2.1 Fiction, Fact, and Fantasy

A representative product (and popular commodity) within this new and buzzing occultist “marketplace” was The Coming Race, an early work of science fiction by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (sometime Secretary of State for the Colonies) that found a wide readership at the time, and clearly inspired Blavatsky – to the extent that she references the work several times in her first major work, Isis Unveiled (1877), albeit as visionary document rather than fictional text. To read it closely allows us to see ways in which occultism and Orientalism came together as part of a broader quest for alternative cultural frameworks in Victorian Britain, though in a highly imaginative setting. The novella reflects Bulwer-Lytton’s own interest in the occult, as it imagines a race of beings with mysterious powers beyond human capacity. Like Alice, its fictional narrator falls through a hole and into an adventure, when an inquisitive foray down a mineshaft lands him in the midst of an unknown subterranean civilization. At first, the narrator of The Coming Race finds uncanny resonances in this new world: The vegetation is unfamiliar but analogous to plants he knows, and the first gigantic building he encounters, which appears Egyptian from the outside, is “fitted up with an Oriental splendour” within.Footnote ²⁰ The creatures of this skyless universe prove, too, to be at once alien and familiar. They are human, and yet “a type of man distinct from our known extant races”:Footnote ²¹ red-skinned, dark-eyed, enormous, vaguely terrifying creatures fitted up with wings, and “with all the gravity and quietude of Orientals.”Footnote ²² Moreover, the main source of their power is “vril,” a form of “atmospheric magnetism” that powers not just the Vril-ya’s wings, or their weaponry, locomotive transport, and physical illumination but also clairvoyance and telepathy. To a reading public caught up in the spiritualist craze, the idea would have been quite familiar: Bulwer-Lytton completes the likeness by explaining vril in the occultist terms of the 1850s and 1860s (“mesmerism, electro-biology, odic force, &c”).Footnote ²³

Despite its otherworldly and fantastical setting, The Coming Race manifests a veridic impetus as well. This goes beyond the familiarity of its occultist terms. The narrator’s repeated early references to the Vril-ya’s “Oriental” qualities explicitly associate the powerful opacity of the fictional alien civilization with contemporary cultural encounters: As with many imperial fictions, for example, a prominently placed thwarted romance stages the impossibility of racial and ethnic mixing. Revealingly, the novella allegorizes these pervasive cultural anxieties as it relocates them to the otherworld of its speculative fiction. However, what is even more telling, for our purposes, is the way in which their expression draws in key textual referents. What makes The Coming Race so emblematic of its times, in other words, is the fluency with which its racial, sexual, and political preoccupations carom between – on the one side – the fantasies of Victorian occultism, and – on the other – the taxonomical impulses of Orientalist scholarship, which find frequent echoes in the anthropological conceit of the narrative.

One of the most intriguing aspects of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel might well be the legend on its frontispiece: The Coming Race is “Inscribed to Max Müller in tribute of respect and admiration.”Footnote ²⁴ The eminent Indologist seems worlds away from an occultist novel about subterranean beings; and yet, by the twelfth chapter, he has climbed off the dedication page and into the novel.

The sentence concludes by assiduously citing its source: “‘On the Stratification of Language’ p. 20.”Footnote ²⁵

By quoting Friedrich Max Müller’s analogy between geological strata and morphological linguistic evolution, Bulwer-Lytton introduces a metaphor that clearly encompasses the central conceit of his novella: that of distinct civilizations and languages, layered above and below ground. The specific ideas that the narrator cites from Müller, however, barely address this basic applicability. Instead, they serve to structure his own pseudo-philology of the fictional Vril-ya language. In the remainder of that particular chapter, the narrator uses Müller’s philological classifications to concoct an evolutionary account of this mysterious language (complete with explanatory examples and grammatical details). Thus, like languages from the “Turanian” family – and here, Bulwer-Lytton is explicitly borrowing from Müller’s ill-fated proposal of a Central Asian language family of that name – the earliest forms of the Vril-ya language featured isolated, monosyllabic roots; thereafter, the language was “agglutinative,” in that different roots were added to each other; and finally, the Vril-ya now have an “inflectional” language. As such, we are told, the singular of “An,” or man, becomes pluralized as “Ana”; in full pseudo-philologist mode, the narrator explains that the letter “Na,” as likened to “the Aryan root Nak, expressive of perishing or destruction,” adds a negative connotation to words, while “Gy” and “An” for female and male, of course, recall their Greek roots.Footnote ²⁶ Throughout, the chapter refers to familiar philological benchmarks.

Bulwer-Lytton’s references to Max Müller seem to anchor his occultist fiction in a foundation of philological fact, but that grounding discourse has its own relationship with fantasy. “On the Stratification of Languages,” which Müller delivered at Cambridge University in 1868, represents one station in his long campaign to define classificatory principles for the discipline of philology. As the novel suggests, the talk argues for a disciplinary correspondence between geology and philology, by establishing a correspondence between the evolutionary strata of the earth and the evolutionary strata of languages. However, the exact points at which Müller articulates this correspondence sound like nothing so much as the basic premise of The Coming Race. His paper begins by considering the role of wonder in the formation of a science. Müller imagines generations of humanity who remained incurious about the layers of the earth and, thus, ignorant of its science: “for thousands of years they must have seen in their quarries and mines, as well as we ourselves, the imbedded petrifactions of organic creatures: yet they looked and passed on without thinking more about it – they did not wonder.”Footnote ²⁷ In The Coming Race, Bulwer-Lytton’s protagonist, who looks, wonders, enters the mine, and falls through to encounter the creatures of the Vril-ya world, is no more than a narrative enactment of Müller’s rhetorical trope. Similarly, the novel’s stratification of languages below and above ground offers a literal performance of Müller’s analogy between philology and geology, which rests on the idea that certain “primitive” languages such as Chinese fossilize the historical traces of linguistic evolution – again, the philological conjecture reveals its own imprinting by contemporary Darwinism.

By the end of the novel, the metaphor of different strata that obtrude onto one another through evolutionary change figures as a fear that the “Coming Race” will rise from its subterranean incubus to overwhelm modern civilization through its superior knowledge and powers. Like the novel as a whole, the philological twelfth chapter ends with the fantasy of a record that will survive the narrator’s death, as if to suggest that the novelistic and philological exercise together constitute a bulwark against destruction at the hands of an alien civilization, or at the very least, a talisman that will outlast the obliterating effects of this inevitable destruction: “Should life be spared to me, I may collect into systematic form such knowledge as I acquired of this language …. But what I have already said will perhaps suffice to show to genuine philological students that [this] language … must have been the gradual work of countless ages and many varieties of mind.”Footnote ²⁸

There is much in The Coming Race to suggest that the arcane academic talk for “genuine philological students” is in concord with the high pitch of anxiety that also emanates from the novel. In his last few pages, the narrator concludes that while the Vril-ya were “originally not only of our human race, but, as seems to me clear by the roots of their language, descended from the same ancestors as the great Aryan family, from which in varied streams has flowed the dominant civilisation of the world,” they are now “a distinct species” that will emerge above ground only to “destroy and replace our existing varieties of man.”Footnote ²⁹

2.2 Aryan Family Values

The Coming Race’s description of the Vril-ya, as at once related (through a shared “great Aryan” ancestry that makes itself known through etymological evidence) and alien to “our existing varieties of man,” brings together the imaginary beings of occultist science fiction and the preoccupations of contemporary Orientalists. Its specification of the Vril-ya’s ancestry situates the warning of the novella’s last few pages squarely within the broader philological discourse that linked the languages and races of Europe to those of the Orient. By the late nineteenth century, the term “Aryan” was the common term for the Indo-European language family, and had also taken on the racial overtones implied by Bulwer-Lytton’s reference to “the dominant civilisation of the world.”Footnote ³⁰ In voicing his apprehensions about a civilization that is at once highly developed, alien, and related to his own, the gloomy protagonist of The Coming Race is bringing into narrative form a fairly widespread phantasmal relation. As European scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries researched the religions, languages, literatures, and histories of lands that had become newly accessible through imperial exploration and conquest (such as India, Egypt, Persia, and Turkey), the notion of a genealogical link enabled colliding conjectures even as it became widely accepted: that these cultures had degenerated into their current state from a glorious, shared ancestry; that they represented an earlier stage in the evolution of the Aryan people than the Europeans; and finally, that they had preserved the original language and religion of the Aryans more faithfully than the changeful societies of the West.Footnote ³¹ In other words, the trails of etymology seem to lead back not only to the protolanguage but also to the notion of an original community that once shared a system of beliefs as well as basic social structures.Footnote ³² In relocating the cathectic work of philology and ethnology within an otherworldly fantasy, The Coming Race takes such conjectures to an imaginative extreme, oriented (as its title suggests) around the future. For the amateur philologist who narrates the novel, the Vril-ya are threatening, ultimately, because they have moved on from the kinship of shared origins to an alien racial and cultural identity – and because the awe-inspiring powers and knowledge they amass, in the process, promise the destruction of “our civilization.”Footnote ³³ The fearful desires generated around racial difference and cultural kinship are plain to see in this occultist–Orientalist allegory, with its vivid vision of possible annihilation at the hands of beings who are at once related to and estranged from British culture. As such, the novella testifies to the uncanny intensities generated by seemingly dry scholarly hypotheses.

It is strikingly apparent, too, that The Coming Race takes for granted its readers’ familiarity with the notion of the Aryan family. The assumed obviousness of a common kinship invites us to open the close reading of this occultist novella out into a wider historical narrative. The ease with which Bulwer-Lytton allows the terminology of agglutinative roots and Aryan families into his fantastical fiction suggests the significance of comparative philology at this time – not unlike finding the preoccupations of comparative religion reflected in Mr. Casaubon’s quest for the Key to all Mythologies in Middlemarch, or those of ethnology in the arcane passions of Colonel Creighton or Hurree Babu in Kim, but more central to the very conception of the literary work in question. We turn then from Bulwer-Lytton to the broader history out of which his work grew – which he draws explicitly into its fiction, as we have noted, through the network of references. To consider this broader history, we will undertake a brief archaeology of the notion of linguistic kinship that grew into the conception of the Aryan family, first in philological and then ethnological and racial terms. These, as we will go on to examine, find their own echoes and reflections in the arcane cosmologies of Blavatsky’s Theosophical writings.

