Blavatsky’s Coming Race: Nationalism, Racism and Fiction in Theosophical Doctrine PDF

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Draft Copy – Do Not Cite Blavatsky’s Coming Race: Nationalism, Racism, and Fiction in Theosophical Doctrine John L. Crow, Florida State University In 1888, the American section of the Theosophical Society began holding an annual convention, bringing together the nation’s Theosophists to organize the...

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Draft Copy – Do Not Cite

Blavatsky’s Coming Race: Nationalism, Racism, and Fiction in Theosophical Doctrine John L. Crow, Florida State University In 1888, the American section of the Theosophical Society began holding an annual convention, bringing together the nation’s Theosophists to organize their efforts, and celebrate their achievements. Society co-founder, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, sent a letter to each annual convention, and in them, she frequently mentioned the unique role America played in the advancement of the human race. According to her two-volume magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, America would be the home of the next sub-race of the fifth root-race.1 That is, in her scheme of human evolution, America would be home to the next sub-group of the current level of human spiritual and physical evolution.2 By her 1891 letter, which was also her last, she mentions, like in many of her previous letters, the unique position of Americans, and warns that their developing powers needed to be controlled. “Your position as the forerunners of the sixth sub-race of the fifth root-race has its own special perils as well as its special advantages.”3 In this letter Blavatsky connects American nationalism directly to her theories of human race development. These theories were also influenced by, not only established nineteenth-century racial categories, but the occult fiction of the English novelist, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in particular, his last novel, The Coming Race. Building on texts she encountered in India, nineteenth-century theories of race, her American patriotism, and Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, Blavatsky developed a theory of human evolution that simultaneously separated humanity into distinct races while, at the same time, celebrated the mixing of races in the United States. As a result, American Theosophists, and later offshoots, combined American nationalism and occultism in the development of their occult doctrines which still persist today and influence a

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2 variety of esoteric traditions. However, before engaging Blavatsky’s theories of race, we must first briefly review the race theories which permeated nineteenth century. Racism is hardly a modern phenomenon. However, beginning in the eighteenth century, the emergence of scientism gave it a renewed veneer of legitimacy. By the end of the eighteenth century, natural scientists had developed a variety of schemas, such as skull size and volume, skin and hair color, and other physical traits that reified the preexisting hierarchy applied to the races. Accordingly, this emerging science demonstrated that Europeans were superior to all other races, Africans the lowest, and others in between. One of the first biological classification systems came from the Swedish naturalist, Carolus Linnaeus, wherein he divided humans into numerous categories.4 Linnaeus looked not at the intellect, but solely the biological aspects of man, moving away from the justification of man’s superiority over other animals by his ability to reason. This moved man into the purely biological realm, making “the human species as merely one part of the natural system, legitimately classified in the same way as flora and fauna.”5 Overall, these natural scientists considered “white” as the standard and attempted to explain skin color variations. Many explained skin color difference as a result of natural conditions such as climate and geography, an explanation that dated back to the ancient Greeks.6 Indeed, it was primarily skin color that became the factor in determining race. Other attributes, physical and mental, were considered with it, but color was the primary physical determinant. This emphasis on skin color was, in many ways, due to the history of slavery, and in particular European chattel slavery which began as early as the fifteenth century and reached maturity in the eighteenth. While antiquity consistently demonstrated a propensity for humans to oppress and enslave each other, there was always an ambiguity in the status of slaves. In most cases, they looked similar to their owners. David Brion Davis notes “some slaves merely had their heads shorn or wore an

