LA VISAGE D'HISTOIRE: HPB
Key members of the Blue Rider, Dada and Bauhaus movements were theosophists. Here's why ...
ABSTRACT - As the "face of history", Helena Petrovna Blavatsky* embodies/disembodies (after all it is only a face) the tragic force in historical consciousness that continually eats its own children. Chronos -- Time Itself -- is relentless. HPB gazes from her famous portrait of 1889 no longer worried about this cannibalism. She has only two years left. Her frown is the inverse of Mona Lisa's smile; her disdain is the modern equivalent of Mona Lisa's allure. HPB is a cat with the whole of truculent modernity in its mouth. She has been caught before the empty cage and doesn't care. As Sphinx, she is part lioness and part pharaoh. As Mona Lisa, she is coquette and cipher. Mixed together, she is the universal enfant terrible. She was capable of the most outrageous behavior and assertions on behalf of eating the canary. Her eyes beg you -- dare you -- to contradict her. In your attempts to demolish her system, you will fall into your own subjectivity as if it were a reflecting pool ... But instead of drowning, Narcissus-like, you will emerge transformed, enlarged, deified. You will be Cat, Canary and Cage.*Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (b. 1831-d. 1891), Russian-born founder of the Theosophical Society (in New York, in 1875).
I. History and Pseudo-History
Metaphysical chains ... History is pseudo-history ... It has its own fallenness, its own face, its own monumental folly. Yet it is a redemptive career, a 4,000-year walk through a small section of Time -- a zone. A mere stroll, in the sense that historical time is such a trifle in relationship to geologic or any other significant sense of time -- Cosmic (and cosmogonic) especially. But what a stroll!
Formal systems have accompanied this stroll -- emerged with it -- thrown down with alacrity and sagacity and as quickly discarded. The languages uttered by 'la visage d'histoire' -- an intentionally feminized noun -- is a plethora of sounds, shapes, figures -- many oppressive, foul, incoherent -- others charming, clear, holy. Such is aesthetic experience.
HPB arrived -- in historical time -- at the point in this stroll that might be said to have frightened the mythic mind the most. This other mind is a vast under-continent within history, within history-the-ne'er-do-well. Great discourses on imperial and empirical matters were in the air ... A residuum of the near conquered, non-empirical mind, absorbed and reflected in Romanticism, lay hidden in speculative gestures in art and poetry, literature and architecture (formal languages -- tropics) but essentially banned from the salons of modern thought by science and Enlightenment rationality in general. HPB was -- in this scenario -- a late-romantic scourge.
The chief storehouse of archaisms (the figurative, formal languages repressed by the Enlightenment) was Masonry -- in all its forms. Nevertheless, in Europe, Masonry was an elective aesthetic system indulged by the highest social orders -- the aristocracy included (HPB first came upon this system in the library of her grandfather). Masonry's face was archaic -- symbolic and mysterious to the nth degree. It countered the outer, empirical discourses, ironically often underwriting the then-prevalent Deistic world view, and, in a type of hermetic casuistry, the imperial grand designs of the nineteenth century -- in particular the Great Game (the imperial game between Russia and Britain to control Central Asia). Espionage and Masonry have always been very intimate. Hence the endless rumors that HPB (and Gurdjieff, the other famous magus from Russia's Near Abroad) was a Russian spy.
Spy ... A figure of speech surely. But a figure of thought as well? HPB worked two worlds at once -- the imaginative historiographic mists of esoteric systems in the East and West. When she was finished with the latter, she sailed for the former. When she had absorbed the former, she returned to the West with a synthesis of the two. Each system -- the Eastern and the Western esoteric systems -- considered the other with suspicion. East met West in the same ideological half-nelson in the esoteric schools as in the imperial demimonde of political intrigue. "Two worlds" is simply a cognitive encumbrance -- a map that is Ptolemaic in its pretensions to accuracy. These two worlds were the same. The East and the West, the esoteric and the political, upon closer inspection, are/were/will always be one and the same thing. The lens in one case reveals the visage grise of the other, and vice versa. History has produced worldwide anomie. Out of this house of mirrors History has emerged as a narrative given to imaginative turns and sudden plunges. As often, it rises to the occasion, to sheer poetic synthesis -- e.g., Romantic historiography -- joining East and West. Can we, do we wish to, muster that courage (again) in the early twenty-first century? Or shall we melt into post-colonial, postmodern, post-cultural, multi-cultural mush?