In the late eighteenth century, William Jones was the most prominent (though not, strictly, the first) source of the hypothesis of the Indo-European language family. In 1786, Jones famously argued for a linguistic relationship between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, and a select few other languages, in his “Third Anniversary Discourse” before the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta. While Jones marveled that Sanskrit was “more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin,”Footnote ³⁴ he did not go so far as to dub it the source of Greek and Latin: instead, he hypothesized that these languages were themselves descended from another, original language (a hypothesis that has remained, positing a lost original language we now call proto-Indo-European).Footnote ³⁵ In the decades following this epiphanic moment, evidence of this earlier kinship would feed into an Indomania that galvanized Europe, particularly Germany, during the heights of Romanticism. Friedrich Schlegel, for instance, wrote to a friend in 1803 that “everything, everything, originated in India without exception.”Footnote ³⁶

As foundational twentieth-century historians of language and race like Léon Poliakov, Maurice Olender, and Thomas Trautmann have remarked, Jones’s conclusion after studying Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek – that they must all have “sprung from some common source” – folded a search for the original language of Eden, one that stretched as far back as the medieval and early modern periods, into a new theory.Footnote ³⁷ During the early years of the discipline of comparative philology, the taxonomies of language were still indebted to the Biblical story of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japhet, and for that reason the Indo-European languages were also called “Japhetic.” German scholars went on to use “Indo-Germanic” rather than “Indo-European,” a phrase that Thomas Young coined in 1813.Footnote ³⁸ The term “Aryan” first appears in the works of eighteenth-century Orientalists like Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron and Jones himself, arising from the fact that it was a word with some currency in three separate streams of the Indo-European family of languages: namely, Persian, Sanskrit, and Greek.Footnote ³⁹ “Aryan” gained some traction through Schlegel’s usage, but ultimately Max Müller was responsible for its widespread adoption in English during the nineteenth century, as the primary name for the family of languages.Footnote ⁴⁰ Even as the Biblical “Japhetic” gave way to “Aryan,” the new classification retained a racial-linguistic connotation that anticipated its eventual segue from a linguistic to a racial category, ultimately finding its genocidal apogee under Nazism in the twentieth century.Footnote ⁴¹ Overall, nineteenth-century conceptions of languages and races saw them as coextensive modes of kinship.Footnote ⁴²

If the founding moment of comparative philology incorporated the Biblical idea that all languages emerged from one divinely ordained language, the idea of a singular Edenic language whose decipherment might once more unlock the secrets of religion was the basis, too, of esoteric thought as signified by the Christian and Jewish Kabbalah. Before the philological hypotheses of the late eighteenth century, Hebrew had the strongest claim on being the original language of the Tower of Babel myth, but in the first flush of Romantic Orientalism, philologists speculated that Sanskrit itself might be this mysterious Ur-Sprache.Footnote ⁴³ In their crucial writings on the Aryan hypothesis, Poliakov and Olender present convincing explications of the cultural fantasies invested in the Indo-European hypothesis. As Poliakov suggests, the idea of an Indo-European family located in India opened up the possibility of an alternative lineage for Christianity: a genealogy that had nothing to do with a Semitic identity. He quotes Arthur Schopenhauer as writing, for instance, that “Christian doctrine issuing from the wisdom of India has covered over the old trunk of gross Judaism.”Footnote ⁴⁴ While the full racial implications of this genealogy would become obvious only later in the nineteenth century (through the works of writers such as Arthur de Gobineau and Ernest Renan), Olender and Poliakov argue that the esoteric sub-text of philology – the search for a protolanguage that would conform to religious narratives – meant that the Biblical conflation of language and race was already a part of philological classifications. Since the early engine of comparative philology was etymology, as Stefan Arvidsson points out, it kept religion and language, too, contiguous with one another – for instance, through William Jones’s momentous suggestion that the Roman “Jupiter” was etymologically related to “the Vedic Dyáuș pitā.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The obvious implication here is that the same shared ancestors who once all spoke the same protolanguage must also have worshipped the same deity. Religion, language, and race come together inextricably in ideas such as this; in their entanglement, we can discern new channels for the further growth of an esotericist belief in a mysterious perennial philosophy that was originally shared across now diverse wisdom traditions, in ways that we go on to explore.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, we see the philological focus on roots and etymological cognates increasingly give way to the rhetoric of biology, as newer formations like ethnology, Darwinism, and race science come to bear on the Aryan question.Footnote ⁴⁶ By the mid-nineteenth century, for example, Gobineau was already describing Aryans as the most superior specimens of the white race.Footnote ⁴⁷ The growing prevalence of such an attitude offered a kind of contestation and rebuttal of philology’s earlier celebration of an original kinship. Instead, a turn to the investigative innovations of race science (such as craniology) emphasized biological differences between the Asian and European members of the Indo-European family, and fed new theories, such as the idea that an original race of white Aryans had invaded India and reshaped its language and religion, or the suggestion that it would be incorrect to group Asian and European Aryans as a family, rather than as colonized and colonizer.Footnote ⁴⁸

In the philological response to this development, we can see both vociferous objection and unwitting complicity. Müller, for instance, worked hard to distance his classification of Indo-European languages as Aryan from biological taxonomies, writing that “[t]here are Aryan and Semitic languages, but it is against all rules of logic to speak, without an expressed or implied qualification, of an Aryan race, of Aryan blood, of Aryan skulls … many misunderstandings, many controversies, would have been avoided, if scholars had not attempted to draw conclusions from language to blood, or from blood to language.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Such an emphasis on languages also allows Müller to avoid the other leaps implied by this facile jump “from language to blood,” such as a matching swerve from language to creed or from creed to blood. In an 1860 review entitled “Semitic Monotheism,” he quotes Ernest Renan as saying that the Semitic races were “monotheistic in religion, lyrical in poetry, monarchical in politics, abrupt in style, and useless for speculation.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Müller took particular exception to Renan’s identification of monotheism as an “instinct” of the Semitic races, explaining instead that the differences were in fact purely linguistic: The roots of words in Semitic languages remain obvious, whereas in Aryan languages, the prefixes and suffixes and various morphologies of the words obscure the original root of the word entirely. That is why, he tells us, Aryan languages include various metaphorical and mythological names for God, whereas in Semitic languages such plurality is restricted to adjectives, while the root remains constant. For Müller, all religions strive toward one monistic divinity: Polytheism and monotheism are simply linguistic variations that communicate the same singular spiritual apprehension. In its own way, this harkening back to a singular core shared across religions is a theosophical impulse, reminiscent of the early modern affinity for esotericism and self-discovery that App presents as a constitutive element of the early Orientalist interest in Asian religions.

However, despite this strong denunciation, philology is not entirely free of the tendency to see blood, creed, and tongue as coextensive.Footnote ⁵¹ Müller’s position entails a strong denunciation of race science’s appropriation of linguistic genealogies and families – and yet, there are times when those presiding conceits of genealogy and family, even if applied to the history of languages, make such a crisscrossing seem almost unavoidable. In the very same talk in which he rejects the notion of “Aryan blood” and “Aryan skulls,” he makes precisely such a move himself, while metaphorically revisiting the original Aryan family: “even in these faint pulsations of language, in the changes of accent in Greek and Sanskrit, may we feel the common blood that runs in the vein of the old Aryan dialects.”Footnote ⁵² This inability to keep systems of language and biology apart in his figures of thought, in the evocation of “common blood,” is indicative of conflations within the larger comparative project. Ultimately, the philological opposition to race science keeps getting ensnared in its own previous assumptions about the coextensive nature of language and race. Looking back, it is possible to see that the biologism of late-nineteenth-century understandings of race simply repurposed this already existent confusion of tongues, creeds, and peoples, but ordered them into a hierarchical classification that rejected the promise of kinship in favor of othering and disavowal.

3.1 Major Works

As Blavatsky’s rhetorical question makes clear, once it moved to India in 1879, Theosophy increasingly defined itself as a pedagogical alternative to Orientalist scholarship, even as it continued to lean on these philological sources. Müller – the best known Indologist within “the walls of Oxford” – is a frequent target, not only when she cites his claims on behalf of Indian culture but also when she attacks his scholarly methodology (although particularly her earlier writings do at times cite him and other Orientalists in more complimentary terms). In Isis Unveiled, for example, she scoffs at his inability to understand the true meaning of the Popol-Vuh, which Müller compared to the Arabian Nights Entertainments.

As the context of this passage makes clear, the kinds of “coincidences” to which Blavatsky refers are the motifs shared, inexplicably, by cultures not known to be historically linked, or claims of influence and transmission that Müller has dismissed for not meeting “scientific” criteria, and thus banished to the realm of the fantastical. One of the recurrent Theosophical criticisms of Orientalist scholarship centers on the imposition of exoteric, positivist structures of inquiry onto subjective, even supernatural, experiences of religion and culture; another, of course, concerns its textualist bias and neglect of interpretations from within the culture or religion under study.Footnote ⁶⁰ Theosophy privileges the “vague, contradictory, miraculous, absurd” in service of a vision of ancient Oriental wisdom that could only be described (after Said) as genealogically related but “ontologically and epistemologically distinct” from the Occident. However, paradoxical as it might seem, Blavatsky’s personal Orientalism enables a prescient deconstruction of the assumptions and axioms of academic Orientalism. Prefiguring Said by approximately a century, Blavatsky anticipates his specific critique of “flexible positional superiority” in Orientalist scholarship, as well as critiquing the unarticulated interdependence between Orientalist scholarship and empire. In Isis Unveiled, for instance, she writes of academic Orientalists that

At another point, she critiques scholarly collusion with Church and Empire, remarking sarcastically that “[o]f late there has been a touching accord between philologists holding high official positions, and missionaries from heathen lands.”Footnote ⁶² The link that she draws between supposedly disinterested scholars and their participation in colonial administration clearly anticipates the Saidian critique of Orientalist scholarship and study as being inescapably bound to, and ultimately in service of, the imperial project.

