Blavatsky the Satanist: Luciferianism in Theosophy, and its Feminist Implications

Abstract

H. P. Blavatsky’s influential The Secret Doctrine (1888), one of the foundation texts of Theosophy, contains chapters propagating an unembarrassed Satanism. Theosophical sympathy for the Devil also extended to the name of their journal Lucifer, and discussions conducted in it. To Blavatsky, Satan is a cultural hero akin to Pro- metheus. According to her reinterpretation of the Christian myth of the Fall in Genesis 3, Satan in the shape of the serpent brings gnosis and liberates mankind. The present article situates these ideas in a wider nineteenth-century context, where some poets and socialist thinkers held similar ideas and a counter-hegemonic reading of the Fall had far-reaching feminist implications. Additionally, influences on Blavatsky from French occultism and research on Gnosticism are discussed, and the instrumental value of Satanist shock tactics is con- sidered. The article concludes that esoteric ideas cannot be viewed in isolation from politics and the world at large. Rather, they should be analyzed both as part of a religious cosmology and as having strategic polemical and didactic functions related to political debates, or, at the very least, carrying potential entailments for the latter.Keywords: Theosophy, Blavatsky, Satanism, Feminism, Socialism, Romanticism.

Christus verus Luciferus, Demon est Deus Inversus

“…Siitoin considered theosophy as a form of Satanism (seeNordling & Koskela 2006, 192). This conception is in line with Blavatsky's theosophical sympathy towards Lucifer(Faxneld 2012).…”

Secularizing Demons: Fundamentalist Navigations in Religion and Secularity

“…Evolutionary ideas were highly influential in the development of the nineteenth‐century occulture from which the forebears of New Age spirituality arose, notably the Theosophical Society, which repudiated “exoteric” Darwinian evolution but formed its own schema based on ideas of the spiritual evolution of the cosmos. Furthermore, as Per Faxneld explores, while Theosophy's core texts rejected ideas of Satan as a really existing entity, they saw the Fall as a positive event that set evolution in motion by “breaking free from stasis, disrupting equilibrium by eating the forbidden fruit” (, 216).…”

“…This paradigm was not widespread, but was taken up by several occultural and political milieu, from Theosophy to socialism and women's liberation (Faxneld , ). For the milieu, however, the most relevant form of symbolic Satanism is its usage (occasional and ironic) by atheist humanists and transhumanists.…”