Roots of the Oriental Gnosis
W. E. Coleman, H. P. Blavatsky, S. F. Dunlap
Jake B. Winchester Supervisor: Dr Marco Pasi
Second Reader: Prof Dr Wouter Hanegraaff Thesis for the MA in Western Esotericism
Table of Contents
1. “Nonsense and Charlatanry”: HPB and William Emmette Coleman 2. “Oriental Gnosis”: HPB and Samuel Fales Dunlap.
In 1895, William Emmette Coleman (1843-1909) scandalized the theosophical world with the release of his essay “The Sources of Madame Blavatsky’s Writings.”1 In it, Coleman
accuses Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (HPB, 1831-1891), founder of the occult group known as the Theosophical Society (TS), of massive and systemic plagiarism. Although Coleman’s essay condemns the entirety of HPB’s corpus, it specifically focuses on her 1877 work Isis Unveiled. Written only two years after Blavatsky founded the TS with Henry Olcott (1832-1907), Isis
Unveiled was an immediate and unexpected success, selling out its first run in a week.2 In fact,
the publisher, J.W. Bouton, repeatedly attempted to goad a sequel out of HPB with the promise of a princely advance.3 The success of Isis Unveiled was largely responsible for the rapid
expansion of the TS in the 1870s and 80s, and the work is widely regarded among scholars as one of the foundational texts of the modernist occult revival.4
From the perspective of members of the fledgling TS, Isis Unveiled was more than just an occult expose—it was a revelation. HPB herself insisted that the work was not a product of her own mind, but was composed with the aid of the “Mahatmas”—a secret cabal of supernaturally wise sages. In other words, Isis Unveiled is a channeled text—the product of a preternatural intelligence. HPB described the channeling experience in a letter (ca. 1875-6) to her relatives in Russia, writing: “Several times a day I feel that besides me there is someone else, quite separable from me, present in my body. I never lose the consciousness of my own personality; what I feel is as if I were keeping silent and the other one—the lodger who is in me—were speaking with my tongue.”5 It is for this very reason—i.e., the channeled nature of the text—that Coleman’s
accusations were so serious. If his claims proved true, it would indicate that HPB did not channel Isis Unveiled, and was thus engaging in conscious fraud. The only alternative is rather absurd: the Ascended Masters were the real plagiarists, and HPB their victim as much as anyone
1 Published as an appendix to Vsevolod Solovyoff’s A Modern Priestess of Isis, as discussed in greater detail below.
2 Lachman, Madame Blavatsky, 224. 3 Ibid., 227.
4 Goodrick-Clarke, Helena Blavatsky, 53.
5 Helena Blavatsky, Letters of H.P. Blavatsky to Her Family in Russia, accessed 1 May 2015. <http://www.blavatskyarchives.com/blavlet1.htm>
else.
But to what extent can Coleman’s account be trusted? At first glance his credentials look impressive: an introductory note in “The Sources of Madame Blavatsky’s Writings” describes him as a member of the American Oriental Society, the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, the Egypt Exploration Fund, and various other respected academic groups.6 On the
other hand, the derisive tone Coleman adopts throughout the text suggests that he is far from neutral and unbiased—indeed, that he resents HPB on a personal level. Clearly, this is not a simple case of whistle-blowing. So how best to evaluate Coleman’s claims? An obvious first step is to evaluate Coleman himself, and to engage more closely with the specific arguments he directs against HPB.
I. “Nonsense and Charlatanry”: HPB and William Emmette Coleman
There is not a single dogma or tenet in theosophy, nor any detail of moment in the multiplex and complex concatenation of alleged revelations of occult truth in the teachings of Madame Blavatsky and the pretended adepts, the source of which cannot be pointed out in the world’s literature. From first to last, their writings are dominated by a duplex plagiarism, -plagiarism in idea, and -plagiarism in language. —William Emmette Coleman7
Although William Emmette Coleman was a famous Spiritualist in his day, piecing together the details of his life is now a difficult task.8 Aside from a handful of newspaper
obituaries, the best source for biographical details comes from a write-up on Coleman which appeared in the San Francisco-based Spiritualist periodical The Carrier Dove in 1886. The article cultivates a laudatory and at times even hagiographic tone, so it is important to maintain a skeptical view in face of some of its more outlandish claims. Nonetheless, it is invaluable for tracing the outline of Coleman’s life.
William Emmette Coleman was born on 19 June 1843 in Shadwell, Virginia.9 His family
6 Coleman, “The Sources of Madame Blavatsky’s Writings,” in Solovyoff, A Modern Priestess of Isis, 353. 7 Ibid., 366.
8 This paper does not include a biography of Helena Blavatsky, since the information is so widely available elsewhere. The most in-depth biography is Sylvia Cranston’s H.P.B.: The Extraordinary Life & Influence of
Helena Blavatsky, although it is important to keep in mind that the author is a theosophist. Also of note is the
recent German language biography Madame Blavatsky: Eine Biographie by Ursula Keller and Natalja Sharandak.
moved around frequently and Coleman spent parts of his childhood in Charlottesville before ending up in Richmond in 1851.10 If his biographer is to be believed, Coleman was a precocious
child and showed early aptitude in reading and writing. He left school at age eleven to become an assistant librarian and was contributing short articles to a Know Nothing periodical by age twelve.11 Coleman openly advocated abolition in antebellum Richmond (placing him
geographically and ideologically near to John Brown’s famous raid), which led to his employment, postbellum, as a clerk in a series of reconstruction offices. This developed into a career as a military clerk for the Quartermaster’s Department, where he would remain employed for the rest of his life.12
“In 1859, at sixteen, came the turning point of his life—his contact with and acceptance of the philosophy of Modern Spiritualism.”13 Coleman was raised Methodist, but when he first
heard the doctrines of Spiritualism described “he at once intuitively and rational perceived their reality, beauty and truth, in contrast to the irrational, and, to him, absurd dogmas of the prevalent Christianity.”14 Spiritualism became the guiding principle of Coleman’s life, and he later stated:
“all that I am, intellectually and morally, I owe to Spiritualism’s beneficent influences.”15
In 1867, Coleman met Andrew Jackson and Mary F. Davis at the Newark Opera House, and he remained close friends with the couple for years.16 Andrew Jackson Davis was one of the
most famous Spiritualists living at that time, and it is no doubt to this chance meeting that Coleman owes much of his later fame. The two were close enough that Davis presided at Coleman’s wife’s funeral in 1882.17 Davis also encouraged Coleman to write his first article for
the Spiritualist press, which appeared in The Banner of Light in 1867.18
In 1873, Coleman “lectured before the Spiritual Society of Albany, New York, against
10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 27. 13 Ibid., 30. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 27. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 27-28 18 Ibid., 27.
the dogma of Reincarnation, which, being subsequently published in the Banner of Light, he received much praise therefor.”19 The question of the reincarnation of souls was a major debate
dividing Spiritualism at the time; thus we see that by the early 1870s Coleman was an active participant in internal Spiritualist disputes. On 12 September 1875, Coleman engaged in a debate on the question “Does Nature disprove the Bible God?” His position was later published as “Truthseeker’s Tract” no. 55. Apparently, his arguments were so well received that he was asked back to the venue to debate on a variety of topics over the next thirteen Sundays in a row without break. His remarks in these debates filled twenty columns in the 1877
Religio-Philosophical Journal (RPJ), a Chicago-based occult periodical..20 “That day [12 September
1875] was truly an epoch in his life; for, from that date, his general literary career may be said to have commenced. it was also the beginning of his career as a public oral debater, critic and controversialist; and on that day, also, was delivered his first production that was ever published in book form.”21 Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society less than a month later, on 17
November 1875.22
Following his early success as a public orator, Coleman began writing in earnest. He published hundreds of articles in a range of Spiritualist journals and secular newspapers, including The Summerland, The Spiritual Offering, The Carrier Dove, The
Religio-Philosophical Journal, The Golden Way, The Banner of Light, The Herald of Progress, The New York Times, The Clipper, The Mercury, The Golden Gate, The Scientific Investigator, and others.