Nonetheless, we see a growing engagement with Orientalist sources in the major Theosophical writings, particularly Blavatsky’s two best-known works. Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine both assert mastery over the “ancient wisdom” that, Blavatsky argues, was lost to Western culture with the spread of Christianity and scientism, but retained by mysterious adepts in (variously) Egypt, India, and Tibet. While Isis Unveiled seeks to demonstrate the superiority of the secret “Oriental Kabala” over exoteric science, religion, and academic Orientalism, The Secret Doctrine claims to actually unfold the content of the ancient wisdom in compiling a quasi-evolutionary theory of human and cosmic history, in which the motor of reincarnation transports planetary systems, life-forms, and human races through patterned phases.Footnote ⁶³ Given the convolution of Blavatsky’s schemata, I will now offer an overview of these major works, to better enable a discussion of their implications for the Theosophical approach to race and caste. I will also begin to enter more closely into the experience of reading Blavatsky, focusing on the contradictions, incoherences, and idiosyncrasies of her works – which help us read against the grain of academic Orientalism, and attest to the broader heterogeneity of the European discourse around “Eastern” religion and culture.

In Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky marshals a plethora of detail in service of clearly defined goals: to demonstrate, first, that all religions share their origins in a perennial philosophy far surpassing contemporary, exoteric philosophies and religions, and second, that this ancient wisdom was scientifically sophisticated enough to explain the supernatural phenomena now incomprehensible to modern science, being more closely allied to the concerns of Victorian occultism and spiritualism, such as the relationship among body, soul, and spirit.Footnote ⁶⁴ As the name Isis Unveiled (with its reference to the Egyptian goddess) suggests, Blavatsky was influenced by Egyptology while writing the book, and at times the “Oriental Kabala” Blavatsky writes about has an Egyptian cast.Footnote ⁶⁵ Regardless of the cultural situation of the Kabala, however, it is firmly presented as a compendium of syncretic knowledge, and one that is posited against the assumptions and methods of philology. As the book continually argues, academic Orientalists are uninitiated into cultural knowledge, and are consequently unable to factor into their analyses and representations the esoteric interpretations and practices preserved by Oriental adepts. In Gauri Viswanathan’s reading of Blavatsky, this “radical reorientation of method” allowed Blavatsky to assert the “continuing vitality” of beliefs that Orientalist scholarship would otherwise consign to a “frozen textual archive associated with an irretrievable past”: it becomes the defining breach between academic Orientalism and Theosophy in this period, and allows for a lively contestation, despite the several and significant overlaps between these two versions of interdisciplinary, comparative, transcultural study.Footnote ⁶⁶

Within the text, the proper names that distinguish one race from another often come across as the detritus of a partial, exoteric historiography. At one point, for instance, Blavatsky explains that while the story of Genesis was derived from the Chaldeans and the Akkadians, she believes the Akkadians to be “cognate with the Brahmans, of Hindustan.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Given the nominality of racial categories in the text, this use of “cognate” seems almost intentionally punning in its simultaneous recall of bloodline and etymology. The elasticity of racial categories at so many places in Isis Unveiled appears strangely contrary to the determinism that characterizes them at other points, as when Blavatsky asserts that “[r]aces of men differ in spiritual gifts as in color, stature, or any other external quality,” or even when she rails against Christian dogma. In fact, such contradictions so blatantly enact the fundamental illogic of racial taxonomies – at once hierarchical and recombinant – that they become allegories of that illogic.Footnote ⁶⁸

While extending this methodological unconventionality and continuing to offer a syncretic approach to the matter of Eastern wisdom, The Secret Doctrine seeks to incorporate even grander totalities than Isis Unveiled. When the book first came out, in 1888, it was divided into two volumes, “Cosmogenesis” and “Anthropogenesis,” which together unfolded the narrative of universal and human evolution as per “the Secret Doctrine,” the essence and source of all religions (in other words, homologous with Isis Unveiled’s “Oriental Kabala”). The text claims to compile, along with Blavatsky’s own explicatory annotations, the translation of a mysterious epic poem written in the esoteric language of “Senzar” and made available to her by the Masters. In an introductory section, Blavatsky asserts that the secret doctrine is based on fundamental principles: there is a basic “Reality,” out of which life emerges; the universe is based on periods and cycles; all souls are part of an oversoul and go through cycles of reincarnation. She also asserts that this doctrine is the content of the esoteric wisdom that lies concealed within the various exoteric traditions of Europe and the Orient. As the preface announces: “[W]hat is contained in this work is to be found scattered throughout thousands of volumes embodying the scriptures of the great Asiatic and early European religions, hidden under glyph and symbol, and hitherto left unnoticed because of this veil.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Both The Secret Doctrine and Isis Unveiled seek to present themselves as scholarly inquiries into the comparative findings of mythology and religion, with the additional benefit of occult training from theosophical initiates that will allow the reader to penetrate this “veil.” The Secret Doctrine is full of such moments, as when Blavatsky expounds upon the esoteric symbology that can conjure forth the real meaning of holy signs like the cross, or when she compares the “true” significance of the number seven in Hindu and Egyptian wisdom traditions. Like Isis Unveiled, the text engages contemporary science and cites the findings of “Esoteric Science” to argue against the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel, even while adopting their methodological conventions and terminology – all while unfolding an elaborate cosmology.Footnote ⁷⁰ Like many other esoteric cosmologies, this grand system traces the correspondences between cosmic, human, and natural orders, but along with Darwinian language, Blavatsky mobilizes timescales, cosmological rhythms, and untranslated Sanskrit terms from Hindu philosophy to do so. Thus, as in the Puranas, the universe (which is itself one among many universes) moves through various periods of Manvantara and Pralaya (evolution and dissolution), going through what Blavatsky describes as sevenfold evolutionary processes that mirror the sevenfold evolution of human races, with beings or “monads” who are reincarnated to move through these universal cycles.Footnote ⁷¹ Planets themselves have a septenary constitution, since each physical planet (including the earth) is accompanied by six “invisible” globes and undergoes a seven-stage evolutionary cycle in which it moves from a spiritual to physical to spiritual level, before beginning a new cycle. At the present juncture, The Secret Doctrine asserts, the earth is in its fourth round, that is, on its way back to a spiritual rather than physical existence.

In the second volume of the work, “Anthropogenesis,” the earth’s septenary evolution is shown to be mirrored by the evolution of human beings (“monads” that have been reincarnated several times on their way into human form), which takes them, too, through different rounds that are divided into seven successive “root races.” These different races similarly represent various stages of a septenary cycle that moves from a spiritual to a physical and back to a spiritual plane of existence. In the context of human evolution, this cycle manifests through the transition from the disembodied, nonsexually reproducing beings of the first root race to people with blood, bones, and sexual differentiation, like those of the current (fifth, Aryan) root race, eventually reaching another level of purely spiritual existence, with the beginning of the next round of evolution. The various root races emerge sequentially from different geographical areas – the North Pole, Atlantis, Asia – and are shown to be distinct from one another through such varying traits as size, color, and means of reproduction, as well as differing intellectual and spiritual capacities. The subraces of the various root races are generally also recognizable, much like the category of “Aryan”: for instance, the fifth subrace of the current root race is that of the “Anglo-Saxon.”

3.2 Visions of Race

The apparent otherworldliness of The Secret Doctrine’s cosmology is, clearly, not much of a mask for its identification with the categories and assumptions of contemporary ethnology and race science. The category of the Aryan is specified as a “root race,” a term whose inaccessibility seemingly distinguishes it from the “race” we know through general usage: the idea that some root races propagated through asexual reproduction, for instance, approaches the terrain of science fiction (somewhat like the gigantic Vril-ya of The Coming Race, whose biological constitution is beyond the human). And yet, as critics including Isaac Lubelsky, James Santucci, and Carla Risseuw have suggested, The Secret Doctrine’s abstracted use of the term still refracts nineteenth-century taxonomies, and bears the imprint of evolutionary thought. As Santucci points out, for instance, the notion of spiritual progress connecting various root races contributes to a hierarchy of inferior and superior races. Each root race has its own seven subraces: some of these signal the coming of a new root race; others are the vestiges of inappropriate pairings between different root races. These root races are classified and described according to a hyperbolically biological taxonomy: one race gives rise to another by “budding”; there are several references to (arguments against, appropriations of) natural selection; indeed, whole chapters seem devoted to esoteric challenges to Darwin and Haeckel. Unlike Müller’s strong (if occasionally self-defeating) objection to the ethnological appropriation of the philological category of “Aryan,” in Blavatsky’s work we see the bricoleur’s enthusiasm for adopting and making do with whatever discursive formation lies close at hand – including race science.

If anything, the evolutionary systems and classifications of The Secret Doctrine present an even more elaborate biological causality for the category of the Aryan than the racist works of a Gobineau or a Taylor.

Blavatsky’s theory of races unambiguously seeks a supernatural validation for classifications that had, in fact, emerged from nothing more eternal or transcendent than the racial assumptions of nineteenth-century ethnology. Her concept of race echoes its Victorian contemporaries, however, only to enmesh them in a wildly implausible system, offering no more than its own assertion of a link to connect the scientific jargon of geology and evolution to the exotic names of “Hindu exotericism.”

