The
Vril Myth Revealed
By N. Goodrick-Clarke
Given
its key characteristics in the idea of correspondences between the
macrocosm and the microcosm, a living nature, intermediaries and the
transmutation of the soul, esotericism is necessarily directed towards
the relationship between man and the universe, and the interconnections
between all parts of nature. In particular, the idea of a living nature
predisposes esotericism especially towards concepts of energy, both
as an origin of divine power and as a means for the communication
and transference of this power throughout nature.
As an intangible, ubiquitous
and lifeenhancing form of energy, light has played a dominant role
in religious, esoteric and mystical ideas throughout history. The
medieval concept of God and medieval Christianity had for their central
image that of light: God as the sun, as the light that radiates its
powers into the world, including the soul and spirit of man. The conceptual
and symbolic world of medieval belief in God consisted in a metaphysics
of light that governed cosmology, epistemology, and also scriptural
exegesis. The Gothic cathedrals were themselves essays in an architecture
of light, with high vaulted roofs, tall windows and rich stained glass
creating a lighted space that was both sublime and mysterious.
With the discovery of
magnetism and electricity, a new image appeared beside the symbolism
of light from the seventeenth century onwards. Magnetism and electricity
emerged as the most tangible manifestation of the hidden presence
of divine power in the world and its objects—as the concealed power
that creates life, movement and warmth; that permeates the whole universe;
that causes the attraction of opposite poles; that accumulates violent
discharges from time to time and manifests itself in lightning as
overpowering, blinding light, as a destructive force in its numinous,
irrational form. Electricity and magnetism became a new symbol for
God.
In this paper
I shall seek to show how Helena Blavatsky drew on this tradition.
Firstly, that she utilised the metaphor of electricity in The Secret
Doctrine to describe Fohat, the cosmological agent responsible
for impressing the ideas of the Absolute onto matter as the laws of
nature. These images are then traced back through her discussions
in Isis Unveiled to show how her ideas of electricity and magnetism
derived from her understanding of Western esoteric sources including
Mesmerism in the nineteenth century and beyond this to Paracelsus,
Athanasius Kircher, Robert Fludd and the Rosicrucians in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries.
1. Electricity
in Modern Theosophy
Antoine Faivre has emphasised
the significance of late nineteenth-century occultism as a modernizing
and modifying influence on the esoteric traditions of theosophy and
German Naturphilosophie, as they developed from the seventeenth
to the early nineteenth centuries. According to his definition, occultism
typically proclaims its hostility towards the shallowness of materialism
in an age of positivism. However, the penchant of occultists for phenomena
and demonstrations show the extent to which they are inextricably
involved in a dialogue with materialist assumptions and discoveries
of modern science. In this respect, occultists seek to assimilate
science and modernity into a "higher" pansophic vision of the cosmos
and man.1 Modern Theosophy is an outstanding example of the new scientific
occultism of the late nineteenth century. Besides their concern with
ancient religions, the seminal texts of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
contain many quotations, paraphrases and footnotes to contemporary
works of archaeology, palaeontology, geology, chemistry and physics.
It is thus not surprising that Blavatsky should thus assimilate electricity
into the metaphysical and esoteric discourse of Theosophy.
Helena Blavatsky’s interest
in electricity as an animating soul-like force or fluid emerged from
the notion of the "ether", widely discussed by scientists at the time
she founded the Theosophical Society. In Isis Unveiled she
frequently referred to The Unseen Universe (1875) by B. Stewart
and P. G. Gait, which developed the idea of the universal ether as
a parallel, invisible universe of force:
Now
is it not natural to imagine, that a universe of this nature...connected
by bonds of energy with the visible universe, is also capable of receiving
energy from it? May we not regard the Ether, or the medium, as not
merely a bridge between one order of things and another, forming as
it were a species of cement, in virtue of which the various orders
of the universe are welded together and made into one? In fine, what
we generally called Ether, may be not a mere medium, but a medium
plus the invisible order of things, so that when the motions
of the visible universe are transferred into Ether, part of them are
conveyed as by a bridge into the invisible universe...when
energy is carried from matter into Ether, it is carried from the visible
into the invisible... when it is carried from Ether to matter it is
carried from the invisible to the visible.
She related these authors’ views on ether to the idea of electricity
as an intelligent, force of formation and next quoted another authority,
one Dr. Jobard of Paris, as distinguishing between two kinds of electricity:
the one brute and blind, produced by the contact of metals and acids;
the other intelligent and clairvoyant.2 She returns to this distinction
between blind or crude electricity, produced by the elements, and a
corresponding electricity produced by the cerebral pile of man: "this
soul-electricity, this spiritual and universal ether...is the
ambient, middle nature of the metaphysical universe, or rather of the
incorporeal universe...[ and] has to be studied before it is admitted
by science, which... will never know anything of the great phenomenon
of life until she does."3
These scattered references
to the allpervasive, intelligent nature of ether (and by association,
electricity) were presented in the form of a cosmology in Blavatsky’s
later work, The Secret Doctrine (1888). This book is conceived
as a commentary on the Stanzas of Dzyan, a secret work of Tibetan
wisdom-literature she allegedly received from masters in the Himalayas.
