Men of the Mountain: Secret Masters and Theosophical Masons

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What were the historical origins of Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophical ‘Secret Masters’? In the following paper we discuss how it may well have been the long-established heritage of high-grade continental masonry that gave birth to the particular spiritual and historical context in which the Theosophical movement was able to promote its ideas of ‘Secret Masters’ – ideas which ultimately tied in with fantastical beliefs surrounding a secret occult hierarchy supervising spiritual evolution on Earth, known as the ‘Great White Brotherhood’. Blavatsky portrayed these ‘Masters’ of the Great White Brotherhood or ‘Mahatmas’, as living in the remote mountains of the Himalayas, often materializing to the Theosophers in person, or communicating with them by ‘letters transmitted by occult means’… but were their origins actually much closer to home?

The Context of Jiddu Krishnamurti

In 1909, Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854-1934), self-confessed clairvoyant and leading member of the so-called ‘second-generation’ theosophers or Neo-Theosophers of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s (1832-1891) famous Theosophical Society, announced that a young Indian boy, Jiddu Krishnamurti (1896-1986), would serve as the physical means by which the prophesied World Teacher, Christ, and Lord Maitreya would enter the material world of the late Edwardian early twentieth-century. [1]

In order to prepare the increasingly secular and industrialised West for this young boy’s coming messianic destiny, Leadbeater along with fellow theosopher Annie Besant (1847-1933) successfully devoted themselves to the remarkable worldwide formation of a secondary organisation known as The Order of the Star in the East (1911) with the young Krishnamurti as it’s head. Despite the devoted hopes of thousands, in his adulthood, Krishnamurti renounced his psychically ordained messianic position and dissolved the Order. [2]

His greatest proponent before this renunciation, Charles Leadbeater, was by all accounts, a highly controversial character. He had been ordained as an Anglican Priest in 1878, consecrated a Bishop in the Liberal Catholic Church in July of 1916 and condemned in The Equinox, Vol. X by Aleister Crowley as a ‘senile sex-maniac’. Indeed, in 1906 he was forced to resign from the Theosophical Society for teaching masturbation. His masonic career is distinguished only by his involvement in International Co-Masonry, and as summarised by the Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon, ‘his association with many of the “fringe masons” and his subsequent writings on masonic themes have led anti-masons to mistakenly assume he speaks with some masonic authority and often quote, out of context, his writings on theosophy and the occult’. Evidently, Leadbetter’s masonic career is not the topic of this paper, nor are the details of his somewhat colourful life. It is rather the manner of Leadbeater’s elevation of Krishnamurti in the Theosophical movement that is of interest here.

Yet, Krishnamurti can in no way be considered the first truly transcendent, enigmatic or otherworldly figure to have become acquainted with the modern Theosophical movement.

In the following pages we will see how it was, in fact, the long-established heritage of High-Grade Continental Freemasonry that gave birth to the spiritual and historical context in which the Theosophical movement promoted ideas of an earthly messiah – ideas which tied in with beliefs about a secret occult hierarchy supervising spiritual evolution on Earth known as the ‘Great White Brotherhood’. These ‘Masters’ of the Great White Brotherhood or ‘Mahatmas’ were portrayed as living in the remote mountains of the Himalayas, and yet they often materialised to the Theosophers in person, or communicated with them by ‘letters transmitted by occult means’. [3] It is within this context that Leadbeater was able to elevate Krishnamurti to the level of messiah, but what are the origins of this context?

What follows is a discussion on how this is a context inherited almost wholesale from the remnants of eighteenth-century continental masonry.