He wrote extensively on the correct interpretation of spiritualist phenomena, and committed himself to rooting out fraudulence among mediums. “There is an organized body of charlatans,” writes Coleman, “who pretend to be mediums [… and] whose methods are the most deadly to the cause of spiritualism.”23
Outside the pages of Spiritualist periodicals, Coleman also engaged in more traditional academic debates. For instance, he wrote a series of articles denouncing the Egyptological findings of Gerald Massey. David Gange briefly recounts the exchange in his article “Religion
19 Ibid., 28. 20 Ibid., 29. 21 Ibid., 28.
22 Goodrick-Clarke, Helena Blavatsky, 8. 23 “Spiritualist Convention.”
and Science in Late Nineteenth-Century British Egyptology.” Gange ultimately pronounces the attacks hypocritical and somewhat ironic, since Coleman himself held “unorthodox” views.24 An
obituary notes that Coleman “published treatises on Darwinism, comparative theology and mythology,”25 but his interests were considerably broader than that. He kept up on scientific
literature, and in “The season of 1878-9 he delivered two lectures before the Academy, on Spectrum Analysis, his second lecture being affirmed, by one of his quondam Christian opponents to be ’able and exhaustive, indicating great research, and worthy of delivery before any learned body in the world.’”26 Most of Coleman’s scholarly work, however, was in the field
of religious studies: he published extensively on biblical history, the historical Jesus, and ancient religions of the classical world.
By his own admission, Coleman did not investigate the history of religions purely out of interest in the material. His goal was to reveal the doctrinal contradictions and totalitarian power dynamics of dogmatic religion: “To establish the truth of Spiritualism, the dogmas of orthodoxy must be overthrown, and in order to do this the sooner and the more effectually, Spiritualists should be familiar with the results of the scientific study of the origin and nature of primitive Christianity.”27 Despite his clearly stated bias, Coleman’s academic articles demonstrate
knowledge of contemporaneous scholarship. In “The Genuine Teachings and Character of Jesus of Nazareth,” for instance, Coleman references important scholars, notes the late date and unreliability of the Gospel of John, and gives an analysis of its borrowings from Neoplatonism28
—all of which indicates engagement with serious scholarly sources.
In 1880 Coleman relocated from the east coast to San Francisco. Subsequently, he was elected president of the California Spiritualist Society, making him one of the leaders of Spiritualism on the west coast.29 Coleman attended and spoke at numerous conventions, and in
1896 was one of four spiritualists deemed important enough to have their sketch included in the newspaper write-up of the National Spiritualist Convention (another was the influential Eclectic
24 Gange, “Religion and Science in Late Nineteenth-Century British Egyptology.” 25 “Death Brings Close.”
26 “Biographical Sketch,” 29.
27 Coleman, “Primitive Christianity,” 117.
28 Coleman, “The Genuine Teachings and Character of Jesus of Nazareth.” 29 “Biographical Sketch,” 29.
Physician Joseph R. Buchanan).30 Coleman’s efforts earned him the admiration of Emma
Hardinge Britten (1823-1899), who said of him: “this man, still young in years, but old in rich experience, has studied so deeply and well the lore of ancient myth and Oriental literature, that his journalistic articles are a perfect treasury of research and valuable information.”31 She went
on to refer to Coleman as the “hammer of the iconoclast” and commend his efforts to “purge the rank weeds of falsehood and sham, that have grown up on the fertile soil of Spiritualism.”32
Coleman did not limit himself to internal debates, and engaged extensively in external polemics as well. He was especially interested in defending Spiritualism against the attacks of skeptics and materialists, and in devaluing Christianity.
After moving to San Francisco, Coleman developed an interest in Orientalism, “including the languages, literature, religions and antiquities of India, China, Persia, Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Arabia, Judea, etc.”33 In 1883 he released a series of articles on “Krishna and Christ” in
the RPJ. Coleman intended the articles to form the basis of a book, but the work never appeared. As we shall see, this was a peculiar habit of Coleman’s. Nonetheless, if Coleman’s biography is to be believed, a wide variety of scholars praised the series, including: W.D. Whitney of Yale College; C. P. Tiele of University of Leiden; A. H. Sayce of Queen’s College, Oxford; Max Müller, Oxford University; Monier Williams, Oxford University; Albrecht Weber, University of Berlin; Maurice Bloomfield, John Hopkins’ University; and Abraham Kuenen, University of Leiden, to name some of the most important. A number of these scholars sent letters of encouragement, including Max Müller, who wrote: “I must send a line to say how much I appreciate your love of truth, and the honest work you have done, free from all partizanship. I should think that your articles would prove very useful published as an independent book.”34
Coleman’s academic efforts paid off, and in May of 1885, “on motion of Prof. Chas. R. Lanman, Sanskirtist [sic] of Harvard University, Mr. Coleman was elected a corporate member of the ’American Oriental Society.’ About the same time, he also was chosen a member of the ’Pali Text Society,’ which is composed of the leading buddhistic scholars of the world, with
30 “Spiritualists Hail Barrett”
31 Britten, Nineteenth Century Miracles, 553. 32 Ibid.
33 “Biographical Sketch,” 30. 34 Ibid.
headquarters in London, and was founded in 1882, for the publication of correct texts of the Buddhist sacred writings in the Pali language, with translations, etc.”35 Coleman was without
doubt a member of the American Oriental Society; his name appears on their membership manifest of 1893 as “William Emmette Coleman, Chief Quartermaster’s Office, San Francisco, California. [Year of Election:] 1885.”36 The list includes a number of the scholars who praised
Coleman’s efforts in “Krishna and Christ,” including Whitney, Müller, Williams, Weber, and Bloomfield. Also included is one “Samuel F. Dunlap,” member since 1854, who will be discussed at length below.37
Coleman had an extensive library of works on historical topics, which a number of his obituaries specifically reference; “His library, the accumulation of years, included works by the foremost investigators in the field of modern psychic research, ancient philosophy, light on the earliest known phases of Egyptian and Jewish history and the origin of the old testament, volumes on Buddhism, serpent worship in Africa and phases of spiritualism. On these subjects he was considered one of the most widely read men on the coast.”38 Coleman’s fellow
Spiritualists hailed him as “one of the most thoroughly well-read men in the country”39 and the
“ableist oriental scholar in America.”40 This is obviously overstating the case, but if the above is
all true—and none of the scholars named ever denied saying anything reported in the Dove—then Coleman was certainly entitled to his reputation as a scholar, and more than qualified to point out plagiarisms in the works of HPB. What remains to be seen, however, is why Coleman devoted so much energy to his attempts to expose her.
