Theos-Talk Archives (November 2001 Message tt00470)

For the incorporation of most of the other authors of the overview 
below, in the Secret Doctrine,(and Daniel's question) reed following 
links.

http://www.geocities.com/rewaldsen/blavsynthesis.html

http://www.geocities.com/rewaldsen/mastershbp3.html

http://www.geocities.com/rewaldsen/angelicmaster.html

http://www.geocities.com/rewaldsen/finalyears.html

http://www.geocities.com/rewaldsen/rosicrucianm.html

Pls send your feed back to the above !

>From the time of The Renaissance until today the word "Theosophy" has 
continuously had different meanings ascribed to it. One form began to 
acquire shape in the spiritual climate of late sixteenth-century 
Germany, reaching such heights in the seventeenth century that it has 
continued to penetrate part of Western culture until the present day. 
A second major form is represented by the Theosophical Society 
itself, officially founded in 1875 , which it is in academic circles 
regarded as a new religious movement, but went in itself through 
various stages of devellopment.

Toward the end of the fiftennth century, when scientists and 
humanists undertook to appropriate various traditions of the past- 
Neo-Pythagoreanism, Neo-Platonism, Alexandrian hermetism, Jewish 
Kabbalah with the concern to show that some of them, indeed all of 
them, mutually enrich one another and represent more or less the 
branches of a common trunk, that is, of a. philosophia perennis, 
something taken up later again by Blavatsky.

Marsilio Ficino, who in 1463 translated from Greek into Latin the 
Corpus Hermeticum (a set of Alexandrian texts dating from the second 
and third centuries of our era) attempted to marry the teachings of 
these texts with those of Christianity and Platonism, while drawing 
inspiration from the old "magical" tradition. In parallel, the Jewish 
Kabbalah, whose texts began to be known in Christianity especially 
after 1492 (the date of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain), became 
an instrument of knowledge for henneneuts applied to the 
christianization of its symbolismwhence the name Christian Kabbalah 
to refer to this new form of literature. 

It is also the era when Pico della Mirandola affirmed that the 
Kabbalah and magic prove the truths of Christianity, allowing it to 
be better understood, and when other hermeneuts began to associate 
the Kabbalah with alchemy. The philosophia perennis thus expressed a 
need to have recourse to traditions of the past through the 
deciphering of documents and scholarly work, in the light of analogy.
It was expected from all the texts thus solicited that they 
represent a higher knowledge a gnosis which by the same token 
presupposed a faculty in Man, to penetrate the mysteries of founding 
or revealed texts. 

This accounts for the series of names, often given in the period, 
where we see side by side Moses, Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, 
Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, and the Sibyls. But when the time came 
when the sciences of Nature tended to separate from theology, then 
mostly reduced to metaphysics, this vast domain then became the 
subject of reinterpretations. These were, on the one hand,prefiguring 
modern science, which would spring to life in the seventeenth 
century; on the other, "extratheological", that is "new religious" as 
it is commonly called today. 

It is among the representatives of this second category of 
reinterpretations that one finds the first "esotericists" in the 
modern sense of the term. Their thought came in some manner to fill 
in the interface between meta- physics and cosmology, with 
speculations tending to account for the relationships between the 
particular and the universal, or among God, Man, and the universe.

They established these relationships referring to different 
authorities of the past, but almost always with a vision of universal 
correspondences inseparable from the idea that the cosmos is alive. 
The appropriation of philosophy by the scholastics was thus matched, 
marginally or reactively, by that of Alexandrian hermetism, the 
Jewish Kabbalah, magia inherited from the Middle Ages, and so on, by 
scholars who had become "specialists" in these traditions.

Its referential corpus was constituted little by little, made up of 
texts belonging to ancient traditions that, at the dawn of the 
Renaissance, began to be compared with one another, and new texts 
starting at the end of the fifteenth century which often were 
commentaries on the first. It was also enriched, especially beginning 
in the sixteenth century, by works that were not "erudite"thus, those 
of Paracelsus presenting themselves far less as commentaries on 
ancient texts, with the exception of the Bible, than as direct 
readings of the Book of Nature, supposed to clarify that of the 
Revelation. 
But these works themselves were incorporated straight away into the 
referential corpus of esotericism. Among the representatives 
of "erudite" esotericism appeared, in the sixteenth century, Ludovico 
Lazarelli, Francois Foix de Candale, Francesco Patrizi (all three are 
inscribed in the current of Neo-Alexandrian hermetism), and in 
addition, Johannes Trithemius, Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano 
Bruno, Giorgi of Venice.
For the seventeenth century one should expecially mention, Robert 
Fludd, Thomas Campanella, and Michael Maier. 

With Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) began the first golden age of 
theosophy; it extended over the whole seventeenth century with the 
immediate successors of Boehme (for example, Jane Leade, John 
Pordage, Quirinus Kuhlmann, Johann Georg Gichtel).

Then followed a period of relative latency, interrupted by the 
appearance of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), who had a considerable 
cultural and spiritual influence. It is from the Swedenborg 
Theosophical Society in London that the inspiration for the name of 
the name for the New York TS of Olcott/HPB has come.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century,there where also Martines 
de Pasqually, Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, Friedrich Christoph 
Oetinger, and others. 
Three common and complementary characteristics could serve to 
account for the notion of theosophy: (a) an illuminated speculation 
bearing on the relationships among God, Man, and the universe 
(Nature); (b) the primacy of myths (biblical) of foundation or origin 
as a point of departure for this speculation; (c) the idea that Man, 
by virtue of his creative imagination, can develop in himself the 
faculty of acceding to the higher worlds.

It is, furthermore, the Rosicrucian current, whose birth certificate 
is the publication in German, at Kassel, of the two famous Manifestos 
Pama Fraternatis, 1614; and ConfessioFraternatis, 1615 (they had been 
circulating for several years in manuscript form)and then of the 
novel, also in German, by Johann Valentin Andreae, The 
ChemicalWeddingofChristianRosenkreuz (Strasbourg, 1616). Just as the 
Latin translation of the CorpusHermeticum by Ficino, almost a century 
and a half previously, had been at the origin of the current of 
modern Neo-Alexandrian hermetism, so these three texts constituted 
the founding act of Rosicrucianism. In the beginning, this placed 
itself under the authority of Paracelsus, more so than theosophy had 
done, and presented itself as an attempt at religious reform not 
meant to found a newly established Church, but rather to improve, to 
palliate the insufficiencies of Protestantism,, to foster a form of 
spirituality as much open to alchemy and occult philosophy as to all 
the sciences of the era.

Starting from the eighteenth century, one sees various initiatic 
societies proliferating. While they placed themselves explicitly 
under the sign of the Rosy Cross, they drew their inspiration from 
other esoteric currents, too. Both the former and the latter took on 
various forms according to the periods, in function of the culture 
and the society of the time. One also sees new currents being born, 
breaking away from those that had preceded but from which they 
issued: Eesotericism is riddled with discontinuities, rejections, 
reinter- pretations. 


Although there is no single point of doctrinal unity among 
theosophers, they do have some common traits, and carry both eastern 
and western influences. 
J.van Helmont, Thomas Moore, together with the Lurian Kabbalah 
popularised for the first time the teachings of reincarnation to 
enter the west based partly on the Lurian Caballah. 

Swedenborg learned about Tibetan and Chinese Yoga from Swedish 
soldier-scholars, who had been prisoners of war in the Siberian and 
Tartar areas of Russia and returned to Sweden in the 1720s. In his 
Spiritual Diary, Swedenborg drew on the travel journal of Philip 
Strahlenberg, a Swedish officer and former prisoner, to describe the 
spiritual relation between the Tibetans, Tartars, Chinese, and 
Siberians, Chinese and Tibetan Tantrism .
See also: Philangi Dasa, Swedenborg the Buddhist; or, The Higher 
Swedenborgianism, Its Secrets and Thibetan Origin ,Los Angeles: 
Buddhistic Swedenborgian Brotherhood,1887.
Note that Blavatsky and Olcott where still living in the US at this 
time, and would move to India the following year and 
become "Budhists".

Swedenborg even predated the idea of the latter Stanza's of Dzyan 
idea by claiming that that angels had explained to him that the Old 
Testament was modeled on an original text from Central Asia.

The Theosophical Society of 1875 first drew more on Western but also 
oriental sources, with a specific Indianisation as of 1878. 

Olcott wrote in his "Old Diary Leaves; "Now that I come to look back 
at it, we were in reality but planning to repeat the work of 
Cagliostro, whose Egyptian Lodge was in his days so powerful a centre 
for the propagation of Eastern occult thought." 

Brigitte