C. C. Martindale sj, 1996 note: this article predates the release of the february 2003 vatican document on the new age by seven years- michael

, Freethought Publishing Company, pp. 169, 1885, carry her story no further than 1879, the year of the Knowlton pamphlet prosecution.

7. But when her mother lay dying, she refused to receive Communion, however necessary to salvation, unless Annie took it with her. "I would sooner be lost with darling Annie than saved without her." Her daughter explained the case fully to Dean Stanley, who made no difficulty about administering Communion to mother and daughter alike (pp. 122-125).
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PART II

Name and history

The name "Theosophy" has had a long history. Ammonius Sakkas (d. about 245), father of Neo-Platonism, claimed to have invented it; and since his time it has often been used to describe the method of reaching a direct intuition of God, and of all things only "in" Him, and a way of achieving a mysterious self-identification with the Self of God. Those who possessed this ideal and this method considered themselves men of "divine wisdom," superior to all others.

The notion was flattering and captivated men of high character, but also, of inferior calibre. The former displayed an activity which may be called, roughly, "mystical"; the latter, one that can be no less roughly called "magical." Mysticism is the effort to reach the direct vision of God by spiritual means: magic, in this sense, the effort to do so by relatively mechanical means.

The Catholic Church has always preached the Beatific Vision, which transcends even the most sublime intellectual conceptions of God and all imagination, as the destiny of all those who leave this life "in grace," grace being mediated through Christ only, incorporating us with Him, causing the Holy Spirit to indwell us in a particular way, and making us true adopted sons of God.

The most startling manifestations of sanctity are but manifestations of an interior fact, i.e., an exceptionally close supernatural union between a soul and God; and theosophists are quite right in subordinating the special phenomena that they claim to experience, to the substance of their doctrine, even though it has been, historically, the exhibition of such phenomena which gave modern Theosophy its vogue.

Christian mysticism passed from St. Paul and St. John through writers like the pseudo-Dionysius to St. Augustine, the

Victorines, German mystics like St. Gertrude, St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure, SS. Catherine of Siena and of Genoa, the Spanish school like SS. Teresa and John of the Cross down to modern times, and Catholic writers on mysticism are perhaps more numerous than they ever were.

There have been "second class" Catholic writers, like Maria d'Agreda; but it is noticeable that Theosophists have preferred "mystics" who diverge more or less from Catholic orthodoxy, like Tauler and Eckhart, "illuminist" authors, J. Bohme, and even Swedenborg. Indeed, they display very great interest (and rightly; the subject in itself is interesting, even though concerned with a perversion of the human spirit) in "magical" writers such as the degenerate Gnostics, inferior Neo-Platonists, the Kabbalists, and men like Cornelius Agrippa, "Paracelsus," or Pico della Mirandola.

The occultist passion of the Templars and the Masons proceeds to the Rosicrucians of the nineteenth century revival, through men like Saint Martin "Eliphaz Levi" (the ex-abbe Constant), "Papus" (Dr. Encausse), till it reaches those moderns who prefer even the unwholesome and fantastic to the normal.

But Theosophy has its history "backwards," too. Through the Gnostics, the Graeco-Judaic philosophies of Philo and Alexandria, obscure parts of Plato's work (and the Pythagoreans, or Orphics) it reaches back towards India and Persia, and ends by claiming affinity with, if not the fatherhood of, some schools of Buddhism, and in fine Brahmanism.

I fear we have to insist that the modern literature of Theosophy, so far as it concerns itself with history, is of no value at all, unless of course you admit a priori that clairvoyance provides the authors with knowledge accessible to no one else. In particular, Theosophic books dealing with oriental religions are misleading. I recommend as an antidote two works of M. R. Guenon (Payot; Paris): Thosophisme: Histoire d'une Pseudo-Religion and his Introduction Generale a l'Etude des Doctrines Hindoues. I do so the more readily as these works were not by a Catholic; indeed, the author displays a veneration for oriental modes of thought, and a contempt for ours, which outpasses the due measure.

