24. Neo-Vedanta

Universal Religion

Following the chronology of the Surya Siddhanta, Blavatsky believed the current age of the Kali Yuga, which she described as the last of the ages into which the evolutionary period of man had been divided, began in 3,102 BC, and the first cycle of 5,000 years was to end between the years 1897 and 1898.[1] Therefore, she wrote:

 

The world moves in cycles, which proceed under the impetus of two mutually antagonistic and destroying Forces, the one striving to move Humanity onward, toward Spirit, the other forcing Mankind to gravitate downward, into the very abysses of matter. It remains with men to help either the one or the other. Thus, also, it is our present task, as Theosophists, to help in one or the other direction. We are in the very midst of the Egyptian darkness of Kali-yuga, the “Black Age,” the first 5,000 years of which, its dreary first cycle, is preparing to close on the world between 1897 and 1898. Unless we succeed in placing the T.S. [Theosophical Society] before this date on the safe side of the spiritual current, it will be swept away irretrievably into the Deep called “Failure,” and the cold waves of oblivion will close over its doomed head. Thus will have ingloriously perished the only association whose aims, rules and original purposes answer in every particular and detail--if strictly carried out--to the innermost, fundamental thought of every great Adept Reformer, the beautiful dream of a UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD OF MAN.[2]

 

While the spiritual teachings of India were widely hailed among Western free-thinkers as the fount of the world’s religious traditions, the one channel which with the most pervasive and long-lasting impact in the West—exemplified by the widespread popularity of Yoga—is not really an India tradition at all, but trend referred to as Neo-Hinduism or Neo-Vedanta. More correctly, it was an attempt to adapt Indian religious teachings to the Christian precepts of Transcendentalist Unitarianism, and to satanize them of their more scandalous aspects, particularly the carnal and vile elements of the Left-Hand Tantra. Ultimately, while Neo-Vedanta was exploited to create the perception that the core of Hinduism was a primordial example of the doctrine of universalism— the idea that all religions are expressions of the same truth, as it came to be perceived in the West, thus serving the support the One-World Religion agenda—it was a deliberate modification of Hinduism manufactured by Indian Freemasons to pass off their religion as advancing the same fundamental principles as Freemasonry. Among the main proponents of such modern interpretations of Hinduism were the Brahmo Samaj movement, Sami Vivekananda (1863 – 1902), and Sri Aurobindo (1872 – 1950), who to some extent also contributed to the emergence of Neo-Hindu movements in the West.

The term “Neo-Vedanta” was coined by German Indologist Paul Hacker (1913 – 1979), who believed that Hinduism began in the 1870s.[3] The central challenge faced by Indian Masons to their acceptance into the lodges was the perception that Hinduism was fundamentally polytheistic.[4] As noted by G.L. Beck, the “Hindus were quick to address the polytheism issue by reaffirming the essentially ‘monotheistic’ nature of Vedic religion.”[5] Hinduism is an umbrella term for a range of Indian religious and spiritual traditions, as first expounded in the Vedas. The major Hindu scriptures are the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas, the Mahabharata, including the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayana, and the Agamas. The six Astika schools of Hindu philosophy that recognize the authority of the Vedas are: Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Nimamsa, and Vedanta. Neo-Vedanta aims to present Hinduism as a “homogenized ideal of Hinduism,”[6] with Advaita Vedanta as its central doctrine.[7] Neo-Vedanta is what Wendy Doniger has called the “Brahmin imaginary,” which, as Gerald James Larson explains, is:

 

…an imagined “integral unity” that was probably little more than an “imagined” view of the religious life that pertained only to a cultural elite and that empirically speaking had very little reality “on the ground,” as it were, throughout the centuries of cultural development in the South Asian region.[8]

 

As members of the fraternity, Freemasons are called upon to be the builders of Universal Religion.[9] According to Albert Pike, “Pike says, “Masonry propagates no creed except its own most simple and sublime one; that universal religion, taught by Nature and Reason. Its Lodges are neither Jewish, Moslem, nor Christian Temples. It reiterates the precepts of morality of all religions.”[10] The pretext of Freemasonry, which began as an ostensibly Christian organization, as providing a medium through which men could transcend their own creeds and join in a single “Universal Brotherhood,” was stipulated in 1723, in James Anderson Constitutions, the first Charge, “Concerning God and Religion,” at first understood to refer only to Christianity. From the 1730s, the rituals of the order were reformed, to remove their explicitly Christian character. The First Charge in Anderson’s Constitutions was adapted in the second edition of 1738 and qualified the true religion as the Noachide Laws, a set of universal moral laws which, according to the Talmud, were given by God as a covenant with Noah and with the “sons of Noah”—that is, all of humanity:

 