3 identification tablet of clay or metal, which could be broken when they were freed.”7 Other cultures were known to brand or tattoo slaves. These methods were necessary because no intrinsic designation identified the person as a slave. However, with the European enslavement of Africans, black skin began to emerge as a natural indicator of enslavement. Once black skin became the natural designation of slaves, numerous explanations, within the framework of slavery, were created to reify that status. Early natural scientists frequently turned to theological explanations for what they saw as blacks’ inherent inferiority. One such explanation was the Bible claiming races were the result of Noah’s curse.8 Thus, the task of scholars concerned with the origins of race, “was to trace which of the three sons of Noah gave rise to the various other ethnic groups.”9 This classification, as historian Sylvester Johnson writes, persisted into nineteenth-century America and became the dominant categorization, or “ethnological rhetoric, being summarized in the three colors, white, yellow and black.”10 Another explanation, compatible with the Myth of Ham, appealed to the notion of the Great Chain of Being (scala naturae). Built on Platonic and Neo-Platonic notions of emanation, this idea was naturalized to explain the varying races, describing non-white races as intermediaries leading to the apex, white Europeans. In terms of slavery, “the method helped to buttress and confirms a hierarchy of cultures that could be ranked or graded along a variety of dimensions from savagery to civilization.”11 Ultimately, as Audrey Smedley, a historian of race in America, summarizes, determining the difference between races were the central concern of Pre-Darwinian anthropology.12 When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 and later, The Descent of Man (1871), he challenged certain typologies of race and supported others. In his work, he described the means by which animals survive and adapt to conditions. In The Descent of Man,

4 he applies his theories of evolution to mankind, claiming humans evolved from animals and “that man’s mental and moral nature was not different in kind from that of animals, but only in degree and quantity.”13 Thus, his work challenged various race origin theories and Biblical notions, such as the Curse of Ham and the claim that human beings had not changed since God created them. However, his findings supported other race positions such as the Chain of Being and inherited abilities and characteristics. Indeed, as Nancy Stepan notes, in the long run, Darwin’s ideas tended to “strengthen rather than overthrow traditional racist ideas.”14 During this evolving discussion on race, there was a parallel discussion of what was becoming of those immigrating to America. These discussions were mixed with American nationalism that emerged after the United States achieved independence from Great Britain. One of the first to make reference to this emerging “race” was the French-American, John Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. In his Letters from an American Farmer (1782), he describes how the European, once living in America, abandons his former country and is “melted into a new race of men.”15 These Europeans became a “race called Americans.”16 This understanding of racial identity and the discourse of an “American race” became a common trope repeated by numerous Americans and immigrants throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. By the mid- to late-nineteenth century, the idea of a new race of mankind emerging in America was commonly discussed, especially in intellectual circles. One illustration was in the writings of German-émigré and scholar of American Religion, Philip Schaff. In his work, he comments on “America’s digestive power” whereby it assimilates all “foreign elements, excepting only the African and Chinese.”17 Indeed, for Schaff the new American man was a combination of European materials, an amalgamation where one could only find the “faint echo of European nationalities” of which it was composed.18 Stephen R. Graham, a biographer of

5 Schaff’s, points out that both Schaff and Crèvecoeur had similar views including the agreement that “in this chaos of peoples the traces of a specifically American national character may be discerned.”19 At the turn of the twentieth century, artists were also incorporating claims of a new American race into their work, especially works that celebrated the assimilation of minorities into the masses of Americans. In 1900, Charles W. Chesnutt published three essays in the Boston Evening Transcript where he claimed that the American races, especially African Americans, were being slowly assimilated. In 1908, the London born Russian Jew, Israel Zangwill, released the play The Melting Pot. The plot describes the struggle of two Russian immigrants, one a Christian and the other a Jew, who overcome the cultural divisions that keep them apart. The play’s “patriotic rhetoric, poly-ethnic sentiments, and sacred imagery”20 celebrates America’s ability to form a new people and to bring together such diverse peoples of race and religion. Zangwill’s ideals mirrors Crèvecoeur’s central theme, a message, which judging by the enthusiastic response of The Melting Pot from the opening night audience, “was attractive to many Americans,” well into the twentieth century.21 Americans were not the only ones looking at North America and imagining a new, unified race. The English novelist, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, also had this assimilation of races at the center of his last book, The Coming Race (1871).22 The story opens in America in the nineteenth century. The unnamed American protagonist is asked to assist in exploring a troublesome mine. Quickly the plot shifts, the protagonist finds himself trapped underground in the presence of a new race of formidable humans powered by a mysterious energy called “vril.”23 Describing the race of the new people, the protagonist appealed to scientific ideas that the mixing of races was positive. Yet, the protagonist’ discussion continues indicating that only the

