Quest Magazine

Printed in the Fall 2015 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard."The Strange Identity of Jesus Christ" Quest 103.4 (Fall 2015): pg. 130-136.

Most Christians think the New Testament says that Jesus is God. They’re wrong.

By Richard Smoley

The New Testament may be the most widely read book in the world. And as everyone knows, the New Testament is about Jesus Christ.

You would think, then, that people would know what the New Testament says about Jesus. But as it turns out, a great deal of what they know is wrong. Most people think it says he was God. Really? Then how do you explain verses like this, in which Jesus says, “Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God” (Matthew 19:17)? (Biblical quotations here and elsewhere are from the King James Version unless otherwise noted.)

Problems like this lead us to wonder exactly what the earliest Christians thought of Jesus.

In all likelihood they thought very different things. Even in the earliest generation of Christianity, there were many “faith communities,” often in the same vicinity, with different and competing beliefs. One extinct sect, a Jewish Christian group called the Ebionites, thought Jesus was a human like everybody else. Gnostic groups, by contrast, often saw him as a phantom materialized in this foul material world somewhat like a Tibetan tulpa. But none of them — at least none that we know of — thought he was God.

For this article, let’s focus on the Christians who wrote the New Testament, such as Paul, John the evangelist, and the unknown author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Their writings all became validated as canonical scripture, so they must agree to a certain extent about who Jesus was. By and large they do. But weirdly, what they agree on is quite different from what the Catholic Church and its offshoots — which include practically the whole of the Christian world — later claimed.

To see why, let’s start with a much-discussed passage from Paul’s epistle to the Philippians, which says that Jesus, “being in the form of God, did not think that being equal with God was something to be grasped at, but he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself, being obedient unto death, death on a cross. Therefore God exalted him, and blessed his name above every other name” (Philippians 2:6–9; my translation and emphasis).

There is a lot about this passage that is obscure, and whole books have been written about it. For our purposes the main point is this: scholars believe that Paul did not write these words — not originally. Instead he is quoting a kind of doxology, or doctrinal formula, that is already familiar to the people he is writing to.

This is a curious fact, because Philippians was written sometime between AD 56 and 63. Meaning that by this time — no later than thirty years after Jesus’s death — he was widely venerated as a divine being by his followers.

But what kind of divine being? To say that Jesus “did not think that being equal with God was something to be grasped at” is peculiar. How could he “grasp at” being equal to God if, as most Christians today believe, he was God himself?

Here is another verse, again by Paul, in which he reminds the Galatians how well they treated him: “You received me as an angel, as Christ Jesus” (Galatians 4:14; my translation). The natural and obvious way of reading the Greek here is that “as Christ Jesus” is an expansion or elaboration of “as an angel.”

This suggests that the early Christians — and again, I’m referring to those who wrote the New Testament — did not think that Jesus was God. They thought he was the incarnation of an angel.

As New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman puts it: “Jesus was thought of as an angel, or an angel-like being, or even the Angel of the Lord — in any event, a superhuman divine being who existed before his birth and became human for the salvation of the human race. This, in a nutshell, is the incarnation Christology of several New Testament authors” (Ehrman, chapter 7).

We might also be able to say which angel they thought Jesus was. Quest readers may remember an earlier article of mine, “God and the Great Angel” (Quest, Winter 2011). In it I argue that, by some theories, there were originally two Gods in Israel: El, the high God, and Yahweh, God of Israel alone, sometimes known as the Angel of the Lord. Eventually, however, the Jews decided that Yahweh was not an angel; he was the high God himself; El and Yahweh were the same. This transition had probably been made by the sixth century BC.

But the Great Angel did not go away. He continued to survive in Judaism for centuries afterward. He was sometimes known as the Son of Man.

The first usage of “the Son of Man” in this sense appears in the book of Daniel, from the second century BC: “I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him” (Daniel 7:13).

Sometimes the Son of Man was called Metatron, a name that looks more Greek than Hebrew. That may be because it is. One theory (there are many) says this name comes from the Greek metà toû thrónou — the angel “with the throne” of God.

Metatron, the Great Angel, was known in other ways too, depending upon which text you look at. Here is a list of some names for him:

The Angel of the Lord
The Son of Man
The Son of God
The second God (deúteros theós in Greek)
The Name of God
The Logos = The Word
Wisdom

It would take a long and highly technical treatise to go through all of these terms and explain where they occur and how they connect to each other. That’s impossible here. For our purposes it’s best to take them as a basket of names for more or less the same concept. It would be hard to overstate the importance of this concept to early Christianity.

Here it is: there is a kind of subordinate God, a “second God,” through whom the high God relates to the universe and through whom he created the universe. This subordinate God is actually an angel — the Son of Man, Metatron.

One text that sheds some light on the subject is a pseudepigraphical work called 1 Enoch:

And at that time that the Son of Man was named, in the presence of the Lord of Spirits
And his name before the Head of Days.
And before the suns and the “signs” [i.e., constellations] were created
Before the stars of the heaven were made,
His name was named before the Lord of spirits.
                                                         (1 Enoch 48:2–3; Idel, 20)

Exactly as in the verse from Daniel, there are two figures here: one is the Lord of Spirits, the Head of Days (or Ancient of Days), the high God, the Father. The other is the Son of Man. You will notice that the last line of the verse above emphasizes his “name.” This is important.

The ancient Hebrews saw a much closer connection between the word and the thing than we do. In fact, they used the same word for both: davar. This fact meant that God’s name was, in some way, equivalent to God himself. (To this day pious Jews sometimes refer to God as ha-Shem, “the Name.”)

The Name is a hypostasis. It is an attribute (usually of God) that takes on a life of its own and becomes a kind of independent entity, a person.

It’s even in the Bible. In Exodus the Lord says to the children of Israel, “Behold, I send an Angel before thee, to keep thee in the way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared. Beware of him, and obey his voice, and provoke him not: for he will not pardon your transgressions: for my name is in him” (Exodus 23:20–21; my emphasis).

