Appetizer for Two [Trenchant Edges]
Yes, it's what you think.
Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges, the newsletter where I keep finding things to do other than write about Helena Blavatsky.
I’m Stephen, and it’s another excuse day. This one is good though, the client who’s paid my rent this month wants things moved up and it’s taking a lot longer than I expected.
Downside is, there’s no time to finish this newsletter today.
TLDR; The big Theosophy post will be coming out on 5pm est on Tuesday.
So I came up with something related that’s also fun.
Back in 2018 I ran a popularity tournament called PSYCHEDELIC THUNDERDOME on my FB Page. Helena Blavatsky was one of the contenders and she narrowly lost to Alfred North Whitehead.
Whitehead won 36 to Blavatsky’s 35.
At the time I thought that was appropriate. Not so sure now.
But I’d long since dismissed her work for my own use where Whitehead seemed way the hell more practical. But was he more influential? Hard to say.
Psychedelic Thunderdome
The premise of PT was a contest between 32 of the most influential people in western psychedelia to see who’s best. If you weren’t there, which is likely, it ended with Terence McKenna losing to Maria Sabina. highly appropriate.
The contest was framed by the question: Who’s More Psychedelic? An obnoxious, ambiguous statement.
All motivated by my working definition of Psychedelic: Consciously shifting perspective the same way a photographer can move around a subject. Highlighting different features and bringing totally different messages to the same thing.
The bracket started at noon every day and voting lasted 24 hours.
And because I figured a lot of readers wouldn’t know the people involved, I wrote up a little introduction. And that’s what I’ve got for you today.
This will give you a rare option: Seeing how my opinion has changed since November 2018. Naturally, I’m not editing a damn thing. So all typos are provided free of charge.
PSYCHEDELIC THUNDERDOME DAY 10: MADAME HELENA BLAVATSKY VS ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
QUEEN OF THE OLD NEW AGE VS LAST GREAT PLATONIC KING
Psychedelia didn’t appear fully formed out of nothing like a goddess hammered out of Zeus’s forehead. It emerged from from the mid-century western cultural milieu and drew from a dizzying array of intellectual influences. Two central streams to the age of Aquarius are 19th century occultism and early 20th century reactions to the science and technology of classical modernity (Roughly from the writing of the constitution to 1900).
And out of those milieus step today’s contenders. One helped founded the pop-occult group The Theosophical Society, who’s writings would go on to shape both the New Thought movement of the early 20the century and its younger cousin the New Age Movement. The other attempted to revolutionize mathematics and sciences a few times with mixed results. Along with Bertrand Russell, he wrote the influential book Principia Mathematica, which attempted to reconstitute all of mathematics through set theory. Later he’d go on to explore the philosophy of science and metaphysics.
There’s no way I can encompass the vast works of Madame Blavatsky or Alfred North Whitehead in this little post. Both wrote so extensively and pioneered so many lines of thinking that the best I can do is give you some idea of some of their more influential ideas were and maybe suggest where to go from there.
Blavatsky, like many contemporaries, was heavily influenced by both newly available translations of “Eastern texts” and by her own travels in Asia. Perhaps more than anyone else she popularized both a mystical view of Eastern Religions like Buddhism and Hinduism and their texts. She paved the way for the syncretic tradition of taking pieces from varied sources to build something new. Which should sound familiar to anyone who remembers Tim Leary’s year or so of telling everyone they should start their own religion. Maybe her most influential idea, repeated in endless variations in the varies corners of the cultic milieu is the notion of spiritual development, a staircase of perfection from total bad to total good.
Whitehead was also influenced by a far away land, but in his case it wasn’t one separated in space but in time. His most famous quote is probably, “0The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writing an inexhaustible mine of suggestion.”
Both figures impact have gone in some dubious directions. Madame Blavatsky’s work occasionally veered into outright antisemitism maybe stemming from her disgust with Christianity. This, along with her concept of spiritual evolution, made its way into the occult side of Nazi ideology. Of course, you can’t blame someone for what the worst people in the world did with her work after her death, but it’s not like they had to work hard to find useful material there. Even if you take some of her wilder claims as sincere, like the existence of secret masters of occult knowledge, it’s hard not to see her work as a template for lots of bad faith cult leaders later.
Whitehead’s legacy hasn’t fared much better, despite the ambition of the Principia Mathematica its basic premise was more or less fundamentally disproved with Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem. Since if it’s logically impossible to have a set of axioms the cover all cases… the Principia cannot have succeeded. Perhaps appropriately given his comments on Plato, Whitehead’s philosophy has seeded influential notions in Biology, Ecology, mathematics, medicine, and psychology. But, again like Plato, his successors have chosen Truth over loyalty to their friend.
Psychedelians may recognize Whitehead as a major influence of Terence Mckenna. And you can find much of the best of Terence’s ideas scattered throughout Whitehead’s corpus. From the idea of reality as a magic spell made out of language to novelty theory’s developing notion of complexity to his lectures on Whiteheads own ideas you can tell Terence cared deeply what this odd duck philosopher thought.
So who’s more psychedelic? The 19th century traveler who attempted to revolutionize religion or the 20th century philosopher who tried to revolutionize math, science, and philosophy?
So there you have it.
Spoiler: My opinion of her work hasn’t gotten better, but it has deepened.
Anyway, we’ll see how things play out on Tueday.
See y’all then.
-SF
Your writing there was super crisp. Thanks for sharing it, love that head to head bracket as a pedagogical device too. Fun.