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Title: Isis Unveiled: Collected Writings, 1877: Volume I Science and Volume II Theology by Helene Petrovna Blavatsky ISBN: 0-8356-0193-5 Publisher: Natl Book Network Pub. Date: 01 January, 1972 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $33.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: A New Platonism meets Darwin and Christianity
Comment: I recommend this edition of "Isis Unveiled" as it has detailed endnotes from the editor that situate key textual references within their nineteenth century context. This edition also has an important historical introduction by its editor Boris de Zirkoff. That being said, it is important to note that these two volumes, purported to be dictated or inspired by disincarnate and incarnate personalities, contain a stunning wealth of historical, mythical, philosophical, and semi-scientific material. Blavatsky wrote the text to resurrect what she called the "Ancient Wisdom" during a period of scientific materialism on the one side and spiritualism, with its claims about the life of the dead, on the other. She wished to situate her theosophical perspective within an older Platonic tradition that would give due place to matter (an inferior but quite real position) and yet to the power of spirit to shape and transform matter. Her fight with Darwin did not entail a simple rejection, but rather left the field of physical evolution to him (and Wallace), while making room for a prior (temporally and ontologically) involution in which spirit encased itself more and more in matter. In her view, we have reached the deepest level of involution and are now on the cusp of a return back toward the light of spirit from which we have come. She posited an emanationist Platonic cosmology but one that tried, not always successfully, to honor the science of the nineteenth century. Yet she was also a master polemecist and took on the Christian theology of her time, with special hatred reserved for the missionaries working in India. Unlike the later Jung and Joseph Campbell, she did not see her Platonic archetypal patterns as occuring spontaneously in different cultural basins, but struggled to show (unconvincingly) that all culture derives from India, via Egypt and Greece, and that nothing in the Christian bible could not be found in better and purer form in Indian thought. In particular, she rejects traditional Christian teachings concerning the devil (whom she does not take too seriously as a personal being), the atonement, the uniqueness of Jesus, and the obsession with conversion. However, she posits a primitive and pure Christism of the true gnostic Jesus against the Christian empire which spent much of its time vilifying her work. Her dating of texts is certainly off the mark by the standards of today's scholarship, yet her attempts at finding parallels among religions has now become common coin. This monumental text can vex the reader many times, as Blavatsky makes absurd non-empirical claims, however, her primary philosophical intuitions are clearly on the mark for those among us who find Platonism and Neo-Platonism compelling perspectives.
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Title: The Secret Doctrine : The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy (Volumes 1 and 2) by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky ISBN: 1557000026 Publisher: Theosophical University PR Pub. Date: December, 1999 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: The Urantia Book by Urantia Foundation ISBN: 0911560513 Publisher: Urantia Foundation Pub. Date: 01 November, 1999 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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