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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

Submitted June 2015

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Table of Contents

1. “Nonsense and Charlatanry”: HPB and William Emmette Coleman

2. “Oriental Gnosis”: HPB and Samuel Fales Dunlap.

3. Concluding Remarks.

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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

else.

But to what extent can Coleman’s account be trusted? At first glance his credentials look

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>

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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 multiplexand complex concatenation of alleged revelations of occult truth in the teachings of MadameBlavatsky and the pretended adepts, the source of which cannot be pointed out in the world’sliterature. 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

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

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.

9 “Biographical Sketch,” 26.10 Ibid.

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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

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

11 Ibid.12 Ibid., 27.13 Ibid., 30.14 Ibid.15 Ibid., 27.16 Ibid.17 Ibid., 27-2818 Ibid., 27.19 Ibid., 28.

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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

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

20 Ibid., 29.21 Ibid., 28.22 Goodrick-Clarke, Helena Blavatsky, 8.23 “Spiritualist Convention.”24 Gange, “Religion and Science in Late Nineteenth-Century British Egyptology.”25 “Death Brings Close.”

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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

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

26 “Biographical Sketch,” 29.27 Coleman, “Primitive Christianity,” 117.28 Coleman, “The Genuine Teachings and Character of Jesus of Nazareth.”29 “Biographical Sketch,” 29.30 “Spiritualists Hail Barrett”31 Britten, Nineteenth Century Miracles, 553.32 Ibid.

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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

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

33 “Biographical Sketch,” 30.34 Ibid.35 Ibid., 31.36 “List of Members. March 1893.,” ccxli.

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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

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

37 Ibid.38 “Directs Death to be Made Assured.”39 “Biographical Sketch,” 31.40 “Theosophy Reviewed.”41 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol I, 35.42 Ibid., 66.

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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

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

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., 35.45 Blavatsky, “A Few Questions to ‘Hiraf.’”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.

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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

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

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.

50 Coleman, “Theosophy and Spiritualism.”51 Ibid.52 Ibid.

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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 principlesof man, Kama-loka, Devachan, shells, astral bodies, adeptship, Esoteric Buddhism, black andwhite magic, and all the other tomfoolery conjured up by Madame Blavatsky to deceive andmystify the unwary and the mystically inclined. The world needs none of this fanfaronade ofpretended mystical truth, and the sooner the whole of it is buried deep in the waters of eternaloblivion, 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

53 Ibid.54 Coleman, “The Dangers Now Threatening Spiritualism,” 8.55 Ibid.56 Ibid.57 Ibid.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.

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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

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

60 Bridge, “Madame Blavatsky,” 2.61 Coues, “A Question of Good Taste.”62 Coleman, “Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy: A Reply to My Critics,” 2.63 Ibid.64 “The Dangers Now Threatening Spiritualism [, response to].”65 Ibid.

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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

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

66 Santucci, “Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna” 183.67 Ibid., 183-4.68 Blavatsky, “My Books,” 245.69 Ibid., 243.70 Ibid.71 Ibid., 246.72 Coleman, “The Unveiling of ’Isis Unveiled’,” 65 (April).

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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

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 thatwriter credit therefor, it is called plagiarism; and where an author thus borrows, not from onewriter alone, but from a number of writers, it is wholesale and aggravated plagiarism. The firstfeature of my revelation of ’Isis Unveiled’ is this: This work is a mass of plagiarism, acollection of wholesale plagiarism, such as probably has not been known before in theliterature of the world. The bulk of the book is copied, sometimes verbatim, sometimes inparaphrase or with slight alteration, from other books. In a comparatively small number ofcases appropriate credit is given for the matter thus copied, but in an overwhelming majorityof 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

73 Ibid.74 Ibid.75 Ibid.76 Ibid.

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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

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

77 Excerpt from an interview with Charles Lazenby: The Path, 1910. Quoted from Cranston, H.P.B., 154.78 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.

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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:

Memory—the despair of the materialist, the enigma of the psychologist, the sphinx ofscience—is to the student of the old philosophies merely a name to express that power whichman unconsciously exerts […] to look with inner sight into the astral light, and there beholdthe 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 forall 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

84 Henry Olcott, Old Diary Leaves, 214.85 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.

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legitimation,” or what Olav Hammer terms “discursive strategies”:87 by convincing Olcott and

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

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 appeal, or appeal based on the authority of the speaker), logos (the logical appeal, based on reason and clear 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>93 Hanegraaff, New Age Religion, 24

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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 andperiodicals 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 quotedfrom directly by her. From these hundred and odd books and papers she derived all that shepublished, taken from and relating to the other 1300 books. There are in ’Isis’ about 2100quotations […] and of this number only about 140 are credited […] to the books from whichthey were copied. All the others are cited […] in such a manner as to lead the reader to thinkthat Mme. Blavatsky had read and utilized the original works […] the readers of ’Isis’ havebeen […] misled into believing the Madame to have been an enormous reader, and possessedof a vast erudition: while the fact is that her reading had been very limited, and her ignorancewas 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

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

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., 471.99 Olcott, Old Diary Leaves, 207.

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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

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

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.

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plagiarisms have been in print two years, and no attempt has been made to deny or discreditany of the data therein contained. In that portion of my work which is already in print, as wellas 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 ofMadame Blavatsky’s work in which the passage is found, and the page and name of the bookwhence 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

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

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.”110 Ibid.111 Ibid.

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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. Animportant 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 extendthe Republic of Letters, and add a new province to its dominion: Imitators only give us a sortof Duplicates of what we had, possibly much better, before.” Good authors are original, badauthors 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

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.

112 Ibid.113 Ibid.114 Eco, 202, quoting Frank Arnau.

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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

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

115 Fishman, 5.116 Goodrick-Clarke, Helena Blavatsky 52.117 Santucci, “Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna,” 184.118 Goodrick-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.

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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

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

119 Coleman, “The Unveiling of ’Isis Unveiled’,” 470 (October).120 Lavoie, “Analyzing Coleman,” 45.121 Ibid.122 Ibid.

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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

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

123 Dunlap was an author of scholarly works on comparative religion and philology. His life and writings are explored in greater detail below.

124 Olcott, Old Diary Leaves, 207.125 Coleman, “The Unveiling of ’Isis Unveiled’,” 339 (August).

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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 andof all life.” [Weber, “Ind. Stud.,” i. 290.] Agni, the “Divine Fire,” the deity of the Hindu, isthe sun, [Wilson, “Rig-Veda Sanhita,” ii. 143] for the fire and sun are the same. Ormazd islight, the Sun-God, or the Life-Giver. In the Hindu philosophy, “The souls issue from thesoul of the world, and return to it as sparks to the fire.” [“Duncker,” vol. ii., p. 162] But, inanother place, it is said that “The Sun is the soul of all things; all has proceeded out of it, andwill return to it,” [“Wultke,” [sic] ii. 262.] which shows that the sun is meant allegoricallyhere, and refers to the central, invisible sun, God, whose first manifestations was Sephira, theemanation 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

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.

126 Dunlap, Vestiges of the Spirit-History of Man, 65.127 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol I, 240.128 Coleman, 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).

129 Weber, Indische Studien, 290.

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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

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,

130 Dunlap, Vestiges of the Spirit-History of Man, 114.131 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol I, 240.132 Wilson, Rig-Veda Sanhita, 133 & 143.133 Dunlap, Vestiges of the Spirit-History of Man, 114.134 Ibid.135 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol I, 240.136 Dunlap, Vestiges of the Spirit-History of Man, 115.

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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 fireinfolding itself, and a brightness was about it,” says Ezekiel (i., 4, 22, etc.), “… and thelikeness of a throne … and as the appearance of a man above upon it … and I saw as it werethe 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 wheelsburning 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 Jehovahhad 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. Alsocould no mortal look upon him. A fire glared round about him. A fire also of great compassmounted continually up from him, so that no one of those about him could approach himamong the myriads in his presence. [Book of Henoch, 14, v. 10 ff; Movers, 260] Ezechiel andDaniel give the personality of God in a manner that irresistibly leads one to think of thedescription of Saturn’s castle of flame in the seventh heaven.

“And I looked, and behold a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud and a fireinfolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the color ofamber, out of the midst of the fire . . . And above the firmament (of the color of the terriblecrystal that was over their (the cherubim) heads was the likeness of a throne, as theappearance of a sapphire stone: and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness as theappearance of a man above upon it. And I saw as the color of amber, as the appearance of fireround about within it; from the appearance of his loins even upward: and from the appearanceof his loins even downward, I saw as it were the appearance of fire and it had brightnessround about it.” [Ezechiel i., 4, 22, 26, 27] “The Ancient of days did sit, whose garment waswhite as snow, and the hair of his head like the pure wool; his throne the fiery flame, his

137 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol I, 240-1.

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wheels, burning fire. A fiery stream issued and came forth from before him; thousandthousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him.[Daniel, vii. 9. 10.]”138

If the similarities of wording and citation are not evidence enough that Blavatsky adapted

her entire passage from Vestiges, then the nature of Dunlap’s sources are. The preface to

Vestiges states that “The author has used Tischendorff’s as well as Lachmann’s edition of the

New Testament in Greek, a translation of Griesbach, Sebastian Schmid’s Hebrew and Latin

Bible, Leipsic, 1740, also Cahen’s Hebrew Bible, De Wette’s Version and the Septuagint, ed.

Tischendorff.”139 In other words, when referencing bible passages, Dunlap uses sources in the

Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and German languages. Blavatsky understood none of these, and thus

must have obtained her quotations from Dunlap’s work. She easily could have found the

material in any English language bible (excepting the Book of Enoch, which is non-canonical,

but was nonetheless widely available in English and French during the 19th-century), but for

whatever reason chose to copy the material from Dunlap.

Following these first seven quotes, Coleman lists over a hundred other instances of

source plagiarism in Isis Unveiled derived from the works of Samuel Fales Dunlap alone. He

goes on to list in equally exhaustive detail her plagiarisms from dozens of different authors, an

effort which extended through seven volumes of the Golden Way without an end in sight. It is

difficult to overstate what a truly colossal undertaking this was in the pre-computer age. Today,

Blavatsky’s works—as well as the works of most of her sources—are available in high quality,

text indexed scans online. It is a relatively simple task to search these documents for names or

terms and collate references in Blavatsky’s texts with the same references found in other works.

Coleman had to do things the old fashioned way. For instance, take Coleman’s following claim

regarding Blavatsky’s plagiarisms from the works of B. F. Cocker (1821-1883) and Eduard

Zeller (1814-1908): “Only once is Cocker’s work ever named in “Isis,” and that on page xii of

Vol. I, where a quotation from it, concerning God, is properly credited to that work. In the case

of Zeller, there are, in 'I. U.' i, xx, xxi, four quotations from his work for which credit is given,

but in an inaccurate and misleading manner.”140 In order to determine this one simple point out

138 Ibid., 116-7.139 Ibid, iv.140 Coleman, “The Unveiling of ’Isis Unveiled’,” 151 (May).

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of literally thousands, Coleman had to hunt through 1400 pages of text to find the scattered

references to these names. Then he had to find the original books (which is by no means an easy

task, since Blavatsky often misrenders author names, book titles, and page numbers) and locate

any passages plagiarized. Presumably Coleman worked out a more sophisticated system than

this, but it remains an ambitious undertaking. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive the amount of

work entailed in Coleman’s project—he was not simply zealous, frankly, he was obsessive.

Coleman himself wondered that nobody else had noticed the truly ostentatious level of

plagiarism found throughout Isis Unveiled—perhaps it is not that nobody noticed, but that

nobody cared. Certainly, hard-line theosophists dutifully dug in their heels and rattled their

sabers when confronted with Coleman’s claims, but there is a certain sense in which Blavatsky’s

followers did not seem to take her very seriously—at least, not as seriously as Coleman, who

rather flatters her with the amount of attention he devotes to her person and writings. Nobody

can know how many thousands of hours of the last decades of his life Coleman devoted to

carefully studying Blavatsky’s works; but he clearly cared more about her than all but the most

devout theosophists.

Whatever the case, Coleman did his homework. Further specific examples of plagiarism

will be explored in greater detail below, but for now let us consider his claims, at least regarding

Blavatsky’s use of Dunlap, vindicated. This allows us to turn our attention from specific copied

passages to the influence which Dunlap’s work had on Isis Unveiled more broadly—from the

theft of words to the transmission of ideas.

