The H.D. Book (21 page)

Isis Unveiled
and
The Secret Doctrine,
midden heaps that they are of unreasonable sources, are midden heaps where, beyond the dictates of reason, as in the collagist’s art, from what has been disregarded or fallen into disregard, genres are mixed, exchanges are made, mutations begun from scraps and excerpts from different pictures (“2100 quotations . . . without proper credit”) to form the figures of a new composition. In the conglomerate that Blavatsky gathered, things of disparate traditions whirl and take on new shapes for the conscious imagination, separated from their contexts and credits, tainted with foreign meanings. Her conscious insistence that her work was dedicated to the immutable and archetypal Reality of the esoteric wisdom hid or veiled her unconscious wish—it was a vital intuition also of the meaning of science, religion, and art—for a magic to take over nature, our own inner nature then, from the Father, and to give birth to a new Nature, to prove
What Is
to be an illusion in the light of What Must Be. The Isis, the Esoteric Wisdom of What Is, appears in the imagination to keep alive the rebellious writer’s sympathies with her own nature, with Nature then—in the presence of the would-be usurping wish.

So, Blavatsky saw vividly how Science, under the dictatorship of Reason, had isolated itself from concern with any world of spirit or psyche, and finally from human and animal sympathies, declaring only that world to exist which could be positively known. “We must bravely face Science and declare,” she wrote in 1888, “that the true Occultist believes in
Lords of Light
”:

that he believes in a Sun, which—far from being simply a ‘lamp of day’ moving in accordance with physical laws; and far from being merely one of those Suns, which according to Richter, ‘are sun-flowers of a higher light’—is, like milliards of other Suns, the dwelling or the vehicle of a God, and of a host of Gods.

Behind the world that science had defined, she sensed intentions and potentialities that disturbed those definitions. There was no realm of matter that was not charged with spirit, and man’s increasing knowledge in the material realm was filled with the karma or hubris of his unacknowledged spiritual content at work there. Blavatsky’s chapter heading in
The Secret Doctrine
—“Modern Physicists Are Playing At Blind Man’s Buff”—has not lost meaning but has gained in terror in our day. Again and again she portrays eras of desolation and loss in the history of knowing that seem at once to be myths of our present psychic state and ominous predictions of states yet to come. “There had once been,” she tells us:

on the plan of the Zodiac in the
upper
Ocean or the Heavens: a certain realm on Earth, an inland sea, consecrated and called the ‘Abyss of Learning’; twelve centers on it, in the shape of twelve small islands, representing Zodiacal Signs—two of which remained for ages the ‘mystery Signs’—were the abodes of twelve Hierophants and Masters of Wisdom. This ‘Sea of Knowledge’ or learning remained for ages there, where now stretches the Shamo or Gobi Desert. It existed until the last great glacial period, when a local cataclysm, which swept the waters South and West and so formed the present great desolate desert, left only a certain oasis, with a lake and one island in the midst of it, as a relic of the Zodiacal Ring on Earth. For ages the Watery Abyss—which, with the nations that preceded the later Babylonians, was the abode of the ‘Great Mother,’ the terrestrial post-type of the ‘Great Mother Chaos’ in Heaven, the parent of Ea (Wisdom), himself the early prototype of Oannes, the Man-Fish of the Babylonians—for ages, then, the ‘Abyss’ or Chaos was the abode of Wisdom and not of Evil. The struggle of Bel and then of Merodach, the Sun-God, with Tiamat, the Sea and its Dragon—a ‘War’ which ended in the defeat of the latter—has a purely cosmic and geological meaning, as well as an historical one. It is a page torn out of the history of the Secret and Sacred Sciences, their evolution, growth and death—for the profane masses. It relates (a) to the systematic and gradual drying up of immense territories by the fierce Sun at a certain prehistoric period, one of the terrible droughts which ended by a gradual transformation of once fertile lands abundantly watered into the sandy deserts which they are now; and (b) to the systematic persecution of the Prophets of the Right path by those of the Left.

