The Ordinary Business of Occultism Author(S): Gauri Viswanathan Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol

The Ordinary Business of Occultism Author(s): Gauri Viswanathan Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 1-20 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344224 Accessed: 05-01-2018 19:56 UTC

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This content downloaded from 141.161.55.217 on Fri, 05 Jan 2018 19:56:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Ordinary Business of Occultism

Gauri Viswanathan

Occultism and Cosmopolitanism

By the late nineteenth century occultism had become the favorite sport of Britain's leisured classes. Table rapping, seances, and levitations offered new pursuits to those who, exhausted by the earnest stipulations of Victorian society, looked to other diversions that crossed the boundaries between finite and infinite planes of meaning and imagination. For urban cosmopolitans in particular, occultism afforded a mobility between different personae and worldviews increasingly denied or at least circum- scribed by the mainstream morality of their times. The situation was even more extreme in the colonies, where, as E. M. Forster showed so brilliantly in A Passage to India, contact between the colonizer and the colonized was limited to bureaucratic transactions, with the result that whenever social occasions were contrived to overcome the divide, such as through the infamous Bridge Party depicted in the novel, they predictably ended in abject failure.' Forster's novel focused on the alienation of a small group of Englishmen from the racial exclusivism practiced by the colonial bureaucracy. As teachers, missionaries, doctors, and other professionals they could not but be involved with Indians at a level of intimacy forbidden by colonial logic. Such contact, necessitated by the nature of their work as service professionals, did not necessarily mean they were all anticolonial activists, but it did put them in positions where their day-to-day transac-

1. See E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924; New York, 1952), pp. 38-52.

This content downloaded from 141.161.55.217 on Fri, 05 Jan 2018 19:56:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 2 Gauri Viswanathan The Ordinary Business of Occultism tions with colonized Indians gave them a more complex perspective on racialized encounters, resulting in far deeper questioning of the structure and style of existing bureaucratic relationships. Moreover, the distance of these groups of people from the exclusivist practices of the colonial administration dovetailed with an interest in new ways of conceiving relations to various unseen powers, which constituted an important part of the belief systems of the Indians with whom they interacted. In part, this connected with an interest in spiritualist matters that late Victorian society had already begun to demonstrate in its fasci- nation with herbalism, animal magnetism, mesmerism, and other mind practices.2 The phenomenal, worldwide growth of the Theosophical Soci- ety under the tutelage of Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, with its international headquarters set up in Madras, India, is one important indicator of the widespread enthusiasm for astral study among Euro- peans and non-Europeans alike. Yet it is within the colonial context that spiritualism is seen most powerfully to loosen boundaries between closed social networks. In fact, the otherworldliness of the occult offered alternative possibilities for imagining colonial relations outside a hierarchical framework, without succumbing entirely to the next logical step of mis- cegenation that developing closer ties might entail. In reimagining colonial relationships, occultism performs a function similar to what Robert Young describes as culture's role in imperializing Britain, which allowed for a cross-fertilization of language, history, and literature without the racial "degeneration" caused by sexual contact.3 In part, the growing appeal of the astral world lay in its opening up other cosmological views in which the normal distinctions between the colonizer and the colonized

2. See Alison Winter's study, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago, 1998), for an engrossing account of mesmerism as a major spiritualist preoccupation of Victorian society that engaged artists and musicians just as much as it did psychiatrists and medical doctors. One of the significant insights of this book is its argument that mesmerism was instrumental in fashioning modes of human interaction through, for example, per- formative means: "The power of looking [that mesmerism conveyed] and the relations of influence operating between the person looking and the thing being looked at were at the heart of experiments" (p. 31). 3. See Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London, 1995), p. 95.

Gauri Viswanathan is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989) and Outside the Fold: Conversion, Moder- nity, and Belief (1998), which won, among other prizes, the 1999 James Russell Lowell Prize awarded by the Modern Language Association of America.

This content downloaded from 141.161.55.217 on Fri, 05 Jan 2018 19:56:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Autumn 2000 3 blurred, while at the same time it resisted the physical intimacy that such a loosening of boundaries might invite in day-to-day interactions. The unique location of cosmopolitan emigr6s at the nexus of professional and spiritualist interests merged with the tendencies of Oriental- ism, which looked to the East as the fountainhead of spiritual knowledge yet did not necessarily privilege the people who were the conduits for that knowledge. Still, contact with "natives" was an essential part of the professional and spiritual lives of this new breed of Anglo-Indians, alienated from extreme forms of both British colonialism and Indian nationalism.4 To some extent, their relationship with Indian spirituality was parasitic. Since it required intermediaries who, as spiritual adepts, led them like guides to the astral knowledge they craved, proprietorship of the occult was split unevenly between spiritual teacher and Anglo-Indian disciple. Thus, the very word master acquired an ironic twist. In the colonial situation it was inevitably conjoined to hierarchical relationships. Yet in the practice of the occult the relations of domination and subordina- tion were necessarily inverted, and masters were those who guided initiates into unseen phenomena, which remained the uncolonized space resisting the bureaucratic compulsions of colonial management. However, relationships of power are never fully suspended, even as the occult appears to banish the distinctions that dissident Anglo-Indians so disdained in the colonial administration. Ghost authoring as a phenomenon of modern publishing is one instance of the return of power, as the spiritual medium who transmits the messages of the dead and the unseen also doubles as their surrogate.5 Books authored jointly by British initiates and Eastern spiritual adepts pose new challenges in the location of authority. Whose voice is to predominate; the voice of the spiritual master conveying the deepest secrets of the unknown, or the voice of the interpreter and receiver through whom the last impregnable barrier of the unseen and unknown is breached? A new kind of ventriloquism is negotiated, masking the true operations of power. In a stunning inversion of the anti-Orientalist canard, derived from Marx's observation of the French peasantry that "they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented," we hear Anglo-Indian cosmopolitans speaking not in their

4. Though many dissident British in India were alienated from the excesses of British colonialism, they were equally skeptical about extremist versions of Indian nationalism. Even though some, like the theosophists Annie Besant and A. O. Hume, were associated with the Indian National Congress, both in fact being presidents of it (Hume its first), their presence in the nationalist movement was contested by other Indian nationalists who were driven by a more radical agenda to overthrow British rule and who saw sympathetic figures like Besant and Hume as too conciliatory. 5. See Helen Sword's astute essay, "Necrobibliography: Books in the Spirit World," Modern Language Quarterly 60 (Mar. 1999): 85-113, which offers a striking introduction to the legal issues raised by ghost authoring, including the rights of posthumous authors.

