MADAME BLAVATSKY'S BABOON : A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought...

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.