The Secret Doctrine reformulates ethnology’s speculative connections – between race and geographical origin, or race and evolution – with a vivid literalism: for example, the concept of phenotype is reincarnated, here, as a direct correlation between “geological strata” and “complexion.” Given the reductive directness of these correspondences, it comes as a surprise to discover that the ironclad causal links of Blavatsky’s system allow for a rich array of possible racial consequences: not only are Aryans not necessarily white, they are “dark brown, almost black, red-brown-yellow, down to the whitest creamy color.” Like the proliferating nouns that supposedly describe ethnicity or culture in Isis Unveiled (but which seem to disperse categories of identity across a nominal mélange), this inventory of possible pigments denatures the very causality of race that it ostensibly catalogues. Instead, Blavatsky’s Anthropogenesis becomes a parable about ethnology’s construction of race as a natural category through the ascription of natural causes, the specification of traits, and the determination of an origin and a genealogy.Footnote ⁷³

Carla Risseuw has argued that “theosophy uses the concept of race, in a wider context than that of physical characteristics alone … these outer characteristics are unalterably linked to inner characteristics, merging exponents of each race to the civilization they create.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Even so, Theosophy transgresses the carefully narrow boundaries of race science by offering a burgeoning plethora of such “characteristics.” The Secret Doctrine’s use of ethnological categories vacates them of classificatory content and specificity, instead injecting them with a fantastical, algebraic logic, according to which various races either derive from or tend toward (or both derive from and tend toward) one another. In so doing, Theosophy holds up a mortifying mirror to the rhetoric and logic of race science, calling ethnological arguments into question precisely because its mimicry of their logic is organized around unverifiable claims to authority and initiation that reflect back on ethnology’s own structures of evidence.

We can also see how these abstract reimaginings of race reflect back on the very identity categories that so fascinated philologists at this time and, in so doing, create new ways of framing the nineteenth-century workings of race (and consequently, as we will see, of caste). In an essay on the influence of spiritualist and occultist ideas on anthropology, Peter Pels writes that “at about the same time that the Theosophical Society was founded (1875), the originally ‘oriental’ Aryan was transformed into the blond and blue-eyed image of what was to become one of the most frightening forms of modern racism.”Footnote ⁷⁵ At the critical pivot-point of the late nineteenth century, chronologically about halfway between the zenith of Romantic Indomania and the twentieth century’s malignant Nazi reformulation of the Aryan hypothesis, the Theosophical Society offered its own esoteric reformulations of the philological concept.

In The Secret Doctrine, we see Blavatsky diverge from the philological approach somewhat. The term “Aryan” accommodates the cosmological in the racial, as Blavatsky cites the authority of her Masters to repurpose it into a technical term within her esoteric macrohistory.Footnote ⁷⁶ Theosophical geography also departs from both the Orientalist model and the subsequent theories of race science, by situating the original Aryan homeland in India and identifying Indians as Aryans, in line with the beliefs of late-nineteenth-century Hindu revivalists like Swami Dayananda Saraswati and Swami Vivekananda.Footnote ⁷⁷ Even so, Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled often seems to refer the category of Aryan back to philology’s classifications by opposing it to the Semitic stream, which further enables an attack upon Christianity.

In other words, the Semitic is exoteric and sensual, the Aryan esoteric and metaphysical.Footnote ⁷⁹ As with some of the most influential scholarly variations on the Aryan-Semitic theme, Blavatsky’s attack on Christianity jumbles religion, race, and language: not only does she apply the philological classifications of “Indo-European,” “Japetic,” “Aryan,” and “Semitic” as racial categories, but the logic of such distinctions is to be found in a racialized use of language, and, in turn, the types of religious experience the different linguistic traits enable. Blavatsky’s distinctions hark back to Ernest Renan’s taxonomy of religions, according to which the Semites are intrinsically monotheistic, while the Aryans are polytheistic, mythological, and more inclined to abstract philosophizing – precisely the attitude that Müller had rejected in “Semitic Monotheism.”Footnote ⁸⁰

Moreover, what seems to be simply an abstract, computational vision of esoteric world-systems in The Secret Doctrine – one whose use of the term “race” seems near-synonymous with broader term like “beings” or “species” and, as we have noted, reads as a wild allegory of race science itself – in the process also enacts a logic that could best be characterized as eugenic. In one such instance, Blavatsky describes “Malays, Papuans and Hottentots” as racial errors, identifying them as the unfortunate result of crossings between the seventh subrace of the third (Lemurian) root race and the earliest subraces of the fourth (Atlantean) root race.Footnote ⁸¹ In the various descriptions of those subraces that currently inhabit Earth (or “Globe D” as it is known in the text), Blavatsky borrows freely from contemporary ethnological and anthropological discourse, even as she disputes their findings; for instance, when she writes that “the occult doctrine admits of no such divisions as the Aryan and the Semite …. The Semites … are later Aryans – degenerate in spirituality and perfected in materiality. To these belong all the Jews and the Arabs. The former are a tribe descended from the Chandalas of India, the outcasts.”Footnote ⁸² Blavatsky strongly and explicitly disputes the Orientalist conception of Aryans and Semites from her occultist vantage point – but almost simultaneously constructs a narrative of degeneration that both relates and distinguishes Semites and Aryans, implicitly accepting the “division” crafted by Orientalist philology. We see here, too, a glimpse of the fusion of race science and caste, as “materialist” Jews are called the descendants of so-called untouchables or “outcasts.” Anti-Semitism and casteism meet among the root races.Footnote ⁸³

3.3 Occulting Caste

Clearly, even as the specific generic and formal instability of Blavatsky’s texts allows us to read against the grain of their Aryanist assertions, and even though she stoutly objects to certain Orientalist classifications, The Secret Doctrine participates in the contemporary discourse of race and caste. While Blavatsky’s incorporations of contemporary racial categories have received their share of critical attention, it is worth considering the related – and relatively neglected – question of how caste shows up in her writings: all the more so, for our purposes, given that it reflects back the simultaneous influence of both Orientalist ethnology and of Theosophy’s Indian interlocutors. Of course, race and caste are not disconnected, or solely parallel entities – in fact, if the hypothesis of the Aryan family had ramifications for the European view of race, it also reshaped the understanding of the caste system in India, including for Indians themselves.Footnote ⁸⁴

In the reconfigured genealogies of “Anthropogenesis,” and in Blavatsky’s writings more broadly, we glimpse a clear interrelation between the text’s assumed Aryanism and the broader matter of caste. In fantastically conflating the lineage of the “degenerate” Jew with that of the subjugated Indian Chandalas, for example, Theosophy imaginatively paraphrases, as kinship relation, decades of Indological (and more broadly, Orientalist) speculation on the relationship between race and caste as refracted through the Aryan family theory. Gail Omvedt has written that “the ‘Aryan theory of race’ originated by European Orientalists” became “an ideological legitimation of the system of caste hierarchy.”Footnote ⁸⁵ This “ideological legitimation” occurred through Orientalism’s stories of the past as well as in its redefinitions of the textual archive – particularly in relation to the preeminence it granted certain texts such as the Bhagavad Gita.

It is worth noting that the crucial significance of caste’s relationship to race extends far beyond the nineteenth century, and continues to be a vexed matter of debate (as well as a productive locus of transcultural political solidarities), well into our own time. It came into focus, for example, in 2001, when Dalit activists fought to classify casteist discrimination as a site of racism at the UN World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance at Durban, South Africa. More recently, in Caste: The Origins of our Discrimination, Isabel Wilkerson argues that anti-black racism in the United States is best understood as the manifestation of an American caste system, since caste is an assumed and “invisible grammar” of the sort that underlies “the language of race.”Footnote ⁸⁶ In considering ideological paradigms that legitimate this “invisible grammar,” Wilkerson turns to the examples par excellence of Nazi Aryan theory (with its own genocidal phantasmagoria of Semitic degeneracy) and the Laws of Manu, which codified and ranked the four varnas or strata of the Hindu caste system.

The fingerprints of Orientalism are evident here, too. The Manusmriti (the Laws of Manu) was one of the first Sanskrit texts William Jones translated in 1776, as British officials of the East India Company under the guidance of Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of Bengal, sought a primary textual resource for Hindu personal law. As Rita Kothari and Krupa Shah point out, the “translation of ancient texts believed to be the unchanging repositories of ‘Hindu law’ became indispensable” for the purposes of colonial administration.Footnote ⁸⁷ We also see here the crux of the Saidian critique of Orientalism, since the task of translation was inextricable, for Jones, from his professional roles as a judge and administrator, and had far-reaching material consequences for millions of Indians. The first English translation of the Manusmriti transformed it from one among many ancient legal texts into a singular cornerstone of Hindu law, which could then act as the legitimizing primary source, in legal terms, for all aspects of Hindu social existence – most significantly, of caste, since the Manusmriti lays down the laws of the four main classes of the Hindu caste system. Susan Bayly suggests that Jones erroneously believed the Manusmriti to be a quintessentially Aryan text dating back to early Vedic times, and viewed the “primordial Aryans as heroes of a great adventure of migration and conquest ‘at the earliest dawn of history,’ bringing with them from their west Asian homeland the teachings of a divine law-giver, Manu.”Footnote ⁸⁸ In other words, the Aryans are imagined as both authoring and authorizing the foundational logic of the caste system – or to return to Omvedt’s description, precisely providing “ideological legitimation” for the caste system, under the aegis of Indological scholarship and translation.