6 intermarrying of civilized races was permitted and that the non-civilized, i.e. the non-Vril-ya races, were “regarded with more disdain than citizens of New York regard the negroes.”24 Thus, Bulwer-Lytton mirrors the views of others discussed previously who agreed that intermixing was permissible, but only with European peoples. Another social critique contained in The Coming Race, one also found in Blavatsky’s work, is Bulwer-Lytton’s disdain for the ideas of Darwin and evolution. Darwin understood humans as nothing but higher forms of animals. BulwerLytton’s claimed a more religious understanding of humans. This negative view of evolution, as we will see, was shared by Blavatsky. With the publishing of The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky claimed to reveal the occult composition of the cosmos and the hidden evolutionary history of humanity from a lost volume called Book of Dzyan. The stanzas from this occult volume read something akin to a combination of Bible and Vedanta literature. The second volume of The Secret Doctrine, entitled, “Anthropogenesis” tells of the past, present, and future races of humanity, beginning with spirit beings. During this process humans experienced a “fall from grace” and became stuck in physical forms. It is in these stanzas from the Book of Dzyan that Blavatsky makes her first refutation of Darwin. Whereas Darwin claims humans evolved from primates, Blavatsky’s Book of Dzyan claims that ancient races of humanity interbred with animals and the results were primates. While the means of refuting Darwin are different, the points of Bulwer-Lytton and Blavatsky were the same; humans have a spiritual component that other animals lack. And just to be clear to her readers, Blavatsky states, “The real line of evolution differs from the Darwinian, and the two systems are irreconcilable, except when the latter is divorced from the dogma of ‘Natural Selection’ and the like.”25

7 Also similar to Bulwer-Lytton was Blavatsky’s view of the differences in race. Both Bulwer-Lytton and Blavatsky adopted the prevailing Anglo-American classifications of race present at the end of the nineteenth century. Bulwer-Lytton projected his ideas of the various Aryan races onto the Vril-ya and their revulsion of non-vril using tribes. Blavatsky adopted the prevailing race categorizations and projected them onto her rounds of races. The first two races were spirit beings with varying levels of material bodies. The third and oldest of the human races was red, similar to Bulwer-Lytton’s oldest Vril-ya, and the fourth was brown which became black because of the sin that caused the fall. In fact, there were a large variety of skin colors including black, brown, red, yellow and white. However, much like other 19th century racialists, Blavatsky says that all the colors come down to three categories: Esotericism now classes these seven variations, with their four great divisions, into only three distinct primeval races — as it does not take into consideration the First Race, which had neither type nor colour, and hardly an objective, though colossal form. The evolution of these races, their formation and development, went pari passu and on parallel lines with the evolution, formation, and development of three geological strata, from which the human complexion was as much derived as it was determined by the climates of those zones. It names three great divisions, namely, the red-yellow, the black, and the brown-white.26 She continues, the highest, the brown-white is associated with Aryans. “The Aryan races, for instance, now varying from dark brown, almost black, red-brown-yellow, down to the whitest creamy colour, are yet all of one and the same stock — the Fifth Root-Race.”27 She explains that the major races of humanity developed in the fourth root race where the skin darkened because humanity became “black with sin.” She also claims that the lowest forms of humanity are “the ‘narrow brained’ South-Sea Islanders, the African, and the Australian.”28 She states that “African negroes” and “Chinamen” are hybrid remnants of the fourth root race.29 Of course, not all scholars see the connections between Blavatsky’s categories and those of the scientific racialists