At least he shows very clearly how shoddy is the material turned out by Theosophists on their own subject; and, while the distinguished Italian scholar, P. Oltramare, could call his studies of ancient Indian thought "L'histoire des idees

theosophiques dans l'Inde: I, La theosophie brahmanique" (Paris), he has to apologise for the distrust his title must excite nowadays, when the name Theosophy "is affixed to the strangest wares: an amalgam of mysticism, charlatanism and thaumaturgic pretensions which have been combined, in the most unlikely fashion, with an almost childish anxiety to apply the method and terminology of science to transcendent matters. India itself could not but be besmirched by the ridicule and disfavour so justly incurred by the curious doctrines of Mme. Blavatsky and Mrs. Besant" (pp. ii., iii.).

M. Paul Carty competently contrasts M. Oltramare's work with Mrs. Besant's quite unscientific study of Indian religions (Four Great Religions and The Religious Problem of India). It is a pity, too, that English-speaking Theosophists should have learnt what they know of the Hermetic literature not least through the work of Mr. G. Mead, whose books have no scientific value.

Theosophy, then, makes its peculiar boast out of its organic connection with a world-stream of human-divine effort witnessed to by a continuous history. Theosophy is a "divine science," complete and eternal, known in its entirety to but a few, and communicated by them so far as possible to those capable of receiving it, under various symbols suited to the assimilative capacity of each, or of successive generations. It is then the source of all religions, all philosophies, all science, but it is no one of them.

"Theosophy is not a religion. But something of Theosophy can be found under all religious symbols, in all religious dogmas, for the good reason that it is the RELIGION-SCIENCE whence have issued all religions and all sciences." (A. Arnould: Les Croyances fondamentales du Bouddhisme, Paris, 1895, p. 5).

To the question "Is Theosophy a religion?" "It is not," answers H. P. B. (cf. Key, p. 1). "It is Divine Knowledge or Science." Similarly, "it is the doctrinal exposition of the Truths demonstrated by OCCULT SCIENCE" (A. A., p. 6).

"In the sense given to it by those who first used it," writes Col. Olcott, [1] "the word means divine wisdom, or the knowledge of divine things. The lexicographers handicap the idea with the suggestion that it meant the knowledge of God, the deity before their minds being a personal one; but such was not the intention of the first Theosophists.

"Essentially a Theosophical Society is one which favours man's original acquisition of knowledge about the hidden things of the universe, by the education and perfecting of his own latent powers. Theosophy differs as widely from philosophy as it does from theology (italics ours). It has been truly said that, in investigating the divine nature and attributes, philosophy proceeds entirely by the dialectic method, employing as the basis of its investigation the ideas derived from natural reason; theology still employing the same method, superadds to the principles of natural reason those derived from authority and revelation. Theosophy, on the contrary, professes to exclude all dialectical process and to derive its whole knowledge of God from direct intuition and contemplation."

This has been quoted to emphasise the fact that Theosophy bases its statements either upon the ipse dixit of some Mahatma, or on a special psychic process unknown to the ordinary man. This must always be recalled when it declares it advances nothing that has not been proved up to the hilt.

The Mahatmas

Arnould writes of these Guardians of the Immemorial Doctrine that "their number is great," that they are "Beings more completely developed than antecedent or existing humanity. These more advanced Beings have traversed the entire human course, and help their less advanced brethren. All humanity shall one day reach this degree of development, like that which Westerns assign to their anthropomorphic God," and then it will be their turn to help others (pp. 15, 16).

