Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled was tremendously well-received at the time, an instant best-seller, a critical success, going through many reprintings and was the essential theosophical textbook for the first five years of the movement. Upon moving to India, more explicit oriental esoteric information began to be presented in the pages of the Blavatsky-edited, The Theosophist and the success of A. P. Sinnett’s The Occult World and especially Esoteric Buddhism effectively superceded Isis as the essential theosophical textbook for the next five years; so much so that Blavatsky herself was critical of Isis and felt the need to present a revised edition, which eventually became The Secret Doctrine, itself effectively superceding Esoteric Buddhism as the fundamental theosophical reference work.However, despite Blavatsky’s own perhaps overly severe critiques of her own work, posterity has been kind to Isis. Scholars such as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke and Gary Lachman have praised the work and it has seemed to have aged well, standing the test of time and perhaps proving to be more accessible than the mind-boggling Secret Doctrine. Despite the complex writing style, the book makes for an excellent introduction and compendium of essential esoteric, theosophical and spriritual concepts.
The very dense, erudite writing style can be challenging, but I don’t really think the work has deep organizational and editing flaws, but rather the confusing nature of the work is merely due to some superficial hurdles that, if understood, one can see the inherent coherence of the work as a whole. Morever, it is interesting to note that The Secret Doctrine contains many verbatim passages from Isis, credited and uncredited, and there are many more striking passages that remain fundamental and enlightening examples of Theosophical concepts that have lost none of their relevancy. As Michael Gomes has written: ”a thread of continuity emerges with startling clarity through the labyrinth of words, highlighting the basic concepts Blavatsky was trying to explain”.
Primo, the work juxtaposes, compares and contrasts modern writings with a great variety of ancient writings; now the jumping back and forth from present to past ideas are sometimes a bit abrupt and unclear, but once this basic structure is understood, then the basic themes of each chapter becomes clearer.
Secundo, the chapter titles and descriptions are a little vague and do not convey the actual contents as clearly as they could. By digging a little deeper, one can see that all the chapters do have very specific and coherent themes and detailed arguments.
Tertio, the page headings, although meant to be helpful topic summaries, probably suffer from being a little too cryptic and are often phrased with an overly ironic and exotic tendency that are more distracting than useful in conveying the seriousness of the subject matter; my favorite example being ”Do flying guitars unconsciously cerebrate?” (vol. 1, p.233), a rather surrealistic question, but upon reading the page one encounters a very deep analysis of some important documentation of supernatural phenomena.
With these points in mind, the following series of articles aim to present a brief analysis of each chapter of both volumes in order to demonstrate that each chapter has a self-contained, coherent structure and collectively form part of a consistent, larger whole.
On the writing of Isis by GeoffreyFarthing:
https://blavatskytheosophy.com/the-extraordinary-story-behind-isis-unveiled/
The semantics of Isis by DavidReigle:
Introduction to abridged Isis Unveiled by Michael Gomes:
2 Comments
Pavel Axentiev
I agree with your observations regarding the page headings. I have also wondered at their usefulness.
A couple of things I would like to see in the analysis (or, possibly, contribute) are: 1) critical analysis of the logic behind some statements. In some places HPB uses mental devices that are at least a bit irrelevant – from the modern point of view – and could be described as logical errors; they are few and relatively insignificant; however, I find that a similar mode of thinking keeps procreating itself in modern theosophists, including those even on this forum.
2) somewhat related to the previous point, a critique of the scientific arguments she presents. I find some of HPB’s ideas incredibly prophetic, while others, in my opinion, could and should be commented upon. I remember some concepts from embryology introduced in the first few chapters. Purely from the historical perspective, the notions have been greatly advanced in the 1.5 centuries since the writing of ‘Isis,’ and it would be a disservice to the theosophical ideas she presents not to update her arguments with the more modern discoveries.
Pavel Axentiev
From Col. Olcott’s Old Diary Leaves (vol. I, ch. XIII):
She [H.P.B.] said she was writing about things she had never studied and making quotations from books she had never read in all her life: that, to test her accuracy, Prof. Corson had compared her quotations with classical works in the University Library, and had found her to be right. [. . .] In her whole life she had not done a tithe of such literary labour, yet I never knew even a managing daily journalist who could be compared with her for dogged endurance or tireless working capacity. From morning till night she would be at her desk, and it was seldom that either of us got to bed before 2 o’clock A.M. During the daytime I had my professional duties to attend to, but always, after an early dinner we would settle down together to our big writing-table and work, as if for dear life, until bodily fatigue would compel us to stop. What an experience! The education of an ordinary life-time of reading and thinking was, for me, crowded and compressed into this period of less than two years. I did not merely serve her as an amanuensis or a proof-reader, but she made me a collaborator; she caused me to utilize — it almost seemed — everything I had ever read or thought, and stimulated my brain to think out new problems that she put me in respect to occultism and metaphysics, which my education had not led me up to, and which I only came to grasp as my intuition developed under this forcing process. She worked on no fixed plan, but ideas came streaming through her mind like a perennial spring which is ever overflowing its brim. Now she would be writing upon Brahma, anon upon Babinet’s electrical “meteor-cat”; one moment she would be reverentially quoting from Porphyrious, the next from a daily newspaper or some modern pamphlet that I had just brought home; she would be adoring the perfections of the ideal Adept, but diverge for an instant to thwack Professor Tyndall or some other pet aversion of hers, in a ceaseless rivulet, each paragraph complete in itself and capable of being excised without harm to its predecessor or successor.