In the Proem she refers to Spirit (or Consciousness) and Matter as
two aspects of the Absolute (Parabrahm). It is the contrast of these
two aspects of the Absolute that ideas can manifest in physical form,
thus enabling a "manifested universe." This poses the question of
the identity of that agent which links spirit to matter.
Blavatsky called this agent Fohat, defining it further as
The
"bridge" by which the "Ideas" existing in the "Divine Thought" are impressed
on cosmic substance as the "laws of Nature." Fohat is thus the dynamic
energy of Cosmic Ideation; or, regarded from the other side, it is the
intelligent medium, the guiding power of all manifestation, the "Thought
Divine" transmitted and made manifest through the Dyane Cholas, the
Architects of the visible World. Thus from Spirit, or Cosmic Ideation,
comes our consciousness; from Cosmic Substance the several vehicles
in which that consciousness is individualised and attains to self—or
reflective consciousness; while Fohat, in its various manifestations,
is the mysterious link between Mind and Matter, the animating principle
electrifying every atom into life.4In her commentary to the fifth stanza, Blavatsky expands even
further on the cosmogonic functions of Fohat, the "mes-senger of the
will" of the seven Dhyanis appointed to govern the Earth in its present
Round. She writes:[Fohat]
is that Occult, electric, vital power, which under the Will of the
Creative Logos, unites and brings together all forms, giving them
the first impulse which becomes in time law... Fohat produces nothing
yet by himself; he is simply that potential creative power in virtue
of whose action the NOUMENON of all future phenomena divides... Fohat,
then, is the personified electric vital power, the transcendental
binding Unity of all Cosmic Energies, on the unseen as on the manifested
planes, the action of which resembles—on an immense scale—that of
a living Force created by WILL... On the earthly plane his influence
is felt in the magnetic and active force generated by the strong desire
of the magnetizer.
On the Cosmic, it is present in the constructive
power that carries out, in the formation of things—from the planetary
system down to the glowworm and simple daisy—the plan in the mind
of nature, or in the Divine Thought, with regard to the development
and growth of that special thing. He is, metaphysically, the objectified
thought of the gods; the "Word made flesh", on a lower scale, and
the messenger of Cosmic and human ideations: the active force in Universal
Life. In his secondary aspect, Fohat is the Solar Energy, the electric
vital fluid, and the preserving fourth principle, the animal soul
of Nature, so to say, or—Electricity.5
In her commentary on the sixth stanza, Fohat is described as
being behind all such manifestations as light, heat, sound, adhesion
as well as being the "spirit" of electricity, which is no less than
"the LIFE of the universe." As an abstraction it begins with the one
unknowable causality and ends as omnipresent mind and life immanent
in every atom of matter. In a characteristic jibe at materialism, Blavatsky
remarks that "while science speaks of evolution through brute matter,
blind force and senseless motion, occultists point to intelligent
law and sentient Life, and add that Fohat is the guiding
Spirit of all this."6
Fohat is not mentioned
at all in Isis Unveiled. The word makes its first appearance
in a Mahatma letter (No. XIII) of January 1882 from Morya to A. P.
Sinnett, in response to the latter’s cosmological notes and queries.
Fohat is mentioned more fully in a subsequent letter (No. XV) of July
1882 from Koot Hoomi to A. O. Hume, in the context of Subba Row’s
article, "Aryan Arhat Esoteric Doctrines," on the sevenfold principles
of man.7 In the latter reference, Fohat is described as the visible,
phenomenal manifestation of Swabhavat, the infinite life and source
of all life. Fohat went on to make a career in The Secret Doctrine,
as the two earlier extensive quotations demonstrate. Since this later
work is permeated with Blavatsky’s septenary view of the macrocosm
and microcosm, the result of her increasing revelation of Theosophy
as a form of esoteric Buddhism after 1880, we find Fohat closely implicated
in the complex numerology and cosmology of the Stanzas of Dzyan. Fohat
"takes five strides" in descending through the five upper planes of
Consciousness (I, 122), it is the "Son of the Son", the instrument
of the Logos (I, 137), it "produces Seven Laya Centres" (I,
147). "The abodes of Fohat are many, . . . he places his four (electropositive)
Sons in the four circles [Equator, Ecliptic, and the two Tropics];
seven other sons are stationed at the North and South Poles, the very
centres of terrestrial electric and magnetic forces, giving rise to
the familiar aurora of polar lights (I, 204-205). Each time the Manvantaric
impulse commences with the re-awakening of Cosmic Ideation, Fohat
thrills through inert Substance, impelling it to activity and guiding
its primary differentiation on all seven planes of cosmic consciousness
(I, 328).
The mention of Fohat by Morya and
Koot Hoomi in their Mahatma letters of 1882 could lead one to suppose
that Blavatsky’s knowledge of Fohat was derived entirely from conversations
with her Masters and her privileged access to the Stanzas of Dzyan.