For while "a few isolated individuals, borne on by a peculiar enthusiasm, a spiritual moral, and physical hygiene and persevering toil," achieve the goal before their brothers (p. 46), and alone have evolved that sixth principle, or Buddhi, which is as superior to the intellect as the human soul is to the animal (p. 66) yet they can and do put off their entry into Nirvana for the sake of teaching fragments of their lore to men, and may then be called Buddhas of Compassion (p. 49). H. P. B. rationalizes [2] these Mahatmas (=Great Spirits) not a little: though they guide and protect, yet they do not inspire the T. S. or the writings of its leaders (p. 299). So, too, Mrs. Besant says they work for humanity, use the T.S. as an instrument, bless it, and help it at a crisis.[3] Miss Lillian Edger, in a very convenient little book called Elements of Theosophy,[4] says of them that they can "function at will on any one of the three planes on which our evolution is proceeding." They work "unseen, unthanked, even as God Himself works in every form" (p. 121).

From them come the inspirations of art, the intuitions of genius, and the promptings of heroism. From them come physical discoveries and spiritual movements. They appear, it may be, as men, and are misunderstood and persecuted. They may be called Initiates, Adepts, Magi, Hierophants, Mahatmas, Elder Brothers, Great Souls, or Masters. We are told to number among them Pythagoras, Orpheus, Moses, Christ, St. Paul, St. John, Clement and Origen, Krishna and Buddha, high-priests of various cults (including that of the Temple at Jerusalem), Alexander the Great, and many others. [5]

The evidence for their existence may indeed be its "metaphysical necessity."[6] It is postulated by the Law of Cyclic Evolution. The divine germ in man comes from and returns to God, through an uninterrupted series of more or less divine Beings. There cannot, therefore, but be Mahatmas. However, H. P. B., H. S. O., A. B., and even humbler disciples, have been in epistolary communication with these Masters, and A. B., in H. P. B. and the Masters, collects a considerable amount of what she considers adequate evidence of their consorting with mankind. [7]

The Lamas of Tibet (where they are usually domiciled) are said, however, to have denied their existence, while Mr. Hodgson, in the service of the Society for Psychical Research, together with most independent students, will not admit it either.[8] To those who do not grant its a priori necessity, the evidence of the few "eyewitnesses" seems, he argues, valueless; and so is the correspondence by which they, mistakenly enough, reveal their "miserable poor style" and ideas which are "absolute rubbish."[9]

Mme. Blavatsky, however, despises the attacks of the S.PR., which she calls "a flock of stupid old British, wethers, who had been led to butt at them by an over-frolicsome lambkin from Australia" (p. 297).

If she is asked why the Masters do not appear to disprove the charges which are made against them, she asserts that they sometimes do, but that they usually despise to (Key, p. 295). She reiterates the argument that if they do not exist, then she herself has invented the entire contents of their philosophy and all the practical knowledge ascribed to them, so that since she exists, it doesn't really matter whether they do or don't (ibid., p. 298); that to attempt to prove they do not exist is to wish to prove a negative and, finally, that she wishes to goodness modern Theosophists had never mentioned Masters, Adepts, or Occult Knowledge (ibid., pp. 300, 302).

The Church has a doctrine of Tradition, of Sainthood, and of the Beatific Vision and the "spiritual body" to which the saved are destined. But the Tradition is not secret: nor is it doled forth by privileged individuals. Nor can Sainthood be produced by human effort only still less by any "cyclic law."

Nor are Christian beliefs held "blindly," as Theosophists often say (e.g., Key: pp. 87, 218, etc.). Those of the Theosophist, however, are. For they rest on evidence provided clairvoyantly or clairaudiently or in some other extra-scientific way, or transmitted by "Masters." But there is admittedly no "proof" of the validity of the former, or of the existence of the latter.

Therefore the whole affair becomes subjective, and quite unlike Christian "evidence."
God

Mme. Blavatsky's Key is in the shape of a catechism; for the sake of brevity we shall condense slightly its questions and answers without affecting, we trust, their bearing.

"Do you believe in God-the God of the Christians, the Biblical God?"

"In such a God we do not believe. We reject the notion of a personal, or an extra-cosmic and anthropomorphic God. The God of theology is a bundle of contradictions. We will have nothing to do with him."

