Madame Blavatsky's Baboon : A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America

Rating:
Summary: TROUBLE IN PARADISE: Reasonable Scholarship ; Poor Payoff
Review: I approached this book with little background on the groups and personalities discussed herein, although with a strong skeptical bias. Peter Washington shares that bias, but he also seems to have done prodigious research on this time and place in the development of 'Western Mystical' belief systems.

This book recounts the history of the movement through a retelling of its most flamboyant personalities. Helena Blavatsky, Henry Olcott, Annie Besant, and Charles Leadbeater headline the Theosophical School. Krishnamurti and Gurdijieff also receive about 80 pages each of coverage. Many of the lesser lights in the movement, including their respective belief systems and pedagogy are also inside: Rudolph Steiner, Peter Ouspensky, Hermann Keyserling, A.R. Orage, J.G. Bennett to name just a few.

Since all of these people knew each other, and repeatedly back-stabbed each other, this book serves mostly as a fantastic list of grievances internal to a movement. In addition, it is a tale of incredible gullibility on the part of many very wealthy people who funded lavish lifestyles for these frauds.

Unfortunately, this book is written in a very confusing fashion, certainly not linear in time. There are also hundreds of 'minor characters'; named once on page 50, then named again on page 350 for no good reason. PW jazzes up the book with a few anecdotes about true talents on the fringes of these movements like Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, and Frank Lloyd Wright. It took me almost 5 weeks to finish this book because I kept getting impatient with the writing style, although I believe that the scholarship was truly there.

Book includes 20 pages of B&W photographs, 35 pages of notes, a Bibliography with more than 150 entries and an Index.

Rating:
Summary: contemptuous
Review: I'm no follower of the people this book is about, but I wouldn't have picked it up unless I thought I'd get some reasonable objective information from it. Washington has the most contemptuous tone imaginable, often labeling the subjects of his books as pederasts and such. Makes me wonder what his real reason was for writing the book; I didn't get through very much of it.

Rating:
Summary: Blavatsky & "The Three Stooges"
Review: If one is interested in the history and development of current NewAge thought, I recommend starting with a study of life of Madame Blavatsky. The first time I heard of this 19th century "spiritual hustler" was as a youngster watching the earliest black and white comedy episodes of the "Three Stooges." One of their film skits was a classic comedy parody on a Madame Blavatsky spirit seance session.

In my opinion, the "Stooges" had a lot more common sense --and insight into human nature (and its comedy) -- than the presumed spiritually enlightened intellectuals following in the footsteps of the early Theosophists.

One book that the current crop of NewAger's love to hate is: "Madame Blavatsky's Baboon, A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America", by Peter Washington. (See the difference in the reader reviews given here)

I highly recommend this history of the genesis of the faddish modern NewAge spiritual philosophies.

Rating:
Summary: contemptuous
Review: The problem with this book is that the author did not know the people he is writing about. Peter Washington simply read a stack of books by other authors and combined them into single manuscript. What you get from this effort is not new, not particularly insightful, and likely to be highly unreliable in terms of accuracy.

Rating:
Summary: Uneven, mildly engaging and informative
Review: This book begins well but begins to lose steam midway through and never recovers. Over half the book concerns people other than HPB (Krishnamurti, Besant, etc), and the earlier parts of the book that do focus on her are not all that extensive.

Rating:
Summary: Informative but dense
Review: This book starts out well but becomes bogged down in details. Do we really need to know everything about J.G. Bennett's business partners, his mining projects, or learn the exact chronology of Gurdjieff's movements? Eventually the cast of minor characters becomes so confusing that the more important figures are obscured. Careful editing could have removed perhaps 100 pages of useless information and replaced it with more interesting material. Ironically, despite the author's almost pedantic attention to the obscure, several important literary and religious figures who deserved attention were left out.

Though confusing, Washington's focus is extremely narrow. He does very well at describing his characters, but seems unable to explain what really made them tick, or why others chose to follow them. In religious/intellectual terms, the big picture becomes lost in the details. I came away with no real sense of where these characters fit into the history of their time. Washington tells us, for example, every aspect of the foibles of gurus like Ouspensky and Gurdjieff with their tiny bands of disciples in the 20s and 30s, but explains nothing of the wider, pervasive effects of spiritualism on European and American society in those decades. Washington is no historian, and it shows in his floundering descriptions of events like the Great Depression and the world wars.

The most obvious issue is bias. Washington tries. Despite his criticism, I think he actually admires Steiner and Krishnamurti, and tweaks them reluctantly. But his often ribald mockery of the characters he dislikes - Blavatsky, Leadbeater, etc. - grows tiresome. I don't particularly care for them either, but find critiques without sneers more effective.

This is a history that needed to be written. The story of the New Age movement and its collection of frauds and lost souls is enough to make outsiders laugh and cry at humanity's need for truth and endless gullibility. I only wish Washington had written about his subject with more clarity and sympathy.