However, the effective identity of Fohat and ether, in terms of their
respective nature and function as described respectively in The
Secret Doctrine and Isis Unveiled suggest that this idea
has a longer pedigree in the development of her own thought. Blavatsky’s
notion of electricity, together with that of Fohat, however much confirmed
later by esoteric Buddhist sources, actually have their roots in a
Western esoteric tradition, namely the theology of electricity. There
are but three references to the term "electricity" in The Secret
Doctrine (I, 81, 111, 139), each one a qualifying description
of Fohat, whereas the word occurs relatively frequently in Isis
Unveiled, especially in the first volume devoted to science. However,
before leaving The Secret Doctrine, it should be noted that
Fohat is described both as "Solar Energy" and the "electric vital
fluid" (I, 111).
It is these terms, once
traced back to more extensive references in Isis Unveiled,
that reveal Blavatsky’s sources in Western esotericism. In the first
place, the excerpts from The Secret Doctrine identify Fohat
with electricity as a universal, dualistic (positive-negative) force
of nature. In its turn, electricity is a powerful contemporary metaphor
for Fohat’s energy and function of impressing the ideas of the Universal
Mind upon matter. Blavatsky thinks that the notion of "Cosmic Electricity"
does not adequately convey its property of intelli-gence. Then, with
a quick reference to modern science, she recalls that all cerebration
and brain-activity are accompanied by electrical phenomena, thus suggesting
that human intelligence correlates to electricity (I, 85). The same
point was evident in the earlier distinction made in Isis Unveiled
between the brute force of electricity, and that "soul-electricity"
or ether, which is the "ambient, middle nature of the metaphysical
universe."
2. Mesmerism
Blavatsky’s mention
of an "electric vital fluid" recalls the ideas of Franz Anton Mesmer
(1734-1815), famous as the founder of "animal magnetism" for the therapeutic
treatment of illness. Mesmer and animal magnetism feature extensively
in Blavatsky’s thought. Although his name became associated with occultist
currents in the nineteenth century, Mesmer regarded himself as a Newtonian,
concerned to discover the mechanical laws that operated in the universe.
Pondering the cause of universal gravitation, Mesmer had written his
doctoral dissertation De influxu planetarum in corpus humanum [The
Influence of the Planets upon the Human Body] (1766), in which
he posited the existence of an invisible, universally distributed
fluid that flows continuously everywhere and serves as a vehicle for
the mutual influence between heavenly bodies, the earth and living
things. Just as the oceans on earth have tides, so does the universal
fluid, which passes through the earth and all creatures. Mesmer described
this force as "the cause of universal gravitation and, no doubt, the
basis of all bodily properties; which, in effect, in the smallest
particles of fluids and solids of our bodies, contracts, distends
and causes cohesion, elasticity, irritability, magnetism, and electricity;
a force which can, in this context, be called animal gravitation."8
Mesmer duly qualified
as a physician and began a conventional practice in Vienna. It was
only in 1773, when treating the ebb and flow of hysteria in a patient,
that Mesmer began to apply the ideas in his cosmological theory to
the practical application of medicine. The symptoms of hysteria offered
an outstanding example of the tidal effect of the universal fluid,
or animal gravitation, coursing through the body of the patient. Accordingly,
Mesmer developed a therapy based on stroking, touching, hypnotic stares
and pointing with charged wands to control and remedy the ostensible
imbalance of the fluid in the body of the patient.9 Henceforth, Mesmer
considered that he was able to apply this diagnosis and treatment
for all maladies provided that there was no irreparable physical damage
to the bodily organs. His later practice involved his patients sitting
communally around the baquet, a tub filled with water, iron
filings and sand. Holding iron rods immersed in the tub, the patients
formed a chain through which the sup-posed magnetism thus generated
flowed. Mesmer was grievously disappointed by the ensuing controversies
over his highly effective treatments. The repeated rebuffs on the
part of medical faculties and scientific associations to his attempts
to have his theories officially endorsed chiefly hinged on the lack
of proofs for the fluid that supposedly effected the cures.
Contrary to Mesmer’s intentions
to found a new mechanical theory, contemporaries saw its links to
esoteric ideas in the Renaissance and early modern periods.
An early critic, Michel Augustin Thouret, wrote Recherches et doutes
sur le magnétisme animal (1784), in which he traced the idea of
a cosmic fluid in Paracelsus (1493-1541), Jan Baptista van Helmont
(1577-1644), Robert Fludd (1574-1637) and William Maxwell. Mesmer’s
supporters countered that Mesmer had himself stated that he was giving
an old idea a new scientific basis. Irrespective of Mesmer’s own desire
to found a new rational science, his theory is manifestly rooted in
esoteric traditions. His "fluid" is a modern expression of long-standing
speculations about "subtle" agents such as pneuma. Theories
of subtle matter typify Western esotericism, especially in its view
of a living, animate nature. The basic sympathy between this tradition
and Mesmerism guaranteed the latter many supporters among nineteenthcentury
occultists.10
Mesmerism spread rapidly
among occultist and spiritualist groups from the 1830s onwards. In
1829 the Swabian physician and poet Justinus Kerner (1786-1862) published
his account of Friederike Hauffe, the "Seeress of Prevorst", to whom
he had given magnetic treatment for acute hysteria. Because her trance
states involved her vision of spirits, knowledge of Kerner’s work
(translated into English in 1845) would eventually link spiritualism
with Mesmerism. In 1838 Charles Poyen arrived from France to introduce
animal magnetism to the United States. Phineas Quimby, an American
physician, publicised Mesmerism widely. Meanwhile, the leading American
spiritualist, Andrew Jackson Davis, a shoemaker turned clairvoyant,
also practised Mesmerism and was able to make medical diagnoses while
in a trance state. As Bruce Campbell has noted, occultism was introduced
to America in the mid-nineteenth century America in the form of Mesmerism,
Swedenborgianism and Freemasonry.11
Given Blavatsky’s close contact
with American spiritualism after her attendance at the spirit-manifestations
at the Eddy farmhouse in Chittenden, Vermont in 1874, this would have
been the very latest point at which she might have encountered Mesmerism.