The psychic history of the Universe, Earth, and Man, was the drama of each in the drama of the other, written in traumatic scenes—the freezing of the Hyperborean continent, the submerging of Lemuria and Atlantis, the drying up of the Gobi centers. Just as in the bardic tradition, the poet claims to have lived in all times of history from the creation of the world, so in Blavatsky’s theosophy, the individual psyche of the seer inhabits every place and time, every event in the history of the collective; everything survives in some way or other in man.

Gwion (Finn) in the thirteenth-century
Romance of Taliesin
not only tells us that he is the hero or godchild of the land of fairy, Fionn, but names himself also Taliesin, the ninth-century poet, and, again, suggests that he may be a power of the Cosmos, for he claims, “my original country is the region of the summer stars”:

I was with my Lord in the highest sphere,
On the fall of Lucifer into the depth of hell.
I have borne a banner before Alexander . . .

This “I,” the poet’s persona in his song, lives in whatever he sings, as Madame Blavatsky lives in whatever she knows. What they “imagine” has the autonomy of the given:

I am a wonder whose origin is not known.
I have been in Asia with Noah in the Ark . . .

—just as in the psyche-mysteries of Freudian psychoanalysis, the individual psyche was taken to recapitulate the psychic life of his species; the deepest psychic resources, to be found in the collective unconscious. “Since the time when we recognized the error of supposing that ordinary forgetting signified destruction or annihilation of the memory-trace,” Freud tells us in
Civilization and Its Discontents,
“we have been inclined to the opposite view that nothing once formed in the mind could ever perish, that everything survives in some way or other, and is capable under certain conditions of being brought to light again, as, for instance, when regression extends back far enough.” Tracing the history of “the Eternal City” Rome, Freud then turns to picture the
psyche itself as such an Eternal City in one of those creative phantasies in which Freud works a kind of poetry:

Now let us make the fantastic supposition that Rome were not a human dwelling-place, but a mental entity with just as long and varied a past history: that is, in which nothing once constructed had perished, and all the earlier stages of development had survived alongside the latest. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of the Caesars were still standing on the Palatine and the Septizonium of Septimus Severus was still towering to its old height; that the beautiful statues were still standing in the colonnade of the Castle of St. Angelo, as they were up to its siege by the Goths, and so on. But more still: where the Palazzo Caffarelli stands there would also be, without this being removed, the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, not merely in its latest form, moreover, as the Romans of the Caesars saw it, but also in its earliest shape, when it still wore an Etruscan design and was adorned with terra-cotta antefixes. Where the Coliseum stands now we could at the same time admire Nero’s Golden House; on the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the Pantheon of to-day as bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but on the same site Agrippa’s original edifice; indeed, the same ground would support the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the old temple over which it was built.

To penetrate the depths of the psychic life, Freud resolved: “We shall have no hesitation in allowing ourselves to be guided by the common usages of language, or as one might say, the feeling of language, confident that we shall thus take into account inner attitudes which still resist expression in abstract terms.” And in the study of languages, the same sense of all times indwelling in our time or of the essential person of each man indwelling in every period of man’s history takes over. In the grand project of the Oxford English Dictionary, “on historical principles,” undertaken in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the first volume appearing in 1882, the English language was revealed in layers of usage laid bare, even as the city of Rome had been excavated by archeologists or the Earth by geologists. “The past” of our words, once it was acknowledged, entered into the present of their meaning.

Like the detective hero of the murder mystery which was contemporary
in its rise with psychoanalysis and the O.E.D., Freud reads in the dreams and life stories told by his patients searching for clues to a prehistory or metahistory leading to the disclosure of some past event that will make clear what really happened, parallel with the solution that satisfies the form of the popular mystery novel. So, in the Theosophic mystery, the traumas of Hyperborea or of Atlantis come as disclosures of shaping forces in our own lives—they are still with us. “
Those very Monads
which entered the empty, senseless Shells, or Astral Figures of the First Race emanated by the Pitris,” Blavatsky writes, “are the same who are now amongst us—nay, ourselves, perchance
.
” Pound, writing in a period when he was most conversant with Yeats’s Kabbalistic lore, in Canto VII, hearing “Thin husks I had known as men, / Dry casques of departed locusts / speaking a shell of speech,” must have had the presence of such
kelipot
in mind, evil, that are quickened only by the sin of man: “Life to make mock of motion”—

For the husks, before me, move,

The words rattle: shells given out by shells.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And the tall indifference moves,

a more living shell,

Drift in the air of fate, dry phantom, but intact.