A Mason is oblig’d, by his Tenure, to obey the moral Law, as a true Noachida; and if he rightly understands the Art, he will never be a stupid Atheist, nor an irreligious Libertine. But though in ancient Times Masons were charg’d in every Country to be of the Religion of that Country or Nation, whatever it was, yet ‘tis now thought more expedient only to oblige them to that Religion in which all Men agree, leaving their particular Opinions to themselves; that is, to be good Men and true, or Men of Honour and Honesty, by what- ever Denominations or Persuasions they may be distinguish’d; whereby Masonry becomes the Center of Union, and the Means of conciliating true Friendship among Persons that must have remain’d at a perpetual Distance.[11]

 

In Masonic ritual, explains Fabio Venzi—in an article for the prestigious Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, published by the Quatuor Coronati Lodge, a Masonic Lodge in London dedicated to Masonic research founded by members of the Golden Dawn—the doctrine of universalism in Freemasonry is symbolically represented as the “Point within a Circle.” As Venzi explains, also quoting from Guénon:

 

It is consequently from the centre that religions originate and ultimately flow towards the centre, and is in the centre alone that the unification of the primordial tradition and all the associated historic manifestations take place, which, whilst remaining different and separately distinct, all reveal the essence of a divine and indivisible truth as: “The centre is, above all, the origin, the point of departure of all things; it is the principle point, without form and without dimensions, therefore indivisible, and thus the only image that can be given of primordial unity. From it, by its radiation, all things are produced, just as unity produces all numbers without its essence being modified for affected whatsoever.”[12]

 

By the 1840s, through the actions of a rather number of highly influential Freemasons, pressure began to mount for the brotherhood to admit not only more Muslims, but also members of non-Abrahamic faiths.[13] In 1842, the English Grand Master, the Duke of Sussex, ruled:

 

“that provided a Man believe in the existence of the… Architect of the Universe, in fraternity, and extends that belief likewise to a state of Rewards and Punishments hereafter, such a person is fully competent to be received as a Brother.” He also concluded that Freemasonry could help “impress Brotherly and friendly feelings between Europeans and enlightened Hindoos.”[14]

 

The British had adopted a policy, known famously as Macaulayism, of educating an Indian elite in  Western ideals with the intention of bringing them in line with British colonial objectives.[15] Macaulayism is derived from British politician Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800 – 1859), who served on the Governor-General’s Council and was instrumental in making English the medium of instruction for higher education in India. Macaulay advocated shutting down of all colleges where only eastern philosophy and subjects were taught, and introducing Indians to European ideas from the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.[16] Macaulay held Western culture in high esteem, and was dismissive of Indian culture, once claiming “A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”[17] Macaulay saw his undertaking as a “civilizing mission”:

 

We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.[18]

 

As explained by Deschamps, “In the last decades of the 19th century, the Masonic rhetoric of the universal brotherhood of man was systematically used in public displays and worked as some kind of a mantra, which echoed across the Indian Empire.”[19] In 1887, a Masonic periodical pointed out that “Freemasonry [was] a potent instrument for the preservation and propagation of loyalty to the Throne amongst all castes, creeds and classes.”[20] As early as 1733, the Grand Lodge of England had written to the Provincial Grand Lodge of Bengal asking it “to discover in these parts the remains of old Masonry and transmit them to us.”[21] Anderson’s Constitutions mentioned the Temple of Solomon and India: “Nay, even in INDIA, where the Correspondence was open, we may conclude the same.”[22] In 1845, General Sir Charles James Napier, (1782 – 1853), a major general of the Bombay Army, during which period he led the British military conquest of Sindh, who was a Mason himself, delivered a speech in which he traced the origins of Freemasonry back to a Brahmin who had been initiated to the knowledge of the Druses, a faith developed from Ismailism.[23]

Two years later, when visiting lodge St. Andrew in the East No. 67 in Pune, James Burnes, the Provincial Grand Master of Western India insisted that: “No one who has studied history can doubt its connection, or rather identity, with the ancient mysteries of the Hindoos and Egyptians, and others that emanated from them.”[24] James’ brother was Alexander Burnes, the rival in Kabul of Josiah Harlan, “Prince of Ghor,” the “Man Who Would be King.” Some Indian Freemasons actually reinvested the myth of a common Masonic legacy for their own purposes. Darasha Chichgur, a member of Bombay lodge Rising Star of Western India No. 342, in speech was given to the Grand Lodge of Scotland in Edinburgh, asserted, “It is true that Masonry [has] its origin in the East, but owing to the decay and downfall of civilization, and consequent spread of the spirit of religious intolerance, it left its shores and entered a far more congenial sphere in the West.”[25]

 

