No Religion Higher Than Truth: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875-1922
310
No Religion Higher Than Truth: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875-1922
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Overview
Carlson's is the only work on this topic written by an intellectual historian not ideologically committed to Theosophy. Placing Mme Blavatsky and her "secret doctrine" in a Russian setting, the book also discusses independent Russian Theosophical circles and the impact of the Theosophical-Anthroposophical schism in Russia. It surveys the vigorous polemics of the Theosophists and their critics, demonstrates Theosophy's role in the philosophical dialogues of the Russian creative intelligentsia, and chronicles the demise of the movement after 1917. By exploring this long neglected aspect of the Silver Age, Carlson greatly enriches our knowledge of fin-de-sicle Russian culture.
Originally published in 1993.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691636337 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1750 |
| Pages: | 310 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
Read an Excerpt
"No Religion Higher than Truth"
A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875â"1922
By Maria Carlson
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1993 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05682-1
CHAPTER 1
A Historical Survey of Russian Occult Interests
The Russian Silver Age shared in the unprecedented renascence of interest in occultism and speculative mysticism that swept Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. That Russians were part of this renascence was in no way exceptional, for mystical interests have often found fertile soil among the Slavs. This late-nineteenth-century fascination of Russian educated society with the occult did not need to be imported from the West; as with other ideas and philosophies, Russian culture simply borrowed from Europe the external structures that gave form and expression to powerful indigenous inclinations. Nineteenth century occultism in Russia was, in fact, part of a larger cultural tradition and was philosophically rein forced from within. Its roots go back to pre-Christian times.
In Russia certain pagan and occult elements persisted in folk beliefs and coexisted peacefully with Christianity (dvoeverie), leaving the Russian mind predisposed to syncretism and tolerant toward independent mystical experience. Long before the nineteenth century, Russia had an extensive and flourishing tradition of witchcraft and sorcery (znakhari, kolduny, kudesniki, gadalki, ved'my), as well as mystical sectarianism (Khlysty, Belye golubi, Skoptsy, and soon). In addition, the Russian Orthodox church (long noted for its eccentric mystics) did not discourage personal mystical expression, even if such expression did not fit exactly within the prescribed, narrow framework of dogma. Traditional Orthodoxy, rigidly structured on one level, was intellectually adventurous on another; it always left some room for independent, mystical experience. The Gnostic speculations and Sophiology of Orthodox lay an d clerical theologians during the Russian religious renaissance of the Silver Age would have resulted in excommunication for heresy in the Western church, but they were cautiously tolerated in the Eastern Christian tradition .
The Earliest Traditions
Occult traditions (as opposed to folk beliefs and superstitions) have always been associated with "secret writings" and "magic books." The earliest extant Russian magic books (volshebnye knigi) are from the seventeenth century. Used primarily for fortune-telling (gadanie), these "forbidden" manuscripts go back much earlier. Many are compilations of far older geomantic and astrological texts translated from European, Byzantine, Arab, and Persian sources. The titles of these Russian magic books are suggestive: Rafli, Voronograi, Zodii, Mestokryh, Zvezdechet'i Ostrolog, Charovnik, Volkhovnik, Aristotelevy Vrata, Tainaia tainykh, and Kniga imenuemaia Briusovskoi Kalendar'. Some of these books continued to interest both scholars and general readers and were reissued by the historians A. N. Pypin and M. N . Speranskii at various times during the nineteenth century. The well-know n Briusovskoi Kalendar' circulated in numerous exemplars; parts of it were published in the occult journal Izida as late as 1911–1912. These magic books never disappeared, but were copied and recopied by generations of Russian readers over the centuries, with new texts added from time to time. They never had the approval of the church, and were forbidden by ecclesiastical authority long before they were officially banned by the Council of the Hund red Chapters (Stoglav) in 1551; this, needless to say, enhanced rather than diminished their popularity.