II. “Oriental Gnosis”: HPB and Samuel Fales Dunlap

Isis Unveiled is a huge book, extremely complex and varied in content. Blavatsky

scholar James Santucci calls it “monumental […] in scope,” and notes that “the text extended

over 1268 pages in two volumes.”141 “Volume one,” Santucci tells us, “is devoted to the hidden

and unknown forces of nature, discussing subjects such as phenomena and forces (Chapter 2),

elementals and elementaries (Chapter 7), cyclic phenomena (Chapter 9), psychic and physical

marvels (Chapter 11), and the Inner and Outer Man (Chapter 10), all accompanied by a vast

141 Santucci, “Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna,” 180.

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array of supportive and incidental knowledge – ancient and modern, Western and Eastern,

esoteric and exoteric.”142 Given the scientific emphasis, HPB uses Dunlap’s works far less in

this volume than in Volume II, which “discusses similarities of Christian scripture, doctrine,

history, and personalities with non-Christian systems such as Buddhism, Hinduism, the Vedas,

and Zoroastrianism, all based on the notion that they share a common origin referred to as the

‘primitive “wisdom-religion”’.”143 To whatever extent Isis Unveiled can be said to have a single

“thesis” it is the existence of this Prisca Theologia. As Blavatsky herself states: “Our work […]

is a plea for the recognition of the Hermetic Philosophy, the anciently universal Wisdom-

Religion, as the only possible key to the Absolute in science and theology.”144

At their most basic level, the prisca theologia (lit. “ancient theology”) and the closely

related concept of the philosophia perennis (lit. “perennial philosophy”), are examples of the

esoteric fascination with “Tradition.” As noted by Wouter Hanegraaff, “Primarily in Western

esoteric contexts, but not exclusively there, a wide range of terms have been used to refer to the

idea that there exists an enduring tradition of superior spiritual wisdom, available to humanity

since the earliest periods of history and kept alive through the ages, perhaps by a chain of

divinely inspired sages or initiatory groups.”145 HPB situates Isis Unveiled squarely in the

middle of this tradition with passages like the following:

One day [mankind] may learn to know better, and so become aware that […] from the firstages of man, the fundamental truths of all that we are permitted to know on earth was in thesafe keeping of the adepts of the sanctuary; that the difference in creeds and religious practicewas only external; and that those guardians of the primitive divine revelation, who had solvedevery problem that is within the grasp of human intellect, were bound together by a universalfreemasonry of science and philosophy, which formed one unbroken chain around the glove.It is for philology and psychology to find the end of the thread. That done, it will then beascertained that, by relaxing one single loop of the old religious systems, the chain of mysterymay be disentangled.146

Blavatsky uses various terms to denote the content of this Tradition or “primitive divine

142 Ibid.143 Ibid.144 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol I, vi.145 Hanegraaff, “Tradition,” 1125.146 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol I, 33.

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revelation,” including: “wisdom-religion,”147 “oriental kabala,”148 “oriental philosophy,”149 and

more succinctly, “Wisdom.”150

The idea of a chain of “adepts” or “sages” has often inspired advocates of Tradition to

trace the origin of spiritual knowledge back to a single sage through some sort of train of

transmission. Thus, Plethon, one of the earliest proponents of Tradition in Europe, traced all

wisdom back to Zoroaster, who taught Eumolpus, who taught Minos, and so on, until the

Wisdom finally reached Plato.151 Rather than tracing all knowledge back to one teacher who

received an ur-revelation, Blavatsky argues that “The ancient Kabala, the Gnosis, or traditional

secret knowledge, was never without its representatives in any age or country.”152 HPB gives a

list of some of these representatives, including: Moses, Plato, Philo, Pythagoras, Jesus, Elias,

Peter, James, John, Zoroaster, Abraham, Ezekiel and Daniel.153 In this respect, Blavatsky is more

representative of the perennialist perspective, which argues that the True Wisdom has always

been present, and that various spiritually enlightened teachers have independently accessed it.

Note, however, that these two perspectives are not mutually exclusive: there could have been an

ur-revelation that established Truth, which some adepts learned from earlier sages, and others

discovered independently.

One of the founding fathers of the study of Western Esotericism, Antoine Faivre,

developed a heuristic for identifying examples of perennialism:

As summarized by Antoine Faivre (1999, 33), the perennialist perspective is based upon threepostulates: (1) There exists a primordial Tradition of non-human origin – humanity has notinvented but received it – which has progressively gotten lost, and of which the varioushistorical traditions and metaphysics are the membra disjecta. The source of this Traditioncannot be identified by means of scholarly historiography. (2) Modern Western culture,science and civilization is inherently incompatible with Tradition; never before has humanitybeen alienated from the latter as seriously as today. (3) The Tradition may be recovered,partially at least, by focusing on the common denominators of the various religious andmetaphysical traditions.154

147 Ibid., Vol II, 37.148 Ibid.149 Ibid., Vol I, iv.150 Ibid., Vol II, 37.151 Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 36-37.152 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol II, 35.153 Ibid.154 Hanegraaff, “Tradition,” 1132.

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So to what extent does Isis Unveiled conform to this schema? Perfectly—so well, in fact, that it

could have easily been created with Blavatksy in mind. Regarding Faivre’s first postulate, we

have already seen that HPB believes in a “primordial Tradition of non-human origin.” That this

Tradition “has progressively gotten lost” is implicit throughout the entirety of Isis Unveiled.

Although HPB notes that wisdom has survived every attempt to eradicate it—“So surviving the

shock of time, what can this wisdom be but divine and eternal?”155—she also notes that “the most

advanced standpoint that has been reached in our times only enables us to see in the dim distance

up the Alpine path of knowledge [...] that earlier explorers have left to mark the plateaux they

had reached and occupied.”156

Regarding the idea that “the various historical traditions and metaphysics are the membra

disjecta,” HPB remarks that “Our examination of the multitudinous religious faiths that mankind,

early and late, have professed, most assuredly indicates that they have all been derived from one

primitive source. […] As the white ray of light is decomposed by the prism into the various

colors of the solar spectrum, so the beam of divine truth, in passing through the three-sided prism

of man’s nature, has been broken up into vari-colored fragments called Religions. […]

Combined, their aggregate represents one eternal truth; separate, they are but shades of human

error and the signs of imperfection.”157 HPB confirms that “the source of this Tradition cannot

be identified by means of scholarly historiography” when she writes: “What we desire to prove

is, that underlying every popular religion was the same ancient wisdom-doctrine, one and

identical, professed and practiced by the initiates of every country, who alone were aware of its

existence and importance. To ascertain its origin and the precise age in which it was matured, is

now beyond possibility.”158

HPB’s compliance with Faivre’s second postulate, that “Modern Western culture, science

and civilization is inherently incompatible with Tradition,” is apparent in the title of her first

volume: “The ’Infallibility’ of Modern Science.” HPB attacks dogmatic Christianity (especially

Catholicism) and reductionist science throughout the entire work. For instance, while writing of

155 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol I, xx.156 Ibid., 213-4.157 Ibid., Vol II, 586.158 Ibid., 89.

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the phenomenon associated with seances, Blavatsky states: “That this unexpected ghost of pre-

Christian days finds poor welcome from our sober and positive century, is not surprising.”159

Blavatsky would certainly agree that “never before has humanity been alienated from the latter

as seriously as today.” It is Isis Unveiled which is supposed to arrest man’s millennia long drift

away from the truth. She does voice some cautious optimism about the spirit of her age,

however, writing: “Centuries of subjection have not quite congealed the life-blood of men into

crystals around the nucleus of blind faith; and the nineteenth is witnessing the struggles of the

giant as he shakes of the Liliputian cordage and rises to his feet.”160

Faivre’s third posulate, that “The Tradition may be recovered, partially at least, by

focusing on the common denominators of the various religious and metaphysical traditions,” is,

in fact, the entire purpose of Isis Unveiled. This is well stated in Blavatsky’s prism metaphor,

where she indicates that just as light separates into many colors, “as the rays of the spectrum, by

imperceptible shadings, merge into each other,” the true nature of the light is revealed. “Our

examination of the multitudinous religious faiths that mankind, early and late, have professed,

most assuredly indicates that they have all been derived from one primitive source. […] Pre-

Vedic Brahmanism and Buddhism are the double source from which all religions sprung.”

Elsewhere, HPB states that “It is for philology and psychology to find the end of the thread [of

Tradition].”161 Clearly, a “perennialist perspective” is one of the defining aspects of Isis

Unveiled. However, before we can discuss to what extent HPB used SFD’s works as a part of

this agenda, we have to introduce the man himself.

Samuel Fales Dunlap (SFD) was born to Lucy Ann Charlotte Augusta and Andrew

Dunlap on 23 July 1825.162 Andrew Dunlap was an influential Boston lawyer and Harvard

graduate.163 The family was extremely wealthy and well-connected; Andrew corresponded with

both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and held various important legal positions.164 SFD

attended Harvard where, like his father, he studied law. After graduating in 1845, he was “for a

little over a year attached to the American Legation at Berlin,”165 where he served as a cultural

159 Ibid., Vol I, xix.160 Ibid, v.161 Ibid., Vol II, 33.162 De Coursey Fales, The Fales Family of Bristol, Rhode Island, 127.163 Ibid., 124.164 Ibid., 127.165 Ibid. A “legation” was one of the two principle types of diplomatic institution in the 19th-century, the other

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attaché. His official title in this capacity was “Attache a la Legation des Etats Unis

d’Amerique.”166 When Dunlap emigrated to Germany he carried a letter of introduction from the

famous American poet Henry W. Longfellow, indicating that SFD traveled to Berlin “for the

purpose of pursuing his Law Studies, which he has already commenced here.”167 The recipient

was another famous American author, Theodore Sedgwick Fay.

The study of classical languages was compulsory for Harvard students in the mid 19th-

century,168 but it was presumably while in Berlin that Dunlap began studying ancient philology

and the works of the German Orientalists in earnest. He had a library card to the Journal Room

of the Berlin State Library, one of the largest libraries in Europe, 169 and also met with some

minor Orientalist scholars, such as Abraham Constantin d’Mouradgea Ohsson.170 Berlin is also

most likely where SFD made the acquaintance of the Egyptologist Gustav Seyffarth, whom he

corresponded with later in life.171 Apart from Orientalists, SFD also met with numerous

influential political figures, including William Lowther,172 Benjamin Perley Poore,173 and Henry

Howard, 2nd Earl of Effingham.174

It is difficult to trace Dunlap’s movements in the years immediately following his return

to the United States, but he was practicing law in New York by the mid 1850s. It was while

living in New York that Dunlap began his career as an author. His first publication was an

introduction to the 2nd edition of his father’s influential “Treatise on the Practice of the Courts of

Admiralty,” released in 1850.175 This was followed by SFD’s first scholarly publication, the

1856 pamphlet “The Origin of Ancient Names.” As Dunlap explains in the introduction, “We

shall endeavor, in the following article, to show that the proper names of Greece, Italy, Asia

Minor, Babylon, Egypt, Phoenicia, and Judea, more especially the names of places and of the

gods, are generally compound words containing within them the names of the sun-gods Ab, Ak,

being the embassy. The two were merged in the mid 20th-century.166 Calling card of Samuel Dunlap Fales, “Fales Family Papers 1620-1966.”167 Longfellow, The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 106.168 Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 260-3.169 Library Card of Samuel Fales Dunlap, “Fales Family Papers 1620-1966.”170 Calling Card of Abraham Constantin d’Mouradgea Ohsson, “Fales Family Papers 1620-1966.”171 Letter from G. Seyffarth to S.F. Dunlap, “Fales Family Papers 1620-1966.”172 Calling Card of William Lowther, “Fales Family Papers 1620-1966.”173 Calling Card of Benjamin Perley Poore, “Fales Family Papers 1620-1966.”174 Calling Card of Henry Howard, “Fales Family Papers 1620-1966.”175 De Coursey Fales, The Fales Family of Bristol, Rhode Island, 126-127.

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Am, Ar, As, At, El, and On.”176 Dunlap uses philological and etymological evidence to argue

that all language, religion, and culture, can ultimately be traced back to Babylon: “From Europe

and India names are brought back to her as the source from which they sprung. Second mother

of mankind! The human intellect was cradled in her arms as she sat amidst her many waters.

Her Magi went out, like the Apostles of Christ, bearing to other nations her language, her

religion, her philosophy, her civilization.”177 Gustav Seyffarth wrote to SFD regarding the

article: “Your learned treatise: The origin of ancient names, has b. sent me by Rev. Stohlmann

[possibly Rev. Carl F. E. Stohlmann] of N.Y., and I thank you very much for it. You have

demonstrated in it by irrefutable proves [sic], that there existed a primitive people and a primitive

language, the mother of all others in the world. Every one, who will examine your disquisitions,

will enjoy to see, that science improves in America every day, and that in its bosom scholars are

living, who apply themselves to the most difficult and profound studies.”178

In 1858 Dunlap released his first full length book: Vestiges of the Spirit-History of Man.