"Then you are Atheists?" "Not that we know of. We believe in a Divine Universal Principle, the root of ALL, from which all proceeds, and within which all shall be absorbed at the end of the great cycle of Being. Our DEITY is everywhere, in, over, and around every invisible atom and divisible molecule; for IT is the mysterious power of evolution and involution, the omni-present, omnipotent, and even omniscient creative potentiality. IT does not (think); because it is Absolute Thought itself. Nor does it exist, as it is Be-ness, not a Being. Our Deity is the eternal, incessantly evolving, not creating builder of the universe; that universe itself unfolding out of its own essence. It is a sphere without circumference-ITSELF" (Key, pp. 61-66).

The confusions here are manifold. Man has an "analogical" knowledge of God: that is, he knows Him in a human way, not false, but essentially inadequate. He does not know Him as God knows Himself, immediately and comprehensively: if he did, he would be God. Hence man's very idea of God as "Being" is derived and inadequate, but not false. Moreover, God is eternal-this does not mean "very old," but existing wholly simultaneously: and He is omnipresent, which does not mean extended throughout the universe, but wholly present in every part of it. Nor does the "personality" of God mean that He exists as we do, with our "personal" limitations; but that whatever perfection there is in "personality" is also, essentially and as in its source and infinitely, in Him.

H. P. B. is right in claiming for God that He is infinite and unqualified: wrong, when she suggests that (i) we cannot know anything about Him by our reason; and (ii) that He is the universe or evolves into it. The "negative way" of speaking of God-denying to Him anything that we humanwise know-is not adequate though legitimate. It means that we deny any of the human limitations of our experience as true about God; but affirm all their substantial content as infinitely true of Him.

The Christian God is therefore thinkable in a way imperfect, yet true so far as it goes: the Theosophic God is not thinkable at all. Yet the Theosophist keeps on thinking about God. He calls it the causeless cause, the rootless root, the One, etc. To be consistent He should say (and sometimes does) that we are equally right in calling Him non-root, non-cause non-principle, etc. He had better define God as O=X, and let the matter drop.

The universe

Theosophy inclines to "idealistic Pantheism"; the Universe emanates from God, as ray from sun, or is immanent in Him, as drop in ocean, or is Himself, as my dream is I. There is no "creation," but the "'periodical and consecutive appearances of the universe from the subjective on to the objective plane of being.' This is the 'Cycle of Life,' the 'Days and Nights of Brahma,' or the time of Manvantara and that of Pralaya (dissolution). (This process is) Eternal reality casting a periodical reflection of itself on the infinite spatial depths. This reflection 'is a temporary illusion, and, as flitting personalities, so are we' (Key, pp. 83-85). 'In Eternity,' M. Arnould reminds us (p. 12), 'there is but a single moment, ALWAYS.

"'If, for a single moment, there had been nothing, then there would always have been Nothing. Before creation, as after, is

Eternity! Where seize, where place, the moment of Creation? It exists not! It cannot exist!

"'The periods (of activity and rest) can be compared to the double rhythmic beating of the heart. There is a great rhythmic throbbing in the Infinite, in the UNIQUE ALL, which causes transitory forms to emanate, where through the UNIQUE SPIRIT circulates and develops and reabsorbs them.'

"Theosophists can never free themselves from this welter of metaphor: and even Mrs. Besant says: 'God is all, and all is God'" (Theosophy: Religious Systems of the World, p. 642, 1903, etc.).

H. P. B. rejects Pantheism, at least in so far as its "real and primitive meaning has been distorted by blind prejudice and a one-sidedness of view. If you accept the Christian etymology of this compound word, and form it of pan, "all," and theos, "God," and then imagine and teach that this means that every stone and every tree in Nature is a God or the ONE God, then, of course, you will be right, and make of Pantheists fetish-worshippers" (Key, p. 63). But one must etymologize the word, she goes on, "esoterically." The Christian etymology is as correct, as H. P. B.'s conception of their theology is absurd.

