did himself so he has succeeded he has succeeded he is part of that chain that Madame Blavatsky told us upon her death don't let that chain break don't let that chain break and it has not broken this is not about what's going to happen tomorrow this is about what's happening at this hour right now the name Blavatsky is heard but more importantly than that the ideas that she opened up the Western world too are heard and disseminated and studied and explored the name Manley P Hall and the secret teachings of all ages is heard more today than it was during his lifetime and it has inspired it has inspired young people to re-enter and reinvigorate Freemasonry it has inspired scholars to dedicate themselves to the study of the ancient world not as an oddball collection of facts but as a living breathing tradition that's available to the contemporary searching person today in the here and now and I would have to say to all of you in this room a word of deep thanks because you are so part of this you stuck with it through good times and bad when Madame Blavatsky was being run down across the media as this sort of silly charlatan when no one heard the name Manley P Hall they thought it was a dormitory somewhere you know here on campus you stuck with it you maintain the library the magazines the grounds the books the scholarship the studying the searching and so I frankly want to say a word of congratulations to all of you because this hour the link is unbroken and I thank you so much thank you Stefano the bottom of my heart for your wonderful account of Manley P Hall for whom I worked for over 20 years as his lecturer and I fully agree with everything you said about him including that he really by his own frequent admission his principal inspiration was Madame Blavatsky peck on a little different tangent we regarding Madame Blavatsky I would like to ask you to maybe make a few comments on the the fact that she heard interest and her dedication was not the voted exclusively to the Eastern teachings yes though certainly they are very prominent in the sea conducting yes but if you look for instance at Isis on weald there's very little Eastern material there yes and and she was she was utterly utterly proficient in and dedicated to both yes yes that's a very very important point and levansky understood very deeply that the West in the hermetic traditions and other facets of its culture possessed an esoteric tradition that could be found at the kernel of Christianity at the kernel of Judaism within Kabbalah one of her closest colleagues and friends when she came to New York City was a Kabbalistic scholar and she was deeply dedicated as well to unveiling the Western tradition and I think tucked within that is it an interesting facet of her character which Michael alluded to this morning which is that she also believed very deeply in the in the idea of the individual spiritual search and in the sacredness and the need to honor and protect the individual spiritual search there was an aspect to her that encouraged the searching Westerner to look within and understand that he or she could attain a state of refinement that was much greater than anything we had grown up believing in the traditional religions at the time she didn't say a great deal about the burgeoning new thought movement which is something that I spend a lot of time writing about thinking about practicing and analyzing today but she made occasional reference to some of its early lights including the American medium Andrew Jackson Davis who coined the term law of attraction which later got used in a way very very different from what he had intended but she would mention him albeit briefly and say his insights gained while in a mesmeric trance State are very valid very right she felt they coalesced with the material that she wrote about cosmologically in the secret doctrine she was sympathetic to and interested in the American variants of mesmerism mental healing aspects aspects of spiritualism she was critical of spiritualism because she thought spiritualists often got too lost in the minutiae of phenomena and it's funny you know you have these critical biographers who write at madame blavatsky as this charlatan like medium and she spent a portion of her time in america discouraging mediums feeling that they were really just getting too hooked on miracles so to speak but she venerated spiritualism because she felt that it at least opened the door to a Western search It was as if you know this was our first arousing from slumber and that spiritualism at least got people asking questions and poked holes in the straight story that was going on within Western religion at that time that the age of miracles is over the age of phenomena is over the profit or the medium or the person of wisdom was part of the distant past you know she pierced that veil she pierced that veil and so there was so much that she did that that that both arose from and helped to expand Western life Mitch I'll let you explain the person that I'm going to be asking the question about so I'm not talking too long I'm curious about your opinion with respect to new thought and William Walker Atkinson oh yeah because Manley P Hall strikes me as being a person of integrity who was disseminating the material everything I know about William Walker Atkinson is that he was not really of integrity your statement about the law of attraction made me think of him yeah well that's a very interesting question William Walker Atkinson was another Chicagoan who was a lawyer who wrote in the mental healing and new thought tradition very widely in the early 20th century he wrote under pseudonyms sometimes he used the name Magus incognito he used the name three initiates I'll be talking about that book and he used the name my favorite Theron Q Dumont I'm going to change my name to Theron QD mom um I take a more sympathetic view of Atkinson I think that first of all Atkinson in addition to being a lawyer