This was followed by a two volume study, Sod: The Mysteries of Adoni & Sod: The Son of the

Man, released in 1861. These three volumes are critical to the question of Blavatsky’s

plagiarism and will be explored in greater detail below. Dunlap’s next and final work, The

Ghebers of Hebron, did not appear for over thirty years. The Ghebers of Hebron first appeared

in a privately printed edition in 1894. Dunlap remarked in a letter to one “Mr. Gerard” that he

had trouble with previous publishers, and wished to find one “not under the control of the

vendors of religious ignorance.”179 In 1898 the work was republished by J.W. Bouton (the

original publisher of Isis Unveiled). Goodrick-Clarke remarks that Bouton was well known as a

publisher of “works on ancient religion, symbolism and mythology […] as well as volumes on

early Christianity.”180 Given how closely Bouton worked with Blavatsky during the publishing

of Isis Unveiled, it is possible that he already knew Dunlap’s name through her.

The Ghebers of Hebron is ostensibly an investigation of the Gheber Zoroastrian sect of

the city of Hebron. However, over the course of the work’s 1000 pages, Dunlap explores a huge

variety of other topics. The main goal seems to be to trace Christian religion to its Gnostic (or

176 Dunlap, The Origin of Ancient Names, 3.177 Ibid., 26-7.178 Letter from G. Seyffarth to S.F. Dunlap, “Fales Family Papers 1620-1966.”179 Letter from S.F. Dunlap to Mr Gerard, “Fales Family Papers 1620-1966.”180 Goodrick-Clarke, Helena Blavatsky, 53.

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“Nazarene”) source. As Dunlap himself explained in his letter to Mr Gerard,

My work, in the last two chapters only,181 advances from the Kabalah and Jewish Messianismright into the midst of the Sabian and Nazorene sects ’over the Jordan,’ and I have traced ourgospels to their source, their geographical landmarks and their birth place. I have found theirprivate mark by which Matthew’s Gospel and Acts can be specially identified. ConsequentlyI am particularly careful to guard against any act of treachery on the part of a publisher, sothat he, after getting my books in his power under a contract, shall not ’go back on me.’ Mymain subject however is the ’Evidences in regard to Jewish, Sabian and Nazorenephilology.’182

According to Dunlap’s analysis, pre-Christian Nazarene sects had “Chaldean, Persian and Hindu

preaching, morals and literature back of them, with an Essaian and Budhist not beyond their

reach.”183 In other words, Christianity emerged from an incredibly syncretic atmosphere. In the

course of his investigations, Dunlap also explores ancient Jewish religion, and remarks “To fully

understand the religion of Moses we must know its relation to Chaldean, Egyptian, Persian and

Hindu religions.”184 As in “The Origin of Ancient Names,” Dunlap seems to privilege

Mesopotamia as the ultimate source of religious wisdom, stating that “The ancient religions were

based on Chaldean doctrines, but the deity names and the narratives varied.”185 However, at

other points he seems to regard India as the location of the ur-revelation. All considered, the

work is often vague and occasionally inconsistent. What is consistent throughout the text is

Dunlap’s insistence that all religions had public exoteric doctrines and higher esoteric

“mysteries”: “The Hindus, Egyptians, Persians and others concealed their religious doctrines in

Mysteries from all but the priests and the Initiated.”186 Dunlap ends his work with a similar

statement: “The Revelation of the Mystery was the revelation of the secret tradition. The truth

cannot be found out by those who know not tradition.”187

Dunlap died on 31 March 1905,188 just over ten years after the publication of Ghebers.

181 Which, in fact, constitute nearly half of the book.182 Letter from S.F. Dunlap to Mr Gerard, “Fales Family Papers 1620-1966.”183 Dunlap, The Ghebers of Hebron, 636.184 Ibid., xiv.185 Ibid.186 Ibid.187 Ibid., 1000.188 “Another S. F. Dunlap Will Filed.”

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There was immediately a scandalous fight over his massive estate, which was “said to be worth

considerably over $1,000,000.”189 Apparently, two wills surfaced; the benefactors of the first

argued that the latter was invalid, since Dunlap was not in his right mind towards the end of his

life. The orientalist Edward Washburn Hopkins reviewed Dunlap’s Ghebers of Hebron during

the dispute over his sanity. Hopkins writes: “It is a collection, huge and rather shapeless, of great

erudition. A mass of historical facts are presented, which the writer attempts to correlate, but

without the necessary scientific training.” He ultimately pronounces it an “ill-assorted mass of

details, which betray, [...] not so much a disordered mind as a disorderly mind.”190

A number of other humorous details of Dunlap’s life surfaced during the dispute over his

will. Dunlap, a life long bachelor, lived in a house on West 22nd street, Manhattan, with his

housekeeper Rose Ealdon, who revealed a great deal about her late employer during the

inheritance hearings. Apparently Dunlap was a prodigious drinker: “the bachelor octogenarian

was a continual drinker. He had a liking for champagne, and often drank four bottles a day. A

quart of whiskey a day was not unusual, and he often took a couple of days to sleep of one of his

bouts. Once Mrs Ealden got him beer instead of champagne and he drank it without perceiving

the difference, except to remark that it was the finest wine he had ever drunk.”191 One article ties

Dunlap’s drinking to his death, suggesting that “He died of acute inflammation of the

stomach.”192 According to Ealden, Dunlap did his writing during brief periods of sobriety,

usually in the morning.193

Ealden further revealed that Dunlap was a great miser and bargain-hunter, who “always

looked shabby.”194 Another friend remarked that “Dunlap was very eccentric in the matter of

dress, wearing only the shabbiest clothes and keeping his silk hat on his head all day in the

house. He bought one suit of clothes in fifteen years”195 Despite this obsession with thrift,

Dunlap at one point gave Ealden $30,000 in cash and a significant amount of stock. Her salary

at the time was 22 dollars a month.196 Ealden further revealed that “His favorite spot was a back

189 “War Time Sobered Dunlap.”190 Letter from E. Washburn Hopkins to Mr. Stanley W. Dexter, “Fales Family Papers 1620-1966.”191 “Took a War to Keep Him Sober.”192 “Dispute for Dunlap Money.”193 “Took a War to Keep Him Sober.”194 Ibid.195 “Dispute for Dunlap Money.”196 “Took a War to Keep Him Sober.”

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room in the house, the temperature of which was kept at 82 degrees all the year”197 and that “He

had a pet collie dog, Jacob, for which he ordered ice cream frequently, and he would consume

his wine while the dog feasted on the cream.”198 A final, and perhaps more relevant, revelation

was provided by Dunlap’s friend Dr. Fowler: “He wrote several books on theology and Oriental

subjects, and was engaged with the manuscript of another one at the time of his death. Dr.

Fowler said that, though he had read the manuscript through, he was unable to tell what the book

was about.”199

This is a particularly amusing comment in light of Dunlap’s other works: they are

woefully obscure, and at times, seemingly completely non-sensical. Nonetheless, as both

Coleman and Olcott tell us, Blavatsky relied heavily on them during the composition of Isis

Unveiled. It is, moreover, interesting that none of Dunlap’s books are explicitly “occult”—

although they were known and quoted by occultists other than HPB. A minister writing under

the initials “C.B.P.” quoted from Dunlap often in his long-running column “Ancient Glimpses of

the Spirit Land,” which ran for sixty installments over the course of five years (roughly 1859-

1864) in both The Banner of Light and The Herald of Progress. He wrote of Dunlap: “We have

not room to cite this author as much as we could wish. He has much curious information to

impart; and we refer all to his work, ’The Vestiges of the Spirit History of Man.”200 Dunlap’s

works also appeared advertised in occultist periodicals; for example Vestiges was included under

the heading “Some Occult Books For Sale” in the periodical The Rosicrucian Brotherhood.201

Coleman himself referenced Dunlap’s “Vestiges of the Spirit History of Man” in the March 1892

installment of Miscellaneous Notes and Queries.202

Vestiges of the Spirit-History of Man is not only Dunlap’s earliest full-length work, but

also his most accessible, which makes it a convenient vector through which to approach his

thought. As noted, the book is peculiarly organized and obscure even by the standards of 19th-

century scholarship. Coleman remarked that Dunlap’s works “consist almost wholly of

quotations from and summaries of the writings of other authors, strung together by connecting

197 “War Time Sobered Dunlap.”198 Ibid.199 Ibid.200 C.B.P., “Ancient Glimpses of the Spirit Land,” 3.201 “Some Occult Books For Sale,” xiv.202 Coleman, “Miscellaneous Notes and Queries, with Answers,” 49.

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remarks.”203 Dunlap himself remarks that his works are “written by quotations.” 204 Indeed, it is

often unclear if SFD is attempting to make a point or argument of some kind, or if the work is

simply a regurgitation of random facts vaguely connected in the mind of the author. He rarely

introduces or concludes ideas, simply states them and moves on. Nonetheless, it is possible, with

patience, to eke a sort-of a narrative out of the work.

Dunlap starts off Vestiges with a vague encapsulation of the message: “The basis of the

world is power. It lives in us and in every thing. From the beginning it came forth from God, and

was uttered in the philosophies of great teachers and prophets of the ancient world. God has not

placed it here to remain inactive: it strives, creates, institutes. So long as the world is filled with

it so long will its efforts continue, for power expresses the will of God. This work proceeds upon

the conviction that there has been a gradual rise of systems, one cultus growing out of another.

Thought grows like a plant. New fruits become the bases of further developments. The present

perpetually evolves new power.”205 Already we have hints at Dunlap’s perennialist perspective.

In keeping with SFD’s metaphor of religion as a plant, Vestiges of the Spirit-History of

Man constitutes an attempt to find the roots, or at least the main stem, of the religious vine.

Dunlap ultimately traces the source of modern religion back to the monotheistic idea of a purely

abstract, apophatic divinity,206 writing: “We have thus reached the point of union between all the

old philosophies and religions from four to six centuries before Christ—the culminationspoint

[sic] of a prior civilization. It is ’simple abstract Existence’ as the ’First Cause’ of all things.”207

Sometimes he indicates that this idea originated with the early Buddhists and Brahmans.208 We

have already seen that this is the source to which HPB traces all religions. At other points, he

seems to privilege the ancient Persians (whom he variously calls Chaldeans and Babylonians) as

the true source of the prisca theologia, such as when he writes: “The ring of the Magi is found in

India; also the deities and the basis of the philosophy of the countries surrounding Babylon.”209

203 Coleman, “The Unveiling of ’Isis Unveiled’,” 335 (August).204 Dunlap, Sod: The Mysteries of Adonis, vi.205 Dunlap, Vestiges of the Spirit-History of Man, iii.206 At various points Dunlap associates other doctrines with the prisca theologia as well, including the theory of

emanations, the immortality of the soul, creatio ex nihil, and others. However, he most consistently associates the “ancient wisdom” or “oriental philosophy” with a via negativa theology.

207 Ibid., 337-8.208 Ibid.209 Ibid., 326.

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We have already encountered this inconsistency in Dunlap’s “Origin of Ancient Names” and

Ghebers; it most likely results from his over-reliance on the opinions and arguments of other

authors. Whatever the case, he clearly considers the “Ancient Wisdom” to have originated with

Oriental peoples on the farthest edge of the classical world.

In Dunlap’s narrative, the apophatic conception of divinity which constitutes the prisca

theologia was carried from the East to the West by Magi, Gymnosophists, and Buddhist

missionaries. There, it formed the basis for related Western concepts such as the gnostic “One

Principle” and the Egyptian “Unknown Darkness.”210 Through these sources, it inspired

Pythagoras’ thought (and thus, that of every philosopher between him and Iamblichus):

“Pythagoras taught that God is the Universal Mind diffused throughout all things, the Source of

all life, the proper and intrinsic Cause of all motion, in substance similar to Light, in nature like

truth, the First Principle of the universe, incapable of pain, invisible, incorruptible, and only to be

comprehended by the mind.”211

Blavatsky places a similar emphasis on “abstract existence” and the “First Cause” in Isis

Unveiled. In the introduction she notes that “One must needs go deep indeed into the profundity

of the abstract metaphysics of the old philosophies […] based upon an identical apprehension of

the nature of the First Cause, its attributes and method.”212 When discussing Buddhism and

Brahmanism, she writes: “The cause of reincarnation is ignorance of our senses, and the idea that

there is any reality in the world […] except abstract existence.”213

According to Dunlap, after coming over from the East and inspiring Greek and Egyptian

thinkers, “First Cause” also became the basis of Judeo-Christian religion: “The ’One Existence’

of the Hindus and other orientals appears as the “First Cause” in the Jewish Philosophy. It is the

En-soph (“without end”) of the Cabbala.”214 He continues:

The “One Existence” of the Hindus and other orientals appears as the “First Cause” in theJewish Philosophy. It is the En-soph (“without end”) of the Cabbala. This is all things, and

210 Ibid., 351.211 Ibid., 178.212 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol I, xxix-xxx.213 Ibid., 309-10.214 Dunlap, Vestiges of the Spirit-History of Man, 351. Dunlap later remarks: “It is not probable that Judaea, with

its knowledge of Babylon and Persia, could have been even a century without hearing of Buddhistic doctrines taught five hundred years before Christ.” Ibid., 372.