Brahmo Samaj 

The term “neo-Vedanta” was used by Christian missionaries as well as Hindu traditionalists to criticize the emerging ideas of the Brahmo Samaj.[26] With Dwarkanath Tagore (1794 – 1846), Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1772 – 1833) was one of the founders of the Brahmo Sabha (“One God Society”) in 1828, the precursor of the Brahmo Samaj, a monotheistic movement which reformed social Hinduism.[27] Brahmo Sabha was one of the most influential religious movements in India.[28] Roy is considered the “Father of the Indian Renaissance,” a cultural, social, intellectual, and artistic movement that took place in the Bengal region of the British Raj, from the late eighteen century to the early twentieth century, which saw the radical transformation of Indian society, and its ideas have been attributed to the rise of Indian anticolonialist and nationalist thought and activity of the period.[29] In 1805, Roy began a nine-year term of employment for the British East India Company.[30] Roy studied Western languages and literature, which eventually culminated in a working knowledge of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, which he studied during a six-month period under Jewish teacher.[31] In 1817, the urban elite led by Roy cofounded the Hindu or Presidency College in Kolkata, now known as the Presidency University, the only European-style institution of higher learning in Asia at the time, and widely regarded as one of the oldest and most prestigious places of higher education in India.[32]

Among Hindus as well as Westerners, indicated by Alan D. Hodder, Roy is hailed as the founder of the Hindu Renaissance and the father of modern India.[33] One London publication, the Christian Observer, had picked up his story as early as 1816. Two years later the Monthly Repository and the Christian Reformer, both publications of the English Unitarian establishment, began to champion Roy’s cause in the religious press.[34] Even in Boston readers would have been introduced to his writings and activities as early as 1817 when the Christian Disciple, after 1824 retitled the Christian Examiner, published its “Religious Intelligence” column an article headed “A Remarkable Hindoo Reformer.” And in March of the following year, another Boston publication, the North American Review, published an eight-page piece on the “Theology of the Hindoos, as taught by Ram Mohun Roy,” citing several passages of Roy’s 1816 translations of the Kena and Isha Upanishads.[35]

In 1820, Roy published The Precepts of Jesus, the Guide to Peace and Happiness, Extracted from the Books of the New Testament Ascribed to the Four Evangelists. His hope is that “this simple code of religion," purified of its doctrinal and miraculous implications, will thereby achieve for his own people and European free-thinkers alike the uplifting effect intended for it.”[36] The publication caused an eruption of criticism from the Baptist missionaries in India. News of the controversy attracted the attracted the attention of Unitarians in Britain and the United States, who saw Roy’s ideas reflected in their own. Roy’s story created a sensation in the Unitarian publications in the United States when, in 1822, William Adam, a Baptist missionary who had been converted to Unitarianism under Roy’s influence. In September 1821, together with Roy and a coalition of Scottish and Indian sympathizers, Adam founded the Calcutta Unitarian Committee.[37]

November 1921, Roy was introduced to many readers in Boston on the Christian Register’s front page. Quoting a correspondent from Calcutta, whose letter had appeared earlier in the Monthly Repository, the Register shared praises for Roy:

 

We have in Calcutt aa very learned native, a Hindoo of a very large fortune, and a Brahmin, who has changed his opinions, and is now what we should call a Free-thinker. I know not exactly what his religious opinions are, but the good people of Calcutta call him a Deist.

He is one of the first scholars in India, Europeans not excepted, quite a critic in the dead European languages, and is altogether one of the first men of the age… This Brahmin's name is Rammohan Roy.[38]

 

In Boston the result of all this coverage was the formation of the Society for the Promotion of Christianity in India by such Unitarian leaders as William Ellery Channing (1780 – 1842), Joseph Tuckerman (1778 – 1840), Henry Ware (1764 – 1845), and Andrews Norton (1786 – 1853).[39] Channing was the foremost Unitarian preacher in the United States at the time and, along with Norton, one of Unitarianism’s leading theologians. Ware was a preacher and theologian influential in the formation of Unitarianism and the American Unitarian Association, formed by associated Unitarian congregations in 1825, where Tuckerman was as appointed minister at large, and which published the Christian Register. In 1826, following the example of the British Unitarian Committee, the American association voted to committing not more than $600 annually over a period of ten years to the efforts of William Adam and his sympathizers.[40] Roy and the Brahmin leadership of the Unitarian movement conceived a new vehicle for the pursuit of their reformist objectives. With Adam’s support, they formed a Hindu Unitarian syncretist movement which they called the Brahmo Samaj or Society of God. Under the leadership of Roy and then a succession of charismatic teachers, the Brahmo Samaj became the chief agent in the decades following the nineteenth-century Hindu Renaissance.[41]

In 1830, Roy travelled to England, where he met with William Roscoe, and the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. In England, Roy met with Robert Owen, Lord Brougham and liked J.G. Spurzheim.[42] Spurzheim (1776 – 1832) was a German physician who became one of the chief proponents of phrenology, a pseudoscience that involves the measurement of bumps on the skull to predict mental traits. Robert Owen (1771 – 1858) was a Welsh textile manufacturer, and a founder of utopian socialism and the co-operative movement. In 1817, Owen caused enormous controversy when he publicly claimed that all religions were false.

