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20 - The Modernist Afterlives of Theosophy
- Edited by Suzanne Hobson, Queen Mary University of London, Andrew Radford, University of Glasgow
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- Book:
- The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 20 October 2023
- Print publication:
- 31 January 2023, pp 329-342
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Summary
IN HIS ADDRESS at the cremation of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in 1891, a young Englishman called G. R. S. Mead, who, two years earlier, had been appointed General Secretary of the European Section of the Theosophical Society, professed that
Theosophy is not dead because to-day we stand by H.P.B.’s dead body. It lives and must live, because Truth can never die; but on us, the upholders of this Truth, must ever rest the heaviest of all responsibilities, the effort so to shape our own characters and lives that the truth may be thereby commended to others.
Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, founded in New York City in 1875, had offered a radically new structure of spiritual belief fixed initially in spiritualism and, slightly later, in a syncretic approach to Buddhism and Hinduism which sought to create an ecumenical fraternity in which, as the Society’s motto states, ‘There is no religion higher than the truth’. Blavatsky wasn’t striving to create a new religion, but a combinatory system of spiritual belief and a universalising cultural vision that brought together diffuse spiritual traditions. The decisive influences of the Theosophical Society on late Victorian culture, on the history of Indian Home Rule, and on the emergence of the spiritual New Age of the second half of the twentieth century have been well documented. Mahatma Gandhi had an early meaningful interest in theosophy, modern artists Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian were deeply influenced by the precepts of the Society, and the notable work of Italian psychoanalyst Roberto Assagioli was unquestionably shaped by his theosophical interests. What has been less thoroughly examined are the Theosophical Society’s cadet lines, those early twentieth-century offshoots which, following Mead’s directive to ‘shape our own characters and lives that the truth may be thereby commended to others’, restyled the substance and form of Blavatsky’s teachings in the light of the profound social and aesthetic transformations of the modernist era.
Fractured into a wide collection of outgrowths and offshoots during the decades following Blavatsky’s death, the Theosophical Society gave birth to a range of prominent twentieth-century spiritual teachers including Alice Bailey, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Catherine Tingley, G. R. S. Mead and Rudolf Steiner.
Chapter 22 - Decadence in the Time of AIDS
- Edited by Alex Murray, Queen's University Belfast
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- Book:
- Decadence
- Published online:
- 24 September 2020
- Print publication:
- 15 October 2020, pp 394-407
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Summary
The 1980s and 1990s saw a dramatic increase in popular and critical attention to Decadence, largely due to the growing awareness that the trials of Oscar Wilde had been an important milestone in the development of queer identity. Wilde was prosecuted for a lifestyle more than anything else, and the 1890s development of a set of queer cultural tropes and social practices began the process of publicly articulating non-normative sexual identity. This chapter charts the interest in Decadence and aestheticism in this period, paying particular attention to how the lives of Wilde and his circle spoke to the context of the time, particularly the HIV/AIDS crisis. This chapter looks at the role Decadent writing played in the literature of the period, studying in particular Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), David Hare’s play The Judas Kiss (1998), and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library (1988) and The Line of Beauty (2004). The recovery of Decadence at the fin de siècle of the twentieth century seemed to signal that the modernity of the twenty-first century could locate its origins in the radical attitudes and practices of the Decadent 1880s and 1890s.