In view of her long-standing interest in psychic phenomena, it is
much more likely that her familiarity with Mesmerism could date back
to her earliest international travels in the 1850s. In any case, her
numerous references to Mesmerism in the pages of Isis Unveiled
indicate her own bibliographical pursuit of the subject through
several authorities. She quotes the work of Thouret, in order to conclude
(in her case with approval) that the doctrine of Mesmer was simply
a restatement of the doctrines of Paracelsus, Van Helmont, Santanelli
and Maxwell.
Mesmer reaped the glory of Paracelsus’ own pioneering work with magnets,
while the universal fluid is another aspect of Paracelsus’s "sidereal
force", an emanation of the stars and celestial bodies within man.
She quotes verbatim the first eight of Mesmer’s twenty-seven propositions
concerning the universal fluid and animal magnetism contained in his
Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal (1799).12
Among the several authorities
on Mesmerism or animal magnetism quoted in Isis Unveiled, besides
those of Mesmer and Thouret, are Baron Étienne-Félix d’Henin de Cuvillier,
Annales du magnétisme animal (1814-16), Joseph Philippe François
Deleuze, Bibliothèque de magnétisme animal (1877), Marquis
de Puységur, Magnétisme animal considéré dans ses rapports avec
diverses branches de la physique (1804-7), and Baron Jules Dupotet
de Sennevoy, Cours du Magnétisme en sept leçons, deuxieme edition,
augmentee du rapport sur les experiences magnetiques faites par la
Commission de l’Academie Royale de Medecine en 1831 (Paris, 1840)
Blavatsky documents the trials and tribulations of Mesmerism through
its investigation by official commissions by Benjamin Franklin (1784)
and the French Academy (1824, 1826), hardly pausing before recounting
the later successful experiments of Puységur.13 Her greatest enthusiasm,
however, concerned the demonstrations of Baron Dupotet and Regazzoni.
She dwelt at length on the mesmeric feats achieved by Regazzoni at
Paris in May 1856, in which blindfolded strangers were blocked by
an imaginary "kabalistic" line he had drawn across the floor. In another
case, a blindfolded girl was made to fall, as if struck by lightning,
by the magnetic fluid emitted by Regazzoni’s will.14
While Regazzoni
amazed audiences in France and England, Baron Jules Dupotet de Sennevoy
(1798-1881) attempted to systematize the subject of Mesmerism. As
a medical student he had participated in mesmerist experiments in
1820, served on the 1831 commission and practised in London from 1837
to 1845. His Introduction to the Study of Animal Magnetism (1838),
published in London, distinguished three schools of theory and practice:
the original materialist school of Mesmer; the Platonic-spiritualist
school of Lyon, which held that phenomena are caused by an effort
of the soul; and Puységur’s school at Strasbourg of a more experimental
nature.15 Blavatsky referred reverently to Dupotet as the "grand master"
and the "prince of French mesmerists."
For while Regazzoni’s feats prompted comparison with magic, it was
Dupotet’s theoretical writings on mesmerism as an example of the traditional
practice of magic that most impressed Blavatsky.
Blavatsky actually distinguished
two kinds of magnetization. The first was purely animal, while the
other was transcendent and depended on the will and knowledge of the
mesmerizer and the subject’s spiritual capacity to receive impressions
of the "astral light" (a word she borrowed from Eliphas Lévi (1810-1875),
the French historian of magic, for the interconnecting ether in which
the sympathetic effects of magic were transmitted).16 She saw Dupotet
as an adept who understood the link between will in inducing trance
states and power of magic. Dupotet had asked, "What is, after all,
somnambulistic sleep? A result of the potency of magic . .
What you call nervous fluid or magnetism, the men of old called
occult power, or the potency of the soul, subjection, MAGIC!"17
But stressing her argument with further references from Cornelius
Agrippa and Eliphas Lévi, Blavatsky understood the universal fluid
of Mesmerism to be the "soul of the world" (anima mundi) which,
if directed by the corresponding will of a human agent, could communicate
its power to any chosen object. Lévi had described how the initiate
could direct at will the magnetic vibrations in the astral light,
to form an ethereal body, which Blavatsky saw as the secret of her
phenomena involving apports and travel in the astral body. Her verdict
was that "Mesmerism is the most important branch of magic; and its
phenomena are the effects of the universal agent which underlies all
magic and has produced at all ages the so-called miracles."18
Mesmerism’s defenders in the nineteenth
century had divided into the camps of Animists and Fluidists. The
Animists denied the reality of animal magnetism, attributing trance
states to suggestion and imagination, thus anticipating hypnosis and
other aspects of psychology. The Fluidists explained trance in terms
of the universal fluid as a physical fact, as had Mesmer himself.