Rating:
Summary: lowest quality writing
Review: This is a flabbergastingly entertaining look at the history of spiritualism and the (mostly) lovable fakes and frauds who practiced it in its heyday. Washington's scholarship is never dry and always informative, and he treats his sometimes wacky subjects with a kind of respect, even when they're behaving in a lunatic manner. For those who like to see how new religions are born, you can't do better than this book (though "Bare-Faced Messiah" by Russell Miller, the story of L. Ron Hubbard and the rise of Scientology, is another winner in the same vein). Madame Blavatsky and her cohort are worthy of your time-- this funny and sometimes bittersweet story (what happens when the new Messiah doesn't WANT to be the Messiah anymore?) will enthrall you.

Rating:
Summary: I keep coming back to this book . . .
Review: This is an absolutely fascinating and informative book. I go back and read it every two or three years, because it is the only book I know that treats of the various esoteric masters that are current and popular today. The book is very well written, and it is very comprehensive in scope. It is one of the few books that I have read over and over. It is a good book to balance against all the enthusiastic writings about the New Age gurus that Peter Washington writes about.

Rating:
Summary: Theosophy and Its Offspring.
Review: _Madame Blavatsky's Babboon_ by Peter Washington is a history of the various movements which arose out of spiritualism and the Theosophical Society of Madame Blavatsky in the Nineteenth Century. The book covers a great deal, but mostly it focuses on various schisms and scandals within spiritualism, theosophical, and proto-New Age movements. The book also shows the human side of the many spiritualists, magicians, cranks, and mediums - the western gurus who followed from theosophy.

The book begins by discussing various forms of spiritualism in the early Nineteenth century. Spiritualism developed as people grew disenfranchised with both materialism and scientism, brought on by modern progress in science, evolutionism (Darwinism), and developments in modern physics, as well as classical religion. Among the various spiritualist groups discussed include the Fox sisters, who allegedly made contact with the spirit world, various groups which grew out of Anglicanism and liberal movements within the church, Mormonism, and Christian Science. All these new religious movements promised contrast to both modern materialism and something different from classical religion. In addition, new doctrines from the East began to become popular.

It was in this environment, that Henry Olcott made contact with Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and out of this contact and friendship developed the Theosophical Society. Blavatsky, the daughter of a Russian aristocrat, made various outrageous claims regarding her early life and her travels. She claimed to have visited Tibet where she made contact with certain Hidden Masters. She was also to write two important works, _Isis Unveiled_ which argued against the materialism and scientism of her day and _The Secret Doctrine_ which outlined her system, revealed her racial doctrines, and expressed her belief in Hidden Masters. The headquarters of the Theosophical Society were subsequently moved from New York to India, where various conflicts between the temperamental and morbidly obese Blavatsky and other members arose.

One of the earlier converts to Theosophy was Charles Webster Leadbeater, a pedophiliac prelate who helped found the Liberal Catholic Church (a splinter sect off the Old Catholic Church which maintained allegiance to Theosophy). Leadbeater helped found a school for boys along with Annie Besant. Annie Besant, had begun as a radical - socialist and feminist - who developed an interest in Theosophy. She was subsequently to take over the position of Blavatsky within the society. Together Leadbeater and Besant took an interest in a young Indian child whose father had become a convert to Theosophy. This was Krishnamurti whose teachings eventually made their way to the West where he was schooled. Krishnamurti, himself, was involved in various scandals, including love affairs with older and married women.

Rudolph Steiner was another individual who took an early interest in Theosophy. He came from a background which included studies in German idealist philosophy and the writings of Goethe. Later, Steiner was to break off from the Theosophical Society and form his own movement, Anthroposophy. Steiner, always a polymath, had a wide range of interests and was to commission the building of a Goethaneum, modelled on the Wagnerian festivals in Bayreuth. In addition to Steiner, the esotericist Count Herman Keyserling also taught a blend of mysticism.

Two other important figures in the history of Western occultism are those of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, who had a brief alliance with each other. Gurdjieff, a native of Georgia in Russia, was an occult teacher who visited St. Petersburg where he met the intellectual Ouspensky to whom he taught his system. Gurdjieff later became known for his difficult teachings and excessive emphasis on hard work, leading to spiritual wakefulness, or so it was believed. It was always rumored that Gurdjieff was impossible to work with and excessively authoritarian leading many to madness or even suicide under his watch. Ouspensky was an intellectual who developed an interest in the occult through mathematics and modern physics. He was later to split with Gurdjieff though retaining Gurdjieff's system. Another individual who played some role in the history of Gurdjieff's teaching was that of Orage.

Other individuals covered in this book include Aldous Huxley, J. G. Bennett, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, and Idries Shah, all claiming to possess unique spiritual wisdom from the East. This book provides an interesting survey of the teachings of various spiritualists from the mid Nineteenth century to the beginning of the modern era. Nearly all reflect the teachings of Madame Blavatsky in their own teachings, especially her belief in Hidden Masters. Later, these individuals were to provide the basis for the beginnings of the New Age movement which owes much to them.