II. Subjectivity & Language
Something sagacious ... Something wily ... In History is an architectonic -- a structure of thought (Kant's a priori) -- that is monumental. Whether that structure is to be a monumental folly (fixed) or a monumental transformational constellation of useful signifiers (fluid signifiers) is a matter for Voltaire and Augustine to sort out in a hoped for synchronous reincarnation as lords of the realm. If these structures be archetypes, each archetype in the architectonic of reason is epochal. A moment can be epochal, if time truly is relative. The magnitude of any given moment is measured by its contribution to the whole. Representative architectonics, it might be denoted, after Emerson and Carlyle. This whole -- the gestalt of historical time (of rationality) -- real or imagined (preferably we should admit the latter) -- represents a most problematic bundle of time (4,000 years) given the density of another order, of the cosmic and terrestrial systems it somehow resides within.
Architecture as a formal language is under continuous stress to intone, embody and transfigure historical time -- to do something, anything to engage our collective historical consciousness. Consciousness of historical time itself implies 'humanity', a concept now much derided. The late-modern mind prides itself on having overcome the humanist subject -- i.e., humanist subjectivity. Is this what we now are translating into built form within the new architectures? It might appear so, yet a post-humanist subjectivity is a historical subject nonetheless. Architecture is struggling to redefine both civic and psychic space through a new synthetic, poetic language of form, and an emergent technological, formal language that is emerging within the larger technological language is defining the mythological, narrative, and historical consciousness of the age. Post-humanism is a new humanism. Its form is Sphinx-like, an enigma.
François Mitterand and HPB have both been called "Sphinx" -- inscrutability is the chief qualification plus an aristocratic air of disdain for transparency. In the former, the technological jouissance of the age is fully embodied in the soi-disant grands projets built in and around Paris in the 1980s to monumentalize Mitterand's reign (and to 'renew' Paris). Transpose two digits and, in 1890, we find HPB coming to the end of her own monumental project of renewal -- her demolition project on Western historiography principally carried out through her patchwork tome The Secret Doctrine and her celebrated attacks on Max Mueller. This imaginative flight to a trans-historical (trans-Himalayan) landscape of topological sur-realities, comprised of mythic and poetic (mytho-poetic), cosmic and terrestrial, human and divine, extra- and supra-historical genealogies, is the perhaps secret daemonic world of Diotima (Socrates' sibyl) -- a conjoining of two worlds (two historical traditions) that have paralleled one another for millennia. The long-anticipated synthesis -- an early attempt was made by Renaissance humanists -- is taking place in the late-modern era. The apparent duality -- the two minds -- is actually only a historical subterfuge, i.e., a reflection of historical binary thinking (metaphysics), as the seemingly divergent systems have (in a sense) 'mapped' one another since the originary split occurred god knows when. It was the birth of self-consciousness in as recent as the second millennium BCE that established this dual terrain (the daemonic and the rationalist). Scholars wildly point fingers at the Epic of Gilgamesh as evidence of this psychic schism. This places, then, the recent fin-de-siècle, fin-de-millennium angst in perspective, and, perhaps, indicates another reason for adumbrations concerning the Second Coming. Could this be but the dawn of an opening in our collective being to 'supra-consciousness' or 'divinity' (the approach of Nietzsche's end of nihilism)? Self-consciousness, nothing to write home about, is nevertheless the birthplace, in historical time, of post-humanism. Limited by the humanist agenda, by self-consciousness and its rewards (and its discontents), its ecstasies and its agonies, History is about to go extraterritorial, to a synthesis on a 'Himalayan' plateau. Hence the geographical terminology of much present-day rhetoric and HPB's own geographical historiography. Hence also the fascinating academic debates concerning the Hegelian End of History. 'Extraterritorial' simply means to jump from one tropic system to another, to leap forward -- in a quantum fashion, not a Maoist fashion -- out of one mode into another. A 'rebirth' or 'renaissance', if you will. But also something new. Historical consciousness is in labor -- we are the expectant Mother Father Child.
All this means that History (and histories) is (are) a makeshift -- a mosaic of contingencies, temporizing narratives and, perhaps, half-truths and lies. As makeshifts, the architecture(s) must fall (in Time) -- hence the inordinate value (poetic and material) of ruins! The realm of 'falling' is -- in historical terms -- the realm of critique, of rant and rave and diatribe. These aesthetic assaults free the embodied (captive) energies of formal languages. In the last fin-de-siècle rave, the Symbolist poets attempted to reinvent language. In the last fin-de-millennium, the Carolingian renaissance gave way, via intermittent Dark Ages, to the Medieval-Gothic transformation of Europe, a recoding of language clearly depicted in architecture (as Ernst Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia instructed the early modernists of this past century). This rewriting of the expressive languages of a patchwork civilization is often attended by an influx of archaic formulations -- one explanation for the rise of the Gothic imagination. There are others ...