The Theosophical Society

Founded in New York during 1875 by Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907), the Theosophical Society, according to a memorandum of Blavatsky’s, had been formed after she had received orders to do so from a secret Master known as ‘Morya’. Having previously met her Master during the August of 1851, Blavatsky’s memorandum states; ‘M: brings orders to form a Society, a secret Society like the Rosicrucian Lodge.’ [4]

The reality was in fact, that the society had been formed after her eventual disillusionment with the Spiritualist movement gaining popularity at the time. [5] She is known to have met fellow enthusiast Olcott in 1874 at the Eddy farmhouse in Chittenden, Vermount during a séance when both were increasingly active in American Spiritualist circles. [6] Blavatsky had been conversing with a spirit guide known as ‘John King’, but as her sketchbook writings of the time show, she had been having doubts as to whether the Spiritualist path could really lead her to the occult knowledge she sought. Her sketchbook tells how she writes as ‘one who laughs at the supposed agency of Spirits! (but all the same, pretends to be one herself)’. [7]

As early as the February of 1875, Blavatsky’s sketchbook writings start to describe her interest in, what we might term, the ‘traditional’ Western esoteric themes such as Rosicrucianism, Kabbalah, Renaissance Magic, and European High-Grade masonry. [8]

These traditions drew on an ancient microcosm-macrocosm cosmological model. The model, an important basis of Renaissance cosmological understanding, represented essentially a great, yet altogether static hierarchy of being. God, the height of the hierarchy, disseminates through the different orders of angels, elements and planets in various degrees of emanation to the plants, animals, and minerals below, hence following the hermetic axiom: ‘As above, so below’. [9] Wouter Hanegraaff states, ‘Blavatsky did not repudiate spiritualism, but reinterpreted it as a subordinate element within a larger occultist framework’. [10]

Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907)

In the March of that year, Blavatsky‘s spirit contact, ‘John King’, was unceremoniously relegated in favor of the more exotic and productive ‘Masters’ known as ‘Serapis Bey’ and ‘Tuitit Bey’. [11] As powerfully evolved Adepts of a mystical group, Olcott apparently received numerous letters from these mysterious Masters during this time encouraging both he and Blavatsky to continue to push forward on their spiritual path and to found a society known as The Miracle Club in 1879. [12] By virtue of her and Olcott’s numerous published articles and public discussions, Blavatsky had attracted around her a number of influential figures during this period. Her apartment, 46 Irving Place, New York, became a regular haunt for the esoterically minded. On the seventh of November, George Henry Felt (1831-1906) delivered a paper at Blavatsky residence on intermediary beings as proof of elemental spirits. [13] Suitably impressed with Felt’s paper, Blavatsky agreed with Olcott that a new society should be formed to promote, as the late Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke states, ‘the philosophical and experimental study of spiritualist phenomena’. [14]

The societies’ amazing claims of initiation by advanced Adepts, Masters, and Mahatmas of far off mountain lands were to catch the zeitgeist of a resoundingly Colonial Age. [15]

Blavatsky, Theosophy and The Masters

Goodrick-Clarke in his The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (2008) suggests that Blavatsky’s idea of guiding Masters is one inherited, despite Blavatsky’s and modern theosophy’s later self-proclaimed Eastern orientations, wholesale from the indigenous Western esoteric and masonic traditions in which is found both Blavatsky’s and modern Theosophy’s true historical context. Both Hanegraaff and Goodrick-Clarke suggest that these notions of ‘Masters’, derived in actuality from the High-Grade masonry of the eighteenth-century and the late Rosicrucian notion of invisible ‘secret masters’ steering the progress of humanity’s future. Clearly, this very concept of the ‘secret masters’ is one indicative of an older Western esoteric tradition. [16] Indeed, Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society faithfully retains Freemasonry’s distinctive embrace of the exotic East or Orient. [17] Traditional esoteric Western traditions (Alexandrian Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and Gnosticism) are believed to have looked to their seductive Oriental worlds of Egypt and Chaldea (Babylon and Assyria), and that from their Alexandrian standpoint they found gnostic inspiration. [18]

With the advent of modern Theosophy, this view to the Orient was now radically relocated however within distinctly Buddhist and Hindu terms. [19]