Over the course of the nineteenth century and with the further racialization of the Aryan theory, it is possible to trace “an emerging ethnological orthodoxy” in which Brahmins and other upper-caste Hindus were descended from the Aryan invaders of India, while the indigenous “Dravidians” of India had remained outcastes.Footnote ⁸⁹ The implication, clearly compatible with a colonial outlook, is that, despite being of the same “superior” stock as the British, these Aryans over time degenerated into ignorance and superstition and, unlike their white relatives, adopted the oppressive structure of the caste system. And yet, at the same time, despite this seeming denunciation of caste, the logic of the conception is itself casteist, given that it identifies Brahmins as Aryan and thus superior to the other castes. In other words, even as the actions of earlier Orientalists like Jones effectively consolidated the Laws of Manu and its caste diktats as the keystone of Hindu law – and even as nineteenth-century ethnology regularly presented Brahmins and other upper castes as distant kin to the British, therefore assuming caste to be the very ground of their Aryan kinship with IndiansFootnote ⁹⁰ – evangelicals, colonial scholar-officials, and intellectuals like James Mill also criticized the caste system as evidence of Hinduism’s “degrading superstitions” and degeneration, and therefore justification for British rule.Footnote ⁹¹ Colonial discourse has its casteist cake and reprovingly eats it, too.

As happens so often, Theosophy also holds a mirror to both of these attitudes to caste, simultaneously – although the optic it offers is often more funhouse mirror than looking glass. The taxonomical impulse dominating Victorian ethnology, which also influenced the colonial study of Indian castes, religious communities, and tribes, finds itself reflected in the sprawling, eccentric classifications and genealogies that constitute Blavatsky’s cosmologies. Theosophy’s self-presentation as an esoteric movement complicates and compounds its Orientalist derivations. In writing about the evolution of root races, Blavatsky seems to sublimate the rationale of caste into her otherworldly metahistory, by building an elaborate, hierarchical system that operates through heredity and evolution. Caste becomes an occulted model for Theosophy’s racial taxonomies as well as in its historical master narratives.Footnote ⁹² Nor is this a matter of rough analogy – in fact, Blavatsky repurposes the caste system in her very conception of esotericism. Theosophy’s theory of the secret doctrine turns on the notion that only the initiated and the truly elect may have access to an arcane and ancient wisdom – both in the self-evident sense of the phrase (that this is the axis upon which Theosophy revolves), and in the less obvious and contradictory sense that Theosophy, at another level, also turns against this much-touted axiom, since its very mission is to make public and widely accessible the ancient, secret doctrine. Even so, Blavatsky’s writings never let go of the boast and glamor of initiated esotericism: as such, the caste system stands as a readymade model of hierarchical exclusivity, too easily available for her not to adapt and appropriate for her purposes at several points. In Isis Unveiled, for instance, she writes that “the true interpretation” of metempsychosis, “discussed at length in Manu and the Buddhistic sacred books,” is bound to have been widely misunderstood, “having been confined from the first to the learned sacerdotal castes.”Footnote ⁹³ The definitive exclusivity that attends a “true” understanding of religious texts here is effortlessly coextensive with the caste system.

Moreover, Blavatsky’s placement of Manu and “the Buddhistic sacred books” on the same plane comes across as a significant mischaracterization, given that the Buddha broke from the Brahminical social system to found a more egalitarian order. While a shift of this sort is in keeping with Blavatsky’s inventive approach to historical genealogies (and nominal identities) more generally – and as such, challenges the official historiography by diverging from it – this representation also has more far-reaching implications for the larger question of caste and race hierarchy. The anti-casteist bite of Buddhism finds itself defanged here, as Blavatsky reinscribes the Buddha into the Hindu caste system that he rejected, and instead describes him as an upper-caste “Aryan” who learnt from “initiated Brahmins.”

By clipping off a “d” from “Buddhism” and abstracting it to “Budhism” (allying it to the Sanskrit “buddhi,” meaning “wisdom,” rather than the historical personage, Gautama Buddha), Blavatsky suggests that the esoteric doctrine smuggled into Buddhism is no “different from [Brahminical] doctrines”: she recapitulates caste orthodoxy by suggesting that the Buddha’s seemingly egalitarian creed belongs to the realm of the “body,” whereas the initiatic, ascetic, quasi-Brahmin “soul” of his beliefs is kept for the “Elect.” Here, Theosophical esotericism adjusts itself to flow along the prefabricated channels offered by the caste system.

And yet, even as she revels in the mystique of “the learned and sacerdotal castes,” extols the legacy of Manu, or, as here, demotes Buddhist reformism to the level of “outward material body” – in other words, even as she implicitly extends the logic of caste – Blavatsky also elsewhere explicitly rejects the caste system as corrupt, dogmatic, and degenerate, just as many British and European observers and writers did in their denunciation of “Brahmanism.” In a piece called “Misconceptions” published in the French monthly Le Lotus in 1887, Blavatsky responded to a critique of the Theosophical Society (and its Indian, Hindu allegiances) by a votary of western occultism writing under the pen name “Aleph.”Footnote ⁹⁶ “Misconceptions” repeats the idea of “esoteric Budhism,” but over the course of her defense of Theosophy, Blavatsky launches a frontal assault on the caste system. Putting some distance between her organization and the Hindu practices that Aleph’s original critique apparently attacked, she dismisses the devotees of the Hindu deity Jagannath as suicidally “ignorant,” and blames their upper-caste oppressors for perverting the truth of “the esoteric philosophy.”

Here, Blavatsky’s rejection of a corrupt priesthood is reminiscent of the broader Victorian denunciation of the Hindu caste system as superstitious, quasi-“Papish,” and in need of reform; to this, she adds the additional allegation that the priestly caste is stuck in the mire of exotericism, unable to reach the true, concealed meaning of Hindu philosophy that her Masters have shared with her, which is the same as the “Universal Esotericism preserved by certain cosmopolitan fraternities”Footnote ⁹⁸ or the “‘Ancient Wisdom’ of the Ante-Vedic Âryas.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Whereas the trope of an exclusive and initiated fraternity often slides into the idea of upper-caste savants in The Secret Doctrine and other writings, in “Misconceptions,” the Brahmins are emphatically not part of an inner circle. Moreover, the true kernel of “esoteric philosophy” is not simply or solely Hindu (or Brahminical), but rather a transcultural doctrine shared by “certain cosmopolitan fraternities,” reaching for universality. Blavatsky goes on to present Theosophy as the means to a broader reform and revival of Hindu ancient wisdom, both through its esoteric understanding of the perennial wisdom, and its embodiment of a belief in “Universal Brotherhood” (which rids it of the trappings of caste inequality). Much of the essay presents current-day Brahmins as opportunistic and corrupt, and Blavatsky acknowledges Aleph to be “dead right” about “Brâhmanism,” before offering the promise of a future Aryan family reunion hosted by Theosophy.

Here is the longed-for coming together of estranged Aryan brothers, finally seated together at the Theosophical table and equal in their postures of entitlement. If the end of The Coming Race anticipated apocalypse at the hands of an advanced branch of the Aryan family, Blavatsky’s vision of the future departs from that fictional inspiration by imagining a happy “fusion of the two Âryan races” under Theosophy’s auspices. Moreover, in keeping with the rest of “Misconceptions,” which explicitly opposes the caste system, Blavatsky predicts the end of “exoteric Brâhmanism” as the excrescences of superstition fall away, leaving behind a perfect blend of the esoteric truth of the “Ancient Wisdom” and modern occultism or “progressive science.” And yet, in the very same paragraph, as we have seen, Blavatsky assumes a 3,000-year-old “genealogical tree” to be reason enough to exonerate “Brâhmanism” from the charge of inferiority. It is a move that smuggles the hereditary logic of caste back into her attack on European racial arrogance – and on the caste system itself. Nor does the text seem to register that to reject “exoteric Brâhmanism” in favor of “esoteric Vedism” reinscribes the hierarchies of the caste system, given that the Vedas – the oldest scriptural texts written in Sanskrit – are themselves synonymous with Brahminical culture; traditionally, only upper castes were able to access the Sanskrit language of the Vedas, and Brahmins were considered the “custodians of the Veda.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ In insisting upon a distinction between pure “esoteric Vedism” and corrupt “exoteric Brâhmanism,” Blavatsky is not challenging caste hierarchy so much as romanticizing its origins through her celebration of an Aryan ancient wisdom that dates back to the Vedic age, despite her clear denunciation of modern-day Brahmanism.

In this celebration, Blavatsky echoes the views of the Hindu revivalist Arya Samaj, a reformist society with which the Theosophical Society briefly collaborated. Rejecting the rituals and polytheistic profusion of orthodox Hinduism, the founder of the Arya Samaj, Swami Dayananda Saraswati, promoted a more austere, monistic practice based on the values of Vedic philosophy. Theosophy’s encounter with the Swami was significant; in fact, when Olcott and Blavatsky first went to India in 1878, they temporarily rechristened their organization “the Theosophical Society of the Arya Samaj,” although the two groups soon proved to be incompatible partners, falling out in public by 1882. The Swami was unable to stomach either Olcott and Blavatsky’s interest in occultism or their embrace of Buddhism, while the Theosophists were dismayed by the Arya Samaj’s commitment to a narrowly Hindu creed.Footnote ¹⁰² Nevertheless, both societies continued to share the belief that India, or “Aryavarta,” was the original homeland of the Aryans; as such, both disagreed with the academic Orientalist belief in an Aryan invasion of India. In envisioning India as the origin and home of all other religions, Romila Thapar suggests, Theosophy was influenced by Swami Dayananda’s conviction that Vedanta was, in fact, “the source of all knowledge.”Footnote ¹⁰³

Even after the two societies parted ways, we see the continuing influence of the Arya Samaj on Theosophical conceptions of caste.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In the introductory sections of The Secret Doctrine, for instance, Blavatsky writes about the ancient wisdom that was transmitted down the ages and across civilizations: “the universally diffused religion of the ancient and prehistoric world,” preserved in the “crypts” of mysterious libraries.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Tellingly, she cites Dayananda as she envisions a future in which these archives, saved and secreted by “the Occult Fraternity,” may be widely shared – “safe from Western spoliating hands, to reappear in some more enlightened age, for which in the words of the late Swami Dayanand Sarasvati, ‘the Mlechhas (outcasts, savages, those beyond the pale of Aryan civilization) will have to wait.’”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The untranslated term, “mlechha,” Sanskrit for alien or invader and roughly equivalent to “barbarian,” becomes a marker of otherness that (as Blavatsky’s gloss of the term as “outcasts” suggests) preserves the exclusionary structure of caste.