The "rational" eighteenth century was not without its own occult side. In Western Europe the excessive rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment was counterbalanced by a tendency toward the supernatural and occult that expressed itself not only in the refined speculative mysticism of Emanuel Swedenborg (1666–1772), but also in a veritable plague of spirit visitations and widespread werewolf and vampire scares inspired by the folk traditions of the Slavic and Central European lands. The eighteenth century was n o t just the Age of Voltaire, it was also the Age of Cagliostro, the psychic, occultist, and sorcerer. It was an age of mesmeric passes, seances, prophecies, magic cures, "miracles," astrology, alchemy, anagogy, and occult charlatanism on an international scale.
This dualism was manifested in Russian culture as well. There the eighteenth century began with Peter the Great's ambitious attempt to reform and secularize Russian culture and society. Instituted quickly and brutally, his reform s produced only the veneer of rationalism. Beneath that veneer still lay the analogical, nonlinear, intuitive frame of mind that characterizes Russian thought even today. Over the course of the eighteenth century, this analogical mode of thought, coupled with the feeling of spiritual emptiness induced by "modern" rationalism's separation of man from the "medieval" traditional church and its values, served to turn educated Russians toward other esoteric systems, notably Freemasonry, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century. While Catherine II looked with disdain on the occult, it was during her reign, in 1779, that the notorious Count Cagliostro visited her capital, bringing with him magic cures and new Masonic rites.
Most studies assume (although conclusive documentation has never been presented) that Freemasonry first came to Russia in 1731, early in the reign of Empress Anne, when either Captain John Phillips or General James Keith was named Provincial Grand Master for Moscow by Lord Lovell, then head of the Grand Lodge of England. The popular story of Peter the Great having undergone a Masonic initiation in E n gland is probably apocryphal. By the mid-eighteenth century, numerous Masonic lodges had form ed in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the provinces, and had quickly established connections with their French, Swedish, and Germ an counterparts. Freemasonry flourished in Russia among the upper classes. Leading Russian Freemasons of the period included the writer and journalist Nikolai Novikov (1744–1818), Professor I. G. Shvarts, I. V. Lopukhin, and Count I. P. Elagin.
As a result of this occult, particularly Masonic, activity, a new type of esoteric literature appeared in Russia at the end of the eighteenth century. It reflected occult interests that were Western rather than indigenously Russian: Martinism (a blend of theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and mystical Freemasonry attributed to Louis Claude de Saint-Martin [1743–1803]), the Rose Cross, Illuminism, ancient mystery cults, philosophical alchemy, and other subjects associated with European Freemasonry. The occult texts that began appearing in the last quarter of the eighteenth century were almost exclusively translations of European works and were published in Russia either by Nikolai Novikov, who operated the university press, or by Ivan Lopukhin, w ho had a secret printing plant in addition to his regular press. Numbering more than a hundred titles, these texts include translations of Masonic classics, Rosicrucian texts, the Bhagavad Gita, the works of Karl von Eckartshausen, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, Paracelsus, as well as anthologies of mystical thought, supernatural events, and prophetic dreams, much of it anecdotal. Many of the incidents recorded would be told and retold in journals and anthologies throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All of these texts were popular in their time and were sought after again at the beginning of the twentieth century, when they were advertised n o t only in occult publications, but in popular journals and even in national bibliographies, such as Knizhnaia letopis'.
If the prominent contemporary writer and historian Nikolai Karamzin called mysticism "preposterology" (vzdorologiia), and if Catherine the Great viewed spectral visitations with contempt and Masonic lodges with apprehension, her mystically inclined grandson, Tsar Alexander I, surrounded him self with intimates who were involved with the Swedenborgians, Freemasons, Russian mystical sectarians, and the Bible Society (these included Prince Aleksandr Golitsyn, Rodion Koshelev, the Baroness von Kriidener, and Ekaterina Tatarinova). It was rumored that Alexander I him self became a Freemason in 1803. Under Prince Golitsyn's patronage (he was Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod and later Minister of Religious Affairs and Education) occult texts and journals (e.g., Sionskii Vestnik) circulated with relative freedom, despite official ecclesiastical disapproval.
