Yogis Without Borders 75
is actually more indebted to Theosophical metaphysics than to any strictly Neo-
Vedāntin elaboration.
Indeed, from a semantic standpoint, “occultism” may be the wrong term
for Vivekananda’s ideolog y. He goes so far as to attribute the degeneration of
yoga— “one of the grandest of sciences”— to a progressive occultization, claim-
ing that “Mystery- mongering weakens the human brain... . Thus Yoga fell into
the hands of a few persons who made it a secret, instead of letting the full blaze
of daylight and reason fall upon it. They did so that they might have the powers
to themselves.”^46 In Vivekananda’s view, occultism leads directly to superstition,
perversion of the truth, and above all denigration of India’s spiritual capital. It is
perhaps in connection with this reasoning that the influence of Theosophy on
Vivekananda’s work has been largely overlooked.
By the time that Vivekananda became a major player on the international
scene, Blavatsky had passed on and Annie Besant, not Madame Blavatsky and
her phenomena, had become the effective face of Theosophy. Due to a potent
mix of nationalistic sentiment and no small amount of bad blood, stemming
from the cold treatment that he had received from Theosophy’s representatives at
the World Parliament of Religions in 1893 when he refused to join their Society,
Vivekananda was famously unaffectionate toward Theosophy. He maintained:
This Indian grafting of American Spiritualism— with only a few Sanskrit
words taking the place of spiritualistic jargon— Mahâtmâ missiles tak-
ing the place of ghostly raps and taps, and Mahatmic inspiration that of
obsession by ghosts... . the Hindus have enough of religious teaching and
teachers amidst themselves even in this Kali Yuga, and they do not stand
in need of dead ghosts of Russians and Americans.
...
The importation in the case of religion should be mostly on the side
of the West, we are sure, and our work has been all along in that line.
The only help the religion of the Hindus got from the Theosophists in
the West was not a ready field, but years of uphill work, necessitated by
Theosophical sleight- of- hand methods. The writer ought to have known
that the Theosophists wanted to crawl into the heart of Western Society,
catching on to the skirts of scholars like Max Müller and poets like Edwin
Arnold, all the same denouncing these very men and posing as the only
receptacles of universal wisdom. And one heaves a sigh of relief that this
wonderful wisdom is kept a secret. Indian thought, charlatanry, and
mango- growing fakirism had all become identified in the minds of edu-
cated people in the West, and this was all the help rendered to Hindu reli-
gion by the Theosophists.^47