So the Son of Man is the Great Angel, the hypostasis of the Name. Why was he called the Son of Man? Here’s one answer: many of these texts are not just the results of imagination or theologizing. They sometimes represent real visionary experience. We have almost no idea of how this kind of experience was produced. But in it the angels often had the form of men.

The texts say this over and over. Here’s a well-known example, from the famous throne vision of Ezekiel: “And above the firmament . . . was the likeness of a throne, as was the appearance of a sapphire stone: and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness of the appearance of a man above upon it” (Ezekiel 1:26).

But there’s more. Metatron may have been called the “Son of Man” because he originally was (or was believed to be) a man. Enoch, to be specific. Antediluvian patriarch, great-grandfather of Noah, after living 365 years, “Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24).

That is all the Bible has to say about Enoch.

But Jewish mysticism had much more to say. Enoch was not only taken to heaven, but was elevated to the highest of all positions. In fact he became Metatron, the Great Angel.

Below is a verse from a mystical text known as 3 Enoch, which tells of a rabbi’s journey into the heavenly realms. In it Metatron says:

I am Enoch, the son of Jared. When the generation of the Flood sinned and turned to evil deeds, . . . the Holy One, blessed be He, took me from their midst to be a witness against them in the heavenly height. (3 Enoch 4:1; in Charlesworth, 1:238)

To sum all of this up: Judaism at the time of Christ, and long before, had a notion of the Great Angel, the hypostasis of the divine Name. At some point he was identified with the patriarch Enoch, who had ascended to heaven and become the angel Metatron. This may be why Metatron was called the Son of Man.

Christianity took this idea over. The early Christians decided that Jesus was the Son of Man, the Great Angel, who had come down to earth. He had degraded himself to take on fleshly form in order to deliver us from our sins. God rewarded him by exalting him to a still higher level than he had had before.

This is what the passage above from Philippians is trying to say. Here is another example, from the epistle of the Hebrews:

God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken to us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir to all things, by whom also he made the worlds: who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high: being made so much better than the angels, as he hath [been allotted] a more excellent name than they. (Hebrews 1:1–4; my emphasis)

The bracketed passage indicates my own addition to the King James translation. That’s because the King James Version fails to translate one word in the Greek: keklÄ“ronómÄ“ken, “has been allotted.” To say that Jesus was “allotted” his excellent name created some discomfort in light of later belief, so the word was left out. Most translations, even the most reputable and up-to-date ones, do similar things with passages like these.

The Great Angel starts with a very high status. He is right below God himself. In fact, God made the creation through him. But the Great Angel chose to come down to earth, become human, and offer himself up for our sins, so God elevated him to a still higher standing, to God’s right hand. He is thus no longer below God, but is literally on the same level.

The verses from Hebrews also say that God made the worlds through the Great Angel. You may be reminded of the opening of the Gospel of John: “All things were made by him” — the Logos, the Word (John 1:3).

You’ll also have noticed that I put the Logos, the Word, on the same list as the Great Angel and the Son of Man. That’s because the name Logos was also applied to the Great Angel. The first man to do this (to our knowledge) was the Jewish theologian Philo of Alexandria. Philo lived at the time of Jesus (Philo’s dates are c.15 BC–c.AD 50), although he never mentions Jesus and apparently doesn’t know of him.

But Philo does know of the Logos:

And even if there be not as yet any one who is worthy to be called a son of God, nevertheless let him labour earnestly to be adorned according to his first-born word, the eldest of his angels, as the great archangel of many names; for he is called, the authority, and the name of God, and the Word, and man according to God’s image, and he who sees Israel. (Philo, On the Confusion of Tongues, 146; Yonge, 247; my emphasis)

There you have it. The “great archangel” is “the name of God” and “the Word.”

“Word” here is a translation of the Greek lógos. Lógos is an extremely common word in Greek. And it does mean “word.”

Sort of.

In fact when I think back to any Greek text I’ve read, “word” is almost never the best translation for lógos. It’s often best translated as “speech,” “argument,” “reason,” even “true story.” But its meaning goes far further still.

It’s no small feat to say what lógos meant over the course of a thousand years of ancient Greek philosophy. But here is the main idea: lógos is the structuring principle of consciousness. Or, if you like, consciousness as a structuring principle (Heidegger, chapter 2; Smoley, 165).

What on earth do I mean by this?

To understand, simply take a look at your surroundings. Whether they’re familiar or not, you can easily identify objects and people: a table, a chair, that man over there, and so on. Your mind is picking them out from a background of colors, sounds, and other impressions. By picking them out, your mind is organizing them. They are no longer an ocean of random sense data. They are an organized and coherent world. Moment by moment, the lógos in you is creating the world.

It’s no coincidence that the root behind lógos is the verb légō, which originally meant “to pick up” or “pick out.”

By the time of Philo, Greek philosophers had devoted a lot of attention to this idea. In his day, the Stoics were one of the dominant philosophical schools. They said that this lógos, this structuring principle of consciousness, was the basis not only of our experience but of all existence. This idea was extremely influential.

Philo wanted to connect traditional Jewish teachings with Greek philosophy. So he identified this lógos with the Name, the Great Angel.

One man who was probably familiar with Philo’s thought — or with a system very much like it — was the evangelist John. That was how he came to write “In the beginning was the lógos, and the lógos was with God, and the lógos was God” (John 1:1).

Philo identified the Logos with the Great Angel. We see in Philippians that the Great Angel was identified with Jesus. John the evangelist made the obvious connection. The Logos=the Great Angel, incarnated in Jesus.

If this Great Angel was so important, you may be asking why you haven’t heard of him before.

Here’s one reason. At one point the Jewish sages decided that he had gotten too big for his britches. So they dethroned him.

