Worried
that this blog might be considered unpoetical, I thought this post was
overdue, and to pay proper respects to the Theosophical movement's great
Irish heritage...
Yet despite all this, the name A.E. is still imbued with a certain magic, a
presence that gathers around it the like-minded, drawing with a natural
magnetism, ears straining to hear old traces of the new songs of Ireland. And
just as they did during his lifetime, readers, historians, writers, mystics,
activists, poets, students, organisers, politicians, artists, and the
open-minded are still discovering kinship in A.E. and his works.
Hairy
fairy revisited – An Irishman’s Diary on George Russell
Mon, Apr 3, 2017
He was a poet, painter, playwright and nationalist who wrote on economics
and politics, and the list of names of those who attended his famous “soirées”
at his home in Rathgar reads like a “who’s who” of the Dublin of his time.
There he met WB Yeats, who introduced him to theosophy. He joined the Theosophical
Society in 1890, his membership certificate being signed by Madame Blavatsky,
the Russian founder of the society.
Established in New York in 1875 by a small group of people centred on
Helena Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott and Dublin-born William Quan Judge, the
society held that a body of ancient, hidden knowledge lay behind all the
world’s religions and, similarly, that hidden laws lay beyond the bounds of
conventional scientific thought.
In Ireland, George Russell (Æ), James M Pryse and others set up a branch in
Dublin, based at number 3 Ely Place. “It was a kind of commune and in many ways
idealistic, even utopian,” says Moore. “The theosophists were, and are,
completely non-sectarian. They believe in universal freedom and equality.”
Though it sounds as if it might be a religious cult, he points out: “It’s
not. It ambitiously aimed to synthesise elements of science, philosophy and
religion.”
Recent Wall
Street Journal article on Piet Mondrian mentions Blavatsky:
Mondrian was
attracted to both Catholic mysticism and Theosophical religious ideas around
1908. Theosophy—founded on the beliefs of Helena Blavatsky—stressed that a
divine structure was hidden beneath everyday appearances. In 1915, the artist
was briefly drawn to Christosophy—a merging of Theosophy with Christian
theology created by a former Catholic priest. Mondrian had begun his diamond
paintings before he broke away from Christosophy four years later.
From Alexei Jawlensky,
Abstract Faces at Full Intensity
Will Heinrich- March 9, 2017
The son of a colonel in the imperial
Russian Army, Alexei Jawlensky was 18 and a cadet when a visit to the
All-Russian Exhibition of Industry and Art in Moscow in 1882 changed his life
by introducing him to painting. Eventually he moved to Munich with Marianne von
Werefkin, another artistic expat from the nobility, vacationed with Kandinsky,
bought a van Gogh and studied Buddhism, yoga and theosophy.
Yeats"Yeats
died just before the catastrophe of the Second World War but his poetry seems
able to encompass and face up to the most destructive century in human memory.
Its way of doing so is idiosyncratic in the extreme, relying more on Irish and
Greek myth, mystical and antinomian texts by Plotinus, Blake, Swedenborg,
Nietzsche and Madame Blavatsky than on the approved masters of 19th- and
20th-century scientific, political and economic thought. Yeats turned himself
from a wistful romantic into a tough-minded prophet – a unique metamorphosis at
least in poetic history that makes him the bridge between two centuries or
between late romanticism and modernism." http://europe.newsweek.com/w-b-yeats-was-tough-prophet-our-times-330045
The ‘Weird Melancholy’ of Torquay author Rosa Praed - Kevin Dixon
During the 1880s Rosa’s work began to change. In 1878 the Theosophical Society had founded its London branch. She had, since childhood, been interested in spiritualism and she began to attend and host Theosophical Society meetings. She came to know and correspond with the theosophists H.S. Olcott, Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant. Occult themes then began to emerge in her work
The Academician
Theosophical is blogging up a storm with plenty
of interesting Blavatskian research, sample this Blavatsky letter showing the
love to the great Egyptologist Gerald Massey (not to be confused with other
Blavatsky associate C. C. Massey):
