The Limits of Text and Tradition: Theosophy, Translation, and Transnational Vedanta

What is it about?

This paper explores how Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society and its key ideologue, positioned herself not only as an exponent of a universal wisdom tradition but, importantly, as a translator--in both literal and idiomatic ways. Grounding her articulation of Theosophical teachings in a mysterious source text, purportedly written in a sacerdotal language known as the Senzar, Blavatsky presented herself as its translator, deftly maneuvering between competing philosophies of language and knowledge paradigms, from philology to occultism. This allowed her to frame Theosophy as both continuous with Vedāntic and Buddhist thought and as simultaneously superseding them, thus effectively articulating a new—universal—teaching. Utilizing translation theory as an analytical and hermeneutical lens, this paper examines some of Blavatsky’s more notable discursive mechanics and their textual afterlives, tracing the tensions between authorship and authority, tradition and innovation, the particular and the universal. It proposes that attending to such translational practices (or claims thereof) points to broader questions of meaning-making and commensurability implicated in any project of articulating a tradition across linguistic, cultural, temporal and geographical spaces—as well as its limits and challenges.

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Photo by Thomas Kelley on Unsplash

Photo by Thomas Kelley on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Late 19th and early 20th century intellectual developments have seeded global movements of transnational spirituality and contributed greatly to the emergence of worldwide, transcultural universalist thinking. This paper contributes to ongoing scholarship in this area, and in particular, it compels us to think about how ideas of the global/ universal are constructed, vis a vis the particular, specific, and localized—a process that has direct and persisting implications for religious, national, and political discourses today.