Word: spiritualists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Between what is almost certainly true about Madame H.P. (for Helena Petrovna) Blavatsky and what is almost certainly false, there is a perilous region of mists and myths. The dominant truth about H.P.B. was that she founded and was chief illusionist for the Theosophical Society, a spiritualist sect that influenced the poetry of William Butler Yeats and the thinking of Jawaharlal Nehru, and helped to revive the consciousness of India...
...spirit-infested cosmology she described in two long, marvelously jumbled works of Ori ental philosophy, Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. Her Tibetan Masters dictated these volumes to her, she seems to have been convinced, although their San skrit quotations tended to be shaky. If a bit of spiritualist theater in a darkened room helped to shore up the convictions of her fellow Theosophists, where was the harm? It was charlatanism in the highest cause of all, she felt, and thus when one of her stunts went wrong, or when a dis gruntled confederate published letters from her, giving detailed...