Both The Secret Doctrine and “Misconceptions” came out some years after Dayananda’s death, but as we have seen, Blavatsky continued to cite him. Ultimately, the Arya Samaj modeled a form of ambivalence around caste for the Theosophical Society, campaigning against untouchability while holding on to the basic hierarchy of caste.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ We find Blavatsky echoing the Swami’s belief in a Hindu reform based on a return to the Vedas. In espousing a caste system supposedly based on merit rather than heredity (in other words, by ignoring the working of historical privilege), and in its enthusiasm for the Vedic past, the Arya Samaj stopped short of a real critique of caste ideology.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ We see this reflected in Blavatsky’s approach, though “Misconceptions” speaks out against social injustice not only in India but also in the West.

All told, caste must be understood as a significant, albeit understudied, influence on Theosophy’s esoteric hierarchies and classifications. Even so, Theosophy ultimately continues to speak for the broadly utopian horizon of “Universal Brotherhood” in ways that push through these typologies. Even within The Secret Doctrine, which revels in hierarchy and exclusivity, we can see casteist formulations being fabricated along fantastical genealogies, part of an epic cosmology that often reads, with its discussion of root races or virtual globes, like broad speculative fiction. Isis Unveiled, as we have noted, with its nominality of classification, indifference to consistency around identity, and accommodation of esoteric histories, also effectively undermines the purism of the Arya Samaj worldview. Theosophy’s expansive syncretism and interest in occult science are precisely the traits that warned Dayananda Saraswati off a fusion between the two societies.

For Theosophy’s purposes, Dayananda might be thought of as a “native informant,” to cite Viswanathan’s description of the Masters, who allowed Blavatsky to challenge the scholarly authority of expert Indologists.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Blavatsky’s contestation of academic Orientalism, of course, hinges on the idea that the archives and libraries on which philologists and scholars of comparative religion depend are unable to match the knowledge of initiated practitioners. Dayananda becomes an authority that she mobilizes to challenge the chronology of the Orientalists or the worth of their textual archive. In the same introduction to The Secret Doctrine, for example, Blavatsky suggests that “Eastern initiates” could access texts that were completely unknown to the philologists. In this, she cites both “a prominent Cinghalese priest” and “the late Swami Dayanand Sarasvati, the greatest Sanskritist of his day in India,” describing the laughter of the “holy and learned man” when told that Müller had said he had found no textual evidence of ancient revelation.

Evidently, the Swami’s dismissal of “Mr Moksh Mooller” is inextricable from the fact that the Professor is not a Brahmin, and must therefore be denied a visit to the secret Himalayan crypt. The author of The Secret Doctrine, as she offers Dayananda’s posthumous words, seems to revel in the simultaneous put-down of the eminent Indologist and in the esotericism of “Brahmanism.” (Curiously, it seems not to cross her mind that she herself is no Brahmin – perhaps because, as an initiate of the Masters, she floats along on the astral plane far above these mundane matters, requiring nothing more than her own psychic powers to access the great archives of the occult.) Despite the shifts and variations in Blavatsky’s views, it is possible to see a steady consistency, at least, in her stated critiques of scholars of comparative religion and language, even as she cites and draws from their work. By quoting Dayananda’s scathing dismissal of Müller in the introductory section of her monumental work, Blavatsky signals that The Secret Doctrine is a challenge to the findings of philology.

Theosophy’s ambiguity around caste stands for us as an illustrative example of Blavatsky’s typical dodge-and-weave: frequently, we see her assert a certain claim that then invites some form of criticism from either Orientalists or occultists (e.g., that she does not have the requisite archival expertise, or that there is a regressive tendency in Theosophy’s eastward drift). Often, in defense, Blavatsky will go on to contradict an earlier position in order to evade the accusation. If this is her usual “dodge,” the Blavatsky “weave” refers, punningly, to her simultaneous swerve away from previous statements and her working together of myriad eclectic sources into the fabric of Theosophical theory. In that many-stranded tapestry, one finds anti-colonial reform discourse laced together with colonial scholarship; one finds imaginings of caste and race that claim an almost cosmic logic; and yet, one also finds their categories unraveled, transformed, and knotted anew.

4.1 Arguing in Print

During the summer of 1893 (after Blavatsky’s death), Müller published two articles on Theosophy in The Nineteenth Century.Footnote ¹¹² Within the opening pages of the first piece, the author sets up the esoteric and philological approaches to Indic religions as a contest. Müller begins by mockingly paraphrasing the esotericist claim “that there are native scholars in possession of mysteries of which we poor professors have no conception,” pointing out that these mysteries seem available only to those without knowledge of Sanskrit and Pali: an ignorance that – as he sarcastically notes – “seems to be the first condition for being admitted to the esoteric wisdom of India.”Footnote ¹¹³ One might sense a personal edge to this biting retort, and it is entirely possible that he was smarting over the stinging rebukes that Blavatsky formulated, and relayed from Dayananda Saraswati to “Mr. Moksh Mooller.” As we will see, Müller cites precisely those opening portions of The Secret Doctrine, which also expound the notion of “esoteric Budhism” (with one “d,” as in “Misconceptions”). At any rate, neither of his two critics is spared. Müller writes that when Blavatsky first went to India, “she thought that she had found at last what she wanted in Dayânanda Sarasvati … no doubt a remarkable and powerful mind” – but, as Müller also writes (lest the affirmation of this praise be taken as unequivocal), “it can no longer be doubted that Dayânanda Sarasvati was as deficient in moral straightforwardness” as Blavatsky herself.Footnote ¹¹⁴ As we see in these brief excerpts, therefore, Müller seems to have been as dismissive of Blavatsky and the Swami, if more politely so, as they were of him.

After explicating the ways in which the doctrines and writings of Theosophy are misguided and rife with error, Müller comes to a significant grouse: that Blavatsky’s following “has become so large … that the movement started by her can no longer be ignored.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Müller’s objection to the popularity and influence of Theosophy centers on what he sees as the subsequent spread of misinformation, such as the idea of “esoteric Buddhism.” It is a term that Müller rejects as oxymoronic, given Buddhism’s fundamental commitment to making its precepts and practices freely available, regardless of caste; as he puts it, “if there is any religion entirely free from esoteric doctrines it is Buddhism. There never was any such thing as mystery in Buddhism.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ The article does accept the Theosophical criticism that his own scholarship relies excessively on texts rather than experience or “native” instruction – as Müller acknowledges, he has never actually been to India – but he counters that those with little knowledge of the languages of Indian religious texts are ill equipped to make claims about Vedanta and Buddhism.

Müller’s piece in The Nineteenth Century thus doubles and flips Blavatsky’s own critiques, by framing Orientalism’s disagreement with Theosophy as a contest between linguistic and textual knowledge on the one hand, and unsubstantiated claims to initiation on the other. The article, “Esoteric Buddhism,” offers several instances in which Blavatsky’s writings failed to meet the standards of academic analysis – for example, in her vast and indiscriminate citations in Isis Unveiled, which attest to both “drudgery and misdirected ingenuity”; or in some of the rookie errors of etymology or translation that Müller cites.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Beyond critiquing her writings, he also focuses on Blavatsky as a figurehead, speculating that she seemed to have originally been moved by “some strong craving for a spiritual union with the Divine”Footnote ¹¹⁸ and was similar to “many people in our time” in being “in search of a religion” beyond conventional faith or religious dogma.Footnote ¹¹⁹ We see, here, a tacit acceptance that the spirit of the age included a quest for the truth of religions beyond Christianity – something that Müller himself seems to have identified with, and references graciously as the impetus to Blavatsky’s own choices. However, even while allowing for the sincerity of these impulses, Müller suggests that Blavatsky was ultimately forced to rely on trickery and false miracles in order to draw followers: “Madame Blavatsky might have achieved some success if she had been satisfied to follow in the footsteps of Rider Haggard … but her ambition was to found a religion, not to make money by writing new Arabian Nights.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Once more, Müller’s Arabian Nights analogy stands for the dismissal of a given epistemology as imaginative rubbish. Here, it also equates the work of fiction (à la the imperial potboilers of H. Rider Haggard) with making a quick buck. And yet: What might it mean to take his implication seriously – to place Blavatsky’s work in the imaginative space of fiction, despite her encyclopaedic engagement of philological and occultist sources? As we have already discussed, Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine ultimately block any literal readings by virtue of their methodological excess and arbitrariness. Blavatsky is a writer, after all, who took some of her foundational ideas from The Coming Race, which was also a work of genre fiction, if not quite Haggard’s She or King Solomon’s Mines. To a more forgiving eye, the implications of Müller’s cutting dismissal might include subjecting Blavatsky’s writing to a different, less historicist, and more literary standard of reading.