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out of it there is nothing. “No substance has proceeded out of absolute nothing ; all which ishas drawn its origin from a source of eternal light, from God. God is only comprehensible inhis manifestation: the not-manifested God is an abstraction for us. Under this point of viewhe is called the “Nothing.” This “Nothing” (Ayin) is the indivisible and infinite unity; henceit is called En-soph. This is “boundless,” and not limited by any thing. Here we haveAnaximander’s To Apeiron, the Buddhist’s non-existence and the Chinese tao, as analogousideas. The Buddhist Swabhava is not a person; neither was the Tao, nor the Babylonian OnePrinciple of the universe, nor the Egyptian Unknown Darkness.215

Blavatsky makes a very similar set of observations in the first volume of Isis Unveiled, writing:

“The ’First Cause’ of the Hebrew Bible, the Pythagorean ’Monad,’ the ’One Existence’ of the

Hindu philosopher, and the kabalistic ’En-Soph’—the Boundless—are identical.”216

Ultimately, Dunlap argues that, as Christianity developed, the “Ancient Wisdom” was

refined into the Christian concept of the “Logos,” and thus the prisca theologia remains with us

today. Taken as a whole, then, Vestiges argues almost exactly the same thesis as Isis Unveiled,

and it appears that Blavatsky drew significant inspiration and material from the work. While

Blavatsky downplays, and in some instances tries to erase any evidence of her reliance on

Vestiges, Dunlap is much more upfront about his sources. He provides an extensive list of his

favored authors in the introduction:

The author most prominently referred to in this treatise is Movers, Phonizier, Vol. I. Moversis authority among scholars: his work bears the highest reputation. Reference has also beenmade to Roth, Lassen, Weber, and other prominent Sanskrit scholars; Rawlinson, Spiegel,Haug, students of the Old-Persian; Seyffarth, Lepsius, and Uhlemann, on Egyptianantiquities; Pauthier on the Chinese; Duncker on the Persians, Hindus, &c.; Adolf Wuttke onthe Chinese and Hindus: on the American races, to J. G. Müller, Von Tsehudi, Schoolcraft,Squier, Stevens, Gallatin, Prescott, Larenaudiere, Lord Kingsborough, La Croix, Adair, theDacotah Grammar, “Mounds of the Mississippi Valley,” &c.: on the Polynesians, to Hale,Ellis, and, on linguistik, to a number of recent and earlier European publications, besides theworks of Grimm, Bunsen, Lepsius, Bopp, and many other Sanskrit, Old-Persian and otherOriental authorities. The author has used Tischendorff’s as well as Lachmann’s edition of theNew Testament in Greek, a translation of Griesbach, Sebastian Schmid’s Hebrew and LatinBible, Leipsic, 1740, also Cahen’s Hebrew Bible, De Wette’s Version and the Septuagint, ed.Tischendorff.217

215 Ibid., 351.216 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol I, 311.217 Dunlap, Vestiges of the Spirit-History of Man, iv.

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So what does this list tell us? First of all, it is clear that SFD had a decided preference for

German scholarship, especially Orientalist scholarship (Orientalistik) from the 18th and 19th

centuries. He is, moreover, comfortable working in a variety of languages unavailable to

Blavatsky, including German, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Dunlap himself tells us that his most

important source is Franz Karl Movers, whom he cites frequently throughout his Sod books as

well. So who was Movers?

Franz Karl Movers (1806-1856) was a German Catholic theologian, professor, and

orientalist scholar who wrote extensively on the Phoenicians, an ancient Semitic civilization.218

He also made important contributions to Old Testament source criticism.219 Movers’ Die

Phönizier was influential in Germany; Friedrich Nietzsche relied heavily on the work, which was

“the standard one at that time for the history of the Phoenicians.”220 Gustave Flaubert favored the

work as well.221 Despite their success in Germany, Movers works were never translated into

English, with the result that he was never a big name in Anglo-American scholarship. However,

he seems to have been well-regarded by those familiar with him. The influential

transcendentalist and Unitarian minister Theodore Parker wrote in a letter to SFD: “I think highly

of a man who values the lamented Dr. Movers as you do—few Americans or English know any

thing about him.”222

Movers, however, was a sober historian not given to flights of fancy. His work is a

straight-forward history of the Phoenicians, devoid of perennialism and over-ambitious

comparative mythology. Many of the other sources Dunlap lists, such as Martin Haug (1827-

1876), Franz Bopp (1791-1867) and Rudolf Roth (1821-1895), were primarily active as linguists

rather than historians or mythographers. However, a number of the scholars on Dunlap’s list—

including some of the linguists and philologists—shared his interest in pinpointing the origin of

religion. Indeed, “the serious study of languages and cultural histories in the eighteenth century

were, socially culturally speaking, virtually interchangeable.”223

Suzanne Marchand, in her excellent study German Orientalism, notes that the

218 Lauchert, “Franz Karl Movers.”219 Peltonen, History Debated, 128.220 Cancik, “’Mongols, Semites and the Pure-Bred Greeks?’,” 57.221 Flaubert, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 49.222 Letter from S.F. Dunlap to Mr Gerard, “Fales Family Papers 1620-1966.”

223 Marchand, German Orientalism, 55.

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perennialist perspective is very old in Orientalist scholarship. She highlights Pico della

Mirandola as one of the principle sources: Pico (inspired by Plethon and Ficino) sought to

reconcile the religions of the book with pagan religious thought in order to “create a universal

system to which all rational men could subscribe. Thus was born the idea of the philsophia

perennis and a long tradition of esoteric attempts to reconcile pagan philosophies with

Christianity.”224 Pico’s attempts to reconcile Christian doctrine with pagan teaching laid the

framework for a “strain of western thought which saw Asian religious and philosophical ideas as

compatible with Christianity and which recognized the possibility of extremely ancient oriental

ideas as foundational for western ones.”225 Marchand notes that this idea has had “a long and

formative effect on oriental scholarship, from the Kabbalist Johannes Reuchlin […] to the

theosophical impresario Madame Blavatsky.”226

Although the perennialist perspective is most associated with Christian authors of the

Renaissance and the esoteric thinkers they inspired, its palpable presence throughout 19 th-century

orientalist scholarship perhaps should not surprise us: “orientalism” as a scholarly field grew out

of Christian biblical exegesis and its attempts to use linguistics and philology to find

authoritative, orthodox interpretations of bible passage.227 Another important inspiration was the

evangelizing of missionaries, such as the Jesuits, who recognized that to effectively convert a

people it was beneficial to understand their language and culture.228 Accordingly, the idea of a

scholarly orientalism separate from an evangelizing Christian one is a myth—especially in the

early eras of Orientalism leading up to the 20th century. As Marchand puts it, “German

orientalism—defined as the serious and sustained study of the cultures of Asia—was not a

product of the modern, imperial age, but something much older, richer, and stranger, something

enduringly shaped by the longing to hear God’s work, to understand the meaning of his

revelation, and to propagate (Christian) truths as one understood them.”229

As we have seen, early proponents of Tradition such as Plethon and Ficino traced all

religious wisdom back to an ur-revelation received by a single divinized sage—more careful

224 Ibid., 4.225 Ibid.226 Ibid.227 Ibid., 2.228 Ibid., 2-3.229 Ibid., 1.

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later scholars would speak instead of “diffusionism” and certain important Western religious

ideas originating in an Oriental substratum. Such authors tended to speak of ur-cultures rather

than ur-revelations (an idea known today as “hyper-diffusionism”). A perennialist investigation

can lie anywhere on the religionist/rationalist spectrum, but the agenda is always the same: find

the origin (or at least earlier iterations) of (Judeo-Christian) religious ideas. Indeed, the practice

lives on today, in some sense, in academic attempts to reconstruct a “Proto-Indo-European”

religion.

In the 18th- and 19th-centuries, the perceived source of Wisdom in perennialist

investigations typically followed the horizon of orientalist scholarship; whatever ancient culture

happened to be in vogue, that is where authors situated the prisca theologia. The breakdown of

“walls of translation”230 periodically opened up entire bodies of ancient literature, which tended

to inspire great fervor and overly-enthusiastic claims of cultural heritage. The earliest fads saw

the origins of Wisdom in Egypt. This was true of many Renaissance thinkers, inspired as they

were by the Corpus Hermeticum, Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica, and the bible passage indicating

that Moses was learned in the wisdom of the Egyptians.231 Lodovico Lazzarelli, for instance,

regarded Hermes Trismegistus as the originator of Tradition.232 Writing only a century later, Sir

Walter Raleigh occupies a sort-of liminal space between the Renaissance perspective and later,

more scholarly ones. He used philological techniques to argue that “the ancient Israelites were

the earliest people and that Hebrew in some form was the ’language of paradise,’ from which all

other languages had descended.”233 As the material remains of other ancient cultures were

slowly uncovered and codified, authors began to trace Wisdom back to more mysterious and

less-known locales, including India and Persia. This trend reached its peak in the “furor

orientis” of Panbabylonism, which rose in the wake of the decipherment of cuneiform and

argued the “all-pervasive role of things Babylonian in [the] Near Eastern cultural whole.”234

Particularly important for Dunlap are those orientalists who trace Wisdom back to ancient

India, such as Creuzer and Schlegel. “For eighteenth-century writers […] the Orient had

230 Ibid., 5.231 Acts 7:22: “And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and deeds.”

(KJV).232 Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 58.233 Marchand, German Orientalism, 12.234 Ibid., 239.

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stronger claims when it came to question of the origins of peoples, languages, and religions;

especially after William Jones rooted the Indo-European family tree in Sanskrit.”235 Creuzer and

Schlegel are important representatives of what Marchand calls “romantic orientalism,” a subset

of scholars, inspired by the works of authors such as C. G. Heyne (1729-1812) and Johann

Herder (1744-1803), who adapted traditional orientalist scholarship to serve the needs of the

German Romantic movement. Such authors “found useful for their own purposes the Orient’s

traditional associations with the origins of humankind, language, and culture, with spirituality,

mystery, and sensuality, with magical, iconoclastic, and esoteric forms of wisdom. Drawing

deeply on Baroque universal history and Renaissance perennial philosophy, romantic orientalism

[…] was supposed to produce universals.”236 Creuzer and Schlegel were, like many other

members of the romantic school, trained linguists of varying competence. However, they tended

to eschew the critical linguistic approach of orientalists like Bopp, preferring instead to focus on

comparative mythology (Mythenforschung). Ironically, many of the authors Marchand describes

as romantic orientalists derived their material from Greek sources, and thus inherited ancient

cultural misconceptions about the East.237

Inspired by William Jones’ linguistic genealogy, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772-

1829) elaborated a genealogy of myth, which he argues originated in India and spread to Greek,

Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, and Roman quarters.238 Schlegel was a devout Christian and believed

that “the story of language’s diversification could be reconciled with the Old Testament

account.”239 Ultimately, however, Schlegel “was not really interested in using this history to

uncover the origins of language as such—he was interested in pursuing comparative grammar for

the sake of reconstructing historical relations between post-diluvial peoples.”240 In Schlegel’s

opinion, the Pre-Vedic Indians had received the original ur-revelation from God, but had since

fallen into error. For this reason, he focused on the earliest religious texts,

which he believed bore signs that the writers still remembered something of the truth

235 Ibid., 54.236 Ibid., 56.237 Ibid.238 Ibid., 63.239 Ibid., 61. See also the “Critical Intoduction” to Schlegel’s On the Study of Greek Poetry by Stuart Barnett.

(SUNY 2001).240 Ibid., 61-2.

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divulged to humankind in some kind of primeval revelation. The ancient Indian ideas ofemanation and of the transmigration of souls suggested some understanding of immortality;the unique standing of the God Brahma […] seemed to suggest an original monotheism. […]The idea of an ur-revelation was one, as we have seen, entertained both by Jesuitmissionaries and by Neoplatonic and Hermetic philosophers, and it might be argued thatSchlegel here belongs less to the world of Bopp than to that of Pico della Mirandola.241

Although Dunlap does not explicitly cites Schlegel, his influence is felt throughout the entirety

of SFD’s corpus. Indeed, the only conceivable reason that Dunlap would reference authors like

Creuzer without mentioning Schlegel is that he did not have copies of his work. Schlegel is

nonetheless relevant to this study as one of the leading figures of the romantic orientalist school

which inspired Dunlap.