An Everest of the Soul

The year 1859 saw the publication of Charles Darwin’s (1809-1882) The Origins of Species; it was an age characterised by scientific progression and challenges to religious orthodoxy. In this atmosphere of spiritual retraction, combined with the Orientalism indicative of the era’s Colonialism, Blavatsky’s fusing of Eastern ideas with the Western occult tradition attracted a great many spiritually starved Europeans, as well as a great many American’s and Indians to her particular brand of esotericism. It is easy to see how Blavatsky cultivated within herself a distinctive aura of the East through her extensive and persistent travels as a youth. As the runaway bride of the vice governor of the Erivan province in Armenia, Nikifor Blavatsky (d.1838), Helena took flight to the Middle East, traveling throughout Turkey, Greece, and Egypt. She found a traveling companion in the form of a young American explorer Albert Rawson (1828-1902) and in 1850 they both entered a period of study with a Coptic magician in Cairo, Paolos Metamon.

A year later Blavatsky met her Master…

In a Parisian backdrop, she was informed to prepare for an important task. Such was its importance, that three years careful preparation in Tibet was required. Subsequently, between 1856-1857, Blavatsky traveled throughout India, Kashmir, Burma, and Tibet. It wasn’t until some years later in Florence in 1868 that Blavatsky heard once more that her Master, Morya, requested her presence in Constantinople for a further adventure in Tibet. This Master of Blavatsky’s is understood to have lived near the mountain monastery of Tashi Lhunpo in Shigatse. Another Master known as Koot Homi, both Kashmirs of Punjabi descent, ran an advance training school for highly spiritually evolved Adepts.

Blavatsky’s assimilation of the contemporary scientific notion of Evolution is of particular interest here. Her ‘Masters’ represent a reformulated type of Intermediary being; that is to say, that rather than the descent from heaven of an otherworldly angel or daimon, the ‘Masters’ represent the Evolution of Man’s upwards spirituality; a Darwinian spirituality ascending an Everest of the Soul. Blavatsky’s concept of the ‘Masters’ repositioned Man’s ontological dignity back in our world.

Blavatsky’s ‘Masters’ place Mankind once again at the spiritual peak, at the center of our own World: Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem.

The Masonic Tradition: V.I.T.R.I.O.L

Despite all Blavatsky’s Eastern allusions, the reality is that these ideas of ‘Unknown Superiors’ or Masters find their birth in the West – in the German-speaking lands of the eighteenth-century, with one Baron Karl Gotthelf von Hund (1722-1776) and his Masonic Rite of the Strict Observance. Claiming to have been initiated into a Templar Degree in France 1742 by the mysterious ‘Knight of the Red Feather’, a shadowy figure from the northern mountains of the Scottish Highlands, clearly intended to be Charles Edward Stuart ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ (1720-1788), this system traced its origins back to the Knights Templar and implied that the unknown superior or Superiores Incogniti was the Grand Master of the Knights Templar, which continued to exist in hiding in the North of the Scottish mountains (Heredom). This ‘Unknown Superior’ is said to have ruled through von Hund, with the members of his Rite expected to observe the commands of this Superior strictly. However, by the 1770s there were suspicions that those unknown superiors were, in fact, a complete fabrication. Giving rise to reform, in 1781 Johann Joachim Christoph Bode (1731-1793), a counselor at the ducal court in Weimar, printed his Ordered Dutiful Considerations (1781), for circulation within the lodges. As a direct result, from 16 July to 1 September 1782 representatives met in Wilhelmsbald to debate the wholesale reform of the continent’s masonic Orders, eventually resulting in the birth of the Rectified Scottish Rite or as it came to be known L’Ordre de Chevaliers Bienfaisants de la Cité Sainte.