Certainly, he himself is no sympathetic reader of her work or of her personal values. Müller’s critique of Theosophical ideas is interwoven throughout with references to Blavatsky’s character; he even calls her “a clever, wild, and excitable girl,” who was then misguided into “her later hysterical writings and performances.”Footnote ¹²¹ (In his response, discussed in the next paragraph, A. P. Sinnett remarked with some asperity that “her clever girlhood had ripened till she was close on sixty”).Footnote ¹²² Müller goes so far as to attribute Blavatsky’s criticisms of his work to pique, writing that “at first she treated me like a Mahatma, but when there was no response I became, like all Sanskrit scholars, a very untrustworthy authority.”Footnote ¹²³

Blavatsky, of course, was no longer around to respond to Müller (a thought that perhaps crossed his mind as he wrote his article). Instead, Sinnett put out a rejoinder to Müller in the next issue of The Nineteenth Century, which is clearly informed by Theosophical politics. For instance, he seems thoroughly aggrieved by Müller’s ascription of “esoteric Buddhism” to Blavatsky rather than to himself. (That choice on Müller’s part seems deliberate, considering that Blavatsky mentions Sinnett and his book in the very sections of The Secret Doctrine to which Müller is responding.) Sinnett’s rejoinder also expresses some of the standard Theosophical challenges to Orientalist authority. He points out that Müller’s rejection of “esoteric Buddhism,” as an idea completely absent in Buddhist texts, is itself a redundant argument, since “esoteric” is “equivalent to saying there is a view of this subject which is not found in the books.”Footnote ¹²⁴ In fact, he entirely dismisses the academic preoccupation with citation and evidence: “[W]hether I obtained the teaching on which Esoteric Buddhism rests from a Mahatma on the other side of the Himalayas or evolved them out of my own head need only interest people who begin to be seriously interested in the teaching.”Footnote ¹²⁵ (In response, Müller offers sarcastic incredulity: “It is carrying modesty too far,” etc.)Footnote ¹²⁶

The Nineteenth Century battle between Theosophy and philology is thus at heart an argument about what counts as authoritative evidence and testimony. Theosophy situates even its most emphatic and absolutist assertions of truth in a larger context of the unknown and the unknowable, referring back to the authority of a mysterious adept or a secret text rather than to verifiable evidence. The further truth claims that Theosophical texts import from Orientalist study or race science find themselves relocated within narratives of the supernatural, which reflect back on the fantasies of kinship and shared beliefs contained within the scholarly or “exoteric” cultural and philosophical analyses. Given these rich fictions, we might see Blavatsky as indeed, at one level, belonging to the order of the Arabian Nights – in other words, to the realm of the literary rather than the archival, from within which she is able to insist upon the immutable truth value of her texts and theories. The Theosophical approach to the religions of the East may draw from academic Orientalism, may even engage polemically with it and posit itself as an alternative – but it is never interested in settling into a parallel form of study with the same standards of evaluation, one that could be judged according to the conventions and presumptions of philology. It is precisely because they are not parallel, however, that Theosophy and academic Orientalism intersect in such dense, layered, and plural ways.

4.2 Echoes and Reflections

The tempestuous codependency of these two cultural formations is thus not simply a matter of Blavatsky’s charges, or of Theosophy’s debts to Orientalist scholarship and writing; and nor do Max Müller’s sarcastic refutations tell the full story of his attitude to theosophical matters. In fact, even though he publicly came out against Blavatsky’s conception of esoteric Buddhism, and even as he insisted on the value of verifiable claims, textual expertise, and linguistic training, Müller’s pioneering study of comparative religion and comparative philology was motivated by a deep interest in the overlaps in language and religion among cultures, as well as in mystical experiences and syncretic philosophies. In considering the key assumptions and objectives shared by esotericism and philology, then, it is important to look again at Max Müller’s scholarship, imbued with its own theosophical spirit.

In an 1882 lecture to candidates for the Indian Civil Services, Müller extolled India as the best place to study comparative philology and comparative religion.Footnote ¹²⁷ As he explained, these particular fields of study equipped their practitioners culturally as well as philosophically.

In offering the idea of “s’orienter,” Müller reminded his listeners of many things at once: the idea that comparative study and classification offer coordinates through which the student can “determine his real place in the world”; the fact that India was the original locus of this system of study and classification; the fact that there was a career to be made through this study; the idea of “the East” as a fixed relative point in culture, as in nature, that could help “a man” navigate “his” philosophical and worldly education; the idea that, with the study of such subjects as “the Science of language,” each man in the audience could newly discover an East “true” for him; and the fact that India was home to “our nearest intellectual relatives, the Aryans,” and so on.Footnote ¹²⁹

These disparate appeals together form, as if through pointillism, an image of a field and a profession in the process of definition. Along with comparative philology, Müller was one of the founders of the academic discipline he called “the science of religion.” The relative newness of the comparative disciplines Müller discusses in his talk explains the contrary pulls and tugs of their multiple aims. Just as Theosophy was still defining itself through manifestos and statements like “The Original Programme,” many of Müller’s lectures and essays are still negotiating the principle guidelines of these new social sciences. The miscellaneous writings collected in Chips from a German Workshop attest to the theosophical motivations of comparative disciplines, often arguing for syncretism as their basis rather than scholarly isolationism and specialization: Orientalism is recognizably a version of what we now call the global humanities. Moreover, Müller’s study of comparative religions is transparently motivated by an almost pantheistic desire to locate the perennial, numinous truth shared by all religions. In a lecture on the common source of all religions, for instance, he reflected that “if we will but listen attentively, we can hear in all religions a groaning of the spirit, a struggle to conceive the inconceivable, to utter the unutterable, a longing after the Infinite, a love of God.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Theosophical critiques of Müller’s work appear to recognize this aspect of his work; on the opposite end of the spectrum, certain linguists even dismissed his theories as “occultist.”Footnote ¹³¹ We see, even as he denounces the Theosophical Society or Blavatsky, that Müller thoroughly endorses other forms of mystical or syncretic religious experience. In a series of lectures in 1892, collected under the name “Theosophy Or Psychological Religion,” Müller rejects the sectarian understanding of religion in favor of universal spiritual precepts, and pieces together many principles and approaches shared across religions. He also attempts to reclaim the term made famous (or in his words, “greatly misappropriated”) by Blavatsky and Olcott: “one may call oneself a theosophist, without being suspected of believing in spirit-rappings, table-turnings, or any other occult sciences.”Footnote ¹³²

Even though Müller rejected the approach of the Theosophical Society, and resented Blavatsky’s reach and influence, therefore, he identified himself as a “theosophist.” We see this in his ardent interest in personal, heterodox forms of religious experience, as well as in his own belief in a fraternal and syncretic approach to religion that was not ultimately dissimilar to the Theosophical Society’s creed of “Universal Brotherhood.” In “A Real Mahâtman,” an 1896 essay in The Nineteenth Century on the Hindu mystic Ramakrishna Paramahansa, Müller praises the truth and wisdom of Ramakrishna’s spiritual teachings, the beauty of his “ecstatic utterances,”Footnote ¹³³ and what he sees as “most extraordinary,” the fact that Ramakrishna went beyond Hindu customs and divinities to love and worship Islam and Christianity, thus demonstrating “how it was possible to unify all the religions of the world.”Footnote ¹³⁴ In his excitement over the universality of Ramakrishna’s ideas and spiritual experiences (which he presents as emerging, nonetheless, from the very particular style and sublimity of Vedanta), we see the personal passion and search that impelled Müller into his academic work as one of the founding figures of religious studies in the West. Indeed, Ramakrishna’s most famous student, Swami Vivekananda – who made his own contributions to the spread of Hindu philosophy in the West at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago and thereafter – described Müller as something of a Mahatma himself, or at least a “silverheaded sage, with a face calm and benign, and … every line in that face speaking of a deep-seated mine of spirituality somewhere behind.”Footnote ¹³⁵

Blavatsky may not have lavished such extravagant praise on Müller, but there were resonances. Esotericist and Orientalist rhetoric seem sometimes to share an uncanny resemblance in this period, when each was codifying the principles of a system of religious study and articulating its motivating ambitions. In a journal article from 1888, Blavatsky clarifies the Society’s syncretic attitude toward different religious persuasions quite emphatically: “Theosophy is not a Religion, we say, but RELIGION itself,” a statement of essence in line with the claim to represent the perennial wisdom.Footnote ¹³⁶ More surprisingly, a similar impulse may be detected in the discipline of philology; as Max Müller writes, “In the science of language, languages are not treated as a means; language itself becomes the sole object of scientific inquiry …. We do not want to know languages, we want to know language.”Footnote ¹³⁷ Here are two comparable comparatisms, motivated by a similar desire to fix the idealized concentrate shared by variable particulars.

These grand statements of ambition also explain, indirectly, why Theosophy and philology turned to India as the locus of this essential “religion” or “language.” Max Müller writes that the variety of Indian culture allows it to demonstrate, in essential form, “the history of histories, and yet the mystery of all mysteries … religion.”Footnote ¹³⁸ The characteristic rhythm of this formulation, which emphasizes the singular within the plural or the numinous within the particular (a religion/RELIGION, languages/language, histories/history, mysteries/mystery), casts India as the repository of original essences, not only home to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism but also, ultimately, the very ground of the disciplines of philology and comparative religion.Footnote ¹³⁹ Elsewhere in the talk, Müller returns to the original family of the Aryan hypothesis and the “feeling of closest fraternity which … changed millions of so-called barbarians into our own kith and kin.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Even for the Oxford Orientalist who never set foot on Indian soil, the study of languages and religions is a deeply personal, even familial, exploration, one that crosses past the boundaries of given identity and becomes a means through which to dislodge the assumed categories of the civilized and the barbarian, the self and the other. The Theosophists’ interest in the “ancient wisdom” only literalizes these philological truisms, through an alternative history that locates the origin and essence of the Aryans’ religion, language, and race in India.

To think of such similarities is not to minimize the significant differences between the content of Max Müller’s philology and H. P. Blavatsky’s Theosophy: Müller sees the Aryans as originating somewhere in Central Asia, for instance, as opposed to the Theosophists’ Aryavarta; as the dispute in The Nineteenth Century demonstrated, moreover, Theosophy and philology differed significantly in their readings of various religions, such as the concept of “esoteric Buddhism” that occasioned such a sharp spat in the journal – the fulcrum of which lies in the fact that Buddhism was an anti-caste movement. These specific disagreements stem, as we have seen, from the basic divergence over what might count as authoritative evidence. In his final 1893 rebuttal to Sinnett in The Nineteenth Century, Müller objects: “He says that I have no right to speak with authority. I have never claimed to speak with authority …. I simply speak with facts and arguments.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ In reality, both Theosophists and philologists claimed that fact was on their side. Theosophy simply qualified this claim to specify esoteric fact, that which took cognizance of truths and realities beyond the known archives, beyond even the realms of the sensible and the visible.