This content downloaded from 141.161.55.217 on Fri, 05 Jan 2018 19:56:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 4 Gauri Viswanathan The Ordinary Business of Occultism own voices in these problematic texts of joint authorship but through the Indo-Tibetan masters whose occult knowledge becomes part of their expanding field of social interaction.6 This field, in turn, encompassed the full range of professional interests that brought many Englishmen to India and to Indians and continued to influence the reception of occultism as yet another professional pursuit. Yet even as the knowledge of the Eastern masters is normalized and made part of professional knowledge and therefore acceptable, a core part of the teachings remains inaccessible, as is evident in the deliberate strategies of adepts to subvert their colonial "masters' " ventriloquism. Fis- sures in the jointly produced texts of occult transmission are most trans- parent in the disjunctive visions of history, memory, time, and knowledge, pulling the texts in different directions and revealing them to be an un- certain composite of voices often at war with each other. The spiritual teachers' voices convey their refusal to accept a finite, secular view of history and the world, which is the only form in which their teachings can be absorbed by the structures of Western knowledge. The fact that the spiritual teachers' perspective is not suppressed but rather preserved reveals that these texts attempt to negotiate social relationships considered impossible under the normal conditions of colonial rule. We learn that what begins as a leisurely pastime for many urban cosmopolitans, drawn to occultism as an alternative to the regulated social practices of the time, thus becomes a very serious matter, as the astral world is reconstituted as the ground for a redefinition of colonial relationships. That adepts and their European initiates do not necessarily share a common definition shows the extent to which astral matters still continued to function as the last frontier, open to exploration but resistant to false appropriation.

Occultism as Professional Knowledge

Reading Theosophy-as one among many so-called fringe spiritual movements of the nineteenth century-poses the sorts of challenges to critical thinking that secular intellectuals would prefer not to contem- plate. A cosmopolitan movement that acquired worldwide adherents, Theosophy developed in reaction to orthodox Christianity, as it sought the roots of spiritual life not in dogma but in an experiential religion recapturing a non-deity-centered, pantheistic theology. Its appeal lay in finding a common ground between many world religions, without necessarily subscribing to the tenets of any one particular religion. Although it is sometimes grouped along with other spiritualist cults, it is necessary to

6. Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2d ed. (New York, 1978), p. 608.

This content downloaded from 141.161.55.217 on Fri, 05 Jan 2018 19:56:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Autumn 2000 5 distinguish it from the more plebian movements with which spiritualism was often identified.' The fact that so many of the people drawn to Theos- ophy came from the professional classes demolishes the view that fringe movements are usually the preserve of the poorly educated, plebian classes. Many Theosophists were indeed doctors, lawyers, teachers, artists, and public intellectuals, and unless one is willing to declare these groups of people inconsequential to the social weal, there is no way of getting around the fact that their collective presence provided an aura of respectability and authority to the movement. Some, like George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats, flirted briefly with what they considered an entertaining, eclectic movement before becoming either downright hostile to it (as was Shaw) or profoundly ambivalent (as was Yeats).8 Oth- ers were in it for life, often coming from a range of heterodoxies, such as freethought, atheism, and socialism. Annie Besant is the best known of these lifelong converts to Theosophy, but as one of her biographers, Ar- thur Nethercot, points out, there was a steady flow of atheists, socialists, and freethinkers into Theosophy, and they included such prominent persons as George Sexton and John Holmes.9 Theosophy attracted these creative thinkers and intellectuals because it offered a philosophy that approached consciousness as a substantive rather than transcendental phenomenon. At the same time, its resistance to a materialistic ethic appealed to those dissatisfied with socialism's failed promise. Positing one substance and no separate God, Theosophy's pantheistic orientation helped approach the vexing problem that a sup- posedly merciful God can also be the source of suffering. While the unre- solved contradictions in the Christian conception of God invariably led many intellectuals to atheism, Theosophy's decentered divinity encour- aged an alternative route for those still wary of an unreconstructed ni- hilism. At the same time, it permitted them to salvage the preorthodox aspects of Christianity found in the early mysteries, alternatively dubbed "esoteric Christianity."10 Furthermore, Theosophy's interest in the forma- tion of consciousness lent itself to evolutionary theory, which supported

7. Logie Barrow, Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebians, 1850-1910 (Lon- don, 1986) has little to say about Theosophy, other than to describe it as "semi-spiritualist" (p. 107). Theosophy fails to conform to Barrow's characterization of spiritualism as a movement that attracted the masses, grown tired of both orthodox Christianity and secularism. Hence the small space given to Theosophy in his book. 8. Yeats, for instance, remained uneasy about Madame Blavatsky's claims that the occult masters were living beings; in his own speculation, they were dramatizations of her mythmaking capacity. At any rate, he fused his poetic imagination with hers in his mytholo- gizing of the masters as inhabitants of the remote Himalayas, whose secret knowledge would initiate the spiritual regeneration he believed was imminent in Ireland. See Anne Taylor, Annie Besant: A Biography (Oxford, 1992), p. 253. 9. See Arthur H. Nethercot, The First Five Lives ofAnnie Besant (Chicago, 1960), p. 152. 10. See Annie Besant, Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries (1901; Madras, 1989).

