Theosophy and the Society in the Public Eye

A note from the compiler:

The New York Times of April 9, 2012, has an article by Stanley Fish, who is described in Wikipedia as a “Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami, as well as Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the author of 12 books.” The article is part 2 on its subject, but it begins by summarizing part 1, so can be read independently. It does not mention Theosophy, but it is a contribution to the activity prescribed by the Theosophical Society’s second object (which I slightly paraphrase to clarify what I believe is its meaning: “To encourage the comparative study of religion, philosophy, and science.”

Stanley Fish

Evidence in Science and Religion, Part Two

Stanley Fish – USA

In the post previous to this one, I revisited the question of the place of evidence in the discourses and practices of science and religion. I was prompted by a discussion on the show “Up w/ Chris Hayes” (MSNBC, March 25) in which Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins stated with great force and confidence that a key difference between science and religion is that the conclusions of the former are based on evidence that has emerged in the course of rigorous rational inquiry publicly conducted, while the conclusions of the latter are based on dogma, faith, unexamined authority, subjectivity and mere trust.

Marty Bax – The Netherlands

Last week I received a review copy of a new book, from the Amsterdam University Press,  Marton Piet Mondrian, Inside Out Victory Boogie Woogie, edited by Maarten van Bommel, Hans Janssen and Ron Spronk.

Inside Out Victory Boogie Woogie

Mondrian had started on the painting Victory Boogie Woogie, in 1942, but it remained unfinished, because of his death in February 1944. The painting was purchased in 1998 from the collector, Samuel Irving Newhouse, at a whopping price of 82 million Guilders (approx. 37 million Euros) through a gift from the Dutch National Bank, to commemorate the introduction of the Euro into The Netherlands. The acquisition caused a public outrage, and even the House of Representatives raised questions about the way in which it was acquired. Today, however, the painting is on victorious display in the Gemeentemuseum of The Hague, and is, by now, a prominent attraction of the museum.

A book review in the New Yorker magazine of April 9, 2012 (pp. 77-80), entitled “The Case against Kids: Is Procreation Immoral?” examines that topic as it has been treated in two recent books on the subject offering opposite views.

Annie Besant

The review begins with a discussion of a little 1832 book by Dr. Charles Knowlton, Fruits of Philosophy: The Private Companion of Young Married People, by a Physician, which discusses several methods of preventing impregnation—all awkward and inefficient.

John Algeo – USA

Theosophy has greatly influenced artists and musicians, but also some in the broader areas of science, such as Benjamin Lee Whorf, a scientific linguist, who will be of interest to readers of this Web site.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

The Times Literary Supplement of March  23, 2012, has an article on Victoria Welby (in full, the Hon. Victoria Alexandrina Maria Louisa Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie, Lady Welby-Gregory, 1837-1912), a very unusual woman and a pioneer in the study of meaning via the analysis of linguistic expressions, which she called “Significs,” and the author of several books on that subject that influenced such later scholars as C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richardson, whose Meaning of Meaning (1923) depended on her work, and George Orwell, whose Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) also derived from her.

Especially indebted to her is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, derived from the work of Edward Sapir at Yale University but fully formulated by his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf and made generally known in a collection of Whorf’s papers, Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John B. Carroll, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1956. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to think about the world. Physically we may be what we eat, but intellectually we are how we talk.

The TLS article ends (on page 15 of the issue) by observing that Benjamin Lee Whorf’s “work aims, overtly or covertly, at reconciling science and religion, a reflection  . . . of his lifelong commitment to Theosophy.”

An article in an issue of the New York Times (Nov. 29, 2011) does not mention Theosophy but does treat a fundamental Theosophical idea, namely, that human evolution helps to perfect our species. The article concerns a linguist named Steven Pinker, whose most recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, argues that violence has declined during human history because evolution results in an improvement in human behavior. He maintains: “Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.” The implication is that evolution is not simply a matter of causation, but has a purpose; and that is a basic principle of Theosophy.

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.

Spirituality in abstract art began around 1890 and ran in parallel with a growing interest in mysticism and the occult. Many artists were becoming intrigued with spiritual writings, in particular with Madame Blavatsky’s major work, The Secret Doctrine. Undoubtedly there were other influences, such as the works of Édouard Schuré, Jakob Böhme, and Emmanuel Swedenborg. But it was Theosophy that had the most profound effect on the emergence of modern abstract art and specifically on the founding fathers of the movement, Wassily Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimer Malevich.

Composition in Red, Blue and Yellow by Dutch painter Piet Mondrian

Theosophy gave these artists a vista that became the fundamental groundwork of their spirituality. From this viewpoint, they believed they were able to see beyond and into the natural world, as well as gaining an understanding of the ancient wisdom and cosmic principles of our existence. This lofty vantage point elevated all four beyond this-worldly concerns and gave them a sense of divine sight into otherworldly realms. They stood in the doorway between two worlds, they were the messengers, and communicating this knowledge became the objective of their art.

John Algeo – USA

Although the architect Frank Lloyd Wright was not a member of the Theosophical Society (as far as the records indicate), he was strongly influenced by the wider range of modern theosophical insight, according to a recent article in Theosophical History 15.2 (April 2011, published in September): 5-24. That article is “The Red Square: Frank Lloyd Wright, Theosophy, and Modern Conceptions of Space,” by Eugenia Victoria Ellis. According to comments by the editor of Theosophical History, James A. Santucci, this article “offers revelatory insights in understanding . . . the vision of the apparently non-Theosophist and architect Frank Lloyd Wright . . . [whose] notion of interiority . . . space and light, rather than form, guided from ‘within outwards’ [correlates with HPB’s SD (1:274) statement:] ‘The Universe is worked and guided from within outwards.’ . . . And so we find Wright’s vision conforming to that of Blavatsky’s perspective. . . . The larger theme of Dr. Ellis’s article is that of the esoteric or occult milieu permeating the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”

Frank Lloyd Wright

Incidentally, the “Red Square” of the article’s title is not an allusion to Moscow, but a reference to a symbol Wright used to sign his early architectural drawings: “a red square circumscribing an encircled cross,” which combines three geometric forms (square, circle, cross) prominent in esoteric and Theosophical symbolism. This article is a demonstration of the prevalence of Theosophical thought, especially among artists, in earlier times and of its generally overlooked influence on one of the major architects of recent times.

Although not mentioned in this article, another architect similarly influenced but also formally connected with the Theosophical Society was Claude Bragdon, who like Wright was a student of Louis Sullivan, who has been called the "father of skyscrapers" and "father of modernism." Although Bragdon wrote directly on architecture, for example in The Frozen Fountain; Being Essays on Architecture and the Art of Design in Space (1932), he also wrote on many other subjects, including Theosophy, for example in Episodes from an Unwritten History (1910) and The Beautiful Necessity: Seven Essays on Theosophy and Architecture (1910). Bragdon also designed the gateway leading to the Wheaton headquarters of the Theosophical Society in America. Wright’s buildings are works of art, justly valued by history; but Bragdon’s domestic buildings are far more livable, as Bragdon was responsive to how people use architectural space, whereas Wright tended to be concerned solely with the abstract artistry of space. As this article expertly shows, however, Wright’s work was deeply influenced by Theosophy.