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Liber XXXIII · Theosophy

Liber XXXIII · Theosophy · Chapter X: Theosophical Society

Isis Unveiled: Blavatsky's First Book and the Ancient Wisdom

Isis Unveiled (1877), Helena Blavatsky's first book: how it was written, its attack on materialism and dogma, its sources, critics and place in Theosophy.

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Isis Unveiled is the first major book of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, published in New York in September 1877 in two large volumes subtitled "A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology". It argues that the sages of antiquity possessed a universal "wisdom-religion" and a science of hidden natural forces, and that modern materialist science and dogmatic Christianity had both lost sight of it. The book made Blavatsky famous, gave the young Theosophical Society its first programme, and remains a key document of the nineteenth-century occult revival.

Writing Isis Unveiled in New York§

Blavatsky began the book soon after she and Henry Steel Olcott founded the Theosophical Society in the autumn of 1875. Most of it was written in the apartment the pair shared on West 47th Street in Manhattan, a crowded flat full of books and curiosities that visiting journalists nicknamed "the Lamasery". Olcott spent his evenings correcting her English, arranging the manuscript and checking references, and in his memoir Old Diary Leaves he later described long nights of work in which, he believed, her handwriting and manner sometimes changed as if other minds, the Masters, were writing through her.

The Platonist scholar and physician Alexander Wilder also helped prepare the text for the press and compiled material for the index. Blavatsky's working title is usually said to have been The Veil of Isis; it was changed, according to the standard account, because a book of that name had already appeared in England. The publisher J. W. Bouton issued the work on 29 September 1877. It ran to well over a thousand pages, yet the first printing is reported to have sold out within days, and it was reprinted many times.

The book was dedicated to the Theosophical Society, founded in New York in 1875 to study the subjects it treats. In that sense Isis Unveiled was the Society's manifesto, written at a time when the organisation was small, unsure of its direction and still closely tied to the world of American Spiritualism.

Science and Theology: The Structure of the Two Volumes§

The first volume, "Science", is aimed at the confident materialism of the 1870s. Blavatsky attacks the leading popularisers of science of her day, such as Thomas Huxley and John Tyndall, for dismissing whatever could not be weighed and measured. She argues that the ancient Egyptians, Indians, Chaldeans and Greeks had understood forces that modern science was only beginning to glimpse, and she gathers reports of magnetic healing, levitation, the feats of Indian ascetics and the experiments of the mesmerists as evidence. The history of mesmerism and animal magnetism is a constant point of reference.

The second volume, "Theology", turns on the churches. Here Blavatsky argues that Christian doctrine was assembled from older pagan, Jewish, Gnostic and Asian sources, and that the clergy had suppressed or misunderstood the esoteric meaning of their own scriptures. She draws heavily on studies of comparative mythology then in vogue, on the Kabbalah, on the Gnostics and on the newly translated literatures of Hinduism and Buddhism, which she presents with marked sympathy. Freemasonry, the Jesuits and church history all receive long and polemical treatment.

A book without a system§

Readers have always noticed that Isis Unveiled is loosely organised. Its chapters move rapidly from one subject to another, quotations are piled on quotations, and arguments are often made by accumulation rather than by step-by-step reasoning. Admirers saw in this a treasure-house of forgotten lore; critics, a scrapbook. Either way, the book reads less like a treatise than an encyclopaedic polemic.

The Ancient Wisdom-Religion§

Beneath the polemics lies one idea that would define Theosophy. Blavatsky claims that a single, universal wisdom-religion was known to initiates in every ancient civilisation, and that the world's religions are fragments or corruptions of it. True science and true religion, on this view, cannot conflict, because both derive from the same esoteric knowledge of nature and spirit, preserved by a hidden brotherhood of adepts.

The idea had a long prehistory. Renaissance writers spoke of a prisca theologia, an ancient theology passed from Hermes, Zoroaster and Orpheus to Plato, and the Romantic and occultist writers of the nineteenth century had revived it. What Blavatsky added was scale, an aggressive modern tone and a claim to personal contact with the living guardians of that wisdom. In Isis Unveiled these Masters are still sketched only vaguely, with more emphasis on Egypt and the Near East than on the Tibetan Mahatmas who dominate her later writings.