Around 1870 HPB became involved in the Spiritualist movement. She must have been keen on the idea, since she twice attempted to found Spiritualist groups. In fact, she first met the co-founder of the TS, Henry Olcott, at a séance in Vermont. However, her opinion of Spiritualism gradually diminished, and in Isis Unveiled she refers to the movement as “that apple
35 Ibid., 31.
36 “List of Members. March 1893.,” ccxli. 37 Ibid.
38 “Directs Death to be Made Assured.” 39 “Biographical Sketch,” 31.
of discord.”41 In fact “discord” quite accurately describes the state of Spiritualism in the later
1870s: viciously attacked by scientists and materialists, rocked by constant revelations of fraud and deception, the movement was in the early stages of a long and slow decline. While Blavatsky spends considerable time in Isis Unveiled defending Spiritualism against the attacks of “pretenders to science [...and] pseudo-philosophers,”42 she also voices some criticisms of her
own. HPB’s critique of Spiritualism differs from those advanced by scientists and rationalists in that she never questions the veracity of Spiritualist phenomena as such, only their interpretation. She apparently found the “spirits of the deceased” explanation touted by Spiritualists unconvincing, reflecting that “in proportion as the psychological manifestations increase in frequency and variety, the darkness surrounding their origin becomes more impenetrable.”43
Although well aware of the prevalence of fraudulent mediums, Blavatsky argued that “[even] allowing a large discount for clever fraud, what remains is quite serious enough to demand the careful scrutiny of science.”44 However, as early as 1875 she believed that the answers to
Spiritualist phenomena lie in occultism, the superior science, “which stands in relation to Spiritualism as the Infinite to the Finite.”45
Blavatsky’s criticisms of Spiritualism earned her the ire of many believers; however, it was not the only source of tension between the two movements. From the perspective of many Spiritualists—for it is difficult to speak of such a heterogenous movement as a whole—the theosophical system developed by HPB represented a serious spiritual regression. To the Spiritualist, the many discoveries regarding the world of spirits and life after death made daily at séances surely signaled the end of pseudo-mystical, dogmatic religions and their complete
41 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol I, 35. 42 Ibid., 66.
43 Ibid., 36. She gives a more complete explanation in her 1889 The Key to Theosophy: “They maintain that these manifestations are all produced by the ’spirits’ of departed mortals, generally their relatives, who return to earth, they say, to communicate with those they have loved or to whom they are attached. We deny this point blank. We assert that the spirits of the dead cannot return to earth-save in rare and exceptional cases, of which I may speak later; nor do they communicate with men except by entirely subjective means. That which does appear objectively, is only the phantom of the ex-physical man. But in psychic, and so to say, ’Spiritual’ Spiritualism, we do believe, most decidedly.” Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy, 19.
44 Ibid., 35.
usurpation by the true “Spiritual Science.” Thus, Madame Blavatsky’s insistence on the spiritual validity of ancient religions and mystical systems tended to undermine an important foundation of the Spiritualist system.
Certainly, not all Spiritualists were antagonistic towards Blavatsky or her society—much of the early growth of the TS was a result of spiritualists turning to the movement.46 This can
only have increased the feeling of animosity that remaining spiritualists felt towards the TS and its leader. In fact, “The Sources of Madame Blavatsky’s Writings” first appeared as an appendix to Vsevolod Solovyoff’s A Modern Priestess of Isis—a book with the acknowledged single aim of discrediting Blavatsky and exposing her as a fraud. The translation and publishing of Solovyoff’s work (originally in Russian) was funded entirely by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR)—a group founded by Spiritualists to investigate paranormal claims,47 and which
in 1895 still had strong Spiritualist representation in its membership.48 By this time, Spiritualism
was only a shadow of its former self, but that seems to have made the stubborn hold-outs all the more virulent in their polemics. In other words, Coleman was not an impartial actor trying to save the spiritually gullible from a dangerous charlatan, as he sometimes presented himself. He was an ardent Spiritualist attempting to discredit an opponent. His accusations of plagiarism can only be properly understood in reference to the tangled web of Spiritualist-Theosophist polemics and apologetics which dominated the occult world in the last two decades of the 19th-century.
In fact, 1895 was not the first time the occult reading public had heard from Coleman. He had previously published articles denouncing HPB and the TS in several Spiritualist journals and magazines, and would continue to do so for some years.49 From 1880 on, Coleman wrote
46 Coleman complains about these turn-coats at length in his essay “The Dangers Now Threatening Spiritualism,” cited below. Coleman describes them as “Those Spiritualists who have left Spiritualism in disgust with the frauds and follies of many of its alleged adherents, and have betaken themselves to the embrace of the Blavatsky
culte,” p 8.
47 Gould, The Founders of Psychical Research, 137. That the SPR was founded by Spiritualists is somewhat ironic, since the wide-spread fraud the group uncovered helped contributed to the decline of Spiritualism. 48 It was not until Sir Arthur Conan Doyle led a mass-resignation in the 1920s that Spiritualists began to desert the
group in earnest.
49 In the 1870s, Coleman published a number of attacks against institutionalized Christianity in D.M. Bennett’s free-thinker periodical The Truth Seeker. The articles, however, do not mention Blavatsky, as she was not yet famous. See: <http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Stout01-t19-body-d7.html> Accessed 2 May 2015.
mostly for the RPJ: “Of late years his writings have been, largely but not entirely, confined to the columns of The Religio-Philosophical Journal […] its general policy of opposition to the impure and fraudulent in Spiritualism, and its attempts to place Spiritualism upon a purely scientific basis, commend themselves to his judgment and conscience” (bio 30). His first anti-Blavatsky publication in the RPJ was his essay “Theosophy and Spiritualism” which appeared in the 6 August 1881 edition. The article investigates HPB’s “so-called marvels”50 or psychic abilities.
Coleman ultimately concludes that every psychic act attributed to HPB by Olcott and other observers can be explained wholly by her “clever jugglery and strong psychological power.”51
Whatever the veracity of this conclusion, Coleman’s enmity against HPB was clearly long-standing.
Coleman next lashes out against Blavatsky in The Religio-Philosophical Journal of 14 January 1888, and he adopts a decidedly more venomous tone. Whereas in 1881 Coleman argued that “there is a foundation of truth in the vagaries of Theosophy”52 and that “Theosophy
rightly directed would be eminently serviceable to Spiritualism and the world,”53 by 1888 he held
that “Theosophy has been one continuous fraud from beginning to end.”54 The entire
theosophical system, he argues, is the “fabrication of one mind, concocted to deceive those weak enough and silly enough to be led astray by them.”55 Moreover, HPB’s teachings are internally
incoherent; she has developed “some four or five different conflicting theosophical systems.”56
The famous adepts or Mahatmas “exist but in Madame Blavatsky’s vivid imagination.”57
Coleman ends his polemic with an impassioned plea to wayward Spiritualists:
Have done once and forever with the jargon of elementals, elementaries, the seven principles of man, Kama-loka, Devachan, shells, astral bodies, adeptship, Esoteric Buddhism, black and white magic, and all the other tomfoolery conjured up by Madame Blavatsky to deceive and
50 Coleman, “Theosophy and Spiritualism.” 51 Ibid.
52 Ibid. 53 Ibid.
54 Coleman, “The Dangers Now Threatening Spiritualism,” 8. 55 Ibid.
56 Ibid. 57 Ibid.
mystify the unwary and the mystically inclined. The world needs none of this fanfaronade of pretended mystical truth, and the sooner the whole of it is buried deep in the waters of eternal oblivion, the better for all humanity.58
Interestingly, at no point in the article does Coleman accuse Blavatsky of plagiarism, although he charges her with every other conceivable species of deceit.
