Books by Julie Mattos-Hall (Chajes)
Recycled Lives: A History of Reincarnation in Blavatsky's Theosophy , 2019
This study historicises and contextualises the rebirth doctrines of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (18... more This study historicises and contextualises the rebirth doctrines of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), the matriarch of the Theosophical Society and one of the most influential women of the nineteenth century. It analyses Blavatsky’s complicated theories about the cosmos and its divine source as presented in her two seminal Theosophical treatises, Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), as well as her articles and letters. The book argues that Blavatsky taught two distinct theories of rebirth and that the later one developed from the earlier. It reveals Blavatsky’s appropriation of a plethora of contemporaneous works in the construction of these doctrines and contextualises her interpretations in nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural life. In particular, it explores Blavatsky’s adaptations of Spiritualist ideas, scientific theories, Platonism, and Oriental religions, which in turn are set in relief against broader nineteenth-century American and European trends. The chapters come together to reveal the contours of a modern perspective on reincarnation that is inseparable from the nineteenth-century discourses within which it emerged. In addition, it reveals some consequential, perhaps unexpected, and evidently under-acknowledged historical roots of the reincarnationism that is so popular in today’s post-modern world.
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The Cosmic Movement: Sources, Contexts, Impact , 2021
This volume is the first-ever publication devoted to the Cosmic Movement, a mysterious esoteric o... more This volume is the first-ever publication devoted to the Cosmic Movement, a mysterious esoteric organization that was active in the early twentieth century and spawned movements that are still active today. The book includes sixteen chapters that cover the origins, history, contexts, doctrines, practices, and offshoots of the movement, detailing the lives, literary output, and teachings of the movement’s founders, Max Théon and Mary Ware, as well as its later developments and derivatives, which include the celebrated Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and Mirra Alfassa.
Contributors: Toshio Akai, Asher Binyamin, Jean-Pierre Brach, Helena Čapková, Julie Chajes, Christian Chanel, John Patrick Deveney, Christine Ferguson, Peter Heehs, Boaz Huss, Shimon Lev, Jonatan Meir, Michele Olzi, Daniel Raveh, Hana Ewa Raziel, and Gal Sofer.
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Theosophical Appropriations: Esotericism, Kabbalah, and the Transformation of Traditions, edited by Julie Chajes and Boaz Huss, 2016
Theosophical Appropriations
Esotericism, Kabbalah and the Transformation of Traditions
Editors: ... more Theosophical Appropriations
Esotericism, Kabbalah and the Transformation of Traditions
Editors: Julie Chajes, Boaz Huss
The thirteen chapters of this volume examine intersections between theosophical thought and areas as diverse as the arts, literature, scholarship, politics, and, especially, modern interpretations of Judaism and kabbalah. Each chapter offers a case study in theosophical appropriations of a different type and in different context. The chapters join together to reveal congruencies between theosophical ideas and a wide range of contemporaneous intellectual, cultural, religious, and political currents. They demonstrate the far-reaching influence of the theosophical movement worldwide from the late-nineteenth century to the present day.
Contributors: Karl baier, Julie Chajes, John Patrick Deveney, Victoria Ferentinou, Olav Hammer, Boaz Huss, Massimo Introvigne, Andreas Kilcher, Eugene Kuzmin, Shimon Lev, Isaac Luberlsky, Tomer Persico, Helmut Zander.
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Papers by Julie Mattos-Hall (Chajes)
Nova Religio, 2024
The matriarch of Theosophy, Helena P. Blavatsky (1831–1891), wrote a short devotional text called... more The matriarch of Theosophy, Helena P. Blavatsky (1831–1891), wrote a short devotional text called The Voice of the Silence (1889) the end of her life that she intended as scripture and which has been endorsed with enthusiasm by individuals both within and outside the parent Theosophical Society. This article approaches the production of The Voice of the Silence as a case study in the construction of scripture, outlining the work’s doctrines (particularly regarding kundalini and the higher idhhis), describing the controversies that impelled Blavatsky to publish it, and exploring some of her key literary sources. It reveals that Blavatsky strategically rewrote an earlier publication, Light on the Path (1885), by the English Theosophist Mabel Collins (1851–1927). Blavatsky enriched her writing of The Voice of the Silence with material taken from a handful of articles on Hindu thought, including Yoga, written by Indian Theosophists and others. She responded to challenges to her authority by producing a new Theosophical scripture that addressed issues of spiritual and temporal power.