Blavatsky proved herself a staunch Fluidist, not only by her copious
reading and quotation of Mesmer, but also in her explanation of magic
and the divine inspiration of the universe. "By the radiant light
of the universal magnetic ocean, whose electric waves bind the cosmos
together . . . Alone, the study of this agent, which is divine breath,
can unlock he secrets of psychology and physiology, of cosmical
and spiritual phenomena."19 She retained her conviction in a "material,
or substantial magnetic fluid" until her last days.20
The Theology of Electricity
in the Western Esoteric Tradition
(a) From Paracelsus
to William Maxwell
Blavatsky also
related electricity and mag-netism to older sources than Mesmerism
in the Western esoteric tradition. Their writings on magnetism and
electricity demonstrate the way in which these newly-discovered forces
were identified as universal forces of nature and credited with divine
power and agency. As the antecedents of Mesmerism, they acted as crucial
sources and references for the construction of her own theology of
electricity, as later refined and confirmed in her presentation of
Fohat.
She had praised Paracelsus as a pioneer of animal
magnetism and the rediscoverer of the magnet.21 Paracelsus had indeed
referred to the attractive force "like amber or a magnet" in his work
on procreation [Das Buch von der Gebärung der empfindlichen Dinge
(1520), I.i. 261-2]. He discussed the remedial effects of the
magnet in his work Herbarius, I.ii. 49-57 and inVon den
Natürlichen Dingen, I.ii. 123. The next historical figure in her
roll of "fluidist" thinkers she identified was the eminent Jesuit
scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), who wrote the most comprehensive
work on magnetism in the seventeenth century. She quoted extensively
from his book Magnes sive de arte magnetica opus tripartium [Magnets
or the Art of Magnetism, a Work in Three Parts] (1643), the third
book of which depicts magnetism as an elemental force of nature.
Magnetism is here understood
as one of the elemental forces that holds the world together. According
to Kircher, soul, spirit and physical phenomena belong to its sphere.
Kircher maintains that there exists an inner bond of unity (nexum
unionemque) among all of the things becoming radiant in our universe;
their cooperation and mutual attraction can be explained only by a
kind of magnetic power and quality. Kircher links his magnetic interpretation
of the universe’s essential cohesion to more ancient teachings about
the mysterious fundamental force in nature, characterized by Plato’s
artum dei, the "unspeakable power" (arrhetos dynamis)
of the Greeks.22
Kircher’s equation
of the divine spirit as vis magnetica dei with the all-animating
power of nature corresponded to a shift from the idea of the divine
magnet to that of a magnetic, all-pervasive power. This shift reflected
the pansophical theology of nature and anticipates forms the Romantic
philosophy of nature and Mesmer’s evangelium naturae [gospel
of nature].
Indeeed, it is probable that Mesmer was exposed
to Kircher’s ideas on magnetism during his studies at the leading
Jesuit college in Dillingen in Bavaria. Blavatksy readily responded
to Kircher’s ideas on magnetism, quoting his view that there is one
magnet in the universe, and from it proceeds the magnetization of
all that exists. This magnet was identified as the central Spiritual
Sun, or God by the Kabbalists. In her paraphrase of his proem in Book
III, the sun, moon, planets, and stars are magnetized "by living in
the universal magnetic fluid—the Spiritual light."
She quotes extensively from
his work, including the idea that love is a magnetic manifestation
of human sympathy. Instinctual love is equated with electricity, while
pure love is the originator of every created thing.23 In Kircher’s
writings of on magnetism Blavatsky found powerful corroboration for
her own "fluidist" convictions concerning an all-pervading divine
force of nature.
Jan Baptista
van Helmont, the eminent physician and alchemist, also followed Paracelsus
in seeking the hidden spirit in matter. He regarded the will as the
property of all spiritual beings, its prominence being in direct proportion
to their freedom from matter. As Blavatsky noted, his theories on
magnetism, far more elaborate than those of Paracelsus, were bound
up with his notion of the will: "Magnetism is an unknown property
of a heavenly nature . . . Every created being possesses his own celestial
power and is closely allied with heaven. This magic power of man,
which thus can operate externally, lies, as it were, hidden in the
inner man. This magical wisdom and strength thus sleeps, but by a
mere suggestion is roused into activity, and becomes more living,
the more the outer man of flesh and the darkness is suppressed."24
Blavatsky referred frequently to Van Helmont’s magnetic theories,
citing his magnale magnum as a universal ethereal fluid in
all things. As man has the largest share in the will of the Creator,
through which all things received their first impulse, he can move
this fluid and thereby exercise magical powers. She equated his "principle
of life" or archæus with the astral light of Eliphas Lévi and
the universal ether of contemporary science.25
Another important
Renaissance theorist to anticipate Mesmerism was the Scottish physician
William Maxwell, who attended King Charles I and was a friend and
collaborator of Robert Fludd.26 Maxwell also identified magnetism
as a universal lifespirit capable of therapeutic application.