In 1824, Owen  moved to America and put most of his fortune in an experimental socialistic community at which he named New Harmony in Indiana, as a preliminary for his utopian society. Owen purchased the community from the Harmony Society, founded by Johann Georg Rapp (1757 – 1847), who was inspired by the philosophies of Jakob Böhme, Jakob Spener, and Swedenborg, among others.[43] In later years, although no longer officially a functioning group, many of the Philadelphian Society’s views and writings remained influential among certain groups of Behmenists, Pietists, and Christian mystics such as the Society of the Woman in the Wilderness, led by the Rosicrucian Johannes Kelpius, the Ephrata Cloister, and the Harmony Society, among others.[44] Although the project attracted scientists, educators and artists, it lasted about only two years. Other Owenite communities in New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, also failed, and in 1828 Owen returned to London. In 1854, aged 83, Owen converted to spiritualism after a series of sittings with the American medium Maria B. Hayden, who introduced spiritualism to England. Through Hayden, he believed to have made contact with his friends Jefferson, Franklin, Shelley, and with the Duke of Kent, the father of Queen Victoria.[45] Although Prince Albert had already reprimanded Owen for pestering the Victoria with letters, he could not help himself from writing to her again about these communications.[46]

Lord Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux (1778 – 1868), formerly editor of the Edinburgh Review, was worker for Liberal causes and Lord Chancellor of England. Sir David Brewster (1781 – 1868), who collaborated in Brougham’s educational schemes, was the author of Brewster’s Letters on Natural Magic (1832), which showed how magic and psychic phenomena are all explicable by natural causes.[47] Early in 1853, Christopher Cooke, a friend of Richard James Morrison, also known as Zadkiel, a member of the Orphic Circle, tried to convince Edward Bulwer-Lytton to add his name to a petition for the construction of a large telescope near the Crystal Palace, which Brougham’s supported.[48]

 

Unitarianism

In London, Roy was publicly received at the Annual meeting of the Unitarians of England. He was also present at the coronation of George IV and was personally presented to the king. He visited France towards the end of 1832 where he dined several times with the French king, Louis Philippe I, the eldest son of Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, later known as Philippe Égalité, member of the Illuminati and friend of Jacob Falk. Throughout Roy’s three-year visit to England, he remained in close personal contact with the families of such Unitarian leaders as Lant Carpenter (1780 – 1840), William Johnson Fox (1786 – 1864), and J.B. Estlin (1785 – 1855). In the summer of 1833, Joseph Tuckerman was also in England where he met with Roy, and wrote home to Channing eulogizing Roy as a true exemplar of Christian teachings.[49] Roy visited Bristol in 1833 at the invitation of Carpenter’s daughter, Mary Carpenter (1807 – 1877) and other Unitarians.[50] Mary Carpenter was lifelong friends with Transcendentalist Unitarian James Martineau (1805 – 1900), the pioneer of English liberal Unitarianism, and who corresponded with Alfred, Lord Tennyson.[51]

“All tends to the mysterious East,” proclaimed Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was deeply inspired by Roy.[52] Emerson’s aunt, Mary Moody Emerson (1774 – 1863), who is regarded as his “earliest and best teacher,” wrote to him in 1822 after she met Roy, who had uncovered similarities between the “Vedas and Western Unitarianism” that received attention from Boston newspapers.[53] In 1821, Emerson had been conducting research the previous year for his poem on “Indian Superstition,” resorting to the growing body of literature on India and the Orient available at that time in Boston, as well as some of the first published works of Sir William Jones.[54] Waldo’s father, William Emerson (1769 – 1811), a Unitarian minister, pastor to Boston’s First Church and founder of its Philosophical Society, Anthology Club, and Boston Athenaeum, was himself interested in the Orient, and in the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review, which he edited until his death, he had published items on India as early as 1803.[55] In a letter to Max Müller in 1873, Emerson dated the start of his Indian research to his reading in 1831 of a sketch of the Bhagavad Gita in the Cours de philosophie by Victor Cousin (1792 – 1867).[56] Emerson’s so admired Roy that he numbered him in his list of Representative Men. His comment suggests that what Roy held in common with these distinguished list was his idealism: “It is a faithful saying worthy of all acceptation that a reasoning Man conscious of his powers and duties annihilates all distinction of circumstances.”[57]

As Julian Strube indicated, “Brahmos, Unitarians, and Transcendentalists, as diverse as their adherents may have been, generally shared a belief in progress, a synthesis of science and religion, social reform, and eventually the creation of a universal religion of mankind.”[58] As Emerson wrote:

 

In all nations there are minds which incline to dwell in the conception of fundamental Unity…This tendency finds its highest expression in the religious writings of the East, and chiefly in the Indian Scriptures, in the Vedas, the Bhagavat Geeta, and the Vishnu Purana. Those writings contain little else than this idea, and they rise to pure and sublime strains in celebrating it.[59]

 

