Meet me in Atlantis
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- Published: Thursday, 18 June 2015 16:28
Some publications, when referring to HPB and her work, are still filled up with worn out with misinterpretations and incorrect assumptions. The following excerpt is such an example. The reader needs to note that it isn't what the magazine's editor thinks, nor what Theosophy Forward tries to convey.
Adams, Mark. Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City. New York: Dutton, 2015. [Warren County Public Library] "
“Another writer famous for her supernatural insights into Atlantis / was the late nineteenth-century Russian-born occultist Madame Blavatsky, whose head would surely be carved alongside [Edgar] Cayce’s on the Mount Rushmore of psychics. Famous for her séances and for her founding the grab-bag spiritual movement known as Theosophy, Blavatsky popularized the idea of Atlantis as the ancient home of a race of supermen. She claimed that her book The Secret Doctrine was based on a manuscript written in Atlantis (translated from the original language, Senzar), which was at its height in the years prior to 850,000 BC, at least half a million years before the first Homo sapiens is believed to have emigrated from the African continent. The populace of Blavatsky’s Atlantis enjoyed such modern conviences as electricity and airships powered by psychic energy called vril. The causes she attributes to its downfall seem obvious in retrospect: a group practicing black magic spoiled everything by breeding human-animal hybrids akin to centaurs, which were exploited as warriors and sex slaves. Had Blavatsky’s thoughts on ‘cosmic evolution’ merely served as fodder for future New Age fantasies about Atlantis—you can still browse a nice selection of tarot cards at the Theosophical Society bookstore on East Fifty-Third Street in Manhattan—she could be written off as a harmless crank. But her ideas about ‘root races’—a division of humanity into higher and lower species—were adopted by German mystics with a passionate interest in demonstrating that the superior Nordic race could trace its lineage back to a mythical island. Blavatsky had written of the Aryans as the most developed of the root races of Atlantis. The term Aryan (from the Sanskrit word for ‘noble’) had originally been used by linguists to describe peoples stretching from northern Europe to India whose languages had shared origins” (pp. 85-86).
In 2013, I went to Sweden twice for the retrospective exhibition on Hilma af Klint. The invitation came through the Ax:son Johnson Foundation, founded in 1947 by the late Consul General Axel Ax:son Johnson together with his wife Margaret, owner of the Nordstjernan group. The foundation, led by the highly amiable Kurt Almqvist, facilitates scientific research in general, but in particular the liberal arts and the social sciences. I was deeply impressed by their hospitality and professionalism. The foundation has clearly thought very deeply and constructively about how to inform a wider public about pressing issues in society. Conferences with scholars from all over the world, a website, a magazine, even their own TV channel with the top-Swedish interviewer Thomas Gür, who courteously and tongue-in-cheek said it was his fun ‘to ask stupid questions and get intelligent answers’. All in all, amazing. I wish we had such an institution in my country!
The adventure started in February, when an expert meeting was organized at the opening of the exhibition. The meeting was held in Engelsberg, a top-list Unesco heritage site own by the Ax:son group. Mid-winter, snow-covered landscape in the middle of the woods, paths at night lighted with candles along the sides, in the typically Swedish manner; a truly romantic setting. And a relaxed place to meet many international colleagues from other disciplines. For me personally, my acquaintance with Hilma’s work came full circle, when I met Maurice Tuchman again, who in 1986 organized “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985”. Its venue at The Hague constituted my first job as a curator. That exhibition showed Hilma’s work in public for the first time after World War II.
