Historia Hysteria
Written: Nov 06 '99 (Updated Jun 23 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Detailed, solidly researched, dead-on - and incredibly witty
Cons: Well, it does sting the New Agers into incoherent fury (if that's a problem)
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| mshawpyle's Full Review: Madame Blavatsky's Baboon : A History of the Mysti... |
As GK Chesterton noted, when people stop believing in God, it's not that they then believe in nothing, but that they will believe in anything.
The riotously funny story of the Barnum approach to the soul is told admirably in Washington's Mme Blavatsky's Baboon. (I know, I know: I, like Washington, will catch unmitigated Hades for this from the granola people, the flakes and nuts who so earnestly believe in watered-down Eastern mysticism, Hollywood Buddhism, Geller, UFOs, pyramid power, and the whole New Age shower of inanity.) Let the jeers from the perfervid seekers of ecstasy begin; it does not change the solidly established facts recounted in this book.
The fact is, any historian who has looked at the social and political ferment of the period before the Great War and at the inter-war years realizes the force of the whole shambling lurch towards these, um, 'varieties of religious experience' (and intellectual manure). Yeats became an Irish Nationalist in part because he was first sodden in the occult and the pagan Celtic mist (I prefer Bushmill's, myself). The aspirations of the Indian National Congress found support among the British by way of Mme Blavatsky's flying (or levitating) theosophomoric circus at Adyar: while Lutyens was redesigning Delhi and Simla in a style befitting the imperium of the Raj, his wife was dropping British-made ectoplasm for mysterious Himalayan spiritual masters. Bored curate's wives and bored curates besotted with boys and vestments, inferior Corvos, bought into it wholesale.
While Washington does not stress the connection, he does set out, with impeccable scholarship and factual detail, and in a tone as dry as very superior sherry, how the old abolitionists, the radical free-thinkers, the suffragettes, the earliest anti-imperialists, and every sort and condition of leftist drew ever closer to the rather obvious frauds of such Sludge-the-Mediums as Helena Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, the Fox Sisters, Joseph Smith and his Moronic angel with the gold tablets of a new scripture....
The frauds and the fraudsters (and how they could have taken in a four year old eludes me) are nailed, the magnificent reprobates and Wily Wilbys whom Dickens and Damon Runyon alike would have loved are sharply drawn, and the (actually quite serious) impact of this intellectual detritus upon social, political, and even military history is subtly detailed. (Who after all will forget the gentle astrologer's pupil and committed vegetarian and anti-smoker, who was into 'channeling' even in the Roaring '20s, complaining of his dear friend Hermann's wicked hunting of defenseless animals? I refer of course to the man Mohandas K. Gandhi predicted would be 'remembered by future generations of Germans as a pandit - a sage - as a matchless organizer and much more', one Adolf Hitler.)
This is an intellectually rigorous, hysterically funny, firmly factual look at a phenomenon at once sad and side-splitting - and surprisingly important in its effects. It is also a stylistic and intellectual tour de force. I have been, regularly, re-reading it and laughing until tears came for years now.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
mshawpyle
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Member: Markham Shaw Pyle, JD
Location: Houston, Texas
Reviews written: 539
Trusted by: 391 members
About Me:
Historian, baseballing bon vivant, Boll Weevil, W&L man; and the Walter Mitty of field sports
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