4.3 Theosophical Parables

One compelling test of the interpenetration of these two forms of Orientalism – Theosophy and philology, or the esoteric and the academic – is sadly subjective and unprovable: frequently, sentences from Müller sound as though they may be from texts by Blavatsky, and often, phrases or passages from Blavatsky seem distinctly indebted to Müller. Given these uncanny echoes, however, or even the more general shared framework of comparatism, the most fundamental difference between the texts of Theosophy and of academic Orientalism may ultimately be a matter of style and mode. Despite the ardor and lyricism of Müller’s writing at certain moments, or his utopian perception of mutual understanding and cross-pollination among religions, it is possible for the most part to classify him as an academic researcher, analyst, and writer. Despite the absence of such rhapsodic flights, and a determined effort to assert facticity, Blavatsky conversely would appear to a non-Theosophical reader as either an imaginative writer of speculative fiction, or (to a commentator like Müller) a charlatan. The paratextual trappings she borrows from academic method are treated with such scant respect that they begin to seem ornamental, more like motifs within an elaborate fiction than scholarly conventions.

Within Theosophical texts, then, the indisciplines of esotericism remake the disciplines of Orientalism. The patchwork plenitude of Blavatsky’s writing juxtaposes her sources in different patterns, alternating in harmonious overlap or discordant clash with one another.Footnote ¹⁴² A typical deployment of philological sources might look like this: Blavatsky quotes an Orientalist scholar to back a generalization about, say, the mysterious metaphysical essence of esoteric Buddhism; the next paragraph points out, however, that the scholar’s conclusions about Buddhism are irrevocably false, since the real explanation of its metaphysics is known only to a few adepts, who have access to esoteric texts that have never been available to Western scholarship; while revealing this esoteric meaning, though, Blavatsky might well return to the philological literature to bolster some specific aspect of the explanation. She occasionally even registers outrage on behalf of the very scholars who she herself attacks at some other point in the text.Footnote ¹⁴³ Nor does the writing represent its contending impulses as the considered exercise of choice: They are usually expressed through an unrelentingly polemical tone that voices either total approbation or total denunciation. A similar contrariness marks Blavatsky’s use of other sources, too, such as the spiritualist press that she alternately defends for seeking an alternative to secular materialism, and excoriates for being ignorant of the “actual” workings of the afterlife as explained in the esoteric texts of the Egyptians, Buddhists, and Hindus.

Blavatsky’s writings are enlivened by the friction of different forms of authority rubbing up against one another: the textual authority of the scholar or scientist quoted to bolster the legitimacy of Blavatsky’s argument, the authority of an occult Master with access to the real meaning of a scriptural extract or religious precept, the authority of actual practitioners of the exoteric faith under discussion, the authority of the mysterious texts that Blavatsky has been fortunate enough to encounter; and so on. Such appeals to authority insist upon a knowledge that is available only to the elect, continuously reasserting its esotericism. At the same time, they combine to back up the argumentative, grandiloquent, boasting voice of the narrator herself, whether in her persona as the compiler of textual wisdom, both scholarly and esoteric, or as the initiate whose testimony is evidence enough for the authoritative narrative assertions. As such, her works model the magpie syncretism that would go on to become a feature of New Age religions in the twentieth century. In many ways, they also anticipate more recent examples of fringe discourse, with their cherry-picked evidence and authoritative testimony, as well as the outright fabrication of texts and sources. But rather than simply rejecting the entirety of Theosophy on account of such concoctions, elisions, and misrepresentations, a more productive approach might be to take cognizance of the ways in which her writing clearly presses the reader in the direction of the unknown, the playful, and the imaginative.

Indeed, the generalized claim to esotericism in Blavatsky’s works is always sliding into something more subjective, along with the presence of the unknown; frequently, the question of authority is literally located within the question of authorship. The Secret Doctrine is a pseudotranslation that claims to be glossing an arcane text in the mysterious, occultist script of Senzar; as for Isis Unveiled, Theosophists claim that its many quotations were jotted down “astrally,” as Blavatsky conjured up virtual scans of the source texts before her mind’s eye, and transcribed the relevant sections.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ This performative, almost deliberately farcical, figuration of the processes of initiation that culminate in Blavatsky’s authorship does suggest that Theosophy’s most far-fetched moments teeter on the edge of knowing satire. The text’s polyphonous assertions of mastery, along with its formal idiosyncrasies and gestures toward all that is as yet unknown, produce a creative discord that unsettles any singular claim to facticity or authority. The effects of this discord do not limit themselves to the narrative voice, but extend to the other sources and authorities named within the text. The exhaustive naming of narrative interlocutors reinforces the sense that Theosophy’s encyclopedic vision has compiled its own origins and influences along with those of the entire universe.

Theosophy’s stories about its texts – their origins, authorship, and transmission – in fact become figures for the unknowable assumptions and axioms on which all classificatory systems must rest. The Secret Doctrine, for instance, refers back to two textual origins: one in the Senzar poem, The Stanzas of Dzyan, and the other in a collection of letters from Blavatsky’s Masters or Mahatmas to (mainly) Sinnett, in which the Masters M. and K. H. explain Theosophy’s evolutionary cosmology.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The first few lines of the “Proem” that opens The Secret Doctrine describe the manuscript of The Stanzas of Dzyan in vivid detail.

These direct statements of symbolic meaning are untroubled by further clauses tracing their derivation. Instead, the testimony of the initiate is evidence enough, however stative and opaque (“the student knows to represent”) it might seem. The opening paragraph’s most telling phrase might be “specific unknown process,” which could more generally summarize Theosophy’s depiction of the esoteric pasts of categories, cosmologies, and theories. Described in the perpetual present tense of a vision, The Stanzas of Dzyan comes across as a generic conceit (the theoretical category of “Archaic Manuscript”) rather than a particular physical manuscript. The “specific unknown” location and history of the text is diametrically opposed to academic convention: one thinks of Müller’s incredulity that Sinnett could offhandedly equate an “esoteric Buddhism” emerging from his head with one originating in the texts of trans-Himalayan Masters. This generic conceit of The Secret Doctrine as a quasi-Tibetan, quasi-Hindu epic manuscript, written in an esoteric script and preserved secretly by the Masters in their trans-Himalayan hideaway, clearly attempts to grant Blavatsky’s theories a cosmic sanction. And yet, the “specific unknown process” through which the text came into being, or through which it was conjured before the writer’s eye, presents the whole business of origins as mythological, a fantastical tale as in the Arabian Nights, or a work of speculative fiction like The Coming Race.

If we are to take that thought seriously, we must include the work’s frame narrative. The Mahatma letters, which were said to be the source of The Secret Doctrine’s cosmologies, were said to have reached Sinnett through “precipitation.” For most non-Theosophist scholars, the assumption would be that Blavatsky wrote the letters herself, while claiming they came from her Masters. In 1885, representatives from the Society for Psychical Research concluded that Blavatsky was the author, shortly after the “Coulomb affair,” in which a disgruntled Theosophical associate revealed that Blavatsky’s chambers in Adyar featured concealed doors, allowing for sleights of hand (such as miraculously materializing letters penned by occult Masters in Tibet).Footnote ¹⁴⁷ These letters can be riveting, not because of the discursive elaborations on various Manvantaras and root races so much as the touch of epistolary fiction included their gossip, anecdotes, and quarrels. For anybody assuming Blavatsky to be their primary author, the letters are self-deprecating and funny: throughout, the shorthand for “Madame Blavatsky” is “Mad. B.,” and there are many excessive gestures of exasperation at Mad. B.’s womanly irrationality, willfulness, and immoderate enthusiasms. The humor occasionally extends to the process of “facsimile precipitation” itself, playing with epistolary conventions as if to highlight the bizarre notion of an astral correspondence: “I have your letter of November 19th, abstracted by our special osmosis from the envelope at Meerut.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ There are even instances when the letters quite openly mock the conceit of mail-by-precipitation: one note, for instance, offers a postal address only to add “unless, indeed, you really would prefer corresponding through – pillows.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The punctuation wears its comic timing with pride.

Given these elaborate figurations of authorship and transmission, Blavatsky’s arguments about Orientalism and race (and the occulted presence of caste) invite a parabolic reading. If we are to try out the notion of Blavatsky as a writer whose works skate off the authorities and texts she cites into the realm of the imaginative and the literary, might one not read Isis Unveiled as an allegory of philology’s search for its own “Oriental Kabala,” the originary protolanguage and protoreligion of the Indo-Europeans? The most noteworthy stylistic innovation wrought through the text is the thickly significant, almost talismanic use of proper nouns that are said to name racial identity: The significance of the noun lies not in its content but in the unknowable histories to which it alludes, or the kinds of mysterious processes through which “Akkadian” proves to mean the same thing as “Brahman.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Esoteric history, through the proliferating genealogies that are revealed only to adepts, offers an accounting of the ways in which racial distinctions are not what they seem, and the history of cultural transmission is not what it seems. In Blavatsky’s elastic usage, both “esoteric” and “Oriental” become designations for the same thing: the occulted philosophical stock that both runs counter to the established Judeo-Christian traditions, and, at the same time, turns out to be the true root of those traditions. In that sense, “Oriental” is not simply equated with “Indian” or “Chaldean” or “Egyptian” at various points; it can in fact mean a form of “universal” that is anterior to – and within – everything. After describing the paucity of true knowledge about the Jewish and Christian Kabala, Blavatsky writes about the even greater mystery of the Oriental Kabala.

Here, if “Oriental” means anything, it means the same thing as “esoteric”: the name makes reference to a geographic location (the mysterious place where adepts have maintained the oldest of all Kabalas), and yet, that geographical location turns out to be “found everywhere.” What we notice alongside these imaginative homologies is the evocation of atmosphere and sensation: The adepts become like members of a secretive fraternity of superheroes, narrative nodes that hold together diverse histories and an infinitely expansive, changeful geography.