Coleman’s increased vehemence reflects a number of developments in the seven years separating his articles. The 1884 “Coulomb affair” and the resulting Hodgson Report had severely damaged Blavatsky’s reputation.59 However, this did not stop Spiritualists from
continuing to desert their movement for the TS, which helps explain the escalation of criticism and tone in Coleman’s article. The article itself caused quite a stir amongst readers of the RPJ, generating a significant number of replies from both sides of the fence. J. Ransom bridge, for instance, dismissed Coleman as an overzealous reactionary, writing “With certain contributors to the Journal, any reference to Theosophical doctrines or to Madame Blavatsky is like shaking a red flag in the face of a cross bull.”60 Other Theosophists wrote in with anecdotal sketches—
many bordering on hagiography—intending to demonstrate HPB’s noble character and spiritual advancement. One particularly incensed supporter, the author and historian Elliott Coues, voiced his hope that Blavatsky, on first reading Coleman’s “disgraceful words, [...] swore an oath that was heard from Thibet to the Golden Gate [… and] that will be heard to re-echo even in the vast concavity of Mr. Coleman’s dull ears.”61
The overwhelming response to Coleman’s article inspired him to write a follow-up nine
58 Ibid.
59 Emma and Alexis Coulomb were early members of the TS and helped conduct HPB’s affairs in India. However, a series of disagreements caused the Coulombs to reject Blavatsky and publish a series of letters—supposedly written by HPB—indicating that the channeled Mahatama letters were faked. The scandal prompted the SPR to send prominent member Richard Hodgson to India to investigate both the Mahatma letters and stories of HPB’s psychic powers. Hodgson’s report—published in 1885—condemned HPB as a fraud, “one of the most
accomplished, ingenious, and interesting impostors in history.” Subsequent assessments of the report have accused Hodgson of prejudice, which was certainly the position adopted by the TS when the report was published. Coleman quotes from it throughout his articles. See: Proceedings of the Society for Psychical
Research, Vol. III, 207 & Lachman, Madame Blavatsky, 319-324.
60 Bridge, “Madame Blavatsky,” 2. 61 Coues, “A Question of Good Taste.”
months later, titled “Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy: A Reply to My Critics.” “As I expected,” Coleman writes, “my criticisms aroused the indignation of sundry of the more prominent dupes of Madame Blavatsky.”62 He further notes that “no attempt is made by a single
one of my critics to reply to any of the facts and arguments I advanced in disproof of the truth of Blavatskyite theosophy.”63 While this is partly true—many responses to Coleman’s article of
January 14th say nothing at all about its content or arguments—there are a number of exceptions.
One anonymous Theosophist even argued that “[s]o far as theosophy is concerned, there is no argument in Mr. Coleman’s piece that can be met by counter argument, no logic to be refuted in a logical method; and I fear I should be convicted of very bad manners and worse taste if I were to retort, as I easily might, in a ’tu quoque’ or ’you’re another’ style.”64
Although roundly condemned by the Theosophical readership of the RPJ, Coleman retained considerable support amongst Spiritualists. He gloated that “as an offset to the abuse, misrepresentation, and sneers with which I was freely favored from the theosophists, in the Journal’s columns, were the hearty thanks and warm encomiums which I received from representative Spiritualists and others for my critique of theosophy in the Journal of January 14th.”65
In 1891, Coleman released the first in a series of articles titled “The Unveiling of ’Isis Unveiled,’” which ran from April to October in the Golden Way. This was the first time that Coleman accused HPB of plagiarism in print, and thus marks the beginning of one of the more notable scandals in the history of the TS. As historian James Santucci remarks, “Although Blavatsky’s writing career was open to criticism by non-Theosophist theologians, scientists, and academics, by far the most serious challenge to the credibility of her major contributions […] came from a spiritualist, William Emmette Coleman.”66 The charge was so serious that it
remains a touchy subject in the TS today: “Plagiarism has been an issue in Theosophy since the charges first appeared in the late 1880s.”67 In another bizarre instance of synchronicity, HPB
62 Coleman, “Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy: A Reply to My Critics,” 2. 63 Ibid.
64 “The Dangers Now Threatening Spiritualism [, response to].” 65 Ibid.
66 Santucci, “Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna” 183. 67 Ibid., 183-4.
died less than a month after Coleman published the first installment of his attack—all the same, she found time to respond in an article in the May 1891 edition of Lucifer, titled “My Books.” Blavatsky writes that, “had I committed plagiarism, I should not feel the slightest hesitation in admitting the ‘borrowing.’ But all ‘parallel passages’ to the contrary, as I have not done so, I do not see why I should confess it.”68 Although Blavatsky refuses to explicitly name her accuser,
writing “I will not name him. There are names which carry a moral stench about them, unfit for any decent journal or publication. His words and deeds emanate from the cloaca maxima of the Universe of matter and have to return to it, without touching me,”69 her allusions to Coleman are
obvious. The charge, she writes, “has all come from one and the same source, well known to all Theosophists, a person most indefatigable in attacking me personally for the last twelve years, though I have never seen or met the creature.”70 Throughout the article, Blavatsky adamantly
maintains that she never once plagiarized, dismisses Coleman’s charges as frivolous, and argues that any errors of citation in the text likely result from typesetting mistakes and Alexander Wilder’s “very difficult handwriting.”71 As we shall see when we come to analyze Coleman’s
“parallel passages,” this is not a particulary convincing line of argument.
Coleman, for his part, focuses specifically on plagiarisms in Isis Unveiled, remarking: “This work may be termed the Old Testament […] of that system of present-day thought called Theosophy; ’The Secret Doctrine,’ by the same author, constituting its New Testament.”72
Coleman goes on to note that “In both these works […] the fundamental principles of Modern Spiritualism are combated; and at the present time Theosophy is one of the deadliest foes to the Spiritual Philosophy.”73 One of the most insidious aspects of Theosophy, Coleman suggests, is
its dangerous and regressive interpretation of Spiritualist phenomena; like Christianity, “Theosophy admits the genuineness of much of the phenomena, but also attributes them almost wholly to the action of evil spirits.”74 Coleman notes that “’Isis Unveiled’ was extensively
68 Blavatsky, “My Books,” 245. 69 Ibid., 243.
70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., 246.
72 Coleman, “The Unveiling of ’Isis Unveiled’,” 65 (April). 73 Ibid.
advertised as ’a book with a revelation in it. […] It has, indeed, a ’revelation’ in it, but one wholly undiscovered and unsuspected, so far as I can learn, until the discovery was made by the present writer.”75 This observation leads Coleman into a statement of his thesis:
When an author copies the idea or language, or both, of another writer without giving that writer credit therefor, it is called plagiarism; and where an author thus borrows, not from one writer alone, but from a number of writers, it is wholesale and aggravated plagiarism. The first feature of my revelation of ’Isis Unveiled’ is this: This work is a mass of plagiarism, a
collection of wholesale plagiarism, such as probably has not been known before in the literature of the world. The bulk of the book is copied, sometimes verbatim, sometimes in
paraphrase or with slight alteration, from other books. In a comparatively small number of cases appropriate credit is given for the matter thus copied, but in an overwhelming majority of instances, no credit is given to the books from which the plagiarized passages are copied.76
Clearly, Coleman is not one to downplay his case, and his claim naturally raises the question: could HPB have possibly kept that amount of a plagiarism a secret during the writing of Isis
Unveiled, let alone the first fifteen years of its publication?