in a prodigious author and somewhat of a dramatist he was a student of Madame Blavatsky's teachings he venerated Madame Blavatsky loved theosophy he had a flair of the dramatic about him he founded something called the yogi publication Society here in Chicago I bet you some of you in this room have some of their little blue hardcover books on mental dynamics and self-hypnosis and various laws and Sciences of getting rich and prosperity and so forth but his most famous book was written under a pseudonym and that is the kabali on which he wrote under the pseudonym three initiates and there was debate for many many years who were the three initiatives was it Atkinson and and Paul Foster case the Western esotericist and you know runners-up in arranged from Annie Besant to Woodrow Wilson you know the three initiates was in fact William Walker Atkinson he held the copyright it was his work I have a funny relationship with the kabali on which is his most famous work which is probably the most popular arguably the most popular cult work of the twentieth century it is a work of popularized Hermeticism the title seems to be some kind of a Hellenic variation on the word Kabbalah we have kabali on and it is a chapter by chapter popularization of hermetic ideas which Acton probably gleaned from early translations of hermetic literature probably some of them not so good frankly and from his own studies and research I have a quirky sympathy for the Cabal Yong and I was talking to the philosopher Jacob Needleman who's a friend and he was saying to me at one point I hope he doesn't mind my broadcasting this to the world over the Internet but he has tenure it'll be fine he said at one point there are some surprisingly subtle and truthful and complex ideas within the Kabbalah there are some surprises within those pages and he said you know whatever this guy Atkinson was doing he wasn't solely in it you know for the drama and I have a sympathy for Atkinson he was a showman of a kind he was a Salesman but I do think there was a sincerity in the man and I have to say I do think I do think that in the Cabal Eon he had some success in translating certain hermetic ideas into a popular tongue I used to be more critical of the book I used to be very dismissive of the Kabbalah and say well how fascinating the ancient her medicine sounded just like early 20th century New Thought seekers how convenient you know they had a science of getting rich - that's great you know I was dismissive of the book because I felt it was just a charade of repackaging new thought a tradition that I care very much about in this kind of put on fake language of pseudo Hermeticism but as I've gotten older and as I've gone back to the book and there's an audio edition of the book that I've read and that that helped me to return to it with fresh eyes I've come to feel that I think he did have some success as much as anyone in translating certain hermetic ideas into a popular tongue to be sure he ottoman today with some of his own contemporary ideas but I have a sir sympathy for him and I think he was an American experimenter and I think the Cabal Yan has I agree with Jacob needleman's assessment it has within its pages some real subtlety and surprises thank you I had the great good fortune to hear Manley P hall speak in the 1980s in Los Angeles Wow and it was an amazing experience there was quite a large audience at the philosophical Research Society and he was announced he got up he was a presence and he sat alone on the podium and he proceeded without a note without a grimace or even a facial recognition to speak yes and 45 minutes after that then he said well I'll conclude yes and he concluded and I'm just curious as to what kind of a mind can do that yes right right well you know people put different names to it in the end they're all just names you know some would say they thought he had a photographic memory if such a thing really exists some would go to the other end of the scale and said you know well he's the reincarnate of Socrates you know I think probably somewhere between those two polls one can have a conversation he clearly had an extraordinary intellect which was strengthened which was strengthened because he was focusing on material that to his dying day filled him with love with passion it aroused all of his faculties you know I think and and and reven hello can correct me on this even just a day or two before his passing he gave a lecture he gave a talk before he embarked on a trip that was ill-advised and and and ended in his in his passing at near the age of 90 I think that there's a lesson in all that you know one can look at Manley Hall as you've just so they described it and say wow you know it's extraordinary it's supernatural where does this come from and it's an interesting question it's an interesting question and I address it in a cult America as I'm able hand in hand with that I think there's almost something instructive there which is that that prodigious mind of his was strengthened was fortified was imbued with power because of his depth of passion and love for the material that he was working on and that's a lesson you know that I would want to bring to everyone including young people look at the intellectual strength and power that comes from focusing on that which one truly loves and on that note I will end and thank you all so much thank you you

Channel: Theosophical Society

Views: 99,610

Keywords: HPB (Author), H. P. Blavatsky (Author), Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (Author), Theosophy, Theosophical Society, 130th Summer National Convention, Human Self-Transformation, Self-Transformation, Theosophical History, Esotericism, Esoteric Teachings, Ancient Wisdom, Ageless Wisdom, Consciousness, Human Consciousness, Global Consciousness, Mitch Horowitz (Author), Mitch Horowitz (Historian)

Id: SIqlw020DQU

Length: 63min 8sec (3788 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 22 2016