This content downloaded from 141.161.55.217 on Fri, 05 Jan 2018 19:56:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 6 Gauri Viswanathan The Ordinary Business of Occultism the modern teleology of progress and the fulfillment of a world plan." Here indeed was a quasi-religion that satisfied spiritual drives while grounding them in the biological development of human consciousness, from insensate matter to thinking subject. Theosophy allowed religion to be conceived as a science with its own laws and principles. In part, this accounted for its attraction to people in professional fields looking for new forms of religion not founded on faith alone that would also be ame- nable to the tools and techniques of science. Although Theosophy presented itself as a rational alternative to re- vealed religion, it is, of course, another matter to argue from the impres- sive credentials of the Theosophists that their interest in occultism was merely another professional interest, no different from law, medicine, or natural science. No amount of rationalization can write away the discrep- ancy between empiricist ways of knowing (as the professional sciences un- derstand them) and occult knowledge. Yet the inculcation of professional knowledge is precisely the effect achieved by the remote, occultist adepts sending their communications through Madame Blavatsky, who, not sur- prisingly, was accused of impersonating the Tibetan Masters Koot Hoomi and Morya to legitimate her own teachings. Alternatively a form of "gen- der-bending ventriloquism," Blavatsky's mediumship also conferred an authority on the masters' communications that they might not have otherwise had.'2 That designated recipients acquired the masters' occult secrets as a form of professional knowledge is not an accidental effect. It is the result of a calculated series of rhetorical elaborations by means of which hidden cosmic mysteries enter a professionalized bureaucratic apparatus. The message of the anterior world is not transmitted in a vacuum, nor is its final destination exclusively the hearer of such communications. Indeed, the hearer's charge is to commit the teachings to the making of institutions for their care, protection, and fortification. The occult masters' communications with their Anglo-Indian interlocutors have as much to do with the proper procedures for setting up the Theosophical Society as a guarantor of occult teachings as with revelations of hidden mysteries. If institution making creates a public space overtaking the private practice of belief, this new space of institutional articulation constitutes the reality effect achieved by nonrational, nonempiricist forms of knowledge. The institution's disenchantment of occult mysteries illustrates, in the words of a critic studying the sociological effects of spectral imagin- ings, "how the real could be a powerful fiction that we do not experience as fictional, but as true."''" In other words, occultism's successful institu-

11. See Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, N.J., 1998), pp. 177-207, for an analysis of monism, race, and evolutionary theory in The- osophy. 12. Sword, "Necrobibliography," p. 87. 13. Avery E Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneap- olis, 1997), p. 38; hereafter abbreviated GM.

This content downloaded from 141.161.55.217 on Fri, 05 Jan 2018 19:56:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Autumn 2000 7 tionalization in such organizations as the Theosophical Society creates an effect of the real through the new fields of study it spawned, be they Eastern philosophy or comparative religion. Far from resulting in the retreat of sublime values from public life and their return to the transcendental realm of mystic life, as Max Weber theorized the split between religion and disenchantment of the world, the institutional preservation of occult knowledge dispersed nonrational, nonempiricist modes of cog- nition into branches of official study.14 The Theosophical Society's exten- sive involvement in the publication of books and pamphlets on astral phenomena, esoteric religions, and cosmogonies, as well as its sponsor- ship of worldwide conferences and symposia on these subjects, went a long way in routinizing occultism as professional knowledge. Theosophy's obsession with spirit mediums, seances, and occult writing, while inviting dismissal by more skeptical critics, nonetheless traduces these very same preoccupations in a parodic, quasi-deconstructionist move. Theosophy's mixture of mysticism and worldliness will strike some critics as quaint, even grotesquely amusing. Madame Blavatsky's famous corporeality makes writing her spiritual biography a Rabelaisian enter- prise. Rough-hewn and phlegmatic, she conveyed an overpowering im- age of a woman with infinite appetites and incorrigible mood swings. Her eccentricity spilled over to all aspects of her behavior and personality. Over time her very presence was erratic. Treating spectators to a vision of her ample frame bedecked in "perky" plumed hats and satin dresses, she eventually took to wearing a gigantic, ballooning wrapper, under which she hid cigarette papers and tobacco.'5 Yeats described her alternately as a female Dr. Johnson and a curmudgeonly Russian peasant woman.'6 Indeed, the Theosophical Society is more carnivalesque than Carmelite. Charles Leadbeater was accused of molesting little boys, Be- sant of stealing young Brahmin men from their helpless fathers and turn- ing them into messiahs, and Madame Blavatsky and her cofounder Colonel Olcott of perpetrating astral frauds. All the while these colorful figures concentrated their energies on securing the blessing and wisdom of elusive masters from the inner Tibetan reaches to help them build an institution consecrated to the preservation of Eastern mysteries. That these masters had as much to say about the bylaws of the Theo-

14. See Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1946), p. 155. Weber's interpretation of the disenchantment of the world extended to the observation that, with rationalization and intellectualization, not only are magical elements of thought displaced, but even the very possibilities of inward and subjective experiences, such as music, are subject to the bureaucratic trend of rationalization. It is for this reason that religion becomes for him the ultimate retreat from the rational order and therefore outside the public realm. 15. Taylor, Annie Besant, p. 230. 16. See William Butler Yeats, letter to John O'Leary, 7 May [1889], The Collected Letters of W B. Yeats, 1865-1895, ed. John Kelly, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1986), 1: 164, and 1: 481.

This content downloaded from 141.161.55.217 on Fri, 05 Jan 2018 19:56:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 8 Gauri Viswanathan The Ordinary Business of Occultism sophical Society as about secrets of the netherworld is not the least of the carnivalesque effects." In fact, I will argue that the curious, hybrid quality of their communications-mixing mundane, workaday preoccupations with convoluted accounts of astral phenomena--evokes the exaggeratedly mixed quality of modern bureaucratic life, with a decentering of charismatic authority in the rational, quotidian, routine world. The work of occult transmission is thus as much allied to setting up the charter laws of professional organizations as to imparting sublime mysteries to select initiates. In itself this is nothing new; Weber long ago schematized the transference of charismatic authority to the stable structure of institutions as part of the social effort to achieve permanence and durability of ideas. If formal principles and rules of succession and appointment establish the official terms of leadership, they entail a shift from hereditary claims, or an implicit belief in the charismatic qualities of a leader.18 Yet what sounds a new note is that the bureaucratization of occultism is never far from its simultaneous deployment as an anticolonial move. The masters' intense interest in framing the bylaws of the Theosophical Society is also motivated by their anxiety to retain the independence of the Indian branches against any coercive moves by the London branch of the Theo- sophical Society. By urging their Anglo-Indian initiates to frame their rules with the utmost care and rigor, the Masters remind them how im-