“If Roy’s Brahmo Samaj was strongly influenced by Unitarianism,” explains Elizabeth De Michelis, “so was Emerson’s Transcendentalism strongly influenced by Roy’s Neo-Vedanta.”[60] Transcendentalism was also directly influenced by Indian religions. In 1844, the first English translation of the Lotus Sutra was included in The Dial, a publication of the New England Transcendentalists, translated from French by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. In Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote of the Transcendentalists’ debt to Indian religions directly:

 

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma, and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water-jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.[61]

 

Dwarkanath Tagore was a western-educated Bengali Brahmin and one of India’s first industrialists. The Tagore family has been one of the leading families of Zamindars, a class equivalent to lords and barons, of Kolkata, who were regarded as one of the key influencers during the Bengali Renaissance. From 1784 to 1828, only Europeans were elected members of the Society. In 1829, at the initiative of its secretary H.H. Wilson (1786 – 1860), a number of Indians were elected members, including Dwarkanath Tagore. In 1829, he founded Union Bank in Calcutta. In 1834, he helped found the Carr, Tagore and Company, the first equal partnership between European and Indian businessmen and the initiator of the managing agency system in India. The company was  engaged in shipping opium to China.[62] By 1840, he had concerns in shipping, export, zamindari and real estates, insurance, banking, a coal mine and indigo.[63] Tagore had mortgaged a part of his Zamindari to Rani Rashmoni for his passage to England.[64] He died in London, at the peak of his fortune.[65]

Dwarkanath’s prestige grew with his entertainments which he hosted at Belgatchia, his villa outside Calcutta, designed by an English architect in an entirely European style. The villa was visited several times by English poet and novelist Emily Eden (1797 – 1869) and her brother, the Governor-General of India, George Eden, 1st Earl of Auckland (1784 – 1849).[66] In Rome, during his Grand Tour through Europe, Dwarkanath was presented to the Pope. In London, he was treated almost as royalty, given the unofficial title of “Prince.” He met the Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, and was presented to Queen Victoria. At her invitation, the first of many, he attended a grand review of the troops, where he was seated with her, her husband Prince Albert, the duke of Wellington and other members of the aristocracy. Dwarkanath also met radicals and social reformers, one of whom, the abolitionist George Thompson (1804 – 1878), agreed to visit him in Calcutta.[67]

In 1842, Dwarkanath Tagore visited Lady Blessington’s Gore House, where Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Benjamin Disraeli were conducting occult experiments.[68] Dwarkanath and his family were interested in Mesmerism, and all signed the petition to Lord Dalhousie, Scottish Grand Master and Governor-General of India, to support the work of James Esdaile (1808 – 1859), an Edinburgh trained Scottish surgeon, who served for twenty years with the East India Company, at his Mesmeric Hospital in Calcutta. Through the use of Jhar-Phoonk—a form of “white magic” or folk treatment derived from an Islamic exorcism ritual known as Ruqyah, Esdaile reportedly performed “pain-free” major surgery on more than 300 cases, including amputations, removal of cataracts, removal of massive tumors, firstly at Hooghly, and, later at Calcutta.[69]

It was Count D’Orsay who recommended Dwarkanath to Bulwer-Lytton’s friend Charles Dickens.[70] Dickens called on him in 1842 shortly before he sailed to Calcutta. In 1845/6, they met again several times. Dwarkanath held a dinner, attended by Dickens, D’Orsay, William Thackeray, Douglas Jerrold, Mark Lemon and Henry Mayhew.[71] Years later, long after Dwarkanath’s death, Dickens noted in All the Year Round that Dwarkanath Tagore “was called ‘the Oriental Croesus,’ and was well known in England.”[72] In 1861, Dwarkanath’s son Debendranath Tagore (1817 –  1905) broke with Hindu tradition by marrying off his second daughter using a Brahmo ceremony for the first time. A report appeared in Britain in Dickens’ magazine All the Year Round,  titled “A Curious Marriage Ceremony,” noted that the Brahmo wedding

 

…retained much of its Hindoo character; we think, wisely, because if it were made too European, there would be no possibility of rendering the improvement popular, and a powerful opposition would be aroused among the gentle sex.[73]

 

Having studied the Quran, the Vedas and the Upanishads, Roy’s beliefs were derived from a combination of monastic elements of Hinduism, Islam, eighteenth-century Deism, Unitarianism, and Freemasonry.[74] In 1804, influenced by the Islamic idea of the absolute unity of god, he published a tract in Persian, A Gift to Monotheists. He began issuing critiques of the polytheism of Hinduism and searching Hindu texts for traces of monotheism, in an attempt to prove that textual reference to idolatry were merely allegorical, while references to Supreme Deity were the essential basis of Hinduism.[75] Roy, who was heavily indebted to Unitarianism, adopted a universalist perspective, according to which all the religions of the world shared core founded in pure reason. However, he also drew on themes found in Western Indology to argue that Vedic Hinduism came nearer to the true universal religion than did Christianity. Roy therefore called on Hindus to reform their religion so as to return to the “pure” Vedanta.[76] While Roy aimed at reforming the Hindu religion through Unitarianism, his successor Debendranath Tagore, the son of Dwarkanath Tagore, in 1850 rejected the infallibility of the Vedas. Tagore tried to retain some Hindu customs, but a series of schisms eventually resulted in the formation of the breakaway Brahmo Samaj in 1878.