As makeshifts, formal languages are contingent configurations of metaphysical and political-economic realities (transpositions). There is always a vested interest ... A status quo to placate. This status is often the greatest impediment (note 'pediment' as an architectonic term) to change, but also guardian against precipitous, catastrophic change. (The guardian of the threshold is merely there to scare off the weak and enfeebled.) HPB looked askance at all forms of anarchy. Her universe was an orderly, evolutionary one. Revolution, for this aristocratic lady from the southern edges of Russia, was anathema. But it is an article of historical consciousness that revolutions do occur -- dramatic, radical changes do come, and a rapid rewriting of the formal languages that constitute the social order is effected. The changes wrought by both the French and Russian Revolutions, despite the reactions that followed, suggest, however, that political patterns are at most superficial, failing to reach the linguistic depths implicit in language (the formal terrain) and spiritual culture (the daemonic terrain). Or, they are out of sequence, and doomed to fail, because historical consciousness is not up to integrating and retaining the impression of this dramatic alteration of the spiritual-historical landscape. Better, then, to be a poet or an architect. Best to be a 'landscape' architect!
Missing Image - Alexandre Seon (1855-1917), “The Lamentation of Orpheus”, Musée d’Orsay (Paris)
The current, late-modern situation is different. There is, by all estimates, an actual, real, possible transformation of global 'significance' underway, in the true sense of change at the deepest levels of our collective being (historical and otherwise). (The phenomenon of the hyperactive global economy is merely a smokescreen.) All canons of taste, and all paradigms, seem to be under continuous, relentless assault by vigorous intellectual critique. The vigor and the sagacity of these critical pursuits (for Truth with half-truths) marks a revolution in contingent expression. The ennui with politics is good news. A new model of contingency, perhaps. Or a new embodiment of human and divine culture. A conscious realization of the Sacred (Divine) in a post-historical territoriality (i.e., language). The postmodern culture of the late-twentieth century (synonyms: post-cultural, post-humanist, post-historical) was essentially a collective howl of dissident voices in the face of so-called modernist hegemony. It (the howl) was/is the collective rave (critique) against the implicit grandstanding of modernist thought -- its explicit hubris. The postmodern critique has freed 'other' voices (see the spectral place/voice of the 'Other' in Lévinas and Derrida). This is the relative value of its transitional status -- for it, too, is passing into historical consciousness. There are many neologisms attached to this process; i.e., neo-modernisms and neo-postmodernisms, especially in the realm of the rapidly shifting cultural arts. Neo-modernism is most evident in the infra-structural (technological) re-coding of material culture. This is inevitable in a materialistic, mechanistic and secular society. But the ineffable is once again stirring -- the breath of other winds stimulating the imagination and world soul. These other voices -- other time-space narratives -- are not wholly new; they are resurgent, having been suppressed or marginalized by dogmatic, materialistic modernism. The principal mode of modernism -- logical positivism -- sometimes misnamed Rationalism -- has long recognized its shadow self in the Other. Its fear of the Other is the basis for a latter-day critique of this relationship within the broad discourses of post-modernity. History is seen now to be what it always already is -- a narrative written and authorized by the heavy-handed. From the friezes of Athena Nike (at the Acropolis) to the Mitterand-authorized Pyramide at the Louvre, the plastic (sculptural) expressions of a culture have long best expressed the sensibilities and the interpretive schema of patronage. This is unavoidable. It may be transcended only by the critical consciousness that reads formal languages for what they are; i.e., sometimes beautiful, sometimes hideous fictions and parables.
III. Otherness
HPB was the 'avatar of otherness'. She brought to modern thought a bevy (a brew) of illicit cultural forms. More importantly, she claimed to hold the key to understand and read them. This was her foremost claim, for others, too, were reviving the treasure-trove of the esoteric under-histories. It was penetrating interpretation that remained elusive or subjective. HPB brought -- reputedly -- a Rosetta Stone to esoteric historiography. Her Secret Doctrine stands as the classic interpretive key, as well as a type of fantastic diatribe against Western epistemological arrogance. Founded, as it is, on an unknown, 'lost' Tibetan Buddhist text, The Stanzas of Dzyan, The Secret Doctrine is an extraordinary and extravagant accessory to the wholesale assault on modernist doctrine that began with the Romantics and continues, today, with the post-humanists. HPB's visage -- as captured in the famous 1889 Resta portrait known as "The Sphinx" -- iconically stands in for the entire anti-modern discourse, an angel of defiance. Her brilliant brainchild -- Theosophy -- despite all of its bastard offspring -- is summarized by that extraordinary portrait of ennui, defiance, and sagacity. Her disdain is palpable, her powerful intellect audible, in the slightly perturbed countenance. Anyone familiar with Walter Pater's musings on Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa can extrapolate further on HPB's historical aura. She is Sphinx and Mona Lisa and, as such, universal enfant terrible. Her eyes beg you -- in their arch-languid ennui and authority -- to dare to contradict her.
HPB rebelled early, most notably at the tender age of 17, leaving the aristocratic life in Russia's Black Sea region (Ekaterinoslav) to travel and gather the materials that would come to fruition in the writings of the 1880s. Her flight from family and country was a classic quest for knowledge -- a Wilhelm Meister-like wandering and 'apprenticeship'. Her own romanticism served as a compass directing her to some of the more remote regions of the 'West', traveling primarily by her wits. As she matured in this wandering, and as she found inspiration in esoteric movements throughout Europe and the Near East, HPB could not but develop a quixotic attitude toward the prevailing scientism and statism of the day. (It is said she fought alongside Mazzini and/or Garibaldi in the Italian civil war.) Her later rhetoric was hyperbolic in proportion to the staid and banal reductionism of the then ascendant empirical and imperial mindset in the West. This included senses of history, as it was coming to be written in this age -- a discipline striving to be analytic and scientific. Objectivity in historical and scientific inquiry has, since, fortunately fallen -- its grandiosity suspect by some, anyway, in its heyday and now by more than a goodly percentage of the populace. HPB adopted a poisoned-pen strategy -- a campaign in colorful letters, articles and texts throughout the 1880s -- partly in response to the assaults on her own ideas by authorities both academic and clerical (histrionics and historiography being traditional bedfellows). The attacks on HPB in turn brought wider acclaim for her research. Her methodologies remained beyond the pale of scholarly brinkmanship due to the unorthodoxies involved. Calling up a text in the astral light, and quoting from it at length (with remarkable accuracy!), left much to be desired by objective historiographic standards. The establishment of the Theosophical Society, in New York in 1875, was the precursor to HPB's publishing campaign. The greatest battles fought were with the Darwinists, with Sankritists (academic philologists) not far behind but equal in rancor. Western religionists of all stripes were, of course, besides themselves, their timetables and concordances dashed in one heroic sweep of HPB's pen. The cause of ruin in the latter case was the publication of Isis Unveiled, a sprawling work that sought to regather the dispersed Hermetic tradition of the Near East and Mediterranean basin into one synthetic 'Western' system. The Russian magus was a holy (unholy) terror to the orthodoxies of both the Anglican and Catholic churches. Neither did she spare Protestantism. Her historiographic imagination appalled them all. The worldview embraced by Theosophy and HPB reduced the Judaic-Christian civilizations to a recent, albeit anemic, echo of former great ages -- the Indo-Aryan (Hindu) fathering the Greco-Roman. Western rationality, derived as it was from the Greco-Roman cultures, was -- as it were -- demolished by the overwhelming weight of this historical perspectivism. New gravitas seized this upstart tradition and set it into a broader context. One it had problems remembering or acknowledging. Western historical amnesia runs deep.
The system collectively known as Western rationality was always unstable. Traced as it was to Hellenic Attica, the foundations were always shaky due to a disruption of the intellectual cross-fertilization (the intercontinental current) that formerly prevailed in Asia Minor between Asia and the Levant. This historical aporia -- lacuna of the most exceptional kind -- has never been adequately explained. Needless to say, Greek humanism was a unique occurrence regardless, as was Hebrew monotheism, and its fore-grounding of what was later to be called self-knowledge or self-consciousness was the beginning of a type of cultural enlightenment. That this occurred at the same time that the Buddha was altering the face of the East, is an important clue to the lost cultural links East and West. Greek culture was disconnected from the Indo-Aryan due, perhaps, to intervening empires hostile to cultural exchange. The fluid relations of open borders were no doubt impeded by regional tyrannies. It was not till Alexander the Great that these links were reforged, but under the yoke of yet another tyranny. In Greece a self-selecting discourse developed that excluded, increasingly, the archaic. The Homeric universe was intentionally deconstructed by Socrates, Plato and the emergent philosophers of Hellenic Greece. Self-knowledge was the byword of this incipient Age of Reason.
(Warning: Sweeping generalizations follow. Philosophy majors please skip this section.)
From Socrates and Plato to Russell and Wittgenstein, logical positivism (and its antecedents and corollaries) outgrew all other discourses as it gave autonomy to the intellect and the individual conscience. The struggle between church and state, throughout the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, was about nothing if not this struggle. Reason's haughty goal was to destroy all beautiful lies (all noble lies). Self-conscious reflection became rational reflection -- abstraction and metaphysics were its agencies. Along the way, a very long way or a very short way depending on your timetable, in the interstices of historical time, dissenting world views were concealed beneath this lofty discourse (secretly doubted by many), kept alive in symbolic languages and isolated communities (as was Christianity during the Dark Ages). These secret codes continued to fascinate those susceptible to non-rational or sur-rational (not irrational) discourses, to romantic and mythic perspectives. Indeed, such are to be found in Plato and his mentor, Socrates, in what might be called (after Thomas Mann) homeopathic dilution or 'whispers'.
Rationalism, although the prevailing idiom in secular practices today, formerly pervaded sacred practices, in their infancy. The pursuit of self-knowledge is a known ingredient of the mystery schools of the pagan Mediterranean cultures. Self-knowledge was the then-dawning vanguard experience. It was radically new, and, therefore, an article of faith in the initiatory rites that survived into the first centuries AD. Metaphysical knowledge -- 'abstract thinking' as it might be termed -- had come to a crisis, in the philosophy of Spinoza, after a long process of consolidation and codification in medieval scholasticism. Spinoza, able to prove the existence of God with concise, logical formulae, was unable to prove the existence of Man. This crisis ushered in a wave of skepticism -- epitomized by Hume and Kant -- and led to the separation of humanistic and scientific studies typified by the splitting of natural philosophy and natural science. Albertus Magnus (Thomas Aquinas' mentor) was one of the last philosophers of note before this tragic, but somehow necessary split or 'fall'. The plunge into materialism followed -- with the attendant narrow frames of mind -- nihilism, existentialism, phenomenology and structuralism. A necessary fall? Hegel's philosophy of history includes a teleological (eschatological?) end -- the enigmatic 'End of History'. In a sense, the End of History is also the End of Metaphysics As We Knew It. This latter event has come to pass -- say savants everywhere -- with the brilliant life-work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. His Tractatus wrapped it all up, so it is claimed, and put a big 'red' bow on it. (What do you mean by red?)
(All clear: End sweeping generalizations. Philosophy majors, please resume reading here.)
IV. End Game
It is wholly possible, then, that the long-anticipated Apocalypse has actually occurred -- passed by! Some of us survived it. This post-cultural mindset -- mood -- that is upon us collectively is, perhaps, the beginning of something quite spectacular. If we manage it, that is. It is curious that the quattrocento humanists tried, in their own way, to reconcile pagan and Christian worldviews. The same could be said of Theosophy, and its brood (although the latter tend to be more pagan than syncretic). As an exemplar of an emergent mindset, Theosophy was the cat's meow to artists and libertines, aristocrats and plutocrats, and, later, Hollywood movie stars. It appealed to their liberality for all the wrong reasons. Theosophy was a transitional humanism -- a fast exit out the side door of modernity's excessively overheated palazzo. It recovered long vanquished discourses, accepted but qualified most modern ones, and, in the act of bridging the two, redeemed both. Theosophy is an architectonic -- a constructional affair and a historical device -- linking the two continents of human intelligence, Reason and Imagination.
As all architectures are contingent (provisional) acts, noble lies incarnate, Theosophy, as HPB framed it, was nothing more or less than a passage toward unity. It has passed, this passage. What now stands to be accomplished is the unity itself. Even so, Theosophy held a magic mirror to History; it assisted, in a sense, to perform the lucrative act of re-enchantment. History has ended. And metaphysics has (so to speak) passed by. So be it! Let the music begin.
"There is a divine power in every man which is to rule his life, and which no one can influence for evil, not even the greatest magician. Let men bring their lives under its guidance, and they have nothing to fear from man or devil." (HPB, 1887) Somehow I hear the echo in these remarks of another event roughly 100 years earlier, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens. Political and theological hope springs eternal ...
V. A Cosmogonic Eros?
One of the enduring mysteries of the run up to the founding of the Theosophical Society is the authorship of the famous Mahatma Letters. These epistolary essays were precipitated out of thin air by HPB or delivered very long distances without the benefit of human agency. They were reportedly written by two disembodied Eastern adepts. They tell the story of the human race and, indeed, the Cosmos. They form the foundation stone of HPB's exegesis. One, in particular, is a denunciation of religious systems and could have been penned by Lenin or Mao. They are now in the British Museum and will one day, no doubt, be submitted to tests such as those recently administered to the Shroud of Turin. Given that we know the human race exists, if not the Cosmos, it may be better to simply smile and move on.
The Editors
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