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Numen, 2021
The Theosophical Society was an influential transnational religious movement founded by H. P. Bla... more The Theosophical Society was an influential transnational religious movement founded by H. P. Blavatsky and others in 1875. With its theology of the impersonal Divine, Theosophy was particularly influential on the New Age, which inherited a propensity to see the divine in impersonal terms. Offering a corrective to the recent historiographical tendency that focuses solely on Theosophy’s Western aspects, this article analyzes Blavatsky’s written “conversations” on the nature of the Divine with two Indian Theosphists, T. Subba Row (1856–1890) and Mohini Chatterji (1858–1936). Contextualizing these discussions both globally and locally, it reveals Blavatsky’s engagement with Subba Row’s Vedantic reading of John Stuart Mill and her concurrent rejection of Mohini’s Brahmo-Samaj inspired theism. The article considers the power dynamics that lay behind these negotiations. It argues that they involved a mutual drive for legitimacy and were the result of complex transcultural encounters that resist reductionist historiographical tendencies.
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Innovation in Esotericism from the Renaissance to the Present, 2021
Chajes’s chapter draws attention to the complexity that characterizes the encounter between tradi... more Chajes’s chapter draws attention to the complexity that characterizes the encounter between traditions, and encourages the reader to reconsider the boundaries of innovation and tradition. Chajes discusses what seems to be a case of the Buddhist tradition encountering, and rejecting, a Theosophical Orientalist innovation. The conflict centred on the notion of Self, which “orthodox” Theravada Buddhism denied, but which the Theosophist Henry S. Olcott upheld. Olcott’s insistence on the existence of a Self had a Western basis, but his approach was reinforced by Theravada minorities and by the wider tradition of Eastern, particularly Chinese, Mahayana Buddhism. The encounter is a case-study in cultural entanglement that revelas Theosophical Orientalism to have been a more complex phenomenon than has previously been acknoweldged.
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The Cosmic Movement: Sources, Contexts, impact edited by Julie Chajes and Boaz Huss, 2021
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The Cosmic Movement: Sources, Contexts, Impact , 2021
This chapter introduces one of the most important (and hitherto untapped) archival sources in the... more This chapter introduces one of the most important (and hitherto untapped) archival sources in the history of the Cosmic Movement, the personal diary of Max and Madame Théons’ friend and secretary, Augusta Rolfe. Rolfe began writing her diary in 1876 when she was thirty years old and stopped in 1924 when she was almost eighty. The diary covers three clear sections of Rolfe’s life: her time as a nun with Mary Ware as her mother superior; a period in London, during which she attended many plays and participated in the Spiritualist scene, where Mare Ware was known as Una; and her time in Algeria with the Théons. The chapter focuses only on the first section of the diary. It describes the establishment of the sisterhood and considers the influence of the Oxford Movement. Chajes quotes excerpts that touch on daily life at the convent, revealing Claydon to have been a small, transient community of women who undertook some religious duties and charity work but also enjoyed a lot of leisure. She explains the anti-Catholic sentiment that motivated the hostilities Teresa describes and argues that Victorian gender politics were at stake: Convents were disliked because they challenged conventional middle-class family values.