 

Neo-Tantra 

Ram Mohan Roy seems to have been responsible for the fabrication of the Mahanirvana Tantra, a major attempt to purify or sanitize the Tantras, and which was to become one of the most popular works among the reformers of nineteenth-century Bengal, and particularly among the early members of the Brahmo Samaj.[77] Unlike her portrayal in other Bengali texts, for her love cremation grounds, human corpses, or severed heads, in Roy’s Mahanirvana Tantra, the goddess  Kali is described as “the ocean of nectar of compassion… whose mercy is without limit,” and the “possessor of beautiful ornaments, adorable as the image of all tenderness, with a tender body.”[78] The infamous five M’s are mentioned only in one chapter of the text, and the controversial fifth “M” is accorded only a single line, where it is specified that maithuna should be performed only with one’s own wife.[79] Vamachara is the tantric term meaning “left-hand path,” used to describe a particular mode of worship or sadhana (spiritual practice), particularly associated with the panchamakara or “Five Ms”: madya (wine), mamsa (meat), matsya (fish), mudra (grain), and maithuna (sexual intercourse).[80]

An important influence on western spirituality was Neo-Vedanta, also called neo-Hinduism, a modern religious movement inspired by the ecstatic visionary experiences of Sri Ramakrishna (1836 – 1886) and his beloved disciple Swami Vivekananda. Ramakrishna was recognized by many as the prophesied Kalki, the tenth and last Avatar of Vishnu, who is expected to be born at the end of the present Kali Yuga, end by destroying the wicked and ushering in the golden age, the Satya Yuga.[81] After having a vision of the Goddess Kali in a dream, the Indian businesswoman Rani Rashmoni (1793 – 1861) founded the now famous Dakshineswar Kali Temple, and appointed Ramakrishna its priest.[82] Although he was a devotee of the goddess Kali, a major goddess in Hinduism, primarily associated with time, death and destruction, Ramakrishna also adhered to various religious practices from the Hindu traditions of Vaishnavism, Tantric Shaktism, and Advaita Vedanta, as well as Christianity and Islam. He advocated the essential unity of religions and proclaimed that world religions are “so many paths to reach one and the same goal.”[83] Ramakrishna described a vision in which a picture of the Madonna and Child became alive, and he had a vision in which Jesus merged with his soul, and realized his identity with Kali, Rama, Hanuman, Radha, Krishna, Brahman, and Mohammed.[84] In 1861, a female ascetic named Bhairavi Brahmani initiated Ramakrishna into Tantra.[85] He later proceeded towards Vamachara.[86]

Vivekananda became the member of a Masonic lodge and of a breakaway faction of the Brahmo Samaj led by Keshub Chandra Sen (1838 – 1884) and Debendranath Tagore.[87] Keshub was deeply influenced by Ramakrishna. Keshub was also briefly appointed as Secretary of the Asiatic Society in 1854. For a short time thereafter Sen was also a clerk in the Bank of Bengal, but resigned his post to devote himself exclusively to literature and philosophy.[88] A very direct influence on Keshub was exerted by the Unitarian missionary Charles Dall, who arrived in India in 1855. It was through Dall’s efforts that thousands of copies of the complete works of Channing, Emerson and Theodore Parker were circulated among Brahmo Samaj.[89] As early as 1858, Keshub was drawing from the writings of Parker and Emerson to prepare his lectures.[90] Max Müller describes the deep impression made by Keshub on the British public during his 1870 visit to Britain: “I have been struck, when lecturing in different places, to find that the mere mention of Keshub Chunder Sen’s name elicited applause for which I was hardly prepared.” Keshub toured and lectured extensively during this visit, and the accounts of his trip clearly show that he was praised by both liberal Christians as well as the Swedenborg Society. His biographer reports that “invitations poured in to preach from Unitarian and Congregationalist pulpits” but as was the case with Roy, Unitarians were the most supportive.[91]