First of all, it is important to note that HPB did not compose Isis Unveiled in private. In fact, she commenced the work while living at the house of an English professor, Hiram P. Corson. Olcott was frequently at Corson’s house as well, so, assuming Coleman’s charges are valid, either the two men were complicit in HPB’s plagiarism, or she managed to keep it hidden from them. Certainly, neither man ever suggested that she stole parts of the work. Corson wrote of the period: “her method of work was most unusual. She would write in bed, from nine o’clock in the morning, smoking innumerable cigarettes, quoting long verbatim paragraphs from dozens of books of which I am perfectly certain there were no copies at that time in America, translating easily from several languages, and occasional calling out to me, in my study, to know how to turn some old-world idiom into literary English, for at that time she had not attained the literary fluency of diction which distinguished The Secret Doctrine.”77 Corson was particularly
impressed by her output, which averaged “about twenty-five closely written foolscap pages a
75 Ibid. 76 Ibid.
day.”78 Regarding quotations, Corson remarked, “She herself told me that she wrote them down
as they appeared in her eyes on another plane of objective existence, that she clearly saw the pages of the book, and the quotations she need, and simple translated what she saw into English […] The hundreds of books she quoted were certainly not in my library.”79
Olcott recorded a similar observation in his Old Diary Leaves: “Her pen would be flying over the page, when she would suddenly stop, look out into space with the vacant eye of a clairvoyant seer, shorten her vision as though to look at something held invisibly in the air before her, and begin copying on her paper what she saw. The quotation finished her eyes would resume their natural expression, and she would go on writing until again stopped by a similar interruption.”80 This was a popular method of composition for Blavatsky and some later
theosophists, who claimed that they were consulting the “Akashic Record,” a “kind of Cosmic memory bank”81 existing on the astral plain and storing all human knowledge. The nature of this
concept, combined with descriptions of Blavatsky’s astral writing method, have led some scholars to argue that Blavatsky may have possessed eidetic faculty, otherwise known as photographic memory.82 Truly photographic memory has never been shown to exist; however,
classical orators developed a number of visual techniques for memorizing long speeches, and these have since become an important part of the esoteric tradition.83 Although there is no
indication that Blavatsky was familiar with any one particular mnemonic technique, she definitely took pains to cultivate her memory: “For several years, in order not to forget what I have learned elsewhere, I have been made to have permanently before my eyes all that I need to see. Thus, night and day, the images of the past ever marshaled before my inner eye.”84 But did
she use her memory to quote from books that she had read? There is a telling passage on the nature of memory in Isis Unveiled, which reads:
78 Ibid. 79 Ibid.
80 Olcott, Old Diary Leaves, 208-9. 81 Hammer, Claiming Knowledge, 56.
82 Proposed, for instance, by Gary Lachman in his 2012 Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality. 83 See Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory.
Memory—the despair of the materialist, the enigma of the psychologist, the sphinx of science—is to the student of the old philosophies merely a name to express that power which man unconsciously exerts […] to look with inner sight into the astral light, and there behold the images of past sensations and incidents. Instead of searching the cerebral ganglia […] they went to the vast repository where the records of every man’s life […] are stored up for all Eternity!85
Here we see that, in Blavatsky’s mind, whenever somebody “remembers” something, they are simply accessing the Akashic Record. Since she herself—not to mention Olcott and Corson— suggests that she found the quotes used in Isis Unveiled on the astral plane, this is tantamount to admitting that she wrote them down from memory. The peculiar frequency of visual errors in her citations provides some compelling evidence for the idea. At various points, when citing material from other authors, Blavatsky makes mistakes which are clearly errors of sight, rather than of understanding. We will encounter a number of examples over the course of this paper, but here are a few for now: she misrenders an “11” as a “ii”; a “111” as a “iii”; a “171” as a “117”; a “181” as a “118”; “Wuttke” as “Wultke”; “Kleuker” as “Klenker” (an n is and upside down u), etc. She also frequently flips clauses in sentences and commits other minor mistakes of ordering. These are all errors of seeing in that they all clearly derive from the misperception of visual material on the page; this suggests slips in Blavatsky’s eidetic faculty, or trained memory —as we have seen, no memory is truly photographic.86
Ultimately, it is possible—in light of the above evidence, I would even say likely—that Blavatsky used memory training to memorize passages from books and then conspicuously write them out in front of Olcott and Corson as a sort of parlor trick. If this was indeed the case, Blavatky’s claims of consulting the Akashic Record were basically an extension of the “clever jugglerly” with which Coleman accused her. This is a perfect example of a “strategy of legitimation,” or what Olav Hammer terms “discursive strategies”:87 by convincing Olcott and
85 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol I, 159.
86 These mistakes could also reflect errors in typesetting or in the interpretation of the manuscript made during the printing process; accordingly, they cannot be taken as definitive proof.
87 Hammer describes three different discursive strategies used by esotericists to legitimate their authority: the first appeals to “tradition,” the second to “rationality and science,” and the third to “experience.”—Olav Hammer,
Claiming Knowledge, 44-45. These are, in fact, the three elements of Aristotelian rhetoric: ethos (the ethical
Corson that the Mahatmas were helping her write Isis Unveiled from the astral plane, Blavatsky strengthened her reputation as a spiritually enlightened sage—a reputation absolutely critical to the early success of the Theosophical Society. Naturally, this is only a hypothesis—but it is one that neatly accounts for all the different stories regarding the composition of Isis Unveiled without recourse to supernatural claims.88
Olcott moreover claims that Blavatsky wrote parts of the book in a trance. This is an intriguing claim: Isis Unveiled adopts a scholarly tone and methodology,89 which is atypical of
works composed in an altered state of consciousness90. Nonetheless, Olcott is insistent, and
Blavatsky biographer Marion Meade notes that, in the Isis Unveiled manuscript, “in addition to to Helena’s own script, there were three or four others.”91 So was HPB channeling different
“masters” who helped her complete the work? As HPB related in the letter to her sister quoted above, “I never lose the consciousness of my own personality; what I feel is as if I were keeping silent and the other one—the lodger who is in me—were speaking with my tongue.”92 This is
remarkably similar to Helen Schuman’s descriptions of how she “scribed” A Course in Miracles. “In cases of inner diction in which the medium hears a voice dictating messages, (s)he writes [them down] in a fully conscious state.”93
James Santucci notes of Isis Unveiled: “Many years [after its publication], within a month of her death, Blavatsky revealed that the text was not written primarily for the general public but rather for the members of the Theosophical Society; and she added that much of the work was edited by Col. Olcott and Alexander Wilder (1823-1908) – an old acquaintance of Olcott’s, and a
argument), and pathos (the pathetic appeal, based on emotion and personal experience). (See Aristotle’s Ars
Rhetorica for further details). Taken individually, Aristotle argues that the ethical appeal is the most persuasive,
and the logical appeal the least so, which perhaps explains why many esotericists are so careful to legitimate their authority with appeals to tradition, yet so careless in their scholarship.
88 The only way in which this hypthosis could be in any sense proved would be to analyze the original manuscript. 89 Another “discursive strategy” bolstering Blavatsky’s ethos.