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Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 2021
This paper explains the perennialist doctrines of Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), the main theorist... more This paper explains the perennialist doctrines of Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), the main theorist of Theosophy, a form of occultism whose heirs include New Age and contemporary Pagan spirituality. The analysis is restricted to her first major work, Isis Unveiled (1877). In that treatise, Blavatsky argued that a single Pagan tradition lay at the basis of all historical religions and that this ancient wisdom had been corrupted by the Catholic and Protestant churches to gain power over the blind masses. Providing a fine-grained understanding of such influential heterodox perspectives of the nineteenth century, the article contributes to a historicization of religious universalism and other ideas that have become popular in modern and post-modern times, such as the claim that a perennial "mysticism" lies at the heart of all "true spirituality," the idea that "spirituality" is something different from "religion," and the theory that monotheism is an inherently intolerant form of religion whereas mystical, Pagan, or polytheistic spiritualities are inherently peaceful. Scholarly appreciation for the cultural and historical significance of nineteenth-century heterodox currents such as Spiritualism and occultism is growing. This paper contributes to that trend by examining Theosophy, a form of occultism that has impacted many facets of intellectual, cultural, and political life from the late-nineteenth century to the present day, either directly, or through its many derivative
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Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism, 2018
This article considers how the matriarch of the Theosophical Society, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (... more This article considers how the matriarch of the Theosophical Society, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) constructed the category “science,” situating this construal within a world in which the boundaries of “legitimate” science were more contested than they are today. Focusing on her teachings on rebirth, the article demonstrates that Blavatsky’s doctrines owe a considerable debt to the scientific theories under discussion at her time of writing. It explores her debt to the controversial physicists Balfour Stewart (1828–1887) and Peter Guthrie Tait (1831–1909), her hostility towards the popular materialist monism of Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), her hatred of Darwinism, and her preference for theories of evolution influenced by German Romanticism, such as the progressivist versions of orthogenesis proposed by Carl Wilhelm von Nägeli (1817–1891), Karl Ernst von Baer (1792–1876), and Darwin’s nemesis, Richard Owen (1804–1892).
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Correspondences 5 , 2017
Throughout her career as an occultist, H. P. Blavatsky (1831–1891), the primary theorist of the n... more Throughout her career as an occultist, H. P. Blavatsky (1831–1891), the primary theorist of the nineteenth century's most influential occultist movement, the Theosophical Society, taught two distinct theories of rebirth: metempsychosis and reincarnation. This paper provides a detailed description of the latter, as outlined in Blavatsky's magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine (1888), and contemporaneous publications. In so doing, it offers several correctives and refinements to scholarly analyses of Theosophical reincarnationism offered over the last thirty years.
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Journal of Religion in Europe , 2016
Madame Blavatsky (1831–1891), the influential occultist, transvalued the category of monotheism, ... more Madame Blavatsky (1831–1891), the influential occultist, transvalued the category of monotheism, abandoning, in The Secret Doctrine (1888) the positive interpretation that it had been given in Isis Unveiled (1877). This reversal of the prevailing Enlightenment-based valuation of monotheism was related to Blavatsky's construction of identity as an esotericist. Her discussions must be situated within a wider 'invention' of monotheism as a category (taking place most significantly from the early nineteenth century), and they can be contextualised in relation to the contemporaneous philological, Egyptological, and Orientalist scholarship on which she drew.
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Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts, 2018
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Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts , 2018
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Theosophical Appropriations: Esotericism, Kabbalah, and the Transformation of Traditions
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2015
This paper offers an historical and cultural analysis of two treatises of heterodox spirituality:... more This paper offers an historical and cultural analysis of two treatises of heterodox spirituality: Sympneumata (1885) and Scientific Religion (1888), and a novel, Massolam (1886). The main author was the celebrated Victorian diplomat Laurence Oliphant (1829-1888). Drawing on the teachings of the American “prophet” Thomas Lake Harris (1823-1906), Laurence Oliphant and his wife, Alice Le Strange (1846-1886), taught that everyone has a spiritual and physical complement of the opposite gender that can be encountered internally through spiritual practice. Humanity must abandon sexual intercourse in favour of individual communion with this counterpart, in order to return to its prelapsarian androgynous nature. Despite antecedents in earlier esoteric currents, the Oliphants’ androgyne was a Victorian androgyne. It was intimately entwined with the pressing social, cultural, intellectual, political and religious needs of a secularizing world in which the roles and rights of Woman were central—and contested—issues. It can be read as an answer to the nineteenth century “problem of sex” and the “Woman Question,” and it was both conservative and transgressive.
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This article offers a historical and cultural analysis of two treatises of heterodox spirituality... more This article offers a historical and cultural analysis of two treatises of heterodox spirituality: Sympneumata (1885) and Scientific Religion (1888), and a novel, Massolam (1886). The main author was the celebrated Victorian diplomat Laurence Oliphant (1829–1888). Drawing on the teachings of the American “prophet” Thomas Lake Harris (1823–1906), Laurence Oliphant and his wife, Alice Le Strange (1846–1886), taught that everyone has a spiritual and physical complement of the opposite gender that can be encountered internally through spiritual practice. Humanity must abandon sexual intercourse in favor of individual communion with this counterpart, in order to return to its prelapsarian androgynous nature. Despite antecedents in earlier esoteric currents, the Oliphants' androgyne was a Victorian androgyne. It was intimately entwined with the pressing social, cultural, intellectual, political, and religious needs of a secularizing world in which the roles and rights of Woman were central—and contested—issues. It can be read as an answer to the nineteenth-century “problem of sex” and the “Woman Question,” and it was both conservative and transgressive.