17. Compare the master Koot Hoomi's reminder that the Theosophical Society must ensure its own rules and bylaws. The master's meticulous attention to the association's charter extends to the warning that "the new Society shall not be allowed to disconnect itself with the Parent Body, though you are at liberty to manage your affairs in your own way without fearing the slightest interference from its President so long as you do not violate the general Rule. And upon this point I refer you to Rule 9" (A. P Sinnett, The Mahatma Letters to A. P Sinnett: From the Mahatmas M. and K. H., ed. A. T Barker [1923; Madras, 1979], p. 16; hereafter abbreviated ML). (The book covers the correspondence of Alfred P. Sinnett with the Mahatmas between 1880 and 1884; with the permission of his executors, it was published soon after his death in 1921 through the efforts of its compiler, A. T. Barker. The full manuscript of the letters was given to the British Museum in 1939. Providing the complicated publication details of a work already dealing with astral matters uncannily evokes the phenomenon described by Helen Sword as "necrobibliography," the writing of books by the dead.) The obsession with bylaws and rules of succession and appointment reveals the pri- macy of authority and leadership in esoteric organizations, paralleling the rigid hierarchy they putatively oppose in orthodox Christianity. Charles Leadbeater expressed the composite rule-governed and hieratic character best when he pithily described the legislated cen- ters of authority in freemasonry thus: "Three rule a Lodge, five hold a Lodge, and seven or more make it perfect" (Charles W. Leadbeater, The Hidden Life in Freemasonry [Madras, 1926], p. 187). 18. See Weber on professional organization: "With these routinizations, rules in some form always come to govern. The prince or the hierocrat . .. rules ... because he has been legitimized by an act of charismatic election. The process of routinization, and thus tradi- tionalization, has set in" (Weber, "The Social Psychology of the World Religions," From Max Weber, p. 297).

This content downloaded from 141.161.55.217 on Fri, 05 Jan 2018 19:56:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Autumn 2000 9 portant it is to give their organization "such a self-acting system of Gov- ernment as would seldom if ever require any outside interference" (ML, p. 14). Thus, even as they submit to the regularization of hidden mysteries and their absorption by the profane structures of everyday administration, they aim to carve out a public space of autonomous existence. Yet who is narrating this tale of resistance, the Tibetan Masters or their Anglo-Indian interlocutors? Amid the hoaxes, impostures, and scan- dals, a self-ironic presence runs through the history of Theosophy. Its distinguishing characteristic is one of calculated absence. The masters themselves remind us of this when they elusively write that they are "hallooing to each other across an impassable ravine and only one of us seeing his interlocutor" (ML, pp. 216-17).19 Their vivid, homespun communications conjure up, in John Berger's contradictory terms, "the appearances of something that was absent."20 Through the invisible masters who claimed to impart to Madame Blavatsky the knowledge of the occult that she drew up in her magisterial The Secret Doctrine, a reading strategy is crafted, forcing a redrawing of the lines between seen and unseen powers, occult realms and rational, bureaucratic worlds.21 Its effect is to normalize occult transmission as an institutional activity. The unseen world enters the plane of reality by being routinized in the work of bureaucracy. For instance, Master Koot Hoomi, imparting his communications about the hidden world, complains about the lack of writing implements in Tibet, where "a stationer's shop is less needed than breathing air" (ML, p. 33). He mocks Orientalist representations of exotic Eastern mysticism by exaggeratedly apologizing for not having "pink paper to write upon, but I trust modest white will do as well for what I have to say" (ML, p. 10). How exotic can the East be if its secrets are recorded on such ordinary office paper? Repeatedly forewarning his interlocutor Alfred Sinnett that he may have to stop abruptly in the middle of his astral revelations because he has run out of ink, Koot Hoomi coyly construes the mysteries of unknown secrets as a matter of inadequate office supplies. Spoofing

19. Interestingly, "hallooing in [one's] ears" was a frequently heard expression in mes- meric sessions, and it connoted an attempt to break through the trancelike state of persons mesmerized (Winter, Mesmerized, p. 191). The masters' description of an unbridgeable gap between themselves and their interlocutors recalls the one-way communication of those trying to break the isolation of mesmerized persons from the world around them. Inciden- tally, Sinnett himself had written a book on the subject, The Rationale of Mesmerism (Boston, 1892). 20. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London, 1972), p. 10. 21. Donald S. Lopez, Jr., points out how shaky were the claims made by Blavatsky's supporters, who maintained that she did indeed study in Tibet and that The Secret Doctrine, as well as The Stanzas of Dzyan and The Voice of the Silence, drew upon ancient tantras, believed to have long been lost. However, Lopez notes, the Tibetan canon does not contain any of the tantras claimed to be such in Blavatsky's works. See Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago, 1998), p. 51 n. 11.

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himself as a native clerk produced by a gargantuan colonial administration, Koot Homi is more recognizable as a Micawber-like, Dickensian office worker than an august representative of the Mahatma (great soul) order. Yet even when he attends to the fine details of penmanship important to the clerk's profession ("adopt my old fashioned habit of 'little lines' over the 'm's"), he undercuts his exaggerated, lowly clerical status by reminding his readers that his transmissions are not written but "im- pressed" or "precipitated," that is, produced by nonmechanical means (ML, p. 19). He alternately teases, cajoles, abuses, flatters, and pleads with his (potentially skeptical) reader to believe that the secrets of the universe are part of the ordinary, workaday world. Far from contesting the inexorable Western drift toward "disenthralment," a term he deliberately inserts to signify the new climate of secularism, Koot Hoomi facili- tates its realization. For by offering access to a hidden world closed off by rational thinking, he uncovers the roots of secularism's repressed history. He shows this past to be less the antithesis of secularism than its proto- type. In bringing occult secrets into the ordinary world, Koot Hoomi extends secularism's modernity backwards in time and thereby challenges secularism's historical significance as the successor to religion.