Roy’s friend Mary Carpenter had moved into Red Lodge in Bristol in 1858 and entertained a number of Indian visitors to Britain, including Satyendranath Tagore (1842 – 1923), the son of Debendranath Tagore, who arrived in Britain in 1863, and was the first Indian to join the Indian Civil Service through the competitive ranks.[92] In 1854 the Red Lodge was bought by Lady Byron, using Lord Byron’s endowment and given to Mary Carpenter to use as a school.[93] In 1866, Carpenter visited India where she met Keshub, who asked her to form an organization in Britain to improve communication between British and Indian reformers, which she did in 1870, establishing the National Indian Association, to improve education for Indian women.[94] From 1874 to her death in 1878, Princess Alice, the daughter of Queen Victoria, was President of the association. In 1876, when Ramakrishna met with Keshub at the Kali temple at Dakshineshwar, Keshub had accepted Christianity, and had separated from the Brahmo Samaj. Keshub was attracted to Ramakrishna’s Tantric approach of sublimating the sensual drive for women into a spiritual drive for the Divine Mother. Formerly, Keshub had rejected idolatry, but after coming under Ramakrishna’s influence he again accepted Hindu polytheism and established the Nava Vidhan (“New Dispensation”) religious movement, which was based on Ramakrishna’s principles, the worship of God as Mother, and that all religions are true.[95]

Ultimately, however, indicates De Michelis, Keshub’s universalism was derived from Freemasonry and the rationalism of the Enlightenment in general:

 

What is clear, however, from a relatively superficial study of the sources is that strong undercurrents of Enlightenment universalism and radical philanthropy, also key ingredients of Sen’s religious synthesis, were already well established in Western esoteric discourses by the end of the eighteenth century, when British Orientalism brought its modernizing influence to bear on the Indian subcontinent.[96]

 

Likewise, Vivekananda’s universalism was also derived from Freemasonry. According to Vivekananda, “Three religions now stand in the world which have come down to us from time prehistoric—Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Judaism.”[97] He further stated:

 

I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation.[98]

 

Believing that it would help him later in life, Vivekananda encouraged him to join a Masonic lodge. Vivekananda was initiated on February 19, 1884, into the Anchor and Hope Lodge No. 234, later the Grand Lodge of India. The same lodge included a friend of his father’s, Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee (1844 – 1906), an Indian independence activist and barrister, who would later become secretary of the Indian National Congress (INC).[99] And, as indicated by Venzi, Vivekananda several times employed the analogy of the point in a circle to support his universalist message. For example, in his discourse on the Atman, Vivekananda writes:

 

The Hindu believes that every soul is a circle whose circumference is nowhere, but whose centre is located in the body, and death means the change of this centre from body to body. The soul is not bound by the conditions of matter. In its very essence it is free, unbounded, holy, pure and perfect. But somehow or other it finds itself tied down to matter, and thinks of itself as matter.[100]

 

As noted by Urban, although Vivekananda was the chief disciple of Ramakrishna, who was deeply influenced by the teachings and practices of Tantra, “Yet Vivekananda would reinterpret, transform, and adapt Ramakrishna’s teachings to his own neo-Hindu and nationalist agendas, turning this ecstatic devotee of the violent Tantric goddess Kali into an avatar of highly abstract, philosophical Advaita Vedanta and Hindu nationalism.”[101] It was Vivekananda who coined the term “Hinduism” to describe a faith of diverse and myriad beliefs of Indian tradition. Also a Freemason, Vivekananda was a key figure in the introduction of Indian philosophies of Vedanta and Yoga to the western world. Regarding the reception of Tantra, Geoffrey Samuel writes, in The Origins of Yoga and Tantra, that this period of Hindu modernism saw “a radical reframing of yogic practices away from the Tantric context.”[102] As explained by Hugh Urban in Tantra Sex, Secrecy, Politics, And Power In The Study Of Religion, “If Hinduism and the Indian nation were to be defended as strong, autonomous, and independent of Western control, then the profound stench of Tantra would have to be ‘deodorized,’ as it were—either by rationalization and purification, or by concealment and denial.”[103] As Samuel summarizes:

 

Given the extremely negative views of Tantra and its sexual and magical practices which prevailed in middle-class India in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and still largely prevail today, this was an embarrassing heritage. Much effort was given by people such as Swami Vivekananda into reconstructing yoga, generally in terms of a selective Vedantic reading of Patañjali’s Yogasutra (de Michelis 2004). The effort was largely successful, and many modern Western practitioners of yoga for health and relaxation have little or no knowledge of its original function as a preparation for the internal sexual practices of the Nath tradition.[104]

 

The Western new religious movement influenced by elements of Hindu and Buddhist Tantras, emphasizing the sexual aspects of these ancient traditions, is referred to as Neotrantra. The two most important figures in this process, according to Urban, were Vivekananda and Sir John Woodroffe (1865 – 1936), Supreme Court Judge at Calcutta, who wrote under the pen-name of Arthur Avalon.[105] From 1803 until 1815, Roy served a private clerk at the East India Company’ to Woodroffe’s distant uncle, Thomas Woodroffe.[106] Woodroffe studied Sanskrit and Hindu philosophy and was especially interested in Hindu Tantra. Woodroffe’s The Serpent Power: The Secrets of Tantric and Shaktic Yoga is a source for many modern Western adaptations of Kundalini yoga practice. According to Urban, “Woodroffe was also an apologist, seeming to bend over backward to defend the Tantras against their many critics and to prove that they represent a noble, pure, and ethical philosophical system in basic accord with the Vedas and Vedanta.”[107] As indicted by Kathleen Taylor in her study of Woodroffe, the grail became a symbol of esoteric wisdom for the Theosophists, and “The Arthurian legends are bound up with the story of the Holy Grail and its quest. This was a symbol of esoteric wisdom, especially to Theosophists who appropriated the legend. Anyone who named himself after King Arthur or the mystic isle of Avalon would be thought to be identifying himself with occultism, in Theosophists’ eyes.”[108]

