Psychic and Noetic Action E-Book

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

• Herausgeber: Edizioni Aurora Boreale
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), née Hahn Von Rottenstern, often known as Madame Blavatsky, was a Russian mystic and author who co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. She gained an international following as the primary founder of Theosophy as a belief system.
Blavatsky was a controversial figure during her lifetime, championed by supporters as an enlightened sage and derided as a charlatan by critics. Her Theosophical doctrines influenced the spread of Hindu and Buddhist ideas in the West as well as the development of Western esoteric currents like Ariosophy, Anthroposophy, and the New Age Movement.
She wrote fundamental essays, including Isis Unveiled, The Secret Doctrine, The Key to Theosophy and The Voice of the Silence.
The Blavatsky’s article Psychic and Noetic Action, which we propose to our readers today, was published in October-November 1880 in the Lucifer Magazine.
According to Blavatsky, holding to our motto, “There is no religion higher than truth”, we refuse most decidedly to pander to physical science. Yet, we may say this: If the so-called exact sciences limited their activity only to the physical realm of nature: if they concerned themselves strictly with surgery, chemistry—up to its legitimate boundaries, and with physiology—so far as the latter relates to the structure of our corporeal frame, then the Occultists would be the first to seek help in modern sciences, however many their blunders and mistakes. But once that over-stepping material Nature the physiologists of “animalistic” school pretend to meddle with, and deliver ex cathedra dicta on, the higher functions and phenomena of the mind, saying that a careful analysis brings them to a firm conviction that no more than the animal is man a free-agent, far less a responsible one—then the Occultist has a far greater right than the average modern “Idealist” to protest.

Leseprobe

SYMBOLS & MYTHS

HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY

PSYCHIC AND NOETIC ACTION

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Title: Psychic and Noetic Action

Author: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

Publishing series: Symbols & Myths

Editing by Nicola Bizzi

ISBN e-book edition: 979-12-5504-823-7

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

© 2025 Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Via del Fiordaliso 14 - 59100 Prato - Italia

[email protected]

www.auroraboreale-edizioni.com

INTRODUCTION BY THE PUBLISHER

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), née Hahn Von Rottenstern, often known as Madame Blavatsky, was a Russian mystic and author who co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. She gained an international following as the primary founder of Theosophy as a belief system.

Born on August 12 1831 into an aristocratic family in Yekaterinoslav, she traveled widely around the Russian empire as a child. Largely self-educated, she developed an interest in Western esotericism during her teenage years. According to her later claims, in 1849 she embarked on a series of world travels, visiting Europe, the Americas, and India. She also claimed that during this period she encountered a group of spiritual adepts, the "Masters of the Ancient Wisdom", who sent her to Shigatse, Tibet, where they trained her to develop a deeper understanding of the synthesis of religion, philosophy, and science.

By the early 1870s, Blavatsky was involved in the Spiritualist movement; although defending the genuine existence of Spiritualist phenomena, she argued against the mainstream Spiritualist idea that the entities contacted were the spirits of the dead. Relocating to the United States in 1873, she befriended Henry Steel Olcott and rose to public attention as a spirit medium.

In 1875, New York City, Blavatsky co-founded the Theosophical Society with Olcott and William Quan Judge. In 1877, she published Isis Unveiled, a book outlining her Theosophical world-view. Associating it closely with the esoteric doctrines of Hermeticism and Neoplatonism, Blavatsky described Theosophy as "the synthesis of science, religion and philosophy", proclaiming that it was reviving an "Ancient Wisdom" which underlay all the world's religions. In 1880, she and Olcott moved to India, where the Society tried to make allies to the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement. In 1882, while in Ceylon, she and Olcott became the first people from the United States to formally convert to Buddhism.

Although opposed by the British colonial administration, Theosophy spread rapidly in India but experienced internal problems after Blavatsky was accused of producing fraudulent paranormal phenomena. In ailing health, in 1885 she returned to Europe, establishing in London the Blavatsky Lodge as a rival to that run by Sinnett, draining much of its membership. Lodge meetings were held at the Keightleys' house on Thursday nights, with Blavatsky also greeting many visitors there, among them the occultist and poet William Butler Yeats. In November 1889 she was visited by the Indian lawyer Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who was studying the Bhagavad Gita with the Knightleys. He became an associate member of Blavatsky's Lodge in March 1891, and would emphasize the close connection between Theosophy and Hinduism throughout his life. In 1888, Blavatsky established the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society, a group under her complete control for which admittance was restricted to those who had passed certain tests. She identified it as a place for "true Theosophists" who would focus on the system's philosophy rather than experiment with producing paranormal phenomena.

In that years, in London, Blavatsky published The Secret Doctrine, a commentary on what she claimed were ancient Tibetan manuscripts, as well as two further books, The Key to Theosophy and The Voice of the Silence, and founded a magazine, controversially titling it Lucifer. In this Theosophical publication she sought to completely ignore claims regarding paranormal phenomena, and focus instead on a discussion of philosophical ideas.