Georg Friedrich Creuzer (1771-1858) “widely famed, and blamed, for locating the origins

of classical (and Christian) myths and symbols in India, was actually a classicist who specialized

in Hellenistic literature.”242 Creuzer could not actually read eastern languages—like the

philosopher Friedrich Schelling, he came to the conclusion that “pre-rational Greece” (esp. as

connected to the Mystery Religions), had “oriental origins […] by way of the Neoplatonic,

western images of the mystical and wise East.”243 Ancient Greek and Roman authors had a

decidedly romantic conception of the East, especially regarding the spiritual systems of the

Gymnosophists, Chaldeans, and Egyptians. Like many other romantics, Creuzer inherited their

romantic view, which profoundly influenced his religionist model. Dunlap cites Creuzer heavily

throughout Vestiges of the Spirit-History of Man and both of the Sod books.

Finally, Carl Ritter (1779-1859), building upon the work of Schlegel and Creuzer,

“fleshed out an ur-Indian diffusionary history that was even more ambitious than [its] models.”244

The work of these three men, as much romantic and religionist as scholarly, sparked intense

debate in the Orientalist field, “strong echoes” of which can be heard down to the present day.245

As with Creuzer, SFD cites Ritter’s works throughout his entire oeuvre.

Further important influences on Dunlap came from the Mythenforschung works of Baron

241 Ibid., 62-3.242 Ibid., 53.243 Ibid., 66.244 Ibid.245 Ibid.

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Christian Charles Josias von Bunsen (1791-1860) and his student Karl Richard Lepsius (1810-

1884). Unlike the Indologists Schlegel, Creuzer and Ritter, Bunsen and Lepsius were primarily

active as an Egyptologists. As a scholar, Lepsius was “reticent about elaborating grand religious

or historiographical claims,”246 and his influence on Dunlap is mostly limited to linguistic

material. Bunsen, on the other hand, “was openly seeking a means to prove the truth of the Bible

and to find the common home of the Hamitic, Semitic, and Japthetic peoples.”247 His massive

five volume study Äegyptens Stelle in die Weltgeschichte (1844-57) argued that the Egyptians,

rather than the Indians, were the true original culture; Bunsen “based his claims for human ur-

unity directly on the purported derivation of both Semitic and Indo-European languages from

ancient Egyptian or ’Khamitic’ language.”248

Although not explicitly associated with the romantic school or professional orientalism,

two more authors bear mention here. The first is the mysterious Friedrich Nork (1803-1850),249 a

Jewish merchant and autodidact who wrote extensively on comparative mythology.250 SFD

draws deeply from his studies “Mythen der alten Perser. Als Quellen christlicher Glaubenslehren

und Ritualien” (1835), “Braminen und Rabbinen, oder Indien das Stammland der Hebräer und

ihrer Fabeln” (1836) & “Hundert und eine Frage an denkende Evangelienleser unter den Laien,

zugleich beantwortet von dem Fragsteller” (1850). The second is the Martinist Professor Johann

Friedrich Kleuker (1749-1827), who wrote on a variety of esoteric religious concepts and

claimed the existence of “a ‘chain of Tradition’ that can be perceived through all periods of

history.”251

The romantic Mythenforschung works of these various authors clearly inspired Dunlap in

his efforts to trace Wisdom back to ancient India.252 Indeed, as we have seen, his works are

basically a pastiche of their arguments on the point. In this respect, Dunap’s Vestiges and the

246 Ibid., 89.247 Ibid.248 Ibid., 130.249 Nork wrote under a bewildering number of pseudonyms, including Franz Nork, Felix Korn, Selig Nork, Selig

Korn, Selig Kohn, Spiritus Aster, Spiritus Lester, and others. Indeed, there seems to be some confusion regarding his correct birth name.

250 “Korn, Selig (Friedrich N. Nork),” The Jewish Encyclopedia. 251 Hanegraaff, “Tradition,” 1130.252 Although Dunlap’s genealogy of wisdom is clearly based on the works of the romantic orientalists, much of his

factual information on Brahmanism and Buddhism comes from the works of Henry Thomas Colebrook (1765-1837) & Adolf Wuttke (1819-1870), neither of whom were known as diffusionists or perennialists.

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Sod books are veritable treasure troves of learned quotes arguing a perennialist model of ancient

history. Blavatsky made liberal use of these quotations throughout both volumes of Isis

Unveiled. Many of these plagiarism are fairly obvious; since Blavatsky did not speak German,

any time she quotes a German author found in Dunlap’s works we can be reasonably sure she

derived the material from him.253 To start with, Blavatsky references every single romantic

orientalist cited by Dunlap. She particularly favors the works of Bunsen and Lepsius, although

she appears to have had independent access to some of their works in English translation.

Notably absent is any reference to Schlegel, which would seem to confirm that—when it comes

to German orientalism—if it is not found in Dunlap, then it is not in Isis Unveiled.

In his excellent study The Theosophical Enlightenment, Joscelyn Godwin demonstrated

Blavatsky’s debt to the work of English-speaking comparative mythologists such as Richard

Payne Knight (1751-1854), Sir William Drummond (1770-1828) and Godfrey Higgins (1772-

1833), as well as later authors including Hargrave Jennings (1817-1890) and Emma Hardinge

Britten (1823-1899).254 Blavatsky herself groups Dunlap with these authors, writing “We eagerly

applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr.

Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is

constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols.”255

Through Dunlap, we can now add to Godwin’s list a similar set of influences: the German

authors of 19th-century romantic Mythenforschung. However, Blavatsky did not confine her

pilfering of Dunlap’s texts to mythological material—she also borrowed quotations from many

of the more technical authors cited by Dunlap. From F. K. Movers alone she copied over 20

passages. Isis Unveiled also includes citations to Haug, Duncker, Cory, Müller, and Weber,

among others—all easily traceable to Dunlap’s works.

Dunlap used many of the same sources during the composition of his Sod books, which

are essentially an expansion of his arguments in Vestiges. As Dunlap himself notes, “The two

books [Vest. & Sod] are one work! It is necessary to fix this statement in the reader’s mind. We

have no wish to give an unfair reviewer the opportunity to cut our work in twain and then

253 Blavatsky did derive some limited German material from other authors who cite German works, such as Mackenzie and Jacolliot.

254 Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment.255 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol II, 109.

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criticise each part by itself.”256 Commenting on his personal religious beliefs, SFD informs us

that “The author of this treatise is a believer in Revealed Religion—the Revelation by Power.”257

However, he claims to follow a scholarly, facts-based approach: “being limited, let us confine

our reasonings and our assertions respecting God’s Providence to the facts within reach of

human observation. Since God ordained these he intended us to take account of them.”258

Building upon the framework he laid in Vest., Dunlap outlines in further detail the path

that “Wisdom” took from its origins in India to its appearance in the west. In his system, priests

and sages carried the ancient doctrines which constitute the “universal Oriental Philosophy” from

India to Persia, where the Phoenicians adopted and fused them with the Mystery religions of the

Greeks (which, following Creuzer, Dunlap also sees as Oriental in origin) to form the Judaic

religion reflected in the Old Testament. As Dunlap puts it, “The Hebrew Religion stepped out

from the noblest side of the Dionysus-worship, influenced [...] by Persian and Babylonian ideas,

but still retaining the Phoenician impress. The name of the Phoenician Highest God is Bal, Bol,

Bui, Sadak, Suduk, Adonz. This last is the Phoenician-Greek Adorns, the Phoenician-Hebrew

Adon, Adoni, Zadak (Jupiter), Zadik (Just One). It is true that the Rabbins and the modern clergy

call the Hebrew God’s name Adonai but before the Rabbins added their points to the text the

Old Hebrew letters were Adni (Adoni).”259

Sod: The Mysteries of Adoni mainly explores the influence of the Graeco-Roman

Mysteries on the Old Testament: “To connect the Mosaic Religion with the Mysteries is to wrest

from the Church its position, and to show that the Old Testament is the result of human efforts,

the progress which God inspired the human mind to attain in the midst of the ancient civilization!

The Old Testament is the first offshoot from the Mysteries; the New Testament is the second.

The Old Testament is the work of the Reformed Judaeo-Phoenician, or Rabbinical Church—the

New Testament is the Essene-Nazarene Glad Tidings Adon, Adoni, Adonis, called also Bol, was

the Deity in both the Old-Phoenician and the Judaeo-Phoenician styles of worship.”260 Dunlap

ultimately concludes that “the ’Sacred Books’ in some shape existed [...] from the earliest times,

256 Dunlap, Sod: The Mysteries of Adoni, vi.257 Ibid., vii.258 Ibid., viii.259 Ibid., iii-iv.260 Ibid., iii.

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[… but] there is much [in them] that bears the stamp of Plato’s [influence].”261 Importantly, he

does not forgot to mention the influence of ancient India: “The Old Testament philosophy is

completely identified with the Brahman philosophy of India, on pages 335, 151, 231, 153, 176,

160, 164, 165, 333, 238-9, of the Vestiges of the Spirit-History of Man. It identifies the main

principles of the two systems, the ’Spirit and Matter’ Philosophy; also the Hebrew Spirit of God

with the Hindu Purusha, the Hebrew Word or Logos with the Brahman Word of Creation.—

Ibid., 239. It on the same pages identifies the Hebrew Philosophy with the Persian and the

universal Oriental Philosophy.”262

In Sod: The Son of The Man SFD moves on from the origins of Judaism and treats the

origins of Christianity, or the “Nazarene Glad Tidings,” as he calls it: “the spread of Chaldean

and Persian Wisdom was so much advanced that particularly about the time of Christ sects

everywhere came forth which philosophized after the same spirit; who founded themselves

together upon a certain primaeval-Wisdom as the original mother of their own; on the oldest

primitive doctrine of the human race which held in itself the original light of the true and higher

knowledge.”263 In his attempts to validate this thesis, Dunlap explores two different spiritual

traditions: “Sabianism” and Kabbalah. Dunlap figures that Christianity is the result of the

synthesis of these traditions with the Old Testament around the time of Christ, and ultimately

pronounces Christianity “an Oriental religion transplanted. Even with its somewhat mutilated

proportions in the English version it still preserves its Oriental Gnosis and its Kabbalistic

similarities.”264

Ultimately, SFD’s texts do not follow such a pretty narrative: it must be reconstructed

from glimmers of lucidity shining forth from impenetrable walls of text. As a result of his

reliance on quotations and the opinions of other scholars, his works end up being something like

a random synthesis of diffusionist systems. However, with much patience it is possible to

reconstruct a basic narrative of his system: There was an ur-revelation in pre-literary times

somewhere in the area of Mesopotamia and India which resulted in a body of teachings

(including monotheism, an ineffable God, the doctrine of emanations, etc.) described variously

261 Ibid., 147.262 Dunlap, Sod: The Son of the Man, 17-19.263 Ibid., 65.264 Ibid., 106.

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as the “oriental philosophy” and the “oriental kabala.” This teaching migrated west and formed

the basis of the religious thought of Phoenicia, Egypt, Persia (i.e., Chaldea/Babylon), and

Greece, and eventually of Judaism and Christianity as well.

By the publication of the Sod volumes in 1861 this was a very stale narrative. Dunlap’s

work was outdated before it was ever published. As Marchand notes, “A subterranean stream of

esoteric literature kept Creuzerism alive, and in some circles […] the ’ancient theology’ also

lived on. But [...] the promotion of eastern priority, sagacity, or superiority was quite rare at mid-

century.”265 Dunlap’s bizarre style and organization further doomed his works to instant

obscurity, at least among scholars. Blavatsky, however, made extensive use of Dunlap’s

material on the Sabians and Kabbalah when she herself covered those topics in Isis Unveiled.

The “Sabians,” or Mandaeans as they are better known today, are one of the few

“gnostic” sects to have survived the late antique period. Dunlap makes extensive use of their

principle holy text, the Ginza Rba,266 which was available to him in an 1815 Latin translation by

the Swedish orientalist Matthias Norberg (1747-1826). He considers the text replete with

influences from “the oldest parts of kabbala”267 and uses it to argue his perennialist model of

religion. For outsider descriptions of the Sabians, Dunlap turns to various ancient and medieval

authors, most commonly Epiphanius (c. 310?-403), Irenaeus (130-202), and Maimonides (1135-

1204). He also frequently cites the Russian-Jewish orientalist Daniel Chwolson (1819-1911),

who wrote extensively on the Sabians.

