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Sources and influences re: HPB's "Ascended Masters"

Maksutov

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I find Madame Blavatsky to be a fascinating personality whose inventions are still very much with us today. I'm intrigued as to how she developed her "ascended masters" concept. Any thoughts?
 
She was in contact with "The White Lodge", which gave her guidance through psychic communications.

Or...

She made the whole thing up out of whole cloth so she could enjoy being the head-honcho of her very own religion.

The latter seems much more likely to me.
 
I'm wondering if she needed to invoke some authorities for her works (perhaps partly due to cultural sexism and her own lack of credentials) and so a class of beings reminiscent of saints, angels, bodhisattvas--beings "higher" than human but not quite divine--was needed. If I recall correctly, there was a precedent in the hermetic tradition in figures like Hermes Trismegistus; Blavatsky may have blended some such with the versions of Buddhism and Vedantism that she was promoting, along with her own, er, unique contributions.
 
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Maksutov said:
I'm wondering if she needed to invoke some authorities for her works (perhaps partly due to cultural sexism and her own lack of credentials) and so a class of beings reminiscent of saints, angels, bodhisattvas--beings "higher" than human but not quite divine--was needed. If I recall correctly, there was a precedent in the hermetic tradition in figures like Hermes Trismegistus; Blavatsky may have blended some such with the versions of Buddhism and Vedantism that she was promoting, along with her own, er, unique contributions.
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All of her ideas were taken from others. She was a strong plagiarist. Her book Isis Unveiled for example had large chunks of stolen text. She was also influenced by the novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

One of the best book in my opinion is Edmund Garrett's work "Isis Very Much Unveiled: Being the Story of the Great Mahatma Hoax" (1894).

https://archive.org/details/b24884273

There are a handful of other works that dismantle Blavatsky's ascended master fictions.
 
S Bulwe-Lytton list-https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Bulwer-Lytton

Also, his writing style was interesting enough that there is or at least was an annual completion for writing the worst possible story in that style. You will note book collections of some of the years in the list. They are quite entertaining - so much so that the best known imitator is Snoopy re: his It Was A Dark and Stormy Night attempts.
 
Thanks, FuelAir. I know she was influenced by Zanoni and the Vril book. I should take another look at those.
 
I may believe in the occult, but Blavatsky was a self confessed fake. I read some of the three volume work, 'the secret doctrine' and practically the fist thing it says that is obvious rubbish is she said she got knowledge from the book of dyzan. This book was apparently magically treated to be fire proof and water proof. She then goes on to say that there was an Atlantis in the Atlantic. But we have maps of the sea bed that show there never was any continent in the Atlantic. America and England used to be joined together but the mid Atlantic fissure forced them apart.
I may believe in my own experiences of the occult but I don't believe in Madam Blavatsky.
So I am a skeptic after all.
 
jaydeehess said:
Thanks. Never heard of her. Read a bit about this and find it surprising that anyone at all swallowed that hooey, but I suppose one should never underestimate the ability of a segment of the human race to be really stupid.
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:thumbsup:
 
IIRC Bulwer-Lytton was embarrassed that his fiction had been incorporated into the Blavatsky cult and asked them to leave him well out of it.

N.B. that his fictional notion of "vril" - an energetic force that could be manipulated, either creatively or destructively, by the winged, subterranean Vril-ya race - inspired its own, informal cult over the decades, including the formation of a "Vril Society" in London whose members favoured sun- and moon-bathing, vegetarianism and deep breathing exercises.

In more recent decades vril also been rediscovered by conspiracy theorists and woven in to all sorts of Vedic UFO/Nazi occult/etc. fantasies.
 
Great comments, Mackenberg. It's amazing how rich the 19th century was in fantasy. There were so many social movements based on so little rationality. A remarkable cultural ferment.
 
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