The Native Clerk in the Colonial Bureaucracy

The Mahatma Letters to A. P Sinnett is an extraordinary work. Marvel- ously constructed and richly textured, it justly deserves much closer attention than it has received, particularly since it sheds valuable light on the complex dynamics of colonial relations, as well as on the institutional- ization of Eastern thought and the disenchantment of religion in the modern world. To be sure, the literature on Theosophy devotes consid- erable space to its history and reception. Michael Gomes's exhaustive bibliography includes a long section on The Mahatma Letters, which com- prehensively annotates the controversies around the work and the nu- merous reviews and essays written by Sinnett's contemporaries at the time of its publication. But, then as now, discussion is confined to the authorship of the letters. Though Madame Blavatsky claimed she derived occult knowledge from the Tibetan Masters, investigators from the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) looking into questions of fraud concluded that the masters were figments of her own imagination. Skeptical even about the names of the masters, they suspected that Koot Hoomi was a mock- parodic abbreviation of Olcott and Hume, the names of two prominent founding Theosophists who were also the Mahatmas' interlocutors.22

22. See Michael Gomes, Theosophy in the Nineteenth Century: An Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1994), p. 377. In a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette on 26 October 1891, Annie Besant objected to Moncure Conway's allegation that the name was a concoction. Insisting

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Richard Hodgson, whom the SPR appointed to look into Madame Blavat- sky's claims, adduced that the handwriting in the letters sent by the masters was none other than hers. For her part, she claimed that she was merely facilitating Sinnett's communication with the masters by being an intermediary-no more, no less. That she did so by what she claimed were paranormal means made her a postmaster of exemplary efficiency. Once "introduced" to the masters, Sinnett, as well as another fellow Anglo-Indian A. O. Hume, claimed they maintained personal communication with them from 1880 to 1885. At times the correspondence was tense and fractious, the masters balefully reminding their readers that "with our Indo-Tibetan ways the most sagacious English official is not yet acquainted" (ML, p. 215). Even though this was communication between spiritual teacher and disciple, the conflict echoed the tensions between British colonial administrators and the Indians employed in their service (the so-called babus immortalized by Kipling), and it dredged up all the existing stereotypes of the Oriental mind as inexact, prone to falsification, and incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction.23 How then could the masters' secrets be accepted as truth? These exchanges reveal an uncanny overlap between spiritual communication and bureaucratic efficiency, reinforcing the impression that The Mahatma Letters is much more about disenchantment than esoteric belief. In a recent study, Donald S. Lopez has perceptively noted that the modern West has constructed Tibetan Buddhism less as a religion than as a science.24 In part this is a result of the West's own requirement that esoteric knowledge conform to the expectations of regularity, predictabil- ity, and control. Translating Tibetan Buddhism into scientific terms de- contextualizes it from its own traditions and produces discontinuity between its local practice and its subsequent appropriation by Western institutions. At another level, this involves a reworking of Weber's "routinization of charisma," whereby the teachings of charismatic leaders are molded to fit better into a more acceptable social framework-here, the framework of Western science. Spiritual communication can never be what it claims to be, that is, the transmission of a culture's inner under- standings. Rather, it is joined to the purposes of bureaucracy and institution building, which rationalize the knowledge of a people deemed inferior by appropriating it for the purposes of their real "masters," their colonizers. Nowhere is this more clear than in the form and structure of

on a Hindu genealogy, she found what she was looking for in the Vishnu PIrana, in which, she claimed, there was a sage called Koothoomi. 23. See Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York, 1989) for an account of the effect of such representations on creating a new disci- pline-English literary studies-which would inculcate precision, rigor, moral acuity, and historical consciousness in colonized Indians. 24. See Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La, p. 81.

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The Mahatma Letters, with its pivotal representation of a spiritual master who is simultaneously a debased clerical figure coping with the humiliat- ing condescensions of a colonial administration. The spiritual power of the masters is diminished by their absorption into the clerical order set up by colonial administrators to service the wheels of empire. Weber described charisma as the "greatest revolutionary force," in its pure form completely antithetical to everyday routine structures.25 Without hierarchy or spheres of authority, charisma rests on a recognition of the charismatic leader's power and will. As long as belief in the leader's charismatic inspiration remains and is recognized as such, charismatic authority has legitimacy. Yet in its transition to a more broad- based character, involving an organized community of followers and adherents, charisma compromises its opposition both to rational, bureaucratic authority and to traditional authority (of the sort identified with patriarchy). As Weber reminds us,

if [charisma] is not to remain a purely transitory phenomenon, but to take on the character of a permanent relationship forming a stable community of disciples or a band of followers or a party organization or any sort of political or hierocratic organization, it is necessary for the character of charismatic authority to become radically changed. Indeed, in its pure form charismatic authority may be said to exist only in the process of originating. It cannot remain stable, but becomes either traditionalized or rationalized, or a combination of both.26

The irony in this new transformation of charismatic authority is that it is motivated by a desire to place the relationship of adherents to the charismatic leader on a stable, everyday basis. Instead of being cut off from ordinary worldly connections by the rigors of discipleship, followers would be able to participate in normal, daily relationships (such as the family).2" But in the colonial context, the disciples of Oriental knowledge

25. Weber, "The Nature of Charismatic Authority and Its Routinization," On Charisma and Institution Building: Selected Papers, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (Chicago, 1968), p. 53. 26. Ibid., p. 54. 27. The life story of a young Indian Theosophist, Damodar, reveals the disruptive effects of charismatic authority, whose demand for ongoing discipleship required the sacri- fice of family and career. As a disciple of the adept Koot Hoomi (the selfsame interlocutor of The Mahatma Letters), Damodar literally disappeared in February of 1885, having re- nounced his property, family, and caste in order to spend the remainder of his life in Tibet. Until his departure Damodar was one of the most active members of the Theosophical Society and for some time managed its publishing division, including the influential maga- zine The Theosophist. The Mahatma Letters cracks open the tensions in institutional life caused by discipleship to a charismatic ideal, tensions so strong that the spiritual leader Koot Hoomi was forced to promise that "we will send him back" (ML, p. 449). For a collection of Damodar's letters and diaries, which give rare insights into the social history of the Theo- sophical Society in its formative years, see Damodar and the Pioneers of the Theosophical Move- ment, ed. Sven Eek (1965; Madras, 1978).