The bardic tradition may be recalled by Robert Graves in his “historical grammar of poetic myth,”
The White Goddess,
or the primal scene of Titanic infants playing with fire may haunt Freud’s
Civilization and Its Discontents,
as the Atlantean transgression of Nature’s laws occupies Blavatsky’s thought, because we live in a time into which all times are gathering. “The communion of saints is a great and inspiring assemblage,” Whitehead writes in his
Aims of Education
in 1929: “but it has only one possible hall of meeting, and that is, the present.” We find ourselves gathering what they were or drawn to the idea of them, for we have that wish for a great time or a great space—overpopulated as we are—to live in; and we call up the whole population of mankind and even, thinking of Darwin, of the living, to live in us.

“Before the mind’s eye, whether in sleep or waking, came images
that one was to discover presently in some book one had never read,” Yeats tells us in
Per Amica Silentia Lunae:

and after looking in vain for explanation to the current theory of forgotten personal memory, I came to believe in a Great Memory passing on from generation to generation. But that was not enough, for these images showed intention and choice. They had a relation to what one knew and yet were an extension of one’s knowledge. lf no mind was there, why should I suddenly come upon salt and antimony, upon the liquefaction of the gold, as they were understood by the alchemists, or upon some detail of cabbalistic symbolism verified at last by a learned scholar from his never-published manuscripts, and who can have put together so ingeniously, working by some law of association and yet with clear intention and personal application, certain mythological images? They had shown themselves to several minds, a fragment at a time, and had only shown their meaning when the puzzle picture had been put together. The thought was again and again before me that this study had created a contact or mingling with minds who had followed a like study in some other age, and that these minds still saw and thought and chose.

With Yeats, we are close to Blavatsky’s influence, for he had sought her out in 1887 when he was in his early twenties and he had gone on in other circles to devote his life to the esoteric wisdom cults. But it was the affinity that Poetry in the Romantic tradition has for the occult that moved him. For from the first Yeats had believed that Poetry had itself a secret tradition and doctrine. It was the study of Blake that had brought him to the threshold, leading beyond to Boehme and to the
Zohar
of Moses of Leon. It was Shelley who had set him on his way, for Yeats had read in that poet’s poem “Hellas” of a Jew, Ahasuerus, of whom Shelley says:

Some feign that he is Enoch: others dream
He was pre-Adamite, and has survived
Cycles of generation and of ruin.

“Already in Dublin, I had been attracted to the Theosophists because they had affirmed the real existence of the Jew, or of his like,” Yeats tells us in
The Trembling of the Veil.
He demanded, like Blavatsky, that
his images be verified. He had come in search of a Master in life who had appeared to him in Shelley’s play—the Wandering Jew, Ahasuerus. “Mistake me not!” Ahasuerus had said in Shelley’s poem:

All is contained in each. . . . Thought
Alone, and its quick elements, Will, Passion,
Reason, Imagination, cannot die;
They are, what that which they regard appears,
The stuff whence mutability can weave
All that it hath dominion o’er, worlds, worms,
Empires, and superstitions.

It was to increase the dominion of the poetic mind that Yeats pursued his studies in the occult. The doctrine of correspondences that he found there enlarged the mission of metaphor and simile. The concept of the
eidolon
inherited from Iamblichus in which primal and eternal images are the movers or powers of the universe, agents of reality, charged the poet’s reveries and visions with a radical purpose, a directive towards the heart of the matter, taken in what the majority of men took to be a literary pastime—at best a function of cultured sensibility, at worst an idle and even childish indulgence in phantasy.