We find out about this in 3 Enoch. It is a striking and revealing passage.

At one point a heretical rabbi ascends to heaven in a mystical vision. He sees Metatron on his throne and exclaims, “There are indeed two powers of heaven!” Then God dethrones Metatron. The angel Anapiel comes and, Metatron says, “struck me with sixty lashes of fire and made me stand to my feet” (3 Enoch 16:2–5; Charlesworth 1:268).

The passage suggests why Metatron was dethroned. It refers to the rabbi as Acher (the “other one”) — a contemptuous epithet: the Jews considered him an archheretic. His real name was Elisha ben Abuya, and he lived around the turn of the second century AD. Although it’s not clear what kind of heretic he became, most likely he converted to Christianity.

If this is true, it tells us a great deal. The idea of “two powers of heaven” had been in Judaism for centuries. But the Christians used it to great effect: there was the Father, and there was the Son. They identified this Son with Jesus.

At some point the rabbis decided to rid themselves of this troublesome second god, who was leading mystics to heresy. Metatron was demoted in the heavenly hierarchy. He was, so to speak, taken off his throne and made to stand on his feet. Dethroning Metatron was a way of putting a distance between Judaism and Christian doctrines.

Nevertheless, Metatron is still mentioned in later Judaism, mostly in the Kabbalah, which preserves many of the most ancient and profound Jewish teachings. He is still identified with Enoch, who was, according to the Kabbalah, the first fully realized man.

The Great Angel vanished from Christianity because it continued to exalt the status of Jesus from the first to the fourth centuries. We’ve already seen how Jesus was placed on the right hand of God — made equal to God. The next step to say that not only was he equal to God, but that he had always been equal to God.

Thus the doctrine of the Trinity was born.

It was decreed as the official doctrine of the Catholic church at the council of Nicaea in 325. Those, including a bishop named Arius, who held that Jesus was originally a created being were expelled as heretics. Curiously, Arius’s views were probably closer to the beliefs of the New Testament authors than were those of the side that won.

Paul himself would have probably agreed more with Arius. It’s sobering to think that if Paul, the fount of all Christian theology, had been at the council of Nicaea, he would probably have been thrown out as a heretic too. But history is full of many such ironies.

I must add that the doctrine of the Trinity was not merely the fabrication of some fourth-century bishops. The sacred ternary is a universal motif. It is found almost everywhere, under different names. There is the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, as well as the three primordial elements, rajas (force), tamas (inertia), and sattva (equilibrium). Chinese philosophy calls this ternary “heaven,” “earth,” and “man.” Jewish mysticism uses the three letters in the name of Yahweh — yod (Y), heh (H) and waw (W) — to express the same idea. And the pagan Slavs had Tribog (“Three-God”), a three-headed deity. It would be an oversimplification to say that all these concepts are talking about exactly the same things. Nevertheless, the sacred ternary is a genuine, profound, and universal teaching. The Christian Trinity is merely one way of apprehending it. (See René Guénon’s Great Triad for a discussion of this matter.)

One question may arise: Clearly some of Jesus’s earliest followers saw him as the Great Angel, the Son of Man. But was that how he saw himself?

This is not a question that we can definitively answer with the information we now have.

Why? The oldest surviving Gospels are the four in the New Testament, and possibly the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. But scholars almost universally agree that these Gospels do not exactly reflect what Jesus said or did. They include things that were attributed to him later that may have had little or nothing to do with what he said or taught.

This is the scholarly consensus. But it leaves us with a big question: how do you decide which things in these Gospels are authentic and which aren’t? There are many criteria, but all the theories at some point face the same impasse: if you decide to include or exclude a statement by Jesus, this must mean that you have some preconceived idea of who Jesus actually was. You are sculpting the evidence to fit this picture in your head.

If there were other sources about Jesus that were in the slightest bit reliable or informative, it would be different. But there are almost no references to him in surviving non-Christian literature of the first century.

So any statement about who Jesus thought he was has to be made extremely hesitantly and tentatively.

Take this verse, for example: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head” (Luke 9:58). Here Jesus is identifying himself with the Son of Man. But is this statement authentically by Jesus? It very much depends on whom you ask.

As a whole, scholars regard Jesus’s Son of Man statements as mostly authentic. This is partly because the later Christian church no longer remembered who the Son of Man was. (Present-day theologians often seem clueless about it as well.) For this reason, scholars tend to think that the idea of the Son of Man comes from the earliest years of Christianity, and probably to Christ himself. The later church was not likely to make up this title for him, because the church no longer knew what it meant.

Jesus, then, may have believed he was the incarnation of the Great Angel and hinted as much to his disciples. Did he also think he was the reincarnation of Enoch? That is a fascinating possibility that, to my knowledge, scholarship has not addressed.

He may also have thought he was the Messiah. This claim may be based in fact. In the Gospels, Jesus is identified with the Messiah as “the son of David.” That is, he was believed to be a descendant of the royal line of David. (Whether he really was in a biological sense is another question that can’t be answered.) Originally the Messiah — the “anointed one” — was used to refer to the kings of Israel and Judah. If Jesus was the descendant of David, then he was the rightful king of Israel — the anointed one, the Messiah.

But the role of this Messiah in the thought of Jesus’s time is far from clear. James H. Charlesworth, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, writes, “it is impossible to derive a systematic description of the functions of the Messiah from the extant references to him” in the literature of Jesus’s time, because there actually aren’t many references to the Messiah in that literature (Charlesworth, 1:xxxi).

By all the evidence, if Jesus believed he was the Messiah, he saw his role in a spiritual sense; he was not interested in the political liberation of the Jews. But the priests were able to use the political implications of this title to frame him as an agitator and hang him by it. This explains the whole background of the Passion narrative.