90 The academic style, however, could be attributable to Wilder and Olcott's assistance. 91 Meade, Madame Blavatsky.
92 Blavatsky, Letters of H.P. Blavatsky to Her Family in Russia, accessed 1 May 2015. <http://www.blavatskyarchives.com/blavlet1.htm>
member and later Vice-president of the Theosophical Society.”94 Corson claimed HPB “had not
attained […] literary fluency of diction”95 and thus had to rely on Olcott and Wilder for editorial
support. Conceivably, Wilder and Olcott could have been responsible for any instances of plagiarism. Nonetheless, as Coleman points out, “A work produced by deific omniscient beings, with perfect and complete powers of clairvoyance or spiritual vision, should be, to some extent at least, deific, perfect and complete.”96
Following his bold and thorough denouncement of HPB, Coleman goes into greater detail about the nature of the plagiarism he claims to have found in her work:
A careful analysis of “Isis Unveiled” reveals these facts: there are about 1400 books and periodicals quoted from and referred to in that work: and of this number a little over 100, including many periodicals, were actually in possession of Mme. Blavatsky, and were quoted from directly by her. From these hundred and odd books and papers she derived all that she published, taken from and relating to the other 1300 books. There are in ’Isis’ about 2100 quotations […] and of this number only about 140 are credited […] to the books from which they were copied. All the others are cited […] in such a manner as to lead the reader to think that Mme. Blavatsky had read and utilized the original works […] the readers of ’Isis’ have been […] misled into believing the Madame to have been an enormous reader, and possessed of a vast erudition: while the fact is that her reading had been very limited, and her ignorance was deep and profound in all branches of knowledge.97
Coleman further claims that the books used by HPB were “almost entirely confined to the current nineteenth-century.”98 If Coleman was making it all up, as many theosophists have since
claimed, he made a very lucky guess regarding the size of HPB’s library; as Olcott writes in his
Old Diary Leaves, “our whole working library scarcely comprised one hundred books of
reference.”99
To support his charge, Coleman provides several lists of parallel passages correlating specific sections of Isis Unveiled with the books that he claims they were taken from. These
94 Santucci, “Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna,” 180.
95 Cranston, H.P.B.: The Extraordinary Life & Influence of Helena Blavatsky, 154. 96 Coleman, “The Unveiling of ’Isis Unveiled’,” 66 (April).
97 Coleman, “The Unveiling of ’Isis Unveiled’,” 470 (October). 98 Ibid., 471.
parallel passages are explored in greater detail below. He also notes specific subjects in which Blavatsky was particularly deficient, such as the Kabbalah: “She pretended to great Kabbalistic learning, whereas, as I have shown in my lists of her plagiarisms in this series of papers, every quotation from and every allusion to the Kabbala, in ’Isis,’ was copied second-hand from certain books containing scattering quotations from the Kabbalistic writings. [...] she knew nothing of it except through [...] Eliphas Levi, [...] Jacolliot, Dunlap, Mackenzie, King, and a few others.”100
He further accuses her of stealing all of her quotes from the “old-time mystics, Paracelsus, Van Helmont, Gaffarel, Cardan, Robert Fludd, Philalethes, and others” as well as “all the classical authors of antiquity,—Homer, Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Pliny, and the many others, including the Neoplatonic writers, Iamblichus, Porphyry, and others.”101 Coleman moreover accuses HPB of
taking quotes out of context and altering them in order to distort the original meaning (which he calls “garbling”) and of inventing “ideas, statements, [and] language” and attributing them to other authors (which he calls “literary forgery”).102 Coleman ended his final installment of the
Golden Way series with a promise: “to be continued.”103 However, another issue never appeared.
The reading public had to wait two years for further details.
1895’s “The Sources of Madame Blavatsky’s Writings” is essentially a condensed re-hash of Coleman’s claims in the Golden Way. Although he provides substantially less information regarding specific instances of plagiarism, he does extend the charge to a variety of other Theosophical works, including The Secret Doctrine, Theosophical Glossary, Voice of
Silence, Esoteric Buddhism, and From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan.104 Coleman also
includes a handy chart indicating the number of passages Blavatsky stole from specific books when composing Isis Unveiled. For whatever reason, this is the article that is most often cited when authors discuss Coleman’s charges against Blavatsky. Coleman begins the article with a promise to release a book supporting his charges: “they will be embodied in full in a work I am preparing for publication,—an expose of theosophy as a whole.”105 Once again, the promised
100 Coleman, “The Unveiling of ’Isis Unveiled’,” 471 (October). 101 Ibid.
102 Ibid., 478. 103 Ibid., 479.
104 Coleman, “The Sources of Madame Blavatsky’s Writings.” 105 Ibid.
work never appeared. In the mean time, Coleman pointed readers to his Golden Way series:
So far as pertains to Isis Unveiled, Madame Blavatsky’s first work, the proofs of its wholesale plagiarisms have been in print two years, and no attempt has been made to deny or discredit any of the data therein contained. In that portion of my work which is already in print, as well as that as yet in manuscript, many parallel passages are given from the two sets of writings, -the works of Madame Blavatsky, and -the books whence she copied -the plagiarised passages; they also contain complete lists of the passages plagiarised, giving in each case the page of Madame Blavatsky’s work in which the passage is found, and the page and name of the book whence she copied it. Any one can, therefore, easily test the accuracy of my statements.106
So did Blavatsky plagiarize? The answer is not as simple as one could hope. As James Santucci points out, “Blavatsky’s methods of citing sources have been defended by Theosophists, but in all fairness no detailed investigation has even been conducted, nor have criteria been established to prove or disprove the allegations.”107 In order to establish appropriate
criteria, however, it is first necessary to understand something of the conception of plagiarism and literary ethics in the 19th-century. This is more difficult than it may sound, since, even today, there is no universally agreed upon definition of plagiarism. In idiomatic usage, plagiarism refers to “The action or practice of taking someone else’s work, idea, etc., and passing it off as one’s own; literary theft.”108 Although the term accordingly applies to any instance of
“literary theft,” today, accusations of “plagiarism” typically occur in academic and journalistic contexts.
The universal outcry which met Coleman’s charges indicates that, even in the late 19th-century, plagiarism was considered a very serious charge; however, only a century earlier authors were allowed much greater leeway in terms of “borrowing” text or quotes from other authors. Laurence Sterne, for instance, plagiarized extensively from Robert Burton’s The
Anatomy of Melancholy in his novel Tristam Shandy.109 Benjamin Franklin, before he became a
household name, bolstered the popularity of his Poor Richard’s Almanac with recycled Jonathan
106 Ibid.
107 Santucci, “Blavatsky, Petrovna Helena,” 183-4. 108 “Plagiarism, n.”
109 Lynch, “The Perfectly Acceptable Practice of Literary Theft: Plagiarism, Copyright, and the Eighteenth Century.”
Swift jokes.110 By Blavatsky’s day, this would have been considered an extremely damning
instance of plagiarism, but at the time “originality” (as the alternative to plagiarism) apparently did not particularly concern readers.111
Jack Lynch argues in his article “The Perfectly Acceptable Practice of Literary Theft: Plagiarism, Copyright, and the Eighteenth Century” that the rise of “plagiarism” as a charge, and the associated concern with originality and property attribution, are closely linked with the development of Copyright law. “Although authors had been complaining about literary theft since ancient times, they had no recourse until 10 April 1710, when the world’s first copyright act was passed in London: ’An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Author’s or Purchasers of Such Copies,’ known as the Statute of Anne.”112
The law was originally intended to combat literary piracy, especially in the American colonies, where recent books were published without the permission or knowledge of their authors. In other words, Copyright was never meant to address “plagiarism” per se—it only addresses instances that deprive authors of the right to profit from their works. Nonetheless, public opinion slowly gravitated towards the belief that all instances of plagiarism bad, not just those which affect the livelihood of authors.