In order to demonstrate the influence which Sabianism had on Christianity, Dunlap

begins by attempting to identify the Sabians with the “Nazarene” sect referenced in the New

Testament. Dunlap argues that: “The earliest NAZARenes were not the Christians. The

NAZARenes held that John the Baptist was the true Prophet. John the Baptist and his disciples

were Nazarenes. ’For the Haeresy of the Nazarenes was before Christ, and knew not Christ.’—

Epiphanius, I. 121.”268 Dunlap calls John “the Sabian” and notes that he “preached in the Desert

of Judea, wearing the coarse dress of hair and the Iessene Girdle of Leather [...] while the

Nazarenes (Sabians) dwelt in Coele-Syria, [...] beyond the Jordan.”269 Dunlap even considers

265 Marchand, German Orientalism, 123.266 Better known as the “Codex Nasaraeus” in the 19th-century.267 Dunlap, Sod: The Son of the Man, iii.268 Ibid., xxiii.269 Ibid., xxx.

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Jesus a Sabian, writing: “Iesus in this very district receives the Nazarene Baptism of John; and

must therefore be included among the Sabians. The New Testament expressly connects itself

with the ’Nazarene sect’ over the Jordan.”270

Blavatsky paints an eerily similar picture of the Sabians in the second volume of Isis

Unveiled, writing:

The Nazarenes were known as Baptists, Sabians, and John’s Christians. Their belief was thatthe Messiah was not the Son of God, but simply a prophet who would follow John. “Johanan,the Son of the Abo Sabo Zachariah, shall say to himself, ’Whoever will believe in my justiceand in by Baptism shall be joined to my association; he shall share with me the seat which isthe abode of life, of the supreme Mano, and of the living fire’” (Codex Nazaraeus, ii, p. 115).Origen remarks “there are some who said of John (the Baptist) that he was the anointed”(Christus). [“Origen,” vol. ii, p. 150.]271

As we should now be used to discovering, every single element of this passage is lifted from

Dunlap. On page 34 of Sod: The Son of the Man, Dunlap quotes Norberg’s preface to the Codex

Nasaraeus: “They were called Baptists, Sabaeans and Day-Baptists, and ’John’s Christians.’

They believed that the Messias was not the Son of God, but a prophet following John.”272

Dunlap provides a passage from the Codex as further evidence, which reads: “But in this age too

a son shall be born whose name shall be called John, son of the Abo Sabo Zachariah . . . Thus

shall he say to himself: Whoever shall put faith in my Justice and my Baptism shall be joined to

my association (societati) and shall dwell with me in the seat which was the abode of Life, of the

supreme Mano, and of living Fire.—Cod. Nas., II. p. 115.”273 He provides the Origen quote as a

second footnote, which reads “Some thought that John the Baptist was the Anointed. Dictum

fuerat de Ioanne, quia ipse esset Christus […] —Origen, II. p. 150.”274

Having demonstrated to his satisfaction that the Nazarene sect described in the bible was

in fact a Sabian sect, Dunlap turns his attention to proving that the Sabians were actually a

remnant sect of Chaldeans:

270 Ibid., xxxi.271 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol II, 184.272 Dunlap, Sod: The Son of the Man, 34.273 Ibid.274 Ibid.

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The Harranites of the 6th- century preserved the old religion of the land.—Chwolsohn, dieSabier, I. 15, 141, 144, 152, 153, 154. Hamzah Issfahani, a historian of the 10th century,remarks that what is left of the Chaldeans is now in the two cities Harran and Roha, and thatthey in the time of el-Mamun gave up the name Chaldeans and took the name Sabians.—Ibid., I. 142, 141. But the real Sabians (of the Koran) were a Christian sect and dwelt in theMarsh districts.—Ibid., 142. Another Arab historian, a contemporary of the former, sayslikewise that the remains of the Chaldeans who call themselves Sabians and Harranites,sojourn in Harran and Iraq, and first took the name Sabians in the time of el-Mamun.—Ibid.,143. The Sabians are named ’the Chaldean Harranites.’ The Arabs have not made a strongdistinction between Chaldeans, Nabatheans and Syrians but rather identified them in greatmeasure. So Masudi says the Chaldeans are the same as Syrians, identical with the Syrians,and the Syrians with Chaldeans.—Ibid., 162, 163. The Arabs call the Syrians Nabatheans.—Ibid., 163, 164, 441. Ibn Chaldun identifies Babylonians, Chaldeans, Nabatheans and Syrianstogether.—Ibid., 164. The heathen of Harran and the Heathen Sabians of Harran areidentified by Chwolsohn, I. p. 168.275

Blavatsky follows Dunlap’s lead and associates Sabianism with the Chaldeans in both volumes

of Isis Unveiled.276

Dunlap further identifies the Sabians with the ancient Chaldeans by associating them with

the mysterious book Al-filāḥah al-nabaṭīyah (the Nabataean Agriculture). Originally composed

in arabic by the Iraqi agronomist and alchemist Ibn Waḥshīyah (c. 10th-century), the Nabataean

Agriculture is “part practical farming manual, part botanical treatise, and part speculative theory

on the influence of stars and the elements on plants, interspersed with a great deal of magical

lore, myths, ancient stories and religious traditions.”277 Waḥshīyah claimed to have translated the

texts from Chaldean originals composed in ancient Syriac. This greatly excited Chwolson, who

“hailed the ‘Nabataean Agriculture’ as a genuine piece of Chaldean/Babylonian literature, dating

the ‘Ancient Syriac’ original to the 16th century B.C. in his Überreste (1859, p. 65) and thereby

initiating a heated debate.”278 Subsequent scholars have tended to temper Chwolson’s claims and

date the text later, but the question of Chaldean influence remains open.279

Dunlap follows Chwolson in considering the text a repository of ancient Chaldean

material, writing:

275 Ibid., 9.276 Blavatsky, Isis Univeiled, Vol I, 481 & Vol II, 187, 404, etc.277 “Ibn Waḥshīyah, Al-filāḥah al-nabaṭīyah, ‘Nabataean Agriculture’.”278 Ibid.279 Ibid.

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Hottinger speaks of the Religio Nabathaea, or Chaldaea, to which Chaldeans, Persians and,more than others, the Sabaeans were addicted; Sabaeos, Chaldaeos, Nabatheos, Charaneos,quo ad ritus, ceremonias, universamque superstitionem, scriptoribus Arabicis esse eosdem.Chwolsohn, I. 28, 29, 82. ’The author of the Agricultura Nabathaeorum wrote that theBabylonian and Harran Sabians mourn Tammuz; under the first he understands the Men-daites, who really had their abode in Babylonia.’ It was in Wasith and Basrah—Ibid., I., 105,106.280

Through Maimonides, Dunlap firmly connects the Nabataean Agriculture with the Sabians:

“I will mention to thee the Writings out of which thou canst possess thyself of theinformation which I myself possess respecting the belief and institutions of the Sabians. Themost renowned is the book ’the Agriculture of the Nabathaeans’ which has been translated byIbn Wahshijah. This book is full of heathenish nonsense and such things to which only therude mass is inclined ; and to which only it (the ignorant mass) adheres. It speaks of thepreparation of Talismans, the drawing down of the powers of the spirits, Magic, Demons andGholes, which make their abode in the Desert.”—Maimonides; in Chwolsohn, die Ssabier, II.458. It also contains many other follies which awake the sensible man’s contempt.—Ibid.,458. 281

Blavatsky incorporates this passage into the Isis Unveiled section “Jesus Never Claimed to be

God”:

The Nabathaens inhabited the Lebanon, as their descendants do to the present day, and theirreligion was from its origin purely kabalistic. Maimonides speaks of them as if he identifiedthem with the Sabeans. “I will mention to thee the writings... respecting the belief andinstitutions of the Sabeans,” he says. “The most famous is the book The Agriculture of theNabathaeans, which has been translated by Ibn Waho-hijah. This books is full of heathenishfoolishness... it speaks of the preparations of Talismans, the drawing down of the powers oft h e Spirits, Magic, Demons, and ghouls, which make their abode in the desert.”[Maimonides, quoted in Dr. D. Chwolsohn, “Die Ssabier und der Ssabismus,” ii., p. 625.]282

Ultimately, identifying the Nazarenes as a Sabian sect, and the Sabians as an ancient

Chaldean sect, allowed Dunlap to conclude that the ancient “Oriental Kabala” or “Universal

280 Dunlap, Sod: The Son of the Man, 14.281 Ibid., xxxii.282 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol II, 184. Blavatsky also uses Dunlap’s footnote for the passage as part of her

discussion.

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Oriental Philosophy” had formed the basis of the Christian faith—with “its Oriental Gnosis and

its Kabbalistic similarities.”283 Dunlap does not forget to tie this secret Oriental wisdom to

ancient India, and argues that, during its formation, “Gnosticism borrowed both from Brahman

and from Buddhist doctrines.”284 Taken as a whole, this line of argumentation fits perfectly into

Blavatsky’s perennialist model; indeed, she practically looted Dunlap’s text for references to the

Nazarenes, Sabians, and the Ginza Rba. Coleman lists some 40 plagiarized passages from the

Codex Nazaraeus alone—we can add to this list a substantial amount of material derived from

Chwolson, Epiphanius, Irenaeus, Origen, Maimonides, and others. Blavatsky’s plagiarism in

this area occur throughout Isis Unveiled, but they are most concentrated in the third and fourth

chapters285 of the second volume, where hardly a page passes without Blavatsky using material

from Dunlap’s works. Some subsections consist almost entirely of comments and quotations

taken from Dunlap. Indeed, it is unthinkable that Blavatsky could have written either of these

chapters without access to Dunlap’s works—and yet, she only mentions his name a handful of

times.

We have already seen Coleman claim that while Blavatsky “pretended to great

Kabbalistic learning, […] every allusion to the Kabbala, in ’Isis,’ was copied second-hand from

[...] Eliphas Levi, [...] Jacolliot, Dunlap, Mackenzie, King, and a few others.”286 Surveying

HPB’s references to the Kabbalah in light of Dunlap’s text, it seems that this is an accurate

claim. Blavatsky frequently references the foundational Kabbalistic text, the Zohar.

Interestingly, she prefers the spelling “Sohar,” which is more common in German and Latin

texts. In their article “Sefer ha-Zohar: The Battle for Editio Princeps,” Magda Bendowska and

Jan Doktór state that the “Sefer ha-Zohar is a collection of anonymous mystical and theosophical

writings, recorded in Hebrew and in various dialects of the Aramaic language.”287 Initially, “the

writings regarded as part of Sefer ha-Zohar [...] circulated separately and were treated as

independent texts.”288 Beginning in 1558, however, the texts were collected together and printed

as one edition (comprising three volumes) in Mantua, thereby more or less establishing the

283 Dunlap, Sod: The Son of the Man, 106.284 Ibid., 39.285 Titled: “Divisions Amongst the Early Christians” & “Oriental Cosmogonies and Bible Records.”286 Coleman, “The Unveiling of ’Isis Unveiled’,” 471 (October).287 Bendowsa & Doktór, “Sefer ha-Zohar: The Battle for Editio Princeps,” 141.288 Ibid., 142.

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works which fall under the heading Zohar.

In 1877, when Isis Unveiled was first published, very little material from the Zohar was

available in modern language translations. The first complete french translation did not appear

until 1906, and the first English edition even approaching completeness did not appear until

1931. Aside from excerpts found in the works of authors familiar with Hebrew, the only source

for kabbalistic primary texts was Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s (1636-1689) two volume

Kabbalah Denudata. The Kabbalah Denudata is an early latin translation of excerpts of the

Zohar and some other kabbalistic texts. It includes complete translations of certain sections of

the Zohar, such as the Idra Rabbah, the Idra Zuta, and the Sifra di-Zeni’uta. It also includes a

long introductory essay, an extensive kabbalistic glossary (LOCI COMMUNES

KABBALISTICI, Secundum ordinem Alphabeticum concinnati),289 a scattering of essays by

famous kabbalists, and other miscellaneous material. However, it is far from being a complete

translation. Nonetheless, the Kabbala Denudata was the only significant repository of non-

Hebrew kabbalistic material available in the late 19th-century. Indeed, both Eliphas Levi (1810-

1875) and Samuel MacGregor Mathers (1854-1918) based their translations of Zoharic material

on the Kabbala Denudata rather than the Hebrew original.290 Accordingly, Rosenroth’s work is

of crucial significance to our understanding of occultist kabbalah.291 Dunlap quotes the original

latin Kabbalah Denudata, of which he possessed a copy, extensively throughout his Sod books.

He also occasionally cites the original unabridged hebrew Zohar through other authors,

principally Adolphe Franck (1809-1893) and Friedrich Nork.292 Nork we briefly met already, but

Franck needs an introduction.

Wouter Hanegraaff recounts in his article “The Beginnings of Occultist Kabbalah,” that

Franck was born in Liocourt in 1809, and “originally studied for the rabbinate, but changed his

289 von Rosenroth, Kabbala Denudata, Vol I, 4.290 Karr, “Zohar in English,” 23.291 “Blavatsky herself, as with other members in the Theosophical Society [...] showed great interest in kabbalah.