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Books by Julie Mattos-Hall (Chajes)
Contributors: Toshio Akai, Asher Binyamin, Jean-Pierre Brach, Helena Čapková, Julie Chajes, Christian Chanel, John Patrick Deveney, Christine Ferguson, Peter Heehs, Boaz Huss, Shimon Lev, Jonatan Meir, Michele Olzi, Daniel Raveh, Hana Ewa Raziel, and Gal Sofer.
Esotericism, Kabbalah and the Transformation of Traditions
Editors: Julie Chajes, Boaz Huss
The thirteen chapters of this volume examine intersections between theosophical thought and areas as diverse as the arts, literature, scholarship, politics, and, especially, modern interpretations of Judaism and kabbalah. Each chapter offers a case study in theosophical appropriations of a different type and in different context. The chapters join together to reveal congruencies between theosophical ideas and a wide range of contemporaneous intellectual, cultural, religious, and political currents. They demonstrate the far-reaching influence of the theosophical movement worldwide from the late-nineteenth century to the present day.
Contributors: Karl baier, Julie Chajes, John Patrick Deveney, Victoria Ferentinou, Olav Hammer, Boaz Huss, Massimo Introvigne, Andreas Kilcher, Eugene Kuzmin, Shimon Lev, Isaac Luberlsky, Tomer Persico, Helmut Zander.
Papers by Julie Mattos-Hall (Chajes)
Contributors: Toshio Akai, Asher Binyamin, Jean-Pierre Brach, Helena Čapková, Julie Chajes, Christian Chanel, John Patrick Deveney, Christine Ferguson, Peter Heehs, Boaz Huss, Shimon Lev, Jonatan Meir, Michele Olzi, Daniel Raveh, Hana Ewa Raziel, and Gal Sofer.
Esotericism, Kabbalah and the Transformation of Traditions
Editors: Julie Chajes, Boaz Huss
The thirteen chapters of this volume examine intersections between theosophical thought and areas as diverse as the arts, literature, scholarship, politics, and, especially, modern interpretations of Judaism and kabbalah. Each chapter offers a case study in theosophical appropriations of a different type and in different context. The chapters join together to reveal congruencies between theosophical ideas and a wide range of contemporaneous intellectual, cultural, religious, and political currents. They demonstrate the far-reaching influence of the theosophical movement worldwide from the late-nineteenth century to the present day.
Contributors: Karl baier, Julie Chajes, John Patrick Deveney, Victoria Ferentinou, Olav Hammer, Boaz Huss, Massimo Introvigne, Andreas Kilcher, Eugene Kuzmin, Shimon Lev, Isaac Luberlsky, Tomer Persico, Helmut Zander.
The founder of the Theosophical Society, Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), played a significant role in the popularisation of reincarnation in the Western world. Historians have portrayed her doctrine as having western philosophical bases, an important insight that corrects the straightforward association of Theosophy with “Buddhism” and “Hinduism” that was typically asserted by early-twentieth-century commentators. Be that as it may, Blavatsky’s numerous contacts in India, where she lived between 1879 and 1885, influenced her discussions of reincarnation. Becoming her close confidantes and submitting articles to Blavatsky’s periodical, The Theosophist, Indian members of the Society such as Mohini M. Chatterjee and Tallapragada Subba Row provided Blavatsky with the Vedantic terminology she adopted (and inevitably understood in neo-Platonic terms.) Blavatsky presented her resulting teachings a type of “monism,” and as an alternative to the materialist monism that was popularised by the German scientist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel. This paper presents Blavatsky’s reincarnation doctrine as a case study not in the “Western” distortion of Asian ideas, but as one of cultural entanglement, showing how European philosophical concerns came together with those of acculturated Indian elites, contributing to the popularisation of beliefs that have come to have a prominent place in post-modern spirituality.