It was only during the 18th century that ’originality’ in the modern sense became an ideal. An important milestone is Edward Young’s Conjectures Concerning Original Composition, which appeared in London in 1759. There Young celebrates novelty and attacks imitation: “Originals are, and ought to be, great Favourites, for they are great Benefactors; they extend the Republic of Letters, and add a new province to its dominion: Imitators only give us a sort of Duplicates of what we had, possibly much better, before.” Good authors are original, bad authors copy, and copying is no better than “sordid Theft.”113
The ease with which public opinion turned against literary “borrowing” demonstrates one of the most important facts about plagiarism: it is not an independent concept, but lies on a spectrum with other accepted literary practices such as imitation, homage, etc. “The boundaries between permissible and impermissible, imitation, stylistic plagiarism, copy, replica and forgery remain
110 Ibid. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid.
nebulous.”114 For this reason, it is difficult to develop a heuristic which can easily distinguish
plagiarism from appropriate borrowing. In some sense, each individual charge of plagiarism must be approached on a case by case basis.
A good scholar, however, is never deterred by the apparent impossibility of his objective. Accordingly, many academics have proposed heuristics for objectively determining instances of plagiarism. When appropriate, this paper uses Terri Fishman’s proposed definition of plagiarism as any instance where an author (i) “Uses words, ideas, or work products”; (ii) “Attributable to another identifiable person or source”; (iii) “Without attributing the work to the source from which it was obtained”; (iv) “In a situation in which there is a legitimate expectation of original authorship”; and (v) “In order to obtain some benefit, credit, or gain which need not be monetary.”115
Later scholars, such as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, have sometimes dismissed Coleman’s claims of plagiarism as irrelevant. As he puts it, “Coleman may be right concerning Blavatsky’s lack of acknowledgment. It is quite possible that she had no acquaintance with the original sources these nineteenth-century works quoted, but an argument about Blavatsky’s scholarship is beside the point. Given Blavatsky’s then deficient grasp of English, her assertion of a clairvoyant ability to copy sources, and the fact that Olcott, Alexander Wilder, and others helped to edit much of the book, the question of its originality is not germane.”116 However,
Goodrick-Clarke does not ultimately reject Coleman’s claims wholesale, only their moral dimension. This is perfectly reasonable, since highly subjective issues such as moral conduct typically fall outside the parameters of academic investigation. Indeed, given the various claims that the text was “channeled,” no matter how thoroughly one proves that there is plagiarism in Isis Unveiled, it is impossible to prove that HPB is morally culpable. It is also important to note that Isis Unveiled was not intended primarily as a work of a scholarship and should perhaps not be judged by academic standards. On the other hand, Blavatsky took great pains to imitate a scholarly approach, so one could reasonably expect her to imitate scholarly citation practices as well. It is perhaps telling that, as Santucci notes, “many of the authors who were allegedly the victims of
114 Eco, 202, quoting Frank Arnau. 115Fishman, 5.
Blavatsky’s plagiarism were alive when the charges were made, yet none indicted her.”117
As Goodrick-Clarke points out, “What is important in Coleman’s analysis is not his charge of unattributed quotations and plagiarisms, but the identity of [Blavatsky’s] nineteenth-century sources.”118 Accordingly, for the purposes of this paper, we can drop (iv) and (v) from
Fishman’s list—they are the moral aspects of the plagiarism charge. This leaves three criteria for establishing the validity of Coleman’s claims: did Blavatsky (i) “Uses words, ideas, or work products”; (ii) “Attributable to another identifiable person or source”; (iii) “Without attributing the work to the source from which it was obtained?” A further distinction of relevance for this paper is between content plagiarism and source plagiarism. Content plagiarism occurs when an author copies the original words of another author without providing any citation to that author. Source plagiarism occurs when an author copies quotations from the work of another author and cites the original author without referencing the intermediary text. Source plagiarism is a much murkier ethical issue than content plagiarism, which is typically regarded as the most egregious form of literary theft. We have already seen that Coleman primarily accuses HPB of the latter type: “There are in ’Isis’ about 2100 quotations […] and of this number only about 140 are credited […] to the books from which they were copied. All the others are cited […] in such a manner as to lead the reader to think that Mme. Blavatsky had read and utilized the original works.”119
Ironically, Coleman himself was accused of the exact same species of plagiarism only a decade earlier. Jeffrey Lavoie records in his article “Analyzing Coleman,” that “Despite his zeal for copyright ethics, in 1881 Coleman himself faced accusations of plagiarism from William Henry Burr.”120 However, Coleman “adamantly denied the charges,” writing in a letter to Mind
and Matter: “Even were I guilty of what [Burr] charges, it would not be plagiarism. To quote
extracts from other authors found in Mr. B’s. work is not plagiarism.”121 Coleman goes on to
argue, “It is ridiculously absurd to call it plagiarism to use quotations from other writers, taken
117Santucci, “Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna,” 184.
118Goodrick-Clarke, Helena Blavatsky 52. In many respects, Coleman laid the foundation for a critical edition of
Isis Unveiled over a hundred years ago. It is a project long overdue.
119Coleman, “The Unveiling of ’Isis Unveiled’,” 470 (October). 120Lavoie, “Analyzing Coleman,” 45.
second-hand.”122 Coleman’s ethical myopia further underscores the uncertain moral nature of
source plagiarism; although Coleman and Blavatsky both used (or misused) their sources in the
exact same way at various points, Coleman considered his actions appropriate borrowing and
those of HPB “wholesale plagiarism.”
Now that an appropriate methodology has been determined, it is time to establish the parameters of the investigation at hand. Following up all of Coleman’s claims is a task far beyond the means of this thesis. The astonishing breadth of his charges promises that any attempt to systematically investigate them all would quickly outgrow an article, and probably a book as well. It is no wonder that Coleman never came through with his promised monograph on Blavatsky’s plagiarisms. Accordingly, this paper focuses on HPB’s use of the works of one author (Samuel Fales Dunlap123) in the composition of one work (Isis Unveiled). By limiting the
investigation to a narrower case study, it becomes possible to trace the transmission of specific ideas between Blavatsky and her sources. Dunlap is an ideal choice since, according to Coleman, HPB plagiarized from no less than three of his works, and referenced him all together more than any other author. Isis Unveiled is an ideal choice to complete the case study; it is Blavatsky’s earliest book, and thus representative of her early thought. It is also the work that first made the TS famous, and was the focus of Coleman’s most sustained attacks. For these reasons, this paper largely confines itself to investigating the influence of Dunlap’s works
Vestiges of the Spirit-History of Man, Sod: the Mysteries of Adoni, and Sod: the Son of the Man
on Isis Unveiled.
Having established our methodology and parameters, it is time to investigate some of Coleman’s specific claims. It is important to note, first of all, that the question is not: did Blavatsky use the work of Dunlap?—but rather: to what extent? She explicitly references Dunlap or quotes from his books 31 times over the course of Isis Unveiled (14 times in Vol I, 17 times in Volume II). Olcott himself notes that Dunlap was a favorite of Blavatsky’s: “Of some books she made great use—for example, King’s Gnostics; Jennings’ Rosicrucians; Dunlop’s [sic] Sod and Spirit History of Man.”124 Coleman argues that Blavatsky made much greater use
122Ibid.