The Indian terms quoted above are not only used by Theosophists as symbols, but are explained in materialistic detail. A Manvantara comprises 360,000,000 years, [10] and, together with a Pralaya, composes the 100 billion (and more) years of a world period, or Kalpah. During a Pralaya (putting the thing in its Indian form) only Brahma (neuter) exists-Sat, the Unknowable and Absolute.

A new Manvantara dawns: Brahma (masc.) awakes. At once He sees, "Nothing exists." Forthwith we have the opposition of Being and Not Being, the Duality, sat-avidya. The vision of the "being" that once was recurs to Him-Brahma's own revelation, Mahat, the third "logos." The Trinity, Sat, Satavidya, Mahat, is complete.

The out-and in-breathings of Brahma then make and reabsorb the Universe.

Mrs. Besant (Introd., p. 21) develops this doctrine of the Emanating All by means of a quite unhistorical adaptation of the

Greek term Logos, enabling her to assure the Bishop of London that after all Theosophists believe in the Trinity. Underlying this is a (i) fatalist and (ii) meaningless conception of the Infinite "evolving," that is, in any case, changing, which it cannot do; and either improving itself by becoming more than it was, or degrading itself by getting mixed up with matter and having to disentangle itself once more. The Christian doctrine of creation is only inadequately thinkable: the Theosophist one of a fluctuation, a throb, in the Godhead, is positively unthinkable.

Theosophy's structure

Theosophic teaching presents the world as existing in seven planes, not superimposed, but interpenetrating, for each consists of a grosser or purer manifestation of reality so that the slightly less gross has plenty of room to exist and vibrate between the atoms of the grosser. Each plane therefore has its special dimension, time, consciousness and inhabitants.

It seems idle to offer details of the history of this our evolving world. Briefly, it rises in a septuple spiral, mankind passing through seven cycles corresponding to the planets. Mr. Sinnett, Growth of the Soul, 1896, p. 265, says that seven root-race periods make up one world period; seven world-periods (following each other on as many planets in succession), one round; seven rounds, one manvantara; seven manvantaras, one scheme of evolution; seven schemes of evolution (more or less contemporaneous in their activity), the solar system.

He proceeds to relate just how far each planet has got in its evolutionary process-Mars is behind us; many of us lived there; did we but visit it, "as some of our more advanced companions can and do," we should find traces of our passage. Venus is far ahead of us: in fact, "the guardians of our infant humanity" descended thence, stimulated our faculties, and caused us to stand rather further on in our process than we have the strict right to do.

To these Elder Brothers he devotes an entire chapter. Earth-men are at their fourth stage, our third having been lived in the lost continent of Lemuria, where consciousness dawned and man split into the two sexes. Mr. Scott Elliott, in The Lost Lemuria (with two maps) established H. P. B.'s revelations about Lemuria by geology and so forth, and describes also the fourth race that lived in Atlantis (The Story of Atlantis; 4 maps).

Its catastrophes occurred respectively 800,000, 200,000, and 80,000 years ago. But, like H. P. B., he relies for his information upon clairvoyance, scoffing somewhat less than she does at the "abysmal ignorance" of palaeontologists who deny such things, and indeed the whole school of Western Science formed in the school of "Mill, Darwin, Tyndall, Hegel, and Burnouf." The fifth or Aryan race is rushing down to absolute evil: Europe is in a religious, philosophic and philanthropic cul de sac: it is in America that the sixth root-race of our cycle shall be prepared, due some 700 years hence.

