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The “People of the Secret”,
by Colin Wilson.
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Why did Wilson not title this simply "Madame Blavatsky "?
"Early in 1883 a book called Esoteric Buddhism caused an immediate sensation, and quickly went into a second edition. It was by a slender, balding little man called Alfred Percy Sinnett, editor of India’s most influential newspaper the Pioneer. ... "
" ... In October 1880 Sinnett and his wife had played host to that remarkable lady Madame Blavatsky, who told him that most of her knowledge had been obtained from her “secret Masters” who lived in the Himalayas. She convinced Sinnett of her genuineness by a series of minor miracles. ... "
Wilson goes on to describe how the book, and Sinnett, became sensations, only to fall when Richard Hodgson discovered that miracles by Madame Blavatsky were involved. He describes them, and it's unclear why they induced the fall, even though they were not of world shaking order.
" ... It was the result of an investigation by a young man named Richard Hodgson, who had talked to Madame Blavatsky’s housekeepers and learned that most of the “miracles” were fraudulent; their most convincing demonstration was to cause a letter – addressed to Hodgson and referring to the conversation they had only just had – to fall out of the air above his head. Hodgson’s report had the effect of totally destroying Madame Blavatsky’s credibility, and demolishing the myth of the “hidden Masters” in Tibet. ... "
The said miracles, described by him, seem not less than, say, turning water into wine!
Wilson goes on to discuss occult and cybernetics, Alice Bailey and Rev. Stainton Moses, and more.
" ... George Gurdjieff, one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century, spent much of his youth in search of a certain “Sarmoung Brotherhood”, and claimed to have received his basic teachings from a monastic brotherhood in the northern Himalayas. ... But books like In Search of the Miraculous (by Gurdjieff’s leading follower P.D. Ouspensky) make it clear that behind Gurdjieff’s “psychological” teachings lay a highly complex cosmological system, which has no obvious relevance to the psychological teachings, and which it seems unlikely that Gurdjieff invented himself."
"The existence of a secret tradition of hidden teachings is hinted at in Idries Shah’s book The Sufis, and it was in a review of this book in the London Evening News that its literary editor, Edward Campbell, wrote:
"For many centuries there has been a strange legend in the East. It suggests that in some hidden centre, perhaps in the Highlands of Central Asia, there exists a colony of men possessing exceptional powers. This centre acts, in some respects at least, as the secret government of the world.
"Some aspects of this legend came to the West during the Crusades; the idea was renewed in Rosicrucian guise in 1614; it was restated with variations last century by Mme Blavatsky and the French diplomat Jacoliot; was suggested again by the English author Talbot Mundy, and most recently by the Mongolian traveller Ossendowski in 1918.
"In the mysterious Shangri-la of this legend, certain men, evolved beyond the ordinary human situation, act as the regents of powers beyond this planet.
"Through lower echelons – who mingle unsuspected in ordinary walks of life, both East and West – they act at critical stages of history, contriving results necessary to keep the whole evolution of the earth in step with events in the solar system."
" ... Egypt gave birth to the world of the Greeks, and the Greeks transmitted the “energy of fertilization” to Rome via the philosophy of the Stoics and Epicureans. “Again a period of dazzling achievement seemingly from nowhere”. Early Christianity sprang out of Rome, but by the eighth century had fossilized into the corrupt church of the mediaeval papacy. ... “In each of these there was a suggestion of a whole unseen cosmology; each an encyclopedia in stone containing, for those who could read . . . a summary of the Plan and Purpose of evolution”. ... "
Wilson goes on to discuss Idris Shah, Delia Bacon, zeitgeist, Yeats, and more.
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December 09, 2021 - December 11, 2021.
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