His work De medicina magnetica was published at Frankfurt in
1679. Blavatsky quoted triumphantly from his propositions, which she
equated with the doctrines of the alchemists and kabbalists: "That
which men call the world-soul, is a life, as fire, spiritual, fleet,
light, and ethereal as light itself. It is a life-spirit everywhere;
and everywhere the same. . . All matter is destitute of action, except
as it is ensouled by this spirit. This spirit maintains all things
in their peculiar condition . . . . He who knows this universal life-spirit
and its application can prevent all injuries. . . . If thou canst
avail thyself of this spirit and fix it on some particular body thou
wilt perform the mystery of magic. . . . He who knows how to operate
on men by this universal spirit, can heal, and this at any distance
that he pleases . . . . He who can invigorate the particular spirit
through the universal one, might continue his life to eternity."27
In William Maxwell’s aphorisms she felt she had again found striking
confirmation of the identity of the particular and universal lifespirit,
that magnetic or electrical fluid which would later feature as Fohat
in her esoteric Buddhist cosmology.
(b) The
"Fire-Philosophers"
In The Secret
Doctrine, Blavatsky reminded her readers that the translators
of the Stanzas of Dzyan had used the words "Light," "Fire," and "Flame"
interchangeably and that they all denoted, on our plane, the progeny
of electricity. "Electricity, the ONE Life at the upper rung of Being,
and Astral Fluid, the Athanor of the Alchemists, at its lowest."28
She attributed this vocabulary to the old "Fire-Philosophers," namely
the Rosicrucians, who had borrowed their ideas from the theurgists
concerning Fire as a mystical and divine element. As Joscelyn Godwin
has shown, her notion of "Fire-Philosophers" derives from the work
of Hargrave Jennings (1817-1890), a prolific writer on the origin
of religions, mythology, and occult topics such as the Rosicrucians.
In his work Curious Things of the Outside World: Last Fire (1861),
Jennings cited Robert Fludd’s Mosaicall Philosophy (1659) and
the Rosicrucians to imply the existence of a sixteenth-century sect
of alchemists and Paracelsians. These "Fire-Philosophers" had recognised
fire (and light) as the as the first creative impulse that produces
a universe out of nothingness. An afterword in the book emphasised
the "Divinity of Fire."29 Jennings also appears to have taken from
Robert Fludd and Jacob Boehme, a theology in which the Deity is initially
wrapped up in himself in darkness, and first manifests as light and
fire.
Blavatsky was a great
admirer of Jennings’s work. In her first ever article on the Western
esoteric tradition, "A Few Questions to Hiraf," proudly described
as her "first occult shot," she praised his book The Rosicrucians,
Their Rites and Mysteries (1870) and copied his usage, referring
to Paracelsists and alchemists as Fire-Philosophers.30 Following Jennings,
Blavatsky stated that the Rosicrucians "affirmed that the world was
created of fire, the divine spirit of which was an omnipotent
and omniscient GOD."31 She also quoted the Mosaicall Philosophy of
Robert Fludd, "chief" of the "philosophers by fire," concerning the
creator (who is not the Highest God) as the parent of both matter
and spirit and emanates from the highest, invisible cause and pervades
the whole universe.32 Again following Fludd through Jennings, she
wrote that the Hermetists and the later Rosicrucians maintained that
all things were produced by the struggle of light with darkness and
that "every particle of matter contains within itself a spark of the
divine essence—or light, spirit—which through its tendency
to free itself from its entanglement and return to the central source,
produced motion in the particles, and from motion forms were born."33
Once again, we have a clear reference to that "ambient, middle nature
of the metaphysical universe" or "bridge" between the first cause
and the rest of creation, later known as Fohat in the terminology
of esoteric Buddhism.
(c) Swabian Pietist
Theosophy
No account of
the role of light, fire or electricity in Blavatsky’s cosmogony would
be complete without reference to Hebrew and biblical sources. Recalling
the creation story in the Book of Genesis, the Lord first creates
Light, and three days and three nights are said to pass before he
creates the sun, the moon and the stars. What then is this first Light?
She follows the Hebrew tradition in referring to Ezekiel’s vision
(Ezekiel i. 4-22) and Daniel’s vision of the "ancient of days" (Daniel
vii. 9-10). She quotes the Kabala that this first light is the En-Soph,
the Divine Intelligence, the mother of all the Sephiroth on the Tree
of Life. Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the
Supreme. Both Light and Life, she continues, "are electricity—the
life-principle, the anima mundi, pervading the universe, the
electric vivifier of all things. Light is the great Protean magician,
and under the Divine Will of the architect, its multifarious, omnipotent
waves gave birth to every form as well as to every living being. From
its swelling, electric bosom, springs matter and spirit."
The sun is its secondary creation, not the cause of either light or
heat but rather a lens for the concentration of the primordial light.
