Dissertation

Initiated Reading: Occult Hermeneutics in Helena Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled

Brown, Diana

2024

Overview

In this dissertation, I argue that Theosophical Society co-founder Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s first major work, Isis Unveiled (1877), describes an occult hermeneutic of myth based on the privileging of intuition, theorized especially in Neoplatonic terms, and premised on a tripartite spirit-soul-body constitution of the human being. Her hermeneutic also privileges initiation, construed as experiential gnosis often produced by ritual, and she opposes both intuition and initiation to reason and empiricism. Theorizing global myths as allegories revealing elements of a universal religion, or secret doctrine, traceable to India, she brings together an esotericism premised on a combination of Indian religion and thought with the Renaissance amalgamation of Neoplatonism, Hermeticism and Kabbalah. My elucidation of the hermeneutics espoused in Isis also includes explications of Blavatsky’s ideas about the nature of human beings, the world, and the divine, indicating the degree to which reading is imbricated with all facets of her thinking, and I demonstrate the ways in which magical ability and readerly ability are of a piece in her thinking. I also highlight Blavatsky’s significant engagement in polemic with and citation of natural scientists and textual scholars of the nineteenth century. In doing so, I argue that she engages in what I call para-academic argument, meaning that she argues partly in the terms of philological scholars, whose concerns with comparison and origins she genuinely shares, in order to make a partially public case for truths only fully accessible through intuitive and initiatory means. Significantly for the study of religion, Blavatsky engages and opposes Friedrich Max Müller, often remembered as the founder of the modern academic study of religion, in his arguments about the epistemological superiority of the scholar over emic interpreters. Through Blavatsky’s engagement with and positioning of the occult vis-à-vis such scholarship and the impact of Isis Unveiled and the Theosophical Society, I argue that the academic study of religion becomes constitutive of modern occultism.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: American history / American studies / Religion / Sociology
• ISBN: 9798383570913