Mr. Leadbeater indeed knows its very diet, consisting largely of a sort of blancmange variously flavoured and tinted, and partaken of in tea-gardens: no chairs; but marbled hollows in the ground: the plates too are marble and the whole is flooded after each repast. (Man, p. 427; 1913). No one will want us to offer more of this sort of detail.
Man

Meanwhile Man, the Microcosm, is himself septuple, four parts composing the physical, three the spiritual, man. The following is

H. P. B.'s chart (Key, p. 92):

(a) Rupa, or Sthula Sha ira = Physical Body

(b) Prana = Life, or Vital Principle

(c) Linga Sharira = Astral body

(d) Kama rupa = Seat of animal desires and passions

(e) Manas-a dual principle in its functions = Mind, intelligence, the higher human mind, whose light or radiation links the Monad, for the lifetime, to the mortal man

(f) Buddhi = The Spiritual Soul

(g) Atma = Spirit

The first four "principles" compose a man's personality, the last three his Individuality. The Atma, H. P. B. says, is "one with the Absolute"; Sinnett, that it is matter like the rest, only very subtle. Arnould (who describes all this, pp. 63-67) prudently exclaims, "Quant au septieme principe, Atma, n'en parlons pas."

At death, the first four principles, or rather "states of consciousness," evanesce: the one real man, immortal in essence, if not in form, Manas, embodied consciousness (Key, p. 100), "God fallen into matter" (A. B., Introd., p. 27), alone will subsist. Human evolution is the effort of this god to reascend to its proper plane, taking as much of its purified personality with it as it can. But it cannot do this in one lifetime only; reincarnations are therefore necessary, a discarnate existence averaging 1,500 years occurring between each, in the Devachanic or "heaven" plane.

Of this and of the Astral plane, Mr. Leadbeater can give many details based on clairvoyance and the teaching of the Masters.

Each is divided into seven sections. In the Astral plane, its scenery, inhabitants and phenomena, the soul is in a sort of Hades or Purgatory: crass sensualists live as in a black viscous "fluid" at the bottom: on the second highest is the selfish religionist enjoying harp and crown; on the highest, the selfish intellectualist.

This astral condition is largely responsible for fairies, angels, ghosts, etc.; apparitions are often the astral corpse shelled off by the purified spirit; they try to maintain a fictitious life by obsessing living persons, or haunting public-houses or butchers' shops. Mr. Leadbeater's account of the Devachanic Plane (1902) is fuller; to its planes he assigns inhabitants according to what he considers their degree of unselfish but anthropomorphic religion or respectability: on the lowest you may find a "small grocer"; on the sixth, Vishnu and Siva worshippers "wrapped up in a cocoon of their own thoughts", the Irish peasant and the Madonna; the Spanish ecstatic and her Christ. On the fourth are unselfish pursuers of spiritual or artistic knowledge, like Mozart or Bach; but Mohammedanism or Christianity seldom get their devotees so far as this, save for a few Gnostics or Sufis.

Devachan is a result, not a reward: it is still illusory; you get there the best version of the best you had absorbed before death. It lasts as long as one's garnered spiritual forces need in order to energise and express themselves. There is then for the Theosophist no permanent heaven nor hell: nothing finite can remain "stationary." We do not remember our previous incarnations, for the Ego is furnished in each with a new body, brain, and memory-a clean shirt on which it were idle to look for bloodspots though the murderer may wear it.

And the "astral eidolons" of man's lower quaternity await a "second death"; meanwhile, they are but phantoms without divine or thinking elements left in them; it is these that can be magnetised towards a medium, take form within his aura (outside which they dissolve like jellyfish outside water) and live through his brain.

Now reincarnation is not in itself unthinkable: whether it takes place can be decided only by a due authority. Vague elusive

impressions that "I have been here before," "I inexplicably dislike so and so," have no probative value of any sort: unmerited inequalities of birth," or physique, etc., do not need reincarnation to explain them, and men are judged according to their lives in their circumstances, and not in the air, merely according to an abstract morality: finally, if the break in my consciousness between two incarnations is complete, I am morally and practically a new person; continuity between my selves is merely mechanical; it would be immoral to punish my new self for sins committed by the old one.