If what I am saying above is true, it has enormous repercussions. There are hundreds of millions of people walking around today who believe that unless you accept Jesus as God, you are headed straight for eternal damnation. Most of these people also believe in the literal truth of the New Testament. What will they do when they learn that the New Testament itself doesn’t teach that Jesus is God?

This might be a liberating experience for some, but it’s just as likely to be a dispiriting and disorienting one. To have the bedrock of your faith crumble away under you is no small thing. It takes away the sole support that many people have.

This may be why most of the things in this article, while reflecting mainstream scholarship, remain virtually unknown. The clergy — at least in mainstream Protestantism and Catholicism — learned most of these things in seminary; it is not news to them. But they are reluctant or afraid to reveal them. Neither their education nor their denominations have prepared them to do so.

Eventually the truth will come out. What will happen when it does? I’m reminded of a passage in The Tree of Life Oracle, a fortune-telling deck based on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life by Quest contributor Cherry Gilchrist and Gila Zur. There is a card called “The Veil.” Here is the interpretation:

When the veil descended, men revered what it covered. And as time went on it seemed to hide more and more and was revered more and more. Then, when it was heavy with age, young men fresh and arrogant demanded the removal of the veil and demanded to see what was hidden. For they said that whatever is hidden from the people cannot be for the common good. In the thunder and lightning of indignation, the veil was torn down. Nothing lay beyond. At first the young men were startled, but then they laughed jubilantly at the absurd fraud they thought they had uncovered. And the old men grieved, cursing the young men because they had destroyed the veil. (Gilchrist and Zur, 108)

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Sources

Charlesworth, James H., ed. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. 2 vols. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2013 (1983).

Ehrman, Bart D. How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. San Francisco: Harper One, 2014.

Gilchrist, Cherry, and Gila Zur. The Tree of Life Oracle. New York: Friedman/Fairfax, 2002.

Guénon, René. The Great Triad. Translated by Peter Kingsley. Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1991.

Heidegger, Martin. Early Greek Thinking. Translated by David Farrell Krell and Frank Capuzzi. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

Idel, Moshe. Ben: Sonship in Jewish Mysticism. London: Continuum, 2007.

Smoley, Richard. The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe. Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2009.

Yonge, C.D., trans., The Works of Philo. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1993.

This article is adapted from Richard Smoley’s forthcoming book, How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying about God and the Bible, to be published in 2016 by Tarcher/Penguin.

 

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VOLUME 103, NUMBER 4

CONTENTS

The Strange Identity of Jesus Christ
Richard Smoley

God Only Knows
Jay Kinney

To Whom Shall We Pray? HPB's War on the Personal Gods
Jeff Cosby

The Buddha's Teaching of No-Self
Nancy Reigle

Krishnamurti's Inner Life
David Edmund Moody

From the Editor's Desk
Richard Smoley

Viewpoint: Applying the Principles
Tim Boyd

President's Diary

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Tim and Lily Boyd pose with Singapore Young Theosophists.

Printed in the Summer 2015 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Boyd,  Tim."President,s Diary" Quest 103.3 (Summer 2015): pg. 114-115.

At the end of January my wife, daughter, and I left Adyar to return to the U.S. Along the way we stopped in Singapore. I had scheduled a visit with the TS group there. Singapore is a remarkable place. It is a country that its recently deceased founder, Lee Kwan Yew, said should not exist, not because it did not deserve to, but because geography, politics, and demographics all would seem to argue that as a nation, it is impossible.

The TS group there is a dynamic bunch of people. Not too many years ago its membership had declined to seven. Under the guidance of Sanne and Lily Chong the group today has 400-plus members. Although our meeting with the group was unscheduled and on an unusual day for them, around 100 members turned out.

From Singapore I traveled on to Krotona for the annual Partners in Theosophy program. Every year at the end of January members from around the country gather for the week-long program. This year I facilitated our exploration of the Three Objects of the Theosophical Society. Since last year I had been looking forward to cofacilitating the get-together with the Krotona School director, Maria Parisen. Over the years Maria and I have done a number of retreat-type programs together. Although our previous combined efforts have been well received by the participants, my enthusiasm for conducting it was somewhat selfish. I love working with Maria. Unfortunately, because of unforeseeable circumstances she had to withdraw at the last minute. Joy Mills, Betty Bland, Pablo Sender, and I ended up leading the group in an inspiring program.

John and Anne Kern, after John’s talk at Krotona.

In addition to the partners and mentors, each year John Kern, adviser to the trust for The Kern Foundation, also attends the full term of meetings. This year, on the Tuesday when the Ojai Valley Lodge gathered for their weekly session, they had asked John to talk about his life and experiences working for the TS. It was a packed house. John’s intimate acquaintance with the people and history of the TS made for a riveting evening. It was a view of a side of TS history that no one else could have presented. More than four decades ago John retired from his own lucrative business career to work, gratis, solely for the Theosophical organizations served by the foundation. (The MP3 of the talk can be listened to or downloaded at https://www.theosophical.org/announcements/3512).

From Krotona it was finally back to Olcott in time for our February meeting of the board of directors. As always, the members of the board came to the headquarters for the three and a half day meeting. Currently our board is composed of long-time members who hail from Louisiana, New Hampshire, Florida, Wisconsin, Colorado, and Oregon. It’s a diverse, passionate, and very efficient group. Unlike the previous board, which was 50/50 male-female, this one is primarily female. Besides me the one lone man is Dr. Doug Keene from New Hampshire. It could be viewed as an enviable position to be in.

This year the dates for the meeting coincided with Adyar Day. For more than 100 years, February 17 has been a special day for the TS. The commemoration began as a remembrance of Colonel Olcott, the first president and cofounder of the TS, on the date of his passing. In 1922 Annie Besant shifted the emphasis to serving as a memorial for all of the TS’s past leaders and as a day to remember and give support to the TS international headquarters. All around the world programs are held and donations collected for the various works going on at Adyar. For a number of years in the American Section we allowed this occasion to slip. This year I gave an impromptu slide presentation of Adyar —a view from the inside. It was not on the schedule, but still attracted about thirty people. All of the board, a number of staff, and some members of the public turned out.