This interpretation
of the first light in Genesis recalls the thought of Friedrich Christoph
Oetinger (1702-1782), the leading Swabian pietist, whose work embraced
the theosophy of Jacob Boehme, the Kabala, and the visionary revelations
of Emanuel Swedenborg. It was in mid-eighteenth century Germany, among
Protestant pietist theologians and scientists, that a self-conscious
Theology of Electricity was elaborated as an esoteric doctrine relating
to cosmology, anthropology and scriptural exegesis. Besides Oetinger,
its other leading figures were Prokop Divisch (1696-1765) and Johann
Ludwig Fricker (1729-1766). Ernst Benz has extensively documented
this particular group of theosophers and their speculations on electricity.
34
The new philosophy of
life, which Oetinger developed and based on his theory of electricity,
also involved a new interpretation of the story of Creation. Oetinger
believed that the divine word of the Bible presents a document of
the self-realization of God. In his introduction to Divisch’s famous
work, Theorie von der meteorologischen Electricité (1765),
Oetinger set about an interpretation of Genesis Chapter One. He asked
what is the light of this first day of Creation. It could not be the
light of the sun, for according to the same narrative, the sun was
not created until the fourth day. Firstly, Oetinger asserts that the
first light of the first day is the "electri-cal fire," which spreads
out over chaos as a stimulating, warming and form-giving life principle.
It penetrates all matter as a life principle and finally fuses with
matter itself. Secondly, the electrical fire of nature, added to matter
itself, is the life principle that again and again rushes into new
forms, that wants to manifest itself again and again in new living
shapes. Thirdly, it is no less than the principle of evolution that
was part of Creation from the beginning and that manifests itself
as a principle of "natural creation." Next to the "first creation"
in the genesis through the will of God comes the "natural creation,"
whose seed was laid in the lap of matter by God Himself and which
contained the subsequent creation of all forms of life. This
is the birth of the idea of evolution in modern European thought.35
Given its ensouling force
and evolutionary potential, Oetinger’s notion of the electrical fire
of nature is manifestly emanationist and thus an outstanding historical
example of the Western esoteric tradition. Divisch had emphasised
this by identifying electricity as a form of healing and linking it
with earlier notions of "elementary fire" and the Paracelsian archæus.36
Oetinger was convinced that magic was a legitimate endowment of mankind
viewed as the collaborator of God in the sense of an insight into
the innermost secrets of nature with control over their powers. Oetinger
believed that the patriarchs of the Old Testament had knowledge of
a "divine physics." Not only did this enable him to rediscover the
most modern findings of physics, electricity and magnetism in the
Bible, but also allowed him to posit that this knowledge had been
lost through people turning away from God, and that it would be rediscovered
in the final epoch in the history of mankind. Accordingly, he praised
Divisch as "a magician from the East," a precursor of the approaching
millennium.37
Blavatsky only
once referred to a work of Oetinger, Thoughts on the Birth and Generation
of Things, but this related to plant alchemy and it is evident that
she knew it only through a secondary source.38
She made no reference to his theology of electricity. Blavatsky is
not likely to have known about the Swabian pietists nor their tradition
of theosophy. It is a fact that her references to Jacob Boehme (1575-1624),
the father of theosophy and Oetinger’s original inspiration, are scant
in Isis Unveiled in comparison to Paracelsus, Kircher, Van
Helmont and Fludd. Her discussion of Boehme in The Secret Doctrine
is entirely indebted to Gerald Massey’s The Natural Genesis (1883).
We should recall
that the Theosophical Society had its intellectual and social origins
in the English-speaking world.
Irrespective of her own continental
background in Russia and France, Blavatsky formulated her occult debut
as a response to the Anglo-American interest in Mesmerism and spiritualism.
She was neither influenced nor particularly aware of German Naturphilosophie.
She thus remained essentially untouched by German Romantic natural
science, that blend of idealist philosophy with natural philosophy
represented by F.J.W. Schelling (1775-1854), Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert
(1780-1860), A.K.A. Eschenmeyer (1768-1852) and others in the early
nineteenth century. This meant that she was untouched the German esoteric
tradition that blended idealist philosophy with natural science as
represented by F.J.W. Schelling, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, A.K.
A. Eschenmeyer, Lorenz Oken and others in the early nineteenth century.
While this German Naturphilosophie shared many features with
esotericism, the science that she drew on to illustrate and corroborate
her occultism was typically contemporary and positivist, its chief
function being to demonstrate how science was "catching up" with the
mysteries of magic. In this respect, the forces of electricity and
magnetism appeared to her to offer striking proof of a universal life-force,
thus enabling her to present a scientistic form of magia naturalis
as the lost knowledge of the ancients and Renaissance writers.
Blavatsky defined Fohat
as the objectivised thought of the gods, the agent of cosmic ideations,
and in our world, the electric vital fluid and the animal soul of
Nature. Electricity was a primary agent in the cosmogony of Theosophy.
Like the eighteenth-century theologians of electricity, Blavatsky
sees electricity in terms of the Neo-Platonic ensoulment or animation
of matter as a first act of the Creation. However, while their speculations
were engendered and confirmed by Biblical exegesis, she instanced
a variety of references to ancient Egyptian and Greek mythology, Renaissance
Neo-Platonism and Hermeticism, the Kabala, and finally (esoteric)
Tibetan Buddhism in support of the idea of Neo-Platonic emanation.