By the summer of 1822 the Orthodox church, taking advantage of Archimandrite Photius's considerable influence on the Tsar, convinced Alexander to confiscate occult books and to ban all mystical and secret societies on the grounds that they were engaged in revolutionary activity, an accusation with considerable foundation, as Nicholas I had opportunity to discover in the Decembrist Uprising of 1825. The royal decree, however, did not eradicate Russian Freemasonry; the Masonic lodges exercised greater secrecy but did not discontinue their meetings and rituals. Over the course of the century many Russian Freemasons also became members of French, German, English, and Belgian lodges.
Although Nicholas's court, which was most unlike Alexander's, remained untouched by occult tendencies, educated society's interest in the subject did not lessen; only the means of its expression was transform ed. The wave of German romanticism that spilled into Russia during the first quarter of the nineteenth century had carried with it a passion for things occult, fantastic, and supernatural, both on a popular and esoteric level. One result was the appearance of a large body of supernatural fiction, again imitating Western trends and models. The period from 1825 to mid-century was characterized by the flowering of the Russian supernatural short story, which involved both minor and major writers (Antonii Pogorel'skii, M. N. Zagoskin, A. K. Tolstoi, V. F. Odoevskii, Nikolai Gogol', Aleksandr Pushkin, and others).
If fewer occult materials were being published in Russia by the mid-nineteenth century, it was more the result of the increasingly restrictive system of censorship created by Nicholas I than the counteracting effect of modern science and philosophical positivism. Books on occult topics had to be passed by both government and church censors, and anything that looked suspiciously like a threat to the teachings or hierarchy of the Orthodox church was not published. While certain eccentricities of personal behavior (such as attending private seances) might be overlooked, occultism in print was tantamount to spiritual sedition. T he result was that in the second half of the nineteenth century Russian presses were set up in outposts of the Russian Empire and in European cities, notably in Warsaw and Leipzig, and the books printed there were then either quietly smuggled or occasionally "imported" into central Russia as "foreign" publications (which came under a different set of censorship restrictions). Materials also circulated in manuscript copies.
The French Occult Revival
The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a tremendous boom in occultism. It started in France and inevitably spilled over into Russia w here, after the death of the unimaginative Nicholas I in 1855, the last three Russian Tsars embraced it enthusiastically. The doyen of nineteenth-century philosophical occultism, the auth or of the French occult revival, the man who is revered as "one of the key figures in the history of modern occultism," was Eliphas Lévi (pseudonym of Alphonse Louis Constant [1810–1875]). Lévi was a defrocked French priest who had a long-standing interest in occultism and mystical philosophy. Starting almost alone, he soon gathered around him a group of disciples and made France the vanguard of the occult movement. His studies, although vague, romantic, and often contradictory, became increasingly popular and are even today considered classics of philosophical occultism. His major works, circulating in Russia in translated manuscript, were Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (Paris, 1856), Histoire de la magie (Paris, 1860), and La Clef desgrands mystères (Paris, 1861).
Eliphas Lévi was an extremely influential figure. N o t only did he initiate the occult revival of the second half of the nineteenth century, he also influenced the work of many others: the French Symbolist writers (Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Philippe Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Joris Karl H uysm ans, Sar [Joséphin] Péladan), the painters of the Salon de la Rose-Croix, the Nabis (especially Paul Serusier and Paul Ranson), Odilon Redon, Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, Jean Delville, as well as the Dutch artist Jan Toorop, the English pre-Raphaelite painters, and the scandalous poets Charles Algernon Swinburne and Oscar Wilde. The British writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, himself a Rosicrucian, put Lévi and his philosophy into his popular novels. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, whose members included Irish poet William Butler Yeats and the scholar A. E. Waite, attempted to synthesize the vast and bewildering body of occult material into a system, using Lévi as its foundation. Many other occultists based their studies on Lévi's; even the eccentric Mme Blavatsky leaned heavily on Lévi's work for her own Theosophical classics. Writing about the period in general, the popular author Anatole France observed: "A certain knowledge of the occult sciences became necessary for the understanding of a great number of literary works of this period. Magic occupied a large place in the imagination of our poets and novelists. The vertigo of the invisible seized them, the idea of the unknown haunted them."