At this convention, the kabbalistic influence of one Samuel Jacob Falk (ca. 1710-1782), on various Illuminés was also discussed, arising once again at the Philalèthes conferences in Paris in 1783-1787. Falk was a Jewish Kabbalist known as the ‘Baal Shem of London’ (master of the divine names), and some Masons believed him to be the ‘Old Man of the Mountain,’ or an ‘Unknown Superior’ revealed. His most famous disciple was Joseph Balsamo (1743-1795), also known as Count Alessandro di Cagliostro who in 1776 helped Falk develop the Egyptian Rite, which Cagliostro carried to lodges in Holland, France, Germany, Poland, and Russia. According to Catherine the Great (1729-1796), the Russian Masons were infatuated with the teachings of the Swedish philosopher and mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) and thus welcomed Cagliostro, who claimed to possess the secrets of the famous Dr. Falk.

Clearly, we can only summarise here what the Theosophical ‘Masters’ or the ‘Unknown Superiors’ actually were. It seems likely they represent at least something like a conceptual link between modern Theosophy and the traditions of eighteenth-century continental masonry. Charles Leadbeater’s messianic elevation of Krishnamurti in the Theosophical movement is in many ways very similar to Charles Edward Stuart’s elevation in eighteenth-century Masonic circles, perhaps only in far more rarified manner. Whether political messiah or spiritual, whether in the Scottish mountains or the Tibetan, this notion of clandestine hierarchies is as surprisingly popular today as it was in either the eighteenth or nineteenth century. In the popular imagination, such ideas define Freemasonry, regardless of their factual basis in truth. Aloft spiritual and worldly mountains, the sway of Masonry’s plumb line has attracted many great and remarkable men; making good men better, as they say. I will leave it to the conscious of the reader as to whether that can extend to such transcendental limits as suggested by the wonderful Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society.

Footnotes:

(1) Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 229.

(2) Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions, p. 230. See also, Emily B. Sellon and Renée Weber, ‘Theosophy and The Theosophical Society’ in Modern Esoteric Spirituality, ed. Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman (London: SCM Press, 1993), pp. 316-318.

(3) Wouter J. Hanegraaff, ‘Intermediary Beings IV: 18th Century – Present’, in Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff with Antoine Faivre, Roelof van den Broek and Jean-Pierre Brach (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005). p. 629.

(4) Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Helena Blavatsky, (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2004), p. 33.

(5) For Information on Spiritualism at this time see, John Patrick Deveney, ‘Spiritualism’, in Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff with Antoine Faivre, Roelof van den Broek and Jean-Pierre Brach (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005), pp. 1074-1082.

(6) Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions, p.214. The Eddy Brothers; William Eddy (1832-1932) and Horatio Eddy (1842-1922). Best known in the 1870s as claiming psychic powers.

(7) Goodrick-Clarke, Helena Blavatsky, p. 28.

(8) Ibid. pp. 35-48.

(9) Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions, p. 38.

(10) Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture, p. 450.

(11) Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions, p. 214.

(12) Ibid. p. 214.

(13) Ibid. p. 217. The attending audience consisted of Dr Seth Pancoast (1823-1889), an anatomy Professor with the largest Kabbalistic library in the United States; Emma Hardinge Britten (1823-1899), trance medium; Charles Sotheran (1847-1902), high-grade Freemason; Henry J. Newton (1823-1895), spirit photographer and Charles Carleton Massey (1823-1895), who helped found the Society for Psychical Research (1882).

(14) Ibid. p. 217.

(15) Ibid.

(16) Ibid, p. 213.

(17) Ibid, pp. 16-29

(18) Ibid.

(19) Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions, p. 212.

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1 COMMENT

  1. 1-Leadbeater is not “Original Theosophy” nor Alice Bailey and neither Annie Beasant.
    They just saw the market opportunity after betraying HPB.
    So…
    Don’t put them in a same bag.

    At least Helena had some kind of system that somehow had sense, and those traitors just said a lot of things that didn’t even had sense.

    There is a London based lodge called “United Lodge of Theosophist” in which they stick to the true works from Original Theosophy (Specially the works from HPB and William Q. Judge).
    Please excuse my grammar mistakes if I had. I’m from Argentina.