 

Supermind

Another of Max Theon’s disciples was a Mirra Alfassa (1878 – 1973), who was born to a bourgeois Sephardi Jewish family from Turkey, and traveled with Theon to Algeria to practice occultism. After returning to Paris, Alfassa guided a group of spiritual seekers. Her older brother, Mattéo Mathieu Maurice Alfassa, later held numerous French governmental posts in Africa. Alfassa made the acquaintance of Louis Thémanlys who was the head of the Cosmic Movement, the group started by Théon. Alfassa would later associate with Indian yogi Sri Aurobindo, an Indian philosopher and yogi, and become known as The Mother. He joined the Indian movement for independence from British colonial rule, until 1910 was one of its influential leaders, and then became a spiritual reformer, introducing his visions on human progress and spiritual evolution.

Sri Aurobindo’s is an important contributor to the theory of spiritual evolution, where he describes the process of consciousness evolving from matter to the supermind. In addition to Blavatsky, early proponents included Max Theon, Henri Bergson, Rudolf Steiner, Sri Aurobindo, and Alfred North Whitehead. Moina, the sister of the famous French Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941), was married Golden Dawn leader McGreggor Mathers. In Creative Evolution, Bergson put forward an alternate explanation for Darwin’s mechanism of evolution, suggesting that evolution is motivated by an élan vital, a “vital impetus” that can also be understood as humanity’s natural creative impulse. Bergson’s book significantly influenced modernist writers and thinkers such as Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. Bergson married Louise Neuberger, a cousin of Marcel Proust, in 1891, with Proust serving as best man.[109] Aurobindo’s ideas have many similarities to Bergson's philosophy. K. Narayanaswami Aiyer (1854 – 1918), a member of the Indian Section of the Theosophical Society, published a pamphlet titled “Professor Bergson and the Hindu Vedanta,” where he argued that Bergson’s ideas on matter, consciousness, and evolution were in agreement with the Vedas and Puranas.[110]

Aurobindo became politically involved with Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856 – 1920), the first popular leader of Indian Independence. Tilak was born in a family of Marathi Chitpavan Brahmins, a Hindu Maharashtrian Brahmin community inhabiting Konkan, the coastal region of the state of Maharashtra in India. The origin myth of the Chitpavan, as a shipwrecked people, is similar to the mythological story of the Bene Israel Jews of Raigad district, who claim to be descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel.[111] The Bene Israel claim that Chitpavans are also of Jewish origin.[112] Tilak met Shivapuri Baba (1826 – 1963), who he claims “taught him some astronomy.”[113] Shivapuri Baba was born in a Brahmin family in Kerala, which was settled by the so-called Cochin Jews.[114] As early as the twelfth century, mention is made of the Jews in southern India by Benjamin of Tudela. According to The History of the works of the learned (1699), the Cochin Jews of the Malabar coast of India claimed to have been joined by Jews banished from Spain, including the renowned Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra (1089 – 1164).[115] Ibn Ezra Hiyya and his teacher Abraham bar Hiyya (c. 1070 – 1136 or 1145) were the leading influences behind the mystical tendencies of the Ashkenazi Hasidim.[116]

When he was a young boy, Shivapuri Baba’s grandfather, a famous astrologer, announced that he would become a great Sannyasin (renunciate or wandering monk) and became his guru until about 1840. Shivapuri visited all the holy places of India, meeting Sri Aurobindo and Sri Ramakrishna. Shivapuri travelled to Afghanistan and Persia. After performing the Hajj in Mecca, he next traveled to Jerusalem. Then he travelled on to Turkey, through the Balkans into Greece and then through Italy to Rome, with the hope of better understanding the Christian religion. After visiting most European countries, he was invited to England by Queen Victoria’s Indian Secretariat and had eighteen private visits with her.[117] In 1901, after the Queen’s death, Shivapuri visited the United States and met President Theodore Roosevelt. After spending two or three years in America, he went to Mexico, where he met Porfirio Diaz (1830 – 1915), a Mexican general and dictator who served on three separate occasions as President of Mexico. After a period in South America, going on through the Andes to Colombia and Peru, he embarked on a ship for the Pacific Islands, moving through New Zealand and Australia and visiting Japan in 1913. He then followed an ancient pilgrim route into Nepal, then back to India, visiting Benares, having traveled more than 25,000 miles, mostly on foot.[118]

Tilