Review: La Grande Blavatsky by Francesca Serra

Presented at a 1998 AAR regional meeting, this paper provides historical context and commentary on H. P. Blavatsky's first theosophical article, written two months before the Theosophical Society was founded in September 1875, and which serves as a mission statement of her work to come.

Marburg Journal of Religion, 2008

The Theosophical Society (est. 1875), and its associated texts have sometimes been characterized as counter-Orientalizing or only partially Orientalizing, in the sense of at least departing from "official" British-Indian Orientalism and providing a critique of that discourse. In somewhat the same vein, the society has also been characterized as playful, self-ironic and/or postmodernist, and/or as broadly reformist in not only an anti-colonial but also an anti-patriarchal and pro-or-protofeminist way. These approaches fail to grapple with the nature of the orientalism that was fundamental to the foundation of the TS, as well as the pronounced entrepreneurial and exploitative aspect of the cult, its strategic and emotional structuring, and the significance of its syncretizing and revitalizationist processes.

The Theosophist, 2022

An exploration of a statement written by H. P. Blavatsky in her book "The Key to Theosophy," which serves as a mission statement for the Theosophical Society.

It is well known that the worldviews of modern Theosophy are based largely on authoritative claims of superior clairvoyance. But what did clairvoyance really mean for Theosophists in the decades before and after 1900? How did it work? And where did the practice come from? I will be arguing that the specific type of clairvoyance claimed by Theosophists should not be confused – as is usually done in the literature – with its Spiritualist counterpart: while Spiritualists relied on somnambulist trance states induced by Mesmeric techniques, Theosophists relied on the human faculty of the imagination, understood as a superior cognitive power operating in a fully conscious state. As will be seen, this Theosophical understanding of the clairvoyant imagination can be traced very precisely to a forgotten nineteenth-century author, Joseph Rodes Buchanan, whose work was subsequently popularized by William and Elizabeth Denton. Buchanan’s theory and practice of “psychometry” is fundamental to the clairvoyant claims of all the major Theosophists, from Helena P. Blavatsky herself to later authors such as Annie Besant, Charles Webster Leadbeater and Rudolf Steiner.

La Rosa di Paracelso 1 (2017), 2017

In: Christopher Partridge (ed.), The Occult World, Routledge 2015, 119-127.