New Age ?
grandfather
I would much rather be a clown"
- Nietzsche, Ecco Homo
-----------------------------------------------
Madame Blavatsky's Baboon-
A history of the mystics, mediums and misfits,
who brought spiritualism to America.
Peter Washington, Schocken Books. N.Y., 1996
ISBN 0-8052-120496,
Peter Washington was Editor of Everyman’s library and Professor
Of English and European Literature at Middlesex University
in Great Britain and has written a well researched, thought-provoking
and often hilarious book, you might break out in laughter, like the
title 'baboon'
is a reference to Darwin’s 'man-from-monkey-evolution' and since the
beginning
about Blavatsky (teacher of HITLER as well) might be long, if you
start to read
from 'Boys and Gods', you might read it straight to the end, it
becomes
an ironical and very amusing account of the rise of the 'western
guru'.
The 'NEW AGE' is not so new, P. Washington traces it roots to just
the
dawn of
of the twentieth century, when a mysterious renegade Russian
aristocrat named
'Madame Blavatsky' appeared in America claiming that Darwin was
wrong,
that man was descended not from apes, but from spirit beings.
Theosophy, the movement she founded, spawned competing gurus and
sects,
Rudolf Steiner and Adolf Hitler, Gurdjeff, Ouspensky, Krishnamurti
and
Idries Shah – finally OSHO / Bhagwan, that had been particular appeal
to women, to influential intellects of the day like Oscar Wilde, W.B.
Yeats, George Bernard Show, Frank Lloyd Wright, Catherine Mansfield,
Aldows Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and to host of colourful
adventurers, uncertified lunatics, wealthy and lonely spinsters,
charlatans and lost souls.
What they had in common and to share with the millions who make up
the
'alternative religion' of todays 'New Age'-is the hunger for the key
to what
Makes everything fit together, a hunger that has not been satisfied
by
either mainstream religion or science.
Madame Blavatsky was said to have travelled Central Asia in search
for
knowledge and she was called the founder 'mystical Theosophy', the
wisdom or love to God.
Her student Rudolf Steiner founded the 'Anthrosophical society' now
with seat
In Basel/Swiss.
Ouspensky, a Russian migrant travelled and met with another Russian,
Gurdjeff from Kars, born in Alexandropol in Armenia and there was a
third Russian,
George Iwanowitch, son of rich 'ashokh', story teller including
'Gilgamesh-Epos', he daily took COLD BATH, used to raise early and
was
trained like holding a snake in his hand, during his father took his
meal.
After second WW-II the direction shifted from Hindu-Buddhism towards
'militant Islamic mysticism'.
In Gurdjeff's Book ' Meeting with remarkable man we learn about
Ouspenky, who travelled Egypt, he met 1915 with Gurdjeff:
-a man of oriental type, no longer young, with a black moustache and
piercing eyes, who astonished me, because he seemed to be completely
disguised… writes the face of an Indian raja or Arabic Sheikh.
In nomine Babuine, Huxley, Ape and Essence-
His glass essence-like an angry ape, plays such fantasies tricks
before high heaven as make the angels weep –
Shakespeare, 'Measure for Measure'