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Ancestors of the race : the antimodern ethnography of Henry Steel Olcott's People from the other world / Antimodern ethnography of Henry Steel Olcott's People from the other worldSussman, Sarah Gail 17 April 2013 (has links)
In this report, I will examine People from the Other World (1875), a text which documents the transition from American Spiritualism to international Theosophy. The narrative is based off of reports which lawyer-turned-mystic Henry Steel Olcott wrote concerning the validity of séances that were held by the famous mediums, the Eddy brothers, at their rural homestead in Chittenden, Vermont. These gatherings were unique because unlike early Spiritualist séances, which featured the ghosts of departed family members, the Eddy brothers most often contacted a more diverse group including Native American spirits, the ghost of a Khourdish warrior, and the ghost of an Egyptian juggler, among others. I attribute the variety of spirits at these séances to three intersecting tides of cultural influence: The first is the rise of ethnographic studies and the subsequent vogue of ethnographic subjects. Secondly, the Eddy group exhibited signs of antimodern ambivalence towards an age rich with new inventions which may have seemed, to the lay person, to be the work of magic. Finally, at the Eddy séances costumed play is used as a form of therapeutically reassuring ritual during this time of rapid change. While some critics in recent years have posited that such Theosophic meetings may have served as a sign of cross-cultural civic engagement, I will argue that it is far more likely that for the Eddy group, becoming possessed by foreign spirits served as a tool for self understanding which helped them to adapt to the encroachment of a seemingly haunted age. / text
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Saving time : time, sources, and implications of temporality in the writings of H.P. BlavatskyLavoie, Jeffrey January 2015 (has links)
The subject of time has long been a subject of fascination by philosophers and researchers alike: What is it? How can it be measured? Is it connected to the larger metaphysical meaning of life (e. g. eternal life, absorption, reincarnation, etc.)? Having some standard measurement of time became a pressing contemporary issue in the Victorian Era as international traveling and communications became more typical. Also, the prominent role of evolution as propagated by Charles Darwin’s ‘Theory of Natural Selection’ questioned the long accepted Christian beliefs in the biblical ‘Creation’. This forced Victorians to seriously consider the subjects of origin and chronology. It was into this shifting and modernist environment that the Theosophical Society was established emerging out of Spiritualism. H. P. Blavatsky, along with Henry S. Olcott and several other founding members, formed this organization as a means of discovering hidden truths and learning practical occult methods and exercises. Indisputably, Blavatsky was one of the leading forces of this Society and her natural intellect combined with her vast, occult writings brought about one of the most distinctive and philosophical doctrines in the Theosophical belief system — a soteriological view of time. Using her philosophy of time, Blavatsky was able to create the ultimate Victorian mythos that could combine science and world religions into one unified and religious modernist system. This thesis will diachronically study Blavatsky’s writings on time, soteriology and chronology. It will begin in the early days when her philosophy was largely borrowed from comparative mythographers, and trace her writings up until the late 1880s when it became mixed with Hindu and Buddhist notions of time and salvation. While studying the evolution of time and its role in Blavatsky’s teachings is the focal point of this study, the secondary purpose is to examine this system as a Victorian mythology that typified the time period along with its hopes, fears and social anxieties.
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