This content downloaded from 141.161.55.217 on Fri, 05 Jan 2018 19:56:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Autumn 2000 13 are Anglo-Indians like Sinnett and Hume, who are part of the governing culture of British rule, albeit dissenting members of the imperial administration (for instance, Hume was the first president of the Indian National Congress). And the family they would participate in, while pursuing their quest to penetrate Eastern mysteries and absorb the teachings of the masters, is the knowledge-amassing British empire. This affiliation constitutes the normal, everyday relationship that structures the entire transformation of the Tibetan Masters' teachings. Their rationalization (in the Weberian sense) is an inevitable result of the Anglo-Indian appropriation of Eastern knowledge, as Koot Hoomi himself bitterly acknowl- edged by primarily alluding to himself mockingly as a lowly native clerk rather than a spiritual adept. The most striking aspect of the letters is indeed the complex relationship of the two Anglo-Indian men, Sinnett and Hume, to the Mahatmas, whom they claimed not to have met but known only through the letters. Complicating their interest in knowing the secrets of the East is their un- ease in soliciting Oriental knowledge, not through the scholarship of Wil- liam Jones or Henry Colebrooke, or others, but through a native scholar turned native informant. I deliberately use this term, now associated with modern anthropology, to suggest how the Tibetan Masters could be legit- imated only if they were anthropologized as conduits to the mysteries of the Orient, that is, not seen as original sources of knowledge but as facili- tators to its acquisition, like the native guides and interpreters who led colonial adventurers into unfamiliar territory. The cultural superiority felt by Sinnett as a "master" of the English race thwarted his total acceptance of the authoritativeness of the "ignorant Asiatics of Tibet," who, bemoans Koot Hoomi, belong to a race "you have not yet learnt even to tolerate, let alone to love or respect" (ML, pp. 216, 15). Koot Hoomi bitterly criticizes the racial politics of a colonizing Britain that places conditions on the acceptance of knowledge, especially when it originates outside the Western world. In a vivid section on smelly turbans and En- glish flowers he exposes the racial biases of such conditional acceptance, charging that olfactory organs rather than mutual respect have come to decide what constitutes "true" knowledge. Koot Hoomi denounces En- glishmen for declaring that "English Science had emancipated them from such 'degrading superstitions'" and refusing to accept that "the dirty Yogees and Sannyasis knew anything about the mysteries of nature" (ML, p. 12). A vexing question dogging the entire book is how the knowledge of an "inferior" people can be embraced by their mighty superiors: "Few, if any ... would ever consent to have 'a nigger' for a guide or leader, no more than a modern Desdemona would choose an Indian Othello nowadays" (ML, p. 18). It is, of course, another matter that Shakespeare's Desdemona chose not an Indian but an African Moor. But it is indeed striking that Koot Hoomi's bitter reflection on the unequal terms of knowledge exchange should be couched in the metaphors of forbidden

This content downloaded from 141.161.55.217 on Fri, 05 Jan 2018 19:56:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 14 Gauri Viswanathan The Ordinary Business of Occultism interracial romance. From the Anglo-Indian perspective, the answer to the question of accepting an inferior people's religious knowledge is simple: it is done to bring such knowledge within the ambit of bureaucratic rationality, to domesticate it in the forms and procedures of Orien- talist scholarship, as Edward W. Said pointed out in Orientalism. That Koot Hoomi was able to perceive the extent of his own role in the secularization of religious knowledge contributes in no small measure to the al- ternating mixture of irony, bitterness, acquiescence, and subversion that marks the texture of The Mahatma Letters. The second half of the book is virtually taken over by the masters' bitter account of their misunderstandings with Hume on the issue of their own authenticity and their teachings' legitimacy. The misunder- standing is so deep it causes the masters to define their mission with re- gard to the Theosophical Society more sharply than they would have otherwise. They reveal, in effect, that their truths, which are suspect when seen as originating with native inferiors, can be accepted only when normalized in the recognizable contours of Western institutions, such as brotherhoods and other associations. Institution making acquires a new urgency in the colonial context. Its importance in routinizing the supernatural is an accented feature of the masters' communications, with so much of The Mahatma Letters focusing on establishing the charter rules of the Theosophical Society and its relation to parent institutions of spiritualism in Britain. It is apparent these institutions are less significant for constructing a community of members than regularizing occult, Eastern truths and making them part of the functional machinery of society. In part Madame Blavatsky's mediating role consisted of diminishing the Tibetan Masters' authority by assuming it herself and presenting their truth as her interpretation, most notably in The Secret Doctrine.28 Sinnett also struck on the same usurping tactic when he turned his many "communications" with the Mahatmas into two signal works of Theosophy, The Occult World (1881) and Esoteric Buddhism (1883). The writing of these books is no less strange than their inspiration. The story that went the rounds insisted on the supernatural origins of the books. After making notes of questions he intended to ask the masters, Sinnett requested his wife to take them to Madame Blavatsky for transmission, whereupon Bla- vatsky ordered her to put them in an ornate cupboard. Ten minutes later she asked Sinnett's wife, with whom she had been chatting all the time,

28. Blavatsky continued to insist that the masters wrote her book and even helped her rewrite and edit it, despite the offers of help from her more worldly colleagues. Indeed, she sets up her work as a pull between the business interests of the publishing world (which she claims she disdains) and the otherworldly appeal of her supernatural teachers: "I would never say of anything my Master (in particular) and the Masters (in general) tell me to do- that it is sheer madness to do their bidding" (quoted in Boris de Zirkoff, introduction to Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: H. P Blavatsky Collected Writings, 1888, 7th ed., 3 vols. [1888; Madras, 1979], 1:[6]).

This content downloaded from 141.161.55.217 on Fri, 05 Jan 2018 19:56:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Autumn 2000 15 to look again inside the cupboard. There, so the story goes, she found the masters' reply on top of Sinnett's pile of notes.29 Such extravagant stories were evidently necessary in order to place Blavatsky's interpretations securely in the supernatural world and thereby obscure how preoc- cupied with business matters was their actual content. The technology of instant communication provides the necessary theatrics to the works of an Orientalist imagination, which still remain interpretations--not transmissions-of Eastern teachings. For instance, reincarnation is a major preoccupation of the masters, but Sinnett avoided any discussion of this theme in The Occult World and Esoteric Buddhism.30 Thus, even the aura of ghostly transmission never replaces the commanding authorial voice of the Western interpreter and mediator. Furthermore, these two books es- tablished a reputation for Sinnett in England as the voice of exotic India, return from which was as portentous as the return from the world of spirits and other unseen phenomena evoked by the Mahatmas.

Occultism and "Disenthralment"

Yet even as they are orientalized and their communications turned into forms of bureaucratic rationality, the masters invent a new form of secular knowledge that attempts to account for the experiential realities of social and political life hidden by dominant forms of rational thought. I will argue this point regardless of whether the Tibetan Masters were fic- tions of Blavatsky's imagination, and therefore must be considered as her voice entirely, or whether they were real teachers who were reinvented for purposes of legitimating the Theosophical Society as a repository of occult knowledge. In other words, I am taking the text as a composite of voices, actors, writers, and interpreters, all of whom combine to create a complex presence of spiritual authority, alternately accommodating and subversive. As a host of critics have argued, female mediumship, while appearing to conform to "normative ideals of feminine passivity and receptivity," subverted male authority in its pursuit of otherworldly in- sight.31 Thus, the discourse of the Mahatmas allowed for both routinization of occult knowledge and explorations of its transformative energies.

