Theosophy and the Society in the Public Eye

Morton Dilkes – USA

Cities are the source of civilization. The truth of that statement is attested by the very etymology of the word civilization, whose stem is the Latin word civis, meaning “city.”

Madam Blavatsky also bore witness to the connection between cities and civilization in The Secret Doctrine(2:198), where she wrote of the first physical humanity on our planet: “The whole human race was at that time of ‘one language and of one lip.’ This did not prevent the last two Sub-Races of the Third Race from building cities, and sowing far and wide the first seeds of civilization under the guidance of their divine instructors.” Earlier, in Isis Unveiled (2:508), she had referred to the mythic figures of Hermes and Cain as those who “build cities, civilize and instruct mankind in the arts.” And later, in an 1892 article in Lucifer (CW 13:100), she noted: “Some Homeric heroes also, when they are said, like Laomedon, Priam’s father, to have built cities, were in reality establishing the Mysteries and introducing the Wisdom-Religion in foreign lands.”

Alex Ross – USA

[extracts from The New Yorker (July 6 & 13, 2015): 88-89]

At first glance, it is a mystery how the prosperously rustic town of Ojai, California, came to host one of the world’s great festivals of modern music. . . . In the nineteen-twenties, the Indian guru Jiddu Krishnamurti and various personalities connected with the Theosophical movement took up residence in Ojai. . . .

Kathleen Hall – Canada

In many countries, educational reforms are taking place to consider the changing needs of 21^st century learners. The old factory model of education that was mainly concerned with churning out obedient workers no longer suits the needs of today’s world. As educators seek to embrace new ways of learning, many are considering a greater focus on educating the heart as well as the mind. In his ground-breaking video, “Changing Paradigms of Education” Sir Ken Robinson discusses the need for education that is both affective and cognitive. Robinson states that the outdated factory model most schools are still based on directly points to the need for a complete reform in education, one that addresses both the heart and the mind in learning. Humanity is at the forefront of a spiritual epoch. An education that includes the development of spiritual enlightenment also seems necessary in these times.

The emergence of this new spiritual epoch may have begun as far back as the late 19^th century, and educational reforms that encompassed spiritual development were evident in the formation of new schools, many of which embodied Theosophical principles. These principles were defined by Madame Blavatsky, in her ideal of what children should be taught:

“Children should above all be taught self-reliance, love for all men, altruism, mutual charity, and more than anything else, to think and reason for themselves. We would reduce the purely mechanical work of the memory to an absolute minimum and devote the time to the development and training of the inner senses, faculties and latent capacities. Deal with each child as a unit and educate it so as to produce the most harmonious and equal unfoldment of its powers, in order that its special aptitudes should find their full natural development. Aim at creating free men and women, free intellectually, free morally, unprejudiced in all respects, and above all things, unselfish.”

H. P. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy [p. 251/52]

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).

Kathleen Hall – Canada

[Kathleen Hall studied the modern abstractionists and their Theosophical connections while working on the thesis for her master’s degree. In connection with that work she corresponded with a number of contemporary Theosophical artists, particularly Burton Callicott, Don Kruse, and Pamela Lowrie. She is a resident of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and became a member of the Canadian Federation of the Theosophical Society as a result of her study. Kathleen is currently researching arts-based education programs for marginalized Roma children].

At the turn of the nineteenth century, a movement in art emerged that was a response to higher awareness of cosmic truth. Modern abstract art was the visible manifestation of spiritual ideals professed through the teachings of Theosophy and other wisdom lore. The artists of this movement were scribes who painted what words could not say.

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Kathleen F. Hall – Canada

Nicholas Roerich was a spiritually inspired artist whose visionary paintings depict vistas beyond our usual perception of human reality. Roerich’s paintings are alive with the color and light of other worldly realms allowing us to encounter visually that which we may have imagined, grasped, or somehow inherently recognize as the spiritual essence behind the veil of our unseeing eyes; Roerich’s paintings seem intent to inspire, educate and reveal the glorious mysteries of the ancient wisdoms in the landscapes of our souls.

Svetoslav Roerich. Nicholas Roerich with Sacred Casket. (1928)
Tempera on canvas. 
Private assembly, USA.

http://www.tanais.info/Nicholas Roerich was born October 9, 1874, in St. Petersburg, Russia. His father was a liberal-minded and well-respected lawyer whose many friends included scientists, scholars, and artists.  These family friends would often visit the Roerich household and would engage in lively discussions that left an impression on young Nicholas. Roerich’s grandfather, Fyodor Ivanovich Roerich also lived with the family until his death at 105; he had a large collection of Masonic symbols that fascinated Nicholas and his brothers, and these too left an impression on Nicholas that would later be revealed through his life’s work.

Nicholas Roerich Estate Museum in Izvara
http://www.roerich-izvara.ru/eng/vid.htm

[from “Wonder Woman: The Weird, True Story,” by Sarah Kerr in a review of The Secret History of Wonder Woman, by Jill Lepore, and Wonder Woman Unbound, by Tim Hanley, in The New York Review of Books 61.18 (November 20, 2014), p. 14:]

Wonder Woman is TM and © DC Comics
The cover of the July–August 1951 issue of Wonder Woman, by Irv Novick

To the more mysterious question of why Wonder Woman had such an aesthetic pop, she [Jill Lepore] brings a little less flair. And what if we want to know more about early feminist utopian fiction, and the art and ideas that nurtured, it? Why did Amazon imagery come to dominate? What about the seeds of Aquarian ideas that would later reappear in New Age writings? These are parts of the history; should today’s feminists feel responsible for knowing about them? (By the same token, should we feel embarrassed for forgetting the Theosophist underpinnings of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz?)”