8 of her age. James Santucci, one of the foremost scholars on Theosophy, rejects any notion that Blavatsky’s understandings of race were similar to other racialist scientists. He writes, The Theosophical explanation of race provided by Blavatsky and Sinnett should be considered to be entirely separate and apart from the discussions of race common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Any discussion of race in Theosophy must be considered from a different perspective, one that is cosmic and ultimately divine in scope.30 Santucci’s explanation for why Theosophists, in particular Blavatsky, have a separate perspective from those who are considered racist is not convincing. He explains root-races and the cosmological evolution addressed previously. He enters the discussion of the Hindu sources including the Laws of Manu. After reviewing all the material, he concludes stating that “Even a superficial reading of the works of A. P. Sinnett and Helena P. Blavatsky, the two authors who respectively popularized and provided a grand synthesis of the esoteric or occult universe, reveals the absence of racist attitudes.”31 Yet his statement leads one to ask, is it only a coincidence that the race hierarchy Blavatsky claims is part of the esoteric records matches nineteenth century notions of race science? Santucci seems to want to insulate Blavatsky from the labels of racism and the using of terms such as Aryan, which is commonly associated with the Nazis. This seems somewhat justified as many project Nazi racial notions back in time and tar her with their atrocities. However, are these two choices the only ones available to conclude about Blavatsky and race? That she was either a Nazi racist or completely free from all forms of racism? Perhaps it makes more sense to understand Blavatsky as a participant in the discourse of race and European political supremacy during the age of European colonialism. Much like the theorists noted previously, Blavatsky repeatedly cites various scientists, anthropologists, and the like. She debates them, agrees with some and dismisses others. We have already noted her disagreements with Darwin, but she also weighs in on other issues pertinent in her time. She also

9 asserts that races can mix and that race combinations can be beneficial, contrary to those who saw race mixing as degenerating. Thus, instead of denying Blavatsky’s views on race, views which may be distasteful by today’s standards, it seems more reasonable to contextualize and historicize her views, and note which ways her racial claims were not very divergent from other Europeans and Americans of the time. This brings us to her assertions about the next sub-race of the fifth root-race, the Aryans. Blavatsky claims they will come from America because of race mixing. When Blavatsky immigrated to America, she became an American citizen. She was immensely proud of her adopted country as noted previously, and as such, it is not surprising that the rhetoric of a new American race found its way into her narrative of evolution. In her writing we see how the rhetoric going back to Crèvecoeur finds its way into the “occult history” of humanity, and singles out America as the home of the next sub-race of the Aryans, supplanting the Europeans. Blavatsky is unclear as to which races or sub-races are involved in the intermixing, and this ambiguity leaves open the possibility for race inclusion. However in practice, minorities are rarely mentioned or included in Theosophical discourses, although this is not always the case. In 1895, due to a disagreement between Theosophical leaders in America and Europe, a large portion of the American Theosophical Society separated from the headquarters in Adyar, and created their own, independent branch of Theosophy under the leadership of Katherine Tingley. Tingley established a community based on her vision of Theosophy. Prior to Point Loma, which races were involved in the new American race remained vague in practice. Historian W. Michael Ashcraft notes that Judge stressed the Anglo-Saxon base of America in his writings. Point Loma, in contrast, founded just after Judge’s death, had a much larger mix of races including a significant number of Cubans who were involved with the Theosophical

10 schools established on the island. This diverse national heritage found in Point Loma combined with a view of wishing peace for all nations, but also understanding America’s special role. As part of this role, Tingley integrated what has been called a “Higher Patriotism” into her community’s Theosophical practice. Ashcraft writes, Point Loma Theosophists “spoke of the American continent being purified of the poisons left from the negative karma of older races who indulged their passions.”32 Indeed, William Q. Judge claimed that the Theosophical Master’s, the enlightened adepts who instructed the society, guided the American founding fathers to not insert provisions into the Constitution affirming any religious establishment, and even prior to the Constitution, they “oversaw” the drafting of the Declaration of Independence.33 Point Loma Theosophists frequently called America the “United States of the World” and Tingley states that “higher patriotism found embodiment in future Americans whose commonalities prevailed over all other ethnic and national loyalties.”34 Ashcraft continues, “Point Loma Theosophists highlighted this combination of Theosophical principle with emphasis on American life and society in their use of patriotic symbols from American history, especially the Revolutionary War era.”35 One symbol, in particular, was the American flag which became central to the educational environment.36 In fact, it was Tingley’s Raja Yoga schools t...