29. See Josephine Ransom, A Short History of the Theosophical Society (1938; Madras, 1989), p. 179. 30. See Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany, N.Y., 1994), p. 340. 31. Sword, "Necrobibliography," p. 90. See especially Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1989), for a pro- vocative discussion of the strategic uses of female passivity for spiritual power. If Madame Blavatsky had ghost-authored The Mahatma Letters, no surer proof is required than Koot Hoomi's oblique reference to the publication of Isis Unveiled, which he predicts is doomed to fierce attack because its author is a woman: 'Art Magic and Isis emanating from women and, as it was believed, Spiritualists-could never hope for a serious hearing" (ML, p. 50).

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The Mahatma Letters opens with a picture of a world in the first stage of "disenthralment," Koot Hoomi's term to describe the new climate of secularism following the religious divisions and bigotries in Europe's history, a word that uncannily resonates with "disenchantment" (ML, p. 1). The traumatic impact of those events is so great, he suggests, that its after- math has produced a willful blindness regarding the past. Disenthral- ment, or secularization, is Koot Hoomi's analogue to the modern repression of past memories whose recall is so terrifying they must be relegated to a frozen past, as irretrievable as the "narrow vase of dogma- tism and intolerance" that now "rests at the bottom of the sea and can never escap[e] to the surface again" (ML, p. 2). However deliberate the finality of these words, relegating a traumatic history to an archaic, irretrievable past, their correlate is a visionless future. Secularism introduces a present-mindedness that, in suppressing the past, also makes the future unimaginable. The biblical language of the Old Testament prophets per- meates Koot Hoomi's rhetoric as he declaims, "Madmen are they, who, speculating but upon the present, wilfully shut their eyes to the past when made already to remain naturally blind to the future!" (ML, p. 1). At once prophetic and cautionary, the Mahatmas' communications are designed not so much to disrupt the secular moment as to pry it open in order to salvage a past that exceeds the past of European sectarianism. Agents of a new secularism, the Mahatmas conceive of their role as a tearing away of the mask of legal tolerance to show the "religious dogma- tism [that] lingers in the hearts of the multitudes" (ML, p. 4). For the Mahatmas it is essential to recognize this as a starting point for reconstructing a nondogmatic world order. But in opening up sectarian history to new, frightening contemplation, they succeed in drawing attention to a long view of history that would otherwise not be visible. For instance, in a series of letters Koot Hoomi uncovers the evolution of life forms whose progressive differentiation results in the fragmentation of a uni- form world consciousness. Even as he shows that such fragmentation is the essence of sectarianism, he also points to a much larger biological process that is integrative in its impulses. The revelation of occult secrets thus becomes a mechanism for imagining a future in which a world consciousness might be recaptured from its moments of rupture. Whether the masters are fictionalized or ventriloquized, Koot Hoomi's narrative of disenthralment evokes Walter Benjamin's attempt to write a history of the present in confrontation with a silenced past. Benja- min describes the process thus in a notable passage in "Theses on the Philosophy of History":

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystal- lizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical

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subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history-blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time canceled; in the lifework, the era; and in the era, the entire course of history.32

Now it is no mere coincidence that "monad" is Benjamin's term to describe the arresting moment of historical transfiguration. The word has a specific significance in Theosophical thought. Besant defined a monad as "the receptacle of all results, the storehouse in which all experiences are garnered as increasingly active powers."33 Monads articulate form and precipitate the evolution of life matter. The source and cause of respon- sive life, monads incarnate themselves in forms and, "as awakened powers," gather within themselves all the results of the forms they animate (AW, p. 204). They are the focal point of accumulated experiences. Startled into sensation by the recognition of difference, monads are reconstituted as motors of thought. They are the beginning of history, but, at the same time, as forms of thought, they are also the agents of historical change. Confronting the unpalatable fact that as a set of mental images the past fades along with the finite body, Besant looked toward reincarnation as an expression of the past's ongoing relationship with the present. Im- pressed with the need to retain the "causal body" as the unchanging form that endures historical change, she struck upon reincarnation as the most apt description of a past that persists in present forms (AW, p. 224). What for Benjamin is a "Messianic cessation of happening" is for Besant a return to a moment frozen in the past, whose recovery is possible only by connecting with prior forms of consciousness inculcated by morally evolved beings. Such persons hold the accumulated traces of past experience and memory, which Besant terms "ancient wisdom." For Benjamin as much as for Besant, the recovery of the past is a moment of new secular transformation, inviting all that has been suppressed to engage the con- struction of the present. Besant's reincarnation is Benjamin's "blasting," a metaphor signifying both preservation and self-cancellation. Benjamin conceives of the past as holding experiential realities that have been closed off by institutional thinking. His interest in the dead is in how the past remains alive in the present, even when barely visible. From his secular perspective, of course, reincarnation is not a viable term, yet his description of "blasting" an era out of the homogeneous course of

32. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1969), pp. 262-63. 33. Besant, The Ancient Wisdom: An Outline of Theosophical Teachings (1897; Madras, 1972), p. 202; hereafter abbreviated A W