Whenever I have shown images of Adyar to a group, I am fascinated at the audience’s sense of novelty and surprise at seeing the scope of the place and the work. It should not surprise me. Until I started regularly traveling to Adyar, I was the same way. It always seemed like such a mysterious place. I had no mental images to help me grasp its dimensions. Since I became international president, three of our staff members have made extended visits to Adyar and have done significant work while there. Over the years I have noticed that those members who have spent some time at the international headquarters come away with a deeper understanding and commitment to the work.

In March I was off to the San Francisco Bay area for three programs. I was mainly going because for about a year a good friend and founder of the Greenheart International organization, Emanuel Kunzelman, had been trying to coordinate the details for a public conversation between Michael Murphy, founder of California’s Esalen Institute, and me. (See more about this discussion in my “Viewpoint: A Great Idea” .) Given everyone’s hyperbusy schedule, it was difficult.

The event was a two-hour conversation moderated by Emanuel. The description advertising the event went like this: 

This historical evening will bring together Michael Murphy of ITPI (Integral Transformative Practice International) in a conversation with Tim Boyd, international president of the Theosophical Society, as they discuss how the Theosophy of today meets evolutionary theory. Join us for this lively dialogue moderated by Greenheart International president, Emanuel Kuntzelman, as we hear from these two titans of spiritual thought.

Tim Boyd converses with Michael Murphy at their discussion program.

I like it. Titanic! It was a wide-ranging exchange that seemed to bring out the best in both of us. We plan to get together in the future to flesh out our discussion of some of the subjects that came up that evening. (To hear the entire two-hour conversation go here:
https://www.itp-international.org/library/dialogue-michael-murphy-tim-boyd-and-emanuel-kuntzelman.)

We set a date for the conversation that also allowed me to schedule visits with our TS groups in San Francisco and Oakland. So next it was a meeting with the San Francisco TS group. The SFTS has been a dynamic center in the area for many years. Although as a group they are keen students of the Ageless Wisdom teachings, they have always focused on more than mere study. Application and experience have been the emphasis since the days of their famous member and guiding light Joe Miller—an entirely unique and inspired student/teacher/friend. As a young man, Joe had met Annie Besant and formed a bond with the TS. Years later he would say, “Everything I have in life I owe to the Theosophical Society.” They are a group who in quiet, behind-the-scenes ways have been a tremendous support to the TS work. We met at their building, which is right downtown, almost at the top of San Francisco’s famous Nob Hill.

Two days later it was back across the Bay Bridge for a meeting with the Oakland TS. The Oakland group has a long history. It had been almost twenty-five years since I had last visited with them. Many things have changed since then. For a time the group had become inactive, only coming back to life again in the past couple of years. Because their normal meeting place was too small, we met in a lovely hall in the Berkeley public library. Members came from Oakland and the surrounding area. Also a group of friends from Turlock, California, about 100 miles away, came for the talk. I had a meal with the group members, then we drove to the library for the talk. It was a good day, and I am expecting very good things to come out of the Oakland branch.

At the end of March, it was back to Adyar (where I am now writing this piece). I arrived in time to inaugurate and speak at the South Indian Conference. Every year around 150–170 members from some of the Indian states in the south come together (Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka). It is a three-day event that for the last several years has been hosted at Adyar. The subject for this year’s gathering was The Voice of the Silence.

Unlike the Midwest, where we have the four distinct seasons of winter, spring, summer, and fall, the Adyar area is said to have three—hot, hotter, and hottest. Right now is the hotter season, with everyday temperatures in the mid- to upper 90s. It’s surprising how quickly one adapts. Leave Wheaton, Illinois, and 50 degrees, get off an air-conditioned jet plane in Chennai, sweat profusely for two days, and voilà, you have acclimated. Give it a try.

Tim Boyd

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Printed in the Summer 2015 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Bamford, Christopher."Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, and the Perennial Tradition" Quest 103.3 (Summer 2015): pg. 90-94.

By Christopher Bamford

We forget just how much the spiritual movements of the twentieth and now the twenty-first centuries owe to H.P. Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society she founded. Although not yet counted with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as a creator of our time, Mme. Blavatsky, no matter how wild her eccentricity or willful and capricious her natural freedom of spirit, deserves equivalent stature. Contemporary spiritual thinkers could not have accomplished what they have without her strenuous preparatory efforts. Much of what we think of as "New Age" — from Buddhism through "inner development" to channeling — was part of the original Theosophical mission.

Despite the apparent differences in their individual teachings, the capacious being of Mme. Blavatsky, deep as it is wide, lies behind most alternative spiritual teachers still read today, such as G.I. Gurdjieff, J. Krishnamurti, and Rene Schwaller de Lubicz. In fact, it is difficult to imagine anyone escaping her influence. The same is equally true of cultural figures like C.G. Jung (and the Eranos group), as well as contemporary figures like R.J. Stewart, David Spangler, or Caroline Myss. It was HPB, furthermore, who introduced world religions and world history into the theretofore parochial and tightly guarded confines of Western thought. It was she likewise who opened up the possibility of ecumenical and interreligious dialogue and laid the ground (with the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel) for a truly global theory of history as evolution of consciousness.

Above all, it was Blavatsky's stubborn, independent, open-minded exploration that broke open the hegemony of the aging secret societies and began the process of tearing the veil of the temple and making esotericism part of cultural life, in two equally important ways. She made available — for rational reflection, speculation, and contemplation — long-hidden spiritual teachings and doctrines, both Western and Eastern, about the universe and humanity's place and role within it. At the same time, she introduced and began to teach methods and practices of inner work by which any person of good intention willing to make the effort could achieve direct cognition of the realities she expounded, more theoretically, in her books. Thus, despite herself and her passionate anti-Christianity, she was, perhaps without knowing it, of Christ's party.

