Abstract
This article considers how the matriarch of the Theosophical Society, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891) constructed the category "science," situating this construal within a world in which the boundaries of "legitimate" science were more contested than they are today. Focusing on her teachings on rebirth, the article demonstrates that Blavatsky's doctrines owe a considerable debt to the scientific theories under discussion at her time of writing. It explores her debt to the controversial physicists Balfour Stewart (1828-1887) and Peter Guthrie Tait (1831-1909), her hostility towards the popular materialist monism of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), her hatred of Darwinism, and her preference for theories of evolution influenced by German Romanticism, such as the progressivist versions of orthogenesis proposed by Carl Wilhelm von Nägeli (1817-1891), Karl Ernst von Baer (1792-1876), and Darwin's nemesis, Richard Owen (1804-1892).
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 258-286 |
| Number of pages | 29 |
| Journal | Aries |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2018 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2018 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Keywords
- Darwinism
- Ernst Haeckel
- German Romanticism
- Helena Blavatsky
- The Unseen Universe
- Theosophy
- evolution
- materialism
- nineteenth-century science
- orthogenesis
- recapitulationism
- reincarnation
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- History
- Religious studies
- Philosophy