Moreover, the idea of electricity possessing a formative power and
inherent containment of all future evolutionary forms is noticeably
common to both Blavatsky, the theologians of electricity, and Renaissance
writers. In this respect, she adapted the electrical life-spirit to
her over-riding concern to posit a doctrine of spiritual evolution
in defiance of Darwin’s theories and nineteenth-century materialism.
Notes
1 Antoine Faivre,
Access to Western Esotericism (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1994), 88. Wouter Hanegraaff has extended this discussion,
defining occultism as an attempt to adapt traditional esotericism
to a disenchanted secular world.
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and
Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought(Leiden:
Brill, 1996), 421-23. Owing to the advance of secularization, nineteenth-century
occultists can no longer relate directly to the spiritual mystery
and sacrality of Renaissance and early modern esotericism, but feel
the need to explain its ideas in terms of science.
2 Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled (New York: J. W. Bouton, 1877), vol.
I: 187-88. 3 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, I: 322.
4 Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (London: Theosophical Publishing
Company, 1888), vol. I: 15-16.
5 Blavatsky,
The Secret Doctrine, I: 109-112.
6 Blavatsky,
The Secret Doctrine, I: 139.
7 The Mahatma
Letters to A. P. Sinnett, transcribed by A.T. Barker, second edition
(London: Rider, 1933), 72, 90.
8 Vincent Buranelli,
The Wizard of Vienna: Franz Anton Mesmer and the Origins of Hypnotism
(London: Peter Owen, 1976), 34-37 (36).
9 Buranelli,
The Wizard of Vienna: Franz Anton Mesmer and the Origins of Hypnotism
, 61.
10 Wouter J.
Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture, 433.
11 Bruce F. Campbell,
Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 14, 20.
12 Blavatsky,
Isis Unveiled, I: 72, 168, 172-173.
13 Blavatsky,
Isis Unveiled, I: 173-175.
14 Blavatsky,
Isis Unveiled, I: 142-3, 283.
15 Joscelyn Godwin,
The Theosophical Enlightenment(Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1994), 156-157.
16 Blavatsky,
Isis Unveiled, I: 178.
17 Blavatsky,
Isis Unveiled, I: 279. She quoted Dupotet extensively from
his work La magie dévoilée (Saint-Germain, 1875).
18 Blavatsky,
Isis Unveiled, I: 129.
19 Blavatsky,
Isis Unveiled, I: 282.
20 Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky, "The Substantial Nature of Magnetism," Lucifer 9,
No. 49 (September
1891): 8-20,
in H. P. Blavatsky: Collected Writings, Vol. VIII 1887, compiled by
Boris de Zirkoff (Wheaton, Ill.: Theosophical Publishing House, 1960),
315-33 (323).
21 Blavatsky,
"The Substantial Nature of Magnetism," 164, 168.
22 Athanasius
Kircher, Magnes sive de arte magnetica (Cologne, 1643): Proömium
to Book III, 463-465.
23 Blavatsky,
Isis Unveiled, I: 208-210. She also referenced p. 643 in Book
III of Kircher’s work.
24 Blavatsky,
Isis Unveiled, I: 170. The quotation is from Van Helmont, De
Magnetica Vulner Curatione.
25 Blavatsky,
Isis Unveiled, I: 213, 399-400.
26 William Maxwell
is discussed at some length in Carl Kiesewetter, Geschichte der
neueren Okkultismus (Schwarzenburg: Ansata, 1977), 253-61 [First
published in 1891]. His links with Fludd are mentioned in Ron Heisler,
‘Rosicrucianism: The First Blooming in Britain’, The Hermetic Journal
(1989), 30-61; Ron Heisler, ‘Philip Ziegler: The Rosicrucian King
of Jerusalem’, The Hermetic Journal (1990).
27 Blavatsky,
Isis Unveiled, I: 215-16.
28 Blavatsky,
The Secret Doctrine, I, 81.
29 Joscelyn Godwin,
‘Hargrave Jennings’, The Hermetic Journal (1991): 49-77 (55-56);
Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment, 267-268.
30 Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky, "A Few Questions to‘Hiraf’," H. P. Blavatsky: Collected
Writings, Vol. I:1874-1878, compiled by Boris de Zirkoff. Third edition
(Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1988), 101-119 (104-105).
31 Blavatsky,
Isis Unveiled, I: 423.
32 Blavatsky,
Isis Unveiled, I: 309.
33 Blavatsky,
Isis Unveiled, I: 258.
34 Ernst Benz,
The Theology of Electricity: On the Encounter and Explanation of Theology
and Science in the 17th and 18thCenturies,
transl. Wolfgang
Taraba (Allison
Park, Pennsylvania: Pickwick, 1989), 27-44.
35 Ernst Benz,
The Theology of Electricity, 45-54.
36 Benz,The Theology
of Electricity, 82.
37 Benz, The
Theology of Electricity, 95, 97.
38 Blavatsky, Isis
Unveiled, I: 476. She evidently knew his work only through a reference
in Catherine Crowe, The Night-Side of Nature (New York, 1853).