Since their knowledge of kabbalah was derived from the Christian kabbalah tradition, the Zohar texts that they knew were primarily works that were known in Christian Europe thanks to the translations of Knorr von Rosenroth.”—Boaz Huss, “The Translations of the Zohar (Hebrew).” Translation provided by John MacMurphy.

292 For instance, after providing an extended quotation (in english) from the original Hebrew Zohar, Dunlap cites “The Sohar, III. 152; Franck 119.” Turning to page 119 of Die Kabbala, we find the citation: “Sohar, 3. Th., Bl.152 b. Abschn. בהעלותך”—Franck , Die Kabbala, 119. Although Dunlap fails to include the “a/b” marker distinguishing the front and back of a page in Hebrew texts, the citation is basically accurate.

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direction in favor of philosophy.”293 In 1843 Franck released the first edition of his famous

work, La Kabbale ou Philosophie Religieuse des Hébreux. The text was hugely influential, and

Wouter Hanegraaff considers Franck, along with Eliphas Levi, one of the founding fathers of

modern occultist kabbalah.

In La Kabbale, Franck devotes considerable effort to demonstrating the ancient origins of

the Zohar and the closely related Sepher Yetzirah (Jezira). He held that the Zohar “was not

written by Moses de Léon, ’an obscure rabbi from the 14 th century’ and ’a miserable charlatan’:

on the contrary, at least the essential metaphysical core of the Zohar must be traced back to the

first centuries, if not further back.”294 Dunlap himself quotes Franck on this issue, writing: “The

Kabbalist Book Jezira was composed in the time of the first Mishna-teachers, that is, during the

first century before Christ […] —Franck, 65. ’We feel no doubt that all important metaphysical

and religious principles which make up the basis of the Kabbala are older than the Christian

dogmas.’—Franck, 249.”295

Blavatsky herself uses the same citation in Isis Unveiled: “Franck asserts that ’Jezira’

was written one century B.C. (’Die Kabbala,’ 65), but other and as competent judges make it far

older.”296 These unnamed “competent judges” may well be Kleuker and Nork, both of whom

Blavatsky cites (through Dunlap) during her Kabbalistic expositions. Nork, for instance, held

that “The Hebrew Sohar was written by or composed from the writings of Simeon ben Iochai

who lived in the second century before Christ.—Korn (Nork), Hundert und ein Frage, p.

xviii.”297 Although Blavatsky does not use this particular passage in Isis Unveiled, she does

make use of Dunlap’s citations of Nork elsewhere. For instance, when she writes: “Can we

doubt Nork’s assertion that ’the Bereshith Rabba, the oldest part of the Midrash Rabboth, was

known to the Church Fathers in a Greek translation’? [’Hundert und ein Frage,’ p. xvii.;

Dunlap, ’Sod, the Son of the Man,’ p. 87].”298

293 Hanegraaff, “The Beginnings of Occultist Kabbalah,” 111.294 Ibid., 116.295 Dunlap, Sod: The Son of the Man, xx-xxi.296 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol II, 276.297 Dunlap, Sod: The Son of the Man, 89. Original reads: “Sollten Diejenigen wirklich das Richtige erkannt haben,

welche die genannten rabbinischen Schriften erst zwischen dem 5—12 Jahrh. nach Chr. entstanden sein lassen, und selbst dem Buche Sohar, dessen Verfasser doch Simeon Ben Jochai gewesen sein soll, welcher im zweiten Jahrhundert vor Chr. lebte, eine solche Jugend andichten, „weil keine Autorität vor dem 14. Jahrh. sich auf dieses Buch be ruft“.”—Felix Korn, Hundert und eine Frage, xviii.

298 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol II, 223. Note that this one of very few occasions that Blavatsky acknowledges

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Curiously, whenever Blavatsky references Adolphe Franck’s work, she cites the 1844

German translation by Adolf Jellinek (1821-1893). This was the version used by Dunlap, who

does not appear to have read French. Blavatsky betrays no knowledge that the original was

composed in her first language, and thus accessible to her. She even references “Franck’s

’Codex Nazaraeus’”299 at one point, so she clearly did not know much about Adolph Franck as

an author, or his works themselves. In total, approximately half of the Franck quotes found in

Isis Unveiled are clearly derived from Dunlap’s works. However, there are a number of other

passages from Die Kabbala which are not found in Dunlap, so Blavatsky must have plagiarized

them from elsewhere.

Ultimately, Franck saw the kabbalah as an ancient body of religious wisdom underlying

many different religious systems. As Hanegraaff notes, “According to Franck, the entire history

of humanity demonstrates that all truths about the nature of man and the universe have their

origin not in human reason, but in a universal ’power’ (puissance), known as ’religion’ or

’revelation’.”300 Frank himself wondered: “Is it not true that the numbers and letters that are

basic to the entire system […] play a very large role in Pythagoreanism and the earliest systems

of India as well?”301 If this is starting to sound reminiscent of the perennialist agenda found in

both Blavatksy and Dunlap, it is: “What we have here is a religionist or even ’perennialist’

perspective: kabbalah may be a specifically Jewish phenomenon, but its ultimate source and

essence is universal.”302 According to Hanegraaff, Franck traces the Kabbalah all the way back

to ancient Persia, and “[ends] up arguing for a ’perfect resemblance’ between all the essential

elements of kabbalah and the metaphysical principles of Zoroastrianism.”303 This is also the

source to which Levi ultimately traces the kabbalah.304

Dunlap paints a similar picture of the origin and development of the kabbalah throughout

his works—although, once again, he is not entirely consistent. For Dunlap, kabbalah represents

the highest and truest teaching of the Jewish Sages, and is either synonymous with, or based

Dunlap as an intermediary source.299 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol I, 269.300 Hanegraaff, “The Beginnings of Occultist Kabbalah,” 114-5.301 Ibid., 114.302 Ibid., 115.303 Ibid., 117.304 “Essential to [Franck and Levi’s] approach is that they both believe in a ’universal kabbalah’ with non-Jewish

origins, and remarkably, they both trace those origins to the religion of Zoroaster.”—Ibid., 126.

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upon the “universal Oriental Philosophy.” His understanding of it, however, is not completely

clear; sometimes he seems to use “kabbala” to refer to the content of the ur-revelation, but at

other points he states that it originated during the babylonian captivity.305 This lack of clarity is

once again partially attributable to his reliance on the quotes of earlier scholars, who do not

always agree with each other. However, it is also apparent that for Dunlap “Kabbala” refers to

two distinct traditions: the Jewish kabbalah known through the Zohar, and the ancient “Oriental

Gnosis” which inspired it. Thus, Dunlap follows Franck in considering the Kabbala not strictly

Jewish in origin; instead, he considers its “ultimate source and essence […] universal.”306 This

conception of the kabbalah fits Dunlap’s perennialist model perfectly. By arguing that there was

an older, universal kabbalah present in ancient Persia, and that it inspired Jewish sages to create

their kabbalistic system during the captivity, Dunlap connects the chain of Tradition, and further

explains the presence of the “universal Oriental Philosophy” in Judeo-Christian religion.

Dunlap cites Franck particularly heavily throughout his Sod books; however, some of his

most crucial ideas regarding the kabbalah come from Kleuker and Nork, and a third scholar,

Salomon Munk (1803-1867).307 One particular passage from Kleuker’s Ueber die Natur und den

Ursprung der Emanationslehre bei den Kabbalisten308 (1786) sums up Dunlap’s understanding

of the kabbalah quite well, and is worth quoting at length:

’The Emanation-doctrine of the Kabbalists is the soul of a system that, after it was presentamong the Hebrews, put forth its secret and higher theology and was taught and propagatedonly in secret schools by its most speculative minds. This system was known just at a timewhen men in nearly all lands from India to Arabia and Egypt philosophized on the same orsimilar fundamental principles.

Through various political revolutions of Great and Lesser Asia, Syria, and Egypt, the spreadof Chaldean and Persian Wisdom was so much advanced that particularly about the time ofChrist sects everywhere came forth which philosophized after the same spirit; who founded

305 Dunlap, Sod: the Son of the Man, 91.306 Ibid., 115.307 Munk was a Jewish scholar from Silesia who studied oriental languages in Berlin before becoming a professor

of Hebrew in France. Dunlap’s material on the kabbalah in Vestiges was mainly derived from Munk. Unlike Franck, Kleuker, Levi, and others, Munk did not endorse the universalist model of kabbalah. This likely explains why kabbalah takes a back seat in Vestiges, but occupies so much of the Sod volumes. Dunlap needed access to sources like Franck and Kleuker in order to integrate kabbalah into his perennialist model. Nonetheless, Blavatsky borrows a number of Munk quotes from Dunlap, mostly in volume I of Isis. For more information on Munk, see: Fenton, “Qabbalah and Academia,” 53-4.

308 Roughly, “The nature and origins of the emanation doctrine of the Kabbalists.”

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themselves together upon a certain primaeval-Wisdom as the original mother of their own;on the oldest primitive doctrine of the human race which held in itself the original light of thetrue and higher knowledge.

This is true as well of the Kabbalists of that time as of later times.’—Kleuker, 57.309

Here we see clear evidence that Kleuker prefigured Franck in proposing a universalist model of

the kabbalah by nearly seventy years. Kleuker’s work is an attempt to answer a question posed

by the “Hochfürstlichen” school: “ob die lehre der Kabbalisten von der Emanation aller Dinge

[…] aus der Griechischen Philosophie, oder nicht?”310—or, does the emanation doctrine of the

kabbalists have its origins in Greek philosophy? According to Isaac Meyer, an early

Theosophical commentator on the kabbalah, Kleuker finds considerable overlap between Greek

philosophy and kabbalah, and argues that the Zohar is “akin to the Secret Teaching of Orpheus

and Thales, and certainly came from Pythagoras.”311 He considered The “Secret Science” of

kabbalah itself, however, “derived from the Patriarchs, and much cultivated in ancient times in

Chaldea.”312 Paradoxically, Paul Fenton, a modern scholar of kabbalist historiography, claims

that Kleuker “assigned [the kabbalah] a Persian origin.”313 Their seeming contradiction,

however, means little; Kleuker’s writing is woefully obscure, and his system seemingly

contradictory. His work is nonetheless replete with references to the “Oracula chaldaica” and the

“Systeme Zoroasters.” Wouter Hanegraaff finds it remarkable that both Levi and Franck,

seemingly independently, trace the kabbalah back to Zoroastrianism. Perhaps, it is not so

309 Ibid., 65. Original reads: Die Emanationslehre der Kabbalisten ist die Seele eines Systems, das seitdem es unter den Hebräern

vorhanden war, ihre geheime und höhere Theologie ausmachte, und von den speculantesten Köpfen derselben nur in geheimen Schulen gelehrt und fortgepflanzt wurde.

Dieses System wurde gerade zu einer Zeit bekannt, als man fast in allen Landern von Indien bis Arabien, und Aegypten nach denselben oder ähnlichen Grundsätzen philosophirte.

Durch verschiedene politische Revolutionen Groß und Klein Asiens, Syriens und Aegyptens war die Verbreitung Chaldäischer und Persischer Weisheit so sehr befördert worden, daß besonders um die Zeit Christi überall Secten empor kamen, die nach demselben Geiste philosophirten; die sich insgesamt auf eine gewisse Urweisheit, als Stammmutter der ihrigen, beriefen; auf eine urälteste Lehre des Menschengeschlechts, die das ursprüngliche Licht der wahren und höhern Erkenntniß in sich halten sollte.

Eben dieses gilt nun auch von den Kabbalisten sowohl der damaligen als nachfolgenden Zeiten.—Johann Kleuker, Natur und der Ursprung, 57.

310 Kleuker, Natur und der Ursprung, title page.311 Myer, Qabbalah: The Philosophical Writings of Solomon Ben Yehudah Ibn Gebirol, 172. This idea goes all the way back to Johannes Reuchlin, who advanced it in his De Arte Cabalista.312 Ibid.313 Fenton, Qabbalah and Academia, 47.

