Yogis Without Borders 71
realms. It should be noted that despite her appeals to the mysteries of the Orient,
Blavatsky did not romanticize its actual inhabitants. On the subject of Yogis, she
had the following to say:
A Yogi in India is a very elastic word. It now serves generally to designate a
very dirty, dung- covered and naked individual, who never cuts nor combs
his hair, covers himself from forehead to heels with wet ashes, performs
Pranayam, without realizing its true meaning, and lives upon alms. It is
only occasionally that the name is applied to one who is worthy of the
appellation.^37The true Yogi, according to Blavatsky, was one who had achieved the original
meaning of the term’s etymolog y and, having renounced the transient pleasures
of the world, had joined his soul with the great “Universal Soul.” Under such
circumstances, the Yogi could be considered identical to the Mahatma. However,
not all Mahatmas were Yogis. Indeed, not all Mahatmas were Indian. Blavatsky’s
involvement with Indian thought grew through the course of her work, but her
first Theosophical publication, Isis Unveiled (1877), relied much more heavily on
Western esotericism and the work of such contemporary mystics as the French
occultist Eliphas Levi (1810– 1875), incorporating only fragments of Indian bor-
rowings. Even as time went on, though Blavatsky missed no opportunity to invoke
the spiritual authority of India, she and her associates were careful to maintain
that their society was interested in propagating a universal truth rather than a
sectarian religion. Indeed, Olcott maintains that this commitment to objectiv-
ity was responsible for the Theosophists’ rocky three- year association and subse-
quent rupture with the neo- Hindu reform movement, the Ārya Samāj.
The mission statement of the Theosophical Society, as articulated by Olcott,
was to offer an alternative to both “theological superstition” and “tame subservi-
ence to the arrogance of science.”^38 Blavatsky herself was occasionally quite hostile
to contemporary science, though this was due less to a fundamental disagreement
with its claims than to her rejection of the materialistic reductionism that often
accompanied these claims. For Blavatsky, as for many metaphysical thinkers of
her time, science was only beginning to glean the universal truths that esoteric
philosophies had uncovered long ago. Thus, while she was suspicious of the
authenticity of India’s vast population of Yogis, she did not dispute the reality of
the phenomena they were reputed to manifest. On this account, her reasoning
appealed in no small part to scientific thought, as she wrote:
Until gravitation is understood to be simply magnetic attraction and repul-
sion, and the part played by magnetism itself in the endless correlations