Isis Unveiled

Isis Unveiled is Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's first major book and, strictly speaking, the intellectual birth certificate of modern Theosophy. Its subtitle says it all: "a master-key to the mysteries of ancient and modern science and theology". Across two volumes and some thirteen hundred pages, the author fights a war on two fronts. Against the materialist science of her day — Huxley, Tyndall, the positivism that reduced the universe to atoms in motion — she argues that there are forces and faculties physics cannot measure and that the ancients knew. Against the Christian churches she argues that their dogmas are degraded, and often plagiarised, versions of an older wisdom.

That older wisdom is the book's central thesis: a primordial "wisdom-religion", guarded by initiates down the centuries, of which the Egyptian mysteries, the Kabbalah, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, the Vedas and Buddhism would be more or less faithful fragments. India already appears, in the closing chapter of the first volume, as "the cradle of the race", and the East as the keeper of what the West forgot. The author champions Paracelsus, the alchemists and the Neoplatonists against academic science, and offers a reading of spiritualist phenomena — so fashionable in 1870s America — that ascribes them not to the spirits of the dead but to hidden natural forces, to the "astral light" and to elemental entities.

The book is torrential and disorderly. It mixes genuine learning, second-hand quotation, travel anecdote, journalistic polemic and prophecy. Many of her later doctrines are not yet settled: reincarnation, which would become a pillar of The Secret Doctrine, appears here ambiguously and is largely denied for the ordinary case, something the author herself had to explain years later. There is as yet no scheme of seven principles and no cosmogony of the Stanzas of Dzyan.

Its importance, nonetheless, is enormous. Isis Unveiled fixed the gesture that would define modern esotericism: the idea that all religions share a common esoteric core, that science and religion can be reconciled in a higher knowledge, and that this knowledge may be sought in the East. From that intuition, far more than from the book's details, drew the Theosophical Society, the spiritual orientalism of the late nineteenth century and much of what we now call alternative spirituality. To read it is to witness the moment that way of thinking was first formulated, with all its ambition and all its seams showing.