Spiritualism, Elementaries and the Astral Light§

Isis Unveiled appeared in the middle of the Spiritualist boom, and much of it addresses the séance room. Blavatsky did not deny that mediums produced real phenomena. She denied that these were usually the work of the spirits of the dead. Drawing on older occult terminology, she attributed them instead to "elementals", spirits of the natural elements, to "elementaries", the decaying psychic remains of the dead, and to the unconscious powers of the medium. This position, set out more fully in our guide to Spiritualism, angered many Spiritualists and marked the new Society off from the movement in which it had been born.

Her explanation of these powers relied heavily on the "astral light", the universal magnetic medium described by the French occultist Éliphas Lévi. Blavatsky cites Lévi often, along with Paracelsus, the Neoplatonists and the Renaissance magicians, and she presents the adept as someone who has learned to direct the forces that mediums only suffer passively. The emphasis on will, training and initiation, rather than passive receptivity, became characteristic of Theosophy.

Reincarnation in Isis Unveiled§

One feature surprises readers who know later Theosophy. In Isis Unveiled Blavatsky treats reincarnation on earth not as the general rule but as an exception, occurring in special cases such as children who die in infancy. Only in the 1880s, after the move to India, did reincarnation and karma become central to her teaching. Theosophists later argued that the earlier passages referred to the personality rather than the immortal individuality, but historians generally see a genuine development in her thought.

Sources, Borrowings and the Plagiarism Charge§

The book's erudition was impressive on the surface. It quotes or cites hundreds of authors, from classical writers and church fathers to contemporary scientists and Orientalists. Blavatsky said that she had little access to a library and that much of the material came to her by clairvoyant means.

Critics took a less mysterious view. In 1895 the American Spiritualist William Emmette Coleman published a study claiming that Isis Unveiled contained some two thousand passages copied, often without acknowledgement, from about a hundred books, many of them recent works on magic, mythology and comparative religion such as Joseph Ennemoser's History of Magic. Coleman, a hostile witness, may have overstated his case, but later scholars accept that the book depends heavily on secondary literature available in New York in the 1870s. Historians such as Joscelyn Godwin have shown how closely it reflects the speculative mythographers and freethinkers of the early nineteenth century.

For historians of esotericism the question of borrowing is less interesting than the use made of it. Isis Unveiled gathered scattered currents, from Hermeticism and Kabbalah to mesmerism, comparative religion and anticlericalism, into one argument and gave them a shared vocabulary that later occultists would inherit.

Isis Unveiled and the Later Theosophy§

Scholars often distinguish a first, Western phase of Blavatsky's work from a second, Eastern one. Wouter Hanegraaff and others have argued that Isis Unveiled belongs essentially to the Western esoteric tradition: its frame of reference is Hermetic, Neoplatonic and Kabbalistic, even when it praises Indian religion. After Blavatsky and Olcott sailed for India at the end of 1878, the vocabulary shifted toward Sanskrit and Buddhist terms, the Masters became Tibetan and Indian Mahatmas, and karma and reincarnation moved to the centre.

The fullest expression of that second phase is The Secret Doctrine of 1888, with its cosmic cycles and root races. Yet Isis Unveiled set the pattern for everything that followed: the claim of an ancient universal wisdom, the double critique of materialism and dogma, and the figure of the hidden adept. Our biography of Helena Blavatsky and overview of Theosophy trace how these ideas spread.

Frequently asked questions§

What is Isis Unveiled about?§

It argues that an ancient wisdom-religion, known to initiates in Egypt, India and elsewhere, lies behind all religions and sciences. The first volume criticises materialist science and the second criticises Christian theology, while both reinterpret occult and Spiritualist phenomena.

When was Isis Unveiled published?§

It was published in New York by J. W. Bouton on 29 September 1877, in two volumes. It was Blavatsky's first book and appeared two years after the founding of the Theosophical Society.

Did Blavatsky plagiarise Isis Unveiled?§

The critic William Emmette Coleman claimed in 1895 that about two thousand passages were taken without proper credit from other books. His figures may be inflated, but historians agree that the book relies heavily on contemporary secondary sources, which Blavatsky's followers attributed to clairvoyant access to them.

How is Isis Unveiled different from The Secret Doctrine?§

Isis Unveiled is polemical and largely Western in orientation, and it treats reincarnation as an exception. The Secret Doctrine (1888) is a systematic cosmology built around Indian and Buddhist terms, the Stanzas of Dzyan, karma, reincarnation and the evolution of root races.

Sources and further reading§