123Dunlap was an author of scholarly works on comparative religion and philology. His life and writings are explored in greater detail below.
of Dunlap’s works than she let on, writing: “The total number [of plagiarisms] in ’Isis’ from the three works of Dunlap, is 276: and doubtless there are others that I have not included above,— there being probably 300 in all, besides the scattering quotations from these three books, in ’Isis,’ for which the proper credit is given.”125 In other words, according to Coleman, HPB only
properly cited about 10% of the material she derived from Dunlap.
To substantiate his charge, Coleman begins by pointing out a particularly damning series of source plagiarisms in Isis Unveiled. He highlights one particular two paragraph passage from Volume I, the first part of which reads:
Gama is the sun, according to the Hindu theology, and “The sun is the source of the souls and of all life.” [Weber, “Ind. Stud.,” i. 290.] Agni, the “Divine Fire,” the deity of the Hindu, is the sun, [Wilson, “Rig-Veda Sanhita,” ii. 143] for the fire and sun are the same. Ormazd is light, the Sun-God, or the Life-Giver. In the Hindu philosophy, “The souls issue from the soul of the world, and return to it as sparks to the fire.” [“Duncker,” vol. ii., p. 162] But, in another place, it is said that “The Sun is the soul of all things; all has proceeded out of it, and will return to it,” [“Wultke,” [sic] ii. 262.] which shows that the sun is meant allegorically here, and refers to the central, invisible sun, God, whose first manifestations was Sephira, the emanation of En-Soph—Light, in short.
As we can see, this passage contains four citations: to Albrecht Weber, Horace Hayman Wilson, Max Duncker, Adolf Wuttke. Coleman next provides a list of the passages in Vestiges of the
Spirit-History of Man from which Blavatsky derived the material.
As it turns out, all four citations occur in the same section of Vestiges. Blavatsky’s quotation from Weber is found on page 114, and reads: “Yama is the Sun, the source of the souls and of all life; later, he becomes, like Osiris, king of the dead. The Earth-goddess Nirriti is his wife. [Weber, Ind. Stud. i. 290.]”126 Blavatsky had it: “Gama is the sun, according to the Hindu
theology, and ’The sun is the source of the souls and of all life.’ [Weber, ’Ind. Stud.,’ i. 290.]”127
There are a number of indications that Blavatsky did not derive this quote from the original source. First and most importantly, Weber’s Indische Studien was never translated out of the
125Coleman, “The Unveiling of ’Isis Unveiled’,” 339 (August). 126Dunlap, Vestiges of the Spirit-History of Man, 65.
original German, which Blavatsky could not read.128 Moreover, Dunlap’s original cite from
Weber refers to the association between Nirriti and Yama, not the latter’s relationship to the sun: “Beide, Yama, wie Yanii, erscheinen in inniger Verbindung mit der (schwarzen krishnä) Nirriti, der Unheilsgöttin.”129 Apparently, Blavatsky misinterpreted the meaning of Dunlap’s citation
and assumed it also applied to the previous sentence, which she then proceeded to misrepresent as a quote. Without doubt, this fulfills the stipulations of Fishman’s plagiarism heuristic.
Blavatsky’s Wilson quote is found on page 114 of Vest., and reads: “Agni, ’the Divine Fire,’ the Hindu deity, is the Sun; [Wilson, Rig Veda Sanhita, ii. 143.] fire and sun being the same. [Wilson, ii. 133.]”130 Blavatsky’s version reads: “Agni, the ’Divine Fire,’ the deity of the
Hindu, is the sun, [Wilson, “Rig-Veda Sanhita,” ii. 143] for the fire and sun are the same.”131
Wilson’s version of the Rig-Veda Sanhita was composed in English, so HPB could conceivably have used the work in its original. However, there is no reference in either of the original passages Dunlap cites to the “Divine Fire.”132 This is apparently his own observation;
accordingly, Blavatsk’y use of it indicates that she derived the Wilson quote from Vestiges rather than the original source.
The Duncker quote is also found on page 114 of Vest., and reads: “Although a man is risen to pursue thee and to seek thy soul, yet the soul of my lord shall be bound in the bundle of the living Jahoh, thy Elohi (thy God); and the soul of thine enemies shall he sing out in the middle of the hollow of sling. [Duncker, vol. 2, page 162.]”133 Here we find absolutely no
overlap between HPB’s version of the quote and Dunlap’s. Blavatsky was evidently confused and thought that the quote applied to the passage immediately preceding it in Vest., which reads: “In summer and winter, by day and by night, in storm and calm weather, thou wilt remember that the life in thy body and the fire upon thy hearth are one and the same thing. Let the fire go out, and at once thy life is extinguished. [J. Müller, 55.]”134 This is very different from HPB’s
128Coleman, for instance, remarks of another author Blavatsky references, “Olshausen’s works, with one exception, were in German, untranslated, and therefore inaccessible to her.” Coleman, “The Unveiling of ’Isis Unveiled’,” 477 (October).
129Weber, Indische Studien, 290.
130Dunlap, Vestiges of the Spirit-History of Man, 114. 131Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol I, 240.
132Wilson, Rig-Veda Sanhita, 133 & 143.
133Dunlap, Vestiges of the Spirit-History of Man, 114. 134Ibid.
statement: “The souls issue from the soul of the world, and return to it as sparks to the fire.”135
Presumably, Blavatsky admired the fire/life metaphor and manipulated the quotation to serve her argument, a perfect example of what Coleman calls “garbling.” Perhaps most damningly, Blavatsky represents “Duncker” as the title of the work being cited, rather than the name of its author.
She makes the exact same mistake with her “Wultke” citation. In Vestiges, this is a reference to the work of Adolf Wuttke, not a scholarly work titled Wultke: “The Sun is the soul of all things; all has proceeded out of it, and will return to it. [Wuttke, ii. 262.]”136 Moreover,
Wuttke’s work was only available in German during Blavatsky’s lifetime, so we need look no further for proof that she accessed the material through Dunlap. Wuttke’s quote, which appears on page 115 of Vestiges, makes four citations in a row, all plagiarized from the same two pages of material in Dunlap. An example such as this tends to blur the line separating content and source plagiarism; although Blavatsky did not appropriate Dunlap’s own words, she is unarguably representing his research as her own.
The second paragraph of the passage highlighted by Coleman reads:
“And I looked, and behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great could, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it,” says Ezekiel (i., 4, 22, etc.), “… and the likeness of a throne … and as the appearance of a man above upon it … and I saw as it were the appearance of fire and it had brightness round about it. And Daniel speaks of the the “ancient of days,” the kabalistic En-Soph, whose throne was “the fiery flame, his wheels burning fire … A fiery stream issued and came forth from before him.” [Daniel vii. 9, 10.] Like the Pagan Saturn, who had his castle of flame in the seventh heaven, the Jewish Jehovah had his “castle of fire over the seventh heavens.” [Book of Enoch, xiv. 7, ff.]137
Blavatsky’s citations for the books of Enoch, Ezekiel, and Daniel are, as before, all found in the same section of Vest., which is worth quoting at length:
[…] “No angel could penetrate to look upon his countenance the Glorious and Beaming. Also could no mortal look upon him. A fire glared round about him. A fire also of great compass mounted continually up from him, so that no one of those about him could approach him
135Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol I, 240.
136Dunlap, Vestiges of the Spirit-History of Man, 115. 137Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol I, 240-1.