All that said, one might sum up her achievement by naming her the "prophet" or "mother" of what has begun to be called "post-religion spirituality." This is a tricky term, because it was not clear then, nor is it now, in fact, that the age of religions is over. To think so is perhaps only wishful thinking. It may be overly optimistic to believe that we have moved beyond religion to an age of spirituality in which each person has a personal, direct connection to the universe and the Godhead that translates into peace, compassion, justice, and mercy in social relations. It is by no means evident that the shared communal institutions, rites, and rituals that have for untold millennia transmitted revelation and tradition in the form of wisdom and knowledge are obsolete. Certainly much evil has been done in the name of the good, often with the best intentions. But we must never forget that to be human is to interpret, and any religion can turn on a new interpretation if it is radical enough. In this case — if the religions don't atrophy and fade away, but somehow manage to evolve — then the term "metareligious spirituality" would perhaps be more appropriate.

The great Austrian esotericist Rudolf Steiner — who was strongly influenced by Blavatsky — was ambiguous about this question. On the one hand, his Anthroposophy or spiritual science, like Theosophy, was whole in itself — sufficient for a complete spiritual life — and he clearly believed religions were dying (and, indeed, they seemed deader then than now). On the other hand, he was equally clear that Anthroposophy itself was not a religion — it was a "science," a way of knowing. But if one had a religion, the practice of Anthroposophy would only deepen, elucidate, and enrich it.

Whether or not the Kali Yuga, or Age of Darkness, ended in 1900, as Steiner believed, it is true that something new arose in the second half of the nineteenth century. Human beings had forgotten that beyond the countable, weighable, measurable universe lay other worlds. Spiritualism began to change all that. Suddenly the world revealed by sense perception, itself determined by the cognitive structures (ideology, prejudice) of science, became only the tip of an enormous, practically infinite, iceberg. This was obvious, but it had been obscured by three centuries of modern science. Such was the good news proclaimed at the apex of materialism: the world is essentially spiritual. We live in a spiritual world. We are spiritual beings in a universe of spiritual beings. Materiality is the illusion.

Thus the realization dawned that, if the world is spiritual, we need only awaken to this reality to begin to explore it — to develop means of researching it — and so unite, as in the most ancient times, science and religion in a new universal mysticism. This was the mission of Theosophy. What was new in Theosophy was not so much the proclamation or the insights behind it, but the democratization of the teaching: it was available to everyone.

In a sense, the reality had never been forgotten. Throughout dark ages of materialism, however, knowledge of it had remained the jealously guarded province of elitist occult and esoteric groups and secret societies. During the Romantic period, beginning at the end of the eighteenth century and lasting about forty years, an attempt had been made to bring knowledge of the spiritual nature of reality out into the open and transform society, science, and religion in its light, but materialism (and opposing forces) won the day. Spiritualism, which began in upstate New York in 1848 and was to culminate in the profound revelation of esotericism and practice of Theosophy, was the ultimately successful response of the spiritual world to this impasse.

In his essay "Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desert Places," the Irish poet W.B. Yeats (who was also an occultist, magician, philosopher, and early Theosophist) told how he once withdrew in poor health to the west of Ireland. Here he helped his friend in the Celtic Revival, Lady Gregory, collect stories from country people. These stories contained a great deal of wisdom, as living folk traditions often do, and were filled with supernatural occurrences and miraculous powers. Listening to them, the poet felt he was beginning to live in a dream.

As "the ancient system of belief" unfolded before him, Yeats began to notice analogies between the informants' accounts and modern spiritualism. It seemed that a community of potential and practice existed between the Irish peasants and his own experiences when, as he wrote, "I climbed to the top of some house in Soho or Holloway, and, having paid my shilling, awaited, among servant girls, the wisdom of some fat old medium." As he says, "I did not go there for evidence of the kind the Society for Psychical Research would value, any more than I would seek it in Galway or Aran." His aim was simply, like that of Paracelsus, to compare beliefs. And the result? He discovered a continuity and network of kinship that reached from the ancient mystery religions through Jacob Boehme, Emanuel Swedenborg, and William Blake to the spiritualist mediums and philosophers of his own time, and included the second sight of peasant people everywhere.

Andrew Lang (1844-1912), the Scots poet, folklorist, novelist, and psychical researcher, neatly corroborated Yeats's experience by publishing, in 1893, an edition of Robert Kirk's Secret Commonwealth, subtitled Of Elves, Fauns, and Faeries. Yeats in fact owned a copy of this work and may well have been influenced by it. The Reverend Kirk, who was born in 1644, was a Scots minister and a linguist who translated the Psalms into Gaelic and other religious works into Highland dialect. He was also the seventh son of a large family — that is to say, he had "second sight." In June 1685, he was appointed to the family parish of Aberfoyle. Here he remained until his death in 1692, the same year he created the manuscript of The Secret Commonwealth, perhaps the most remarkable work of its kind ever written.

Interest in the clairvoyant capacities of the people of the Scottish Highlands had been at its height in the last twenty years of the seventeenth century. Scottish authors like Kirk, stimulated by scientific and philosophical curiosity about magic, were encouraged to put down whatever they could discover. And what was discovered was marvelous indeed. For Andrew Lang, the phenomena Kirk recounts, having lain dormant for two centuries, were evidently the stuff of contemporary spiritualism: rappings, teleportations, precipitations, poltergeists, and so forth. Lang was not alone in thinking so. W.Y. Evans-Wentz, in his Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, concurred in this assessment. Today such fairy phenomena have been assimilated to abduction and UFO phenomena. In a sense, the more things change, the more they remain the same — "there is nothing new under the sun."