This content downloaded from 141.161.55.217 on Fri, 05 Jan 2018 19:56:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 18 Gauri Viswanathan The Ordinary Business of Occultism history is intended, like reincarnation, to force the present to respond to the repressed past by calling it up once again, as one would a ghost that refuses to go away. Besant had described returning the past to secular memory as a conscious evocation of contrasts, so as to "force their differ- ences upon [the awakened perception]--blow after blow of riotous pleasure, blow after blow of crushing pain" (AW, p. 217). Secular modernity's repressed desire is bound up with its loathing of the rank sectarianism out of which it crafted its own identity, as Besant's metaphors of pleasure and pain so vividly evoke. In fact, the graphic physical sensations of repression are matched only by the terrifying sense of physical gratification that unearthing past memory produces. For his part, Benjamin recognized that the historian had no subject to speak of unless he sought some point of relationship with the past connoted by the dead. In a usage not dissimilar from Besant's, "monad" is his descriptive term for a configuration in time that shocks us into rec- ognizing the animating force of a suppressed past. Besant referred to "desire-nature" as the principle by which perceptions are formed, insis- tently making their way through the edifice constructed by the external world and then registered in the mind of "the Thinker" as the storehouse of the past (AW, p. 216). Reincarnation is a movement of almost sensual gratification for her, as the buried traces of the past resurface in present experience. To Benjamin, on the other hand, the monad remains separate from the historical materialist. His recognition that the monad is an arresting, transfixing moment of history assumes there is an internal force in bringing submerged memory to one's consciousness, but he re- frains from terming it desire, as Besant does. Rather, the monad confronts him with the cessation of all desire; it presents him with the frozen con- tainer of all experience and in so doing freezes all desire itself. In a fascinating work, Avery Gordon interprets Benjamin to mean that the historian, in confronting the past, grapples with spectral presence. In Gordon's haunting formulation, the "oppressed past is neither linear, a point in a sequential procession of time, nor an autonomous alternative past. In a sense, it is whatever organized violence has repressed and in the process formed into a past, a history, remaining nonetheless alive and accessible to encounter" (GM, pp. 65-66). Only ghosts are available for this kind of encounter, and their role in precipitating startling connections between past and present simultaneously pulls down the finite boundaries of material reality. Ghosts leave a scattered trail, and it takes time to reconstruct the world they conjure up; yet reconstructing a lifework involves picking up the pieces left by a ghost and then depositing them elsewhere. As in Alice's adventures in Wonderland, it is a matter of "entering through..,. the door of the uncanny, the door of the fragment, the door of the shocking parallel. Entering one place, another often emerges in juxtaposition, along the lines of a defamiliarization coalescing into a moment of connection, a configuration" (GM, p. 66). There is no

This content downloaded from 141.161.55.217 on Fri, 05 Jan 2018 19:56:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Critical Inquiry Autumn 2000 19 causality leading up to this moment of connection of the sort associated with the social sciences or related epistemologies. Rather, as Gordon points out, the configuration "blasts through the rational, linearly temporal, and discrete spatiality of our conventional notions of cause and effect, past and present, conscious and unconscious" (GM, p. 66). The return of the repressed has no straightforward trajectory, nor is its precipitating moment an echo or a lingering memory of the past. Without subscribing to Weber's view that rational, empirical knowledge works to disenchant the world and transform disenchantment into a causal mechanism of world changes, we may see, as the Tibetan Masters wish us to, that the differentiation and fragmentariness produced by human evolution devalue the world's thrust toward unity.34 They further bring to the forefront conflicts between rational and nonrational claims that never get fully resolved. Weber did observe correctly, however, that otherworldliness is, in many respects, a response to fragmentariness. Alienated from structured forms of bureaucratic life, otherworldliness (which sometimes takes the form of occultism) is an attempt to recuperate meaning from a suppressed past, which in being suppressed leads to a fragmentary view of history. The tension between otherworldliness and divisiveness is palpable, as Weber noted when he observed that "this reaction is the stronger the more systematic the thinking about the 'meaning' of the universe becomes, the more the external organization of the world is rationalized, and the more the conscious experience of the world's irra- tional content is sublimated."35 Every increase of rationalism in empirical science would appear to push religion from the rational into the irratio- nal realm, yet this outcome is resisted as occultism is brought into the domain of professional knowledge. The masters' communications of occult secrets stage an encounter with a past suppressed by the onset of Western modernity and secularism. They brilliantly combine a critique of both colonialism and secularism by admitting the occult into the making of worldly relations and a more inclusive account of the world than the one allowed by imperial, secular histories. Such an account would make room for the histories of the people whose knowledge is mined and appropriated. Describing himself as "out of time," Koot Hoomi nonetheless willingly allows himself to be situated within the worldly ambience of colonial bureaucracy in order to highlight the fraught agencies of spiritual communication, which consist of unequal exchange under colonialism (ML, p. 19). His parodic self- presentation as a native clerk is an insistent reminder of how routinized the knowledge of the East has become-indeed, far more than it is orientalized as a romantic fantasy of colonial writers.

34. Weber, "Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions," in From Max Weber, p. 350. 35. Ibid., p. 357.

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Yet the bureaucratization of occult knowledge, evident in new fields of study such as evolutionary history and comparative religion, is also presented as a site for revising the notion that secularization is a break with religion. On one level, in an anticolonial vein, institutional development provides an opportunity to declare independence from parent organizations and for carrying forward the charismatic authority of spiritual adepts into the formal practices of election and appointment. On another level, however, an alternative culture of governance is imagined, which would draw upon the insights of spiritual teachers to cultivate an expansive secularism, a secularism open to its past. Indeed, the role of the Theosophical Society is proposed as a narrowing of the chasm between rational secularity and occult knowledge. This allows the Anglo- Indian officers of the society to project their organization as oppositional while appropriating the teachings of the truly anti-colonial masters to construct their own self-serving version of a secular society, less opposed to religion than to a present-minded, ahistorical view of life. Finally, I realize how complicated it is to write about the Tibetan Masters in The Mahatma Letters as if they had a reality independent of their interlocutors and authors. And perhaps that is the whole point of the work, as it challenges its readers to imagine whose world is being imagined, whose perspective dominates the disenthralment of the modern world, whose viewpoint ultimately prevails in the reception of astral secrets, and, most of all, whose personae the masters assume. Whatever the answers to these questions, it seems clear the masters are intended to function as agents of a new secularism that is less present-minded and more open to a long view of time, as evident in the Theosophists' fond- ness for genealogies beginning with primordial matter. The expan- siveness of the temporal framework is also designed to allow for a displacement of religious teleology by evolutionary history, which by the nineteenth century had begun to yield new units of scientific analysis such as race and ethnicity.36 The full scope of professional knowledge is thus assured when it absorbs secrets of both the forgotten and the unknown past and turns what Weber called a "process of originating," which also aptly describes the masters' occult transmissions, into a stable structure of historical memory.

36. See Young, Colonial Desire, for an astute discussion of ethnicity and culture in nineteenth-century English thought. See also Viswanathan, Outside the Fold, pp. 196-203, for a reading of Theosophy's investment in cyclical time and evolutionary genealogies, leading to new theories of ethnic and racial differentiation.

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