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surprising at all—they simply read Kleuker’s work. Dunlap himself sees Franck and Kleuker as

complimentary sources and groups them together frequently. For instance, he writes: “’Not only

the most general principles but all the elements of the Kabbala are to be shown in the Zend-

Avesta and its Commentaries.’—Franck, 262; Kleuker, 48 ff.”314

From Nork and Munk, Dunlap derives substantial material. Of particular note for the

current discussion, is the following quote from Munk: “The doctrine of the Kabbala, deposited

later in the Book of the Formation (Yecirah) and in the Book of Splendor (Zohar), has doubtless

had its first origin in the exile of Babylon.—Munk, 519.”315 Dunlap follows up with a quote from

Nork, which reads: “In Babylon the Jews had become acquainted with the Zoroastrian religious

books […] —Hundert und ein Frage, p xii.”316 This, for Dunlap, is the crucial link in the chain

of tradition—the actual point when the Jewish people first adopted the prisca theologia: “At last

the Oriental Gnosis makes its way into the midst of Judea.”317 However, Dunlap does not

exclusively see the origins of kabbalah in Persia or Zoroastrianism, but in India as well, and he

takes great pains to connect the kabbalah with Brahmanism. For instance, he writes that “In the

Kabbala the First Cause (God) is named Ain (Nothing, Not-anything).—Franck, 135 ff. This is

the formless BRAHM of the Hindus.—Spirit-Hist., 329, 333, 336, 351, 338, 180.”318

Blavatsky’s interest in kabbalah is well established. Indeed, kabbalah is one the most

fundamental and important underpinnings of the entire Theosophical system. As Marco Pasi

notes in his article “Oriental Kabbalah,” Blavatsky’s first ever occultist publication, “A Few

Questions to ’Hiraf’,” is an exposition of the kabbalah—or the “Cabala,” as she then styled it.319

Pasi notes that, even at this early stage, Blavatsky made a clear distinction between the Jewish

kabbalah represented by the Zohar, and “an ’Oriental Kabala’ supposedly much older and

original than the Jewish one.”320 Pasi then proceeds to highlight a chapter from the second

314 Ibid., 92. Kleuker twice translated the Zend-Avesta into German.315 Dunlap, Sod: the Son of the Man, 135. Consider also the quotes: “A passage of the Sohar teaches that the Voice

which issues from the SPIRIT is nothing else than the water, the air and the fire, north, south, east, west and all powers of Nature.—Franck, 155; Sohar, part I, 246 b. Compare the same idea in the Hindu philosophy.—Spirit-Hist. 136, 156, 155.”—Ibid., 82. &: “The ANCIENT of the ancient has a form and has no form. He assumed a Form when He called the universe into being.—The Sohar, III. 288, a, Idra Suta; Franck, p. 129. [This is the Hindu Brahm who, in order to create, becomes Brahma the Divine Male.—Spirit-Hist.,180].” —Ibid., 66.

316 Ibid.317 Ibid., 109.318 Ibid., 67.319 Pasi, “Oriental Kabbalah,” 158.320 Ibid., 160.

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volume of Isis Unveiled, titled “Mysteries of the Kabala,” as particularly relevant. He writes of

it:

Blavatsky focuses particularly on the structure of the sefirot and on the concept ofShekhinah, but there are some other aspects that should retain our attention. Blavatsky’smajor source for this chapter is certainly Adolphe Franck’s book on kabbalah and surely alsoEliphas Levi. In particular she seems to like the idea that kabbalah has its origins inZoroastrianism, because this confirms her idea that Jewish kabbalah is a later derivation froma much older Oriental kabbalah. This is further confirmed by all the analogies that she isable to find between Jewish kabbalistic concepts and ideas taken from Hinduism.321

We have already seen that Dunlap traces the kabbalah back through Zoroastrianism and ancient

India. Pasi goes on to note Blavatsky’s “emphasis on the superiority of Eastern—particularly

Indian—doctrines,” which would reach its peak in The Secret Doctrine.322 Although Pasi is

correct in his appraisal of Blavatsky’s conception of the kabbalah—no mean task since, as he

notes, her system “is particularly garbled”323—his information regarding her sources is

incomplete.

Comprising some thirty pages of text, “Mysteries of the Kabala” does not mention Franck

even once, and contains only two references to Levi. Naturally, this in itself is no indication that

Blavatsky did not use their works when composing the section—as we have seen, she has a nasty

habit of failing to acknowledge her sources. Nonetheless, a detailed analysis reveals that Franck

and Levi are relatively minor players in “Mysteries of the Kabala.” What is lacking from the

section in regards to Franck and Levi, however, Blavatsky more than makes up for with

plagiarisms from Dunlap.

A survey of the chapter reveals some five references to the Kabbala Denudata, six to the

Idra Suta, seven to the Idra Rabba, and over twenty to the “Sohar.” With the exception of one

Zohar passage derived from Mackenzie’s Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia, every single one of these

references is taken from—or at least, represents information found in—Dunlap’s works. There

are, moreover, twelve references to the Ginza Rba, as well as scattered cites to Movers, Duncker,

Preller, Spiegel, Müller and Nork, all derived from Dunlap. Blavatsky even cites Kleuker,

321 Ibid.322 Ibid., 162.323 Ibid., 160.

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although she gets his name wrong: “’They regard,’ says Klenker, “the first-born as man and wife,

in so far as his light includes in itself all other lights, and in so far as his spirit of life or breath of

life includes all other life spirits in itself.’ [’Nat. und Urspr. d. Emanationslehre b. d.

Kabbalisten,’ p. ii].”324 She also adopts Dunlap’s terminology, and refers to kabbalah as the

“Oriental Gnosis.”325 Far then from being the principle sources, we in fact see that Franck and

Levi had very little to do with Blavatsky’s chapter on the kabbalah. Dunlap was the real source,

or more appropriately, Dunlap’s version of Franck, with a little Nork and Kleuker thrown in for

good measure.

This recipe largely bears true for the rest of Isis Unveiled; indeed, under further

investigation, well over half of the 50+ Zohar passages found in the work are clearly derived

from Dunlap’s Sod books. The remaining passages are all found in Mackenzie’s Royal Masonic

Cyclopaedia, excepting one or two that HPB seems to have fabricated entirely. Although this is

ostentatious, it is also predictable; we have already seen that kabbalistic primary texts were only

available in Latin and Hebrew when Blavatsky was composing Isis Unveiled, so it is perfectly

obvious that whenever she cites a kabbalistic text she must have gotten the quote from another

source.

Indeed, Blavatsky seems to have a very limited understanding of the actual nature of

kabbalistic texts. She constantly mangles her citations, and betrays no understanding of the

differences between various works. For instance, the distinction between the Zohar and the

Kabbala Denudata is apparently unclear to her. During a discussion of the “Doctrine of

Permutation,” she writes: “We refer the reader to the Kabbala Denudata of Henry Khunrath;326

his language, however obscure, may yet throw some light upon the subject.”327 As we have seen,

the Kabbala Denudata was in fact by Christian Knorr von Rosenroth. HPB must have derived

this mistake from Mackenzie’s Cyclopaedia, which states: “The Kabbalistic Cosmogony is

another topic of vast interest, upon which we have little space to dilate here, as a full description

would itself occupy a volume, and therefore it is better to refer the student to Franck and

Ginsburg for an extended exposition, and, for the scholar, H. Khunrath’s three rare quartos, the

324 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol II, 201. The original quote is found on page 73 of Sod: the Son of the Man, although it cites page 11 of Kleuker’s work, not page ii.

325 Ibid., 191.326 Heinrich Khunrath (1560-1605).327 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, Vol II, 137.

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Kabbala Denudata, would be the best guide.”328 Apparently, Mackenzie did not know much

about the Kabbala Denudata either. Not only did he get the author wrong, the correct number of

volumes is two.

Ultimately, given the extremely close agreement between Dunlap and Blavatsky’s

understanding of the kabbalah—not to mention the large amount of material taken from his

books—we can elevate Dunlap to a higher position in the history of occultism. Through the

work of Blavatsky, Dunlap has exerted a profound influence on modern occultist kabbalah—

although it might be more appropriate to say that Franck, Kleuker, and Nork were the real

influences. Nonetheless, Dunlap added glosses of his own to their material, most importantly by

connecting the kabbalah with ancient India, which is perhaps the single most crucial point of

similarity between Dunlap and Blavatsky’s perennialist systems. Whatever the case, as we saw

in the section on Sabianism above, it is absolutely unthinkable that Blavatsky could have

composed her material on the kabbalah without access to Dunlap’s works. Her understanding of

the tradition may have been influenced by Franck, Jacolliot, Levi, and King, as Coleman

suggests, but far and away her most important source and inspiration was Samuel Fales Dunlap.

III. Concluding Remarks

It is unnecessary to sum up. The reader remembers—Samuel Fales Dunlap on the frivolity ofconclusions.329

In the beginning of this investigation, we set out to answer one of the oldest questions in

contemporary occultism: was Helena Petrovna Blavatsky a plagiarist? The answer, as we have

seen, is much more nuanced and complex than a simple “yes” or “no” could ever provide. To

whatever extent “plagiarism” can even be considered a valid charge in Blavatsky’s case, she was

guilty of it—although most of her infringements were of the murkier variety: source plagiarism.

There is no doubt, however, that she often represented the work of other authors as her own, and

overall gave the impression to her readers that she was much more widely read and proficient in

languages than she actually was. Whether this represents a strategy of legitimation or simply

poor note-taking and lazy citation practices, it is certainly dishonest.

328 Mackenzie, Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia, 407.329 Dunlap, Sod: The Son of the Man, 108.

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This may seem like a somewhat dull note to end on after so much work, but a great deal

of import was uncovered along the way. We have seen Coleman as he really was: a bright-

minded and apparently capable scholar led by a cycle of polemics and apologetics to an

obsessive end. We have seen evidence that Blavatsky may have cultivated her memory as a

strategy of legitimation. Perhaps most notably, we have seen the huge debt which Blavatsky

owes to the works of Samuel Fales Dunlap, and through him the debt she owes to 19th-century

Romantic Mythenforschung, and the kabbalistic writings of Kleuker and Nork. It may be

overstating things a little to suggest that Dunlap inspired Blavatsky to adopt a perennialist model

in the first place. There are simply too many sources which could have inspired her. In a

passage of almost shocking lucidity and insight, Dunlap reflects that, “It would not have required

an excess of intelligence to have reflected that the Hebrews, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Ionians, and

Greeks, living all together in the eastern corner of the Mediterranean, must have thought in

common and had the same religious philosophy.”330 However, given the unusually close

agreement between their perennialist models, there can be little doubt that Dunlap inspired many

of the particulars of Blavatsky’s system. Nonetheless, it is important not to overstate the extent

of his influence. As Sylvia Cranston notes in her Blavatsky biography:

It would be a mistake […] to imagine that Blavatsky’s works were largely anthologies.Coleman would have us believe that Isis, in particular, was little more than borrowings fromother people’s writings. It is easy to prove otherwise: A line-by-line count reveals that only22 percent is quoted material and 78 percent, HPB speaking.331

Coleman estimates that the number of passages Blavatsky took from Dunlap is “probably 300 in

all”332—for a work of over 1400 pages, this is hardly a drop in the bucket.

Since so much of this thesis, by its very nature, has tended to devalue Blavatsky and her

writings, it makes sense to conclude with some comments in the opposite direction. First of all,

there can be no doubt that Blavatsky was a brilliant thinker. Whether she stole her quotes or not,

Isis Unveiled is an incredibly complex and sophisticated work of spirituality and comparative

religion. Its academic value may be close to nil, but so are many of the works Blavatsky cites,

330 Ibid., 108-9.331 Cranston, H.P.B.: The Extraordinary Life & Influence of Helena Blavatsky, 337.332 Coleman, “The Unveiling of ’Isis Unveiled’,” 339 (August).

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even those by trained academics and professors. Indeed, many of her sources would be

completely forgotten today if not for their inclusion in Isis Unveiled. Dunlap’s works, as we

have seen, are practically incoherent in argumentation, and simply present long lists of opinions

and quotes from other authors. Blavatsky took those quotes and integrated them into a system of

clarity and—historically speaking—spiritual significance. Ultimately, she used Dunlap’s

material to far greater effect than he ever did. Moreover, one gets the impression that Dunlap, an

outspoken iconoclast and believer in “revealed religion,” would have been sympathetic to

Blavatsky’s endeavors in Isis Unveiled. As he writes in Sod: the Mysteries of Adoni:

The last twenty centuries have not passed in vain. We have not to retrace our steps to thepoint of divergence between the religions of the ancient world, and to begin human life anew;what we have won is ours! We cannot go back again to the paths of Arabian thought; for it isnot given to us to tabernacle in forms and customs which no longer live on earth. Our life isfounded in the present; and from it we must gather the sources of our own fruitfulness.333

333 Dunlap, Sod: the Mysteries of Adoni, vii-viii.

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“Took a War to Keep Him Sober.” The Evening World: 12 July 1905, p. 3.

“War Time Sobered Dunlap.” The Sun: 13 July 1905, p. 10.

Weber, Albrect. Indische Studien. Berlin: Fred Dümmler’s Buchhandlung, 1850.

Wilson, Horace Hayman. Rig-Veda Sanhita. London: N. Trubner and Co., 1866.

Yates, Frances. The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

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Appendix I

William Emmette Colemanpictured in:

The Carrier Dove, February 1886

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Appendix II

Samuel Fales Dunlappictured in:

The Fales Family of Bristol, Rhode Island