In France, Eliphas Lévi's principal disciple was Stanislas de Guaita (1860–1897). De Guaita, a morphine addict and decadent poet, earned his place in the occult movement with the publication of two works. The first (and more important) was Le Serpent de la Genèse (Paris, 1891), which consisted of two parts, Le Temple de Satan and La Clef de la maple noire. The other work was Essais de sciences maudites (Paris, 1894). De Guaita, together with the Kabbalist Oswald Wirth, Papus, and others, dreamed of uniting occultists everywhere into a single, universal Rosicrucian brotherhood, for occultism has traditionally been a cosmopolitan and not a nationalist phenomenon. There was to be a place for Russian occultists in this brotherhood as well. Leading Russian and Polish occultists had studied abroad with their European mentors, and European occultists regularly visited Russia; all necessary lines of communication were already in place.
Another contributor to the French occult revival was the Polish mathematician and occultist Joseph Hoene-Wrohski (1778–1853), who strove for the synthesis of rationalism, religion, and belief in human progress. He was the author of Messianisme, ou Réforme absolue du savoir humaine (Paris, 1847), which advocated the union of religion and philosophy. The works of Eliphas Lévi and Hoene-Wrohski subsequently influenced Joseph Saint-Yves d'Alveydre (1842–1910), a student of Eastern and Western occult traditions, and his disciple, Gerard Encausse (1865–1916), who wrote prolifically on Kabbalism, alchemy, spiritualism, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, Theosophy, and the Tarot, under the name, famous all over Europe, of Papus. He was translated into all the European languages, and eleven of his major works appeared in Russian. He headed the Faculté des Sciences Hermétiques of the Université Libre des Hautes Etudes in Paris, which attracted Russian students and w hose program form ed the basis of numerous private occult study courses in Russia. Papus was also the head of L'Ordre du Martinisme and its affiliate, L'Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose-Croix.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from "No Religion Higher than Truth" by Maria Carlson. Copyright © 1993 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Esoteric Tradition and the Russian Silver Age 3
I A Historical Survey of Russian Occult Interests 15
The Earliest Traditions 15
The French Occult Revival 19
Spiritualism 22
Theosophy 28
II The Early Days of Theosophy in Russia (1875-1901) 38
The Magnificent Madame 38
The Introduction of Theosophy into Russia 43
III The Theosophical Society in Russia (1901-1917) 54
The First Circles (1901-1908) 54
Theosophical Work (1908-1914) 60
Russian Theosophy during the First World War (1914-1918) 76
IV Other Russian Theosophical Movements 81
The Smolensk Theosophists 81
Vasilii Bogushevskii and Teosoficheskoe Obozrenie 86
An Independent: Khristoforova's Moscow Circle 88
The Russian Anthroposophists: Steiner and Russia 94
V Theosophical Doctrine: An Outline 114
What Is Modern Theosophy? 115
Theosophy and God 116
Theosophy and the Universe 117
Theosophy and Man 120
The Meaning of the Path 123
Anthroposophical Refinements: Rudolf Steiner's Spiritual Science 128
VI The Russian Reception of Theosophical Thought 137
The Three Critiques of Theosophy 140
Theosophy and the Russian Intelligentsia 158
Point and Counterpoint 167
VII The Russian Theosophical Movement after 1917 171
After the Revolution 173
The "Russian Theosophical Society Outside Russia" 180
Afterword: Theosophy's Impact on Fin de Siecle Russian Culture 188
Orientologist and Painter: Nikolai Konstantinovich Roerich (1874-1947) 193
Theorist, Philosopher, and Writer: Andrei Belyi (1880-1934) 198
In Conclusion 205
Notes 209
Glossary 249
Bibliography: Theosophical and Related Works Published in Russia between 1881 and 1918 253
Selected Bibliography 275
Index 283