The story, however, like all good stories, is more complicated. To understand it, several strands must be unraveled — strands that are not just strings of historical connection but lineages or, more precisely, esoteric lines of filiation. Steiner's main concern was to make esotericism and the cult of symbolism, ritual, and practice that traditionally conveyed it accessible to the general public. Therefore he tried to move beyond the dualism of esoteric and exoteric. His later teaching is exemplary in this regard. At the same time, Steiner sought to ensure evolutionary continuity. At the start of his mission, therefore, he consciously and explicitly affiliated himself with those esoteric lineages and movements to whose transformation or flowering he sought to bear witness.

The history of these lineages, as Steiner never failed to emphasize, began long ago. Indeed, in a sense, it is a history without beginning, for it begins in the spiritual world. On earth, however, it passes by Atlantis through great initiates into the great mystery centers of prehistory. Thence, consciousness ever evolving, it metamorphoses into the temples, shrines, cults, and sacred sites — the mystery religions — of antiquity. And these streams, Indian, Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, flow into the great pluralistic, multicultural maelstrom of Hellenism. At which point, suddenly and bafflingly, the incarnation of Christ erupts, transforming everything forever.

The full story is too complex to be told here in any detail — perhaps to be told at all. Nevertheless, several milestones or points along the way may be usefully noted.

Whether or not acknowledged consciously or known by name, the Mystery of Golgotha — Steiner's preferred designation for the Christ event — transformed the world and human nature utterly and forever. What had been outside the world was now in it. Matter was spiritualized. Living fire or spiritual leaven filled all things again and awaited only the love-filled recognition of the sons and daughters of God to be awoken and raised in the spirit to approach the kingdom. The Logos, the divine Word-Son, dwelling within and without, made this possible.

Throughout the early Christian centuries, Greek and Latin church fathers, early Gnostics, and alchemists of the Hellenistic period strove to understand what had come to pass and to create a new culture appropriate to it. Everyone had a part to play in this process. Persia, Egypt, Greece, and Israel all played theirs. From Persia arose the sense of the human mission to cultivate the earth and transform evil. From Egypt, a dynamic and transformative cosmology in the shape of Hermetism. From Greece, philosophy (Presocratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian) and the remnants of the mysteries; and from Israel, the personal and passionate relationship with the living God.

Throughout the Middle Ages this vision encountered and then entered the human heart. True human feeling, residual clairvoyance, and the birth of new thinking came together to create a magnificent synthesis. True and embodied knowledge created a civilization. Consider the greatness of Romanesque and Gothic architecture, the growth of vernacular literatures (the Troubadour and the Grail cycles, for instance), the profound mysticism of such as St. Bernard, St. Francis, Hildegard, Gertrude of Helfta, Margaret of Porete, Hadjewich, and Meister Eckhart, and the cognitive triumph of Thomas Aquinas. These are not signs of a dark and miserable time! Nor is this all. The sacred science of alchemy, Christianized, took hold and flourished. New precursors of a future spirituality planted the seeds of our time: Cathars, Templars, and the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Friend of God from the Highlands, to name but a few. The new message was twofold, with two meanings — the local or particular, and the cosmic or universal — in one. Exoterically, ordinary human beings came to feel that the embodied human heart, made new and united to God in knowing, could overcome evil and transform the world through love. The other side of this was that esoterically, the good news was dawning that the world was in God as God was in the world — in the least atom of matter as in the greatness of the galaxies. The world was spiritual, a heavenly host, whose name (as the Valentinian Gnostics would say) is anthropos, Christ, or the fullness of human nature. In a word, it came to be realized that matter and consciousness were two sides of a single coin: the conscious heart.

It is clear from the above that one may speak of many renaissances. The very word renaissance therefore requires specification. With the Italian Renaissance, which followed, we might say, the renaissances of the ninth and twelfth centuries, reality struck. The foretaste of paradise was over. The journey would be long, perhaps indefinitely so. Many obstacles would call for human resourcefulness before the hard work of consciousness could take hold.

The Byzantine scholar George Gemistos Plethon brought the good news to the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1439: what had been locally intuited was a global phenomenon with an ancient lineage. Zoroaster, Hermes, Orpheus, Min (the first king of Egypt), Minos, and Numa, and even the Brahmans of India, the Magi of Media, and the priests of Dodona — these were the ancient theologians, the prisci theologi, who had all taught the same thing: that the world is full of gods whose nature is of fire. And the human task is the cotransfiguration of the earth by this fiery light of glory, the all-luminous substance that is the true nature of human beings.

Plethon also brought texts: Plato and the Neoplatonists (Plotinus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, Proclus), the Corpus Hermeticum, the Chaldean Oracles. These in turn, translated by Marsilio Ficino, were read and pored over by indigenous magi such as Paracelsus, John Dee, and Giordano Bruno. The practice of alchemy — and other occult sciences, like astrology and magic — deepened and became more widespread. The result was a call for a general reformation of all knowledge and being: a new way of knowing. At the same time, under the impact of the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, the first rays of modern science in the form of the search for abstract mathematical certainty, combined with a pragmatic, empirical literalism, could be sensed dawning on the horizon.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, with Bruno dead at the stake, the battle lines were drawn. The Rosicrucian Manifestos of 1614-17 announced the last struggle. In vain. Religious conflicts and the horrors of the Thirty Years' War decided the issue: mechanistic, materialistic science would become the outer form of the new civilization. The dream of the Renaissance was over. The Rosicrucians left Europe for the East, perhaps the Baltic states, and the inner traditions of sacred science and the work of consciousness went underground, to emerge again later, like a message in a bottle, in Freemasonry and other secret societies. For a while, however, there was an attempt at some kind of collaboration. We see this, for instance, in the background to the Royal Society in England, behind whose ideas lay Rosicrucian ideals mediated by such figures as John Comenius and Samuel Hartlib. It is evident, for example, in the alchemical work of Robert Boyle, the great founder of empirical chemistry. Boyle, like Newton, worked with alchemy all his life and understood the need for a higher, clairvoyant empiricism. For this reason, indeed, Boyle consulted with the Reverend Kirk, quizzing him about Highland "second sight." Kirk also spoke to him of the "Mason Word." For Masonry too appears to have originated in Scotland, where medieval guild initiations seem to have melded with a transformed Templarism — many Templars having fled to Scotland, already a Templar stronghold, after the destruction of the order by the French king Philip the Fair between 1308 and 1314.

All these currents of inner wisdom then flowed through into the eighteenth century, carried primarily by the secret societies. Side by side, as rationalism and materialistic empiricism flourished, the study and practice of ancient initiation metamorphosed and evolved, developed and unfolded by important pioneers such as Martines de Pasqually, Swedenborg, Louis-Claude de Saint Martin, Friedrich Christian Oettinger, Karl von Eckhartshausen, Alessandro Cagliostro, and Franz Anton Mesmer. A whole history remains to be explored here.

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, a new dawn was felt, a third (or fourth) Renaissance: Romanticism. The inner side of Romanticism, from this perspective, is nothing but the transformation of the esoteric. Drawing on the rediscovery of direct experience, coupled with a renewed respect and deep reading of Hermetic texts, these poets and seers proclaimed a new mystery cult of the everyday. A new science, a new religion, a new art — all available to all — were seen to be possible again. The good news was that the world was spiritual after all. We see this in great souls like Goethe, Novalis, Blake, Coleridge. We see it in philosophers like Franz von Baader, as well as the better-known German idealists (Kant, Hegel, and Schelling). Above all we see it in those precursors of spiritualism, "lesser" figures like Jung-Stilling and Justinus Kerner, who wrote the account of the Seeress of Prevorst. For Steiner, this moment marked the earthly reflection of the great reopening of the spiritual school of the archangel Michael in heaven.

By the 1840s, this dream too was over. Materialism again seemed to have won the day. But just when humanity seemed to have reached the nadir, light — weird light — broke forth. Led by figures like Éliphas Lévi, esotericism, occultism, and magic reemerged gradually from the shadows of history to begin what would be a continuous ascent into the light of consciousness. At the same time, to the hour, the phenomenon of spiritualism erupted, shattering forever the complacency of the industrial age. With it, the "New Age" was born.

Spiritualism itself was born in 1848 in the hamlet of Hydesville in Wayne County in the "burned-over district" of western New York, so called because of the number of religious revivals (including Joseph Smith's discovery of the Book of Mormon) that had swept through it. Thence spiritualism, with its attendant and democratic culture of mediumship and the primacy of women, spread like wildfire, first across America (where, by 1850, it could count over two million adherents), and then into Britain and continental Europe. However, there was a difference between Anglo-Saxon "spiritualism" and Continental "spiritism." The Anglo-Saxon variant was concerned mostly with the "spirits of the dead," whereas spiritism, which began in France, under the aegis of Allan Kardec, and moved across into Germany and Austria, became something akin to a "religion of the spirits." (As a kind of animism, it has its major center now in Brazil.) It was furthermore resolutely reincarnationist and, though universalist and even "Druid" in its origins, it was resolutely Christian in its moral and ethical fervor. But it had no method. Mme. Blavatsky's great contribution was both to link it to the perennial and esoteric wisdom traditions of the world and to incorporate into its program a method (meditation, ritual, and astral travel) whereby one could confirm its teachings for oneself. Steiner's perhaps even greater contribution was to remove the dust of the past and Blavatsky's prejudices and to place both method and teachings squarely in the evolutionary development of human consciousness.

It is important to remember, however, that Steiner did this as a Theosophist, within Theosophy. Anthroposophy, which he taught from the beginning, began as, and was for the first ten years of his public (and private) esoteric work, explicitly his contribution to Theosophy. On Steiner's part, this was a conscious deed, a historical decision freely made out of his own understanding of the spiritual world, given as a gift to the movement and impulse that he recognized as carrying the spiritual mandate of our time. During this period (1902"“13), he created an independent body of teaching based on his own spiritual research and written and spoken out of his own experience. But he always did so within the framework and context of the Theosophical movement, whose world-historical mission he understood directly from the spiritual world.

The emergence of Anthroposophy as a separate teaching — its radical separation from Theosophy enforced and rendered irrevocable by the momentous barrier placed around Central Europe by the First World War — came only as a final and humble submission to world destiny. The earthly circumstances of this separation were, of course, many and complex. The precipitating event — whether or not the young Krishnamurti was the reincarnation of the Christ, the World Teacher; indeed, whether or not there could be a reincarnation of the Christ, which Steiner denied — was embedded within an extended, long-standing web of intricate and duplicitous personal and political struggle.

Steiner resisted the inevitable as long as he could. He had honestly placed himself at the service of Theosophy — as late as 1907 he translated Blavatsky's Key to Theosophy — but in 1913 he realized that he had no choice but to place himself at the service of an Anthroposophy no longer connected to Theosophy. It was a costly decision, both in personal and cultural evolutionary terms. I am sure, however, that he made his peace with Mme. Blavatsky and that on May 8, her death day, while no longer giving White Lotus Day lectures, he continued to acknowledge her contribution, to express his gratitude, and seek her counsel.

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Christopher Bamford is editor-in-chief of Steiner Books and Lindisfarne Books and senior editor of Parabola. His works include The Voice of the Eagle: The Heart of Celtic Christianity (Lindisfarne) and An Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West (Codhill Press). He is also coauthor of Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology (Lindisfarne).

This article is adapted from Mr. Bamford's introduction to Spiritualism, Mme. Blavatsky, and Theosophy: An Eyewitness View of Occult History, a collection of Rudolf Steiner's lectures published by the Anthroposophic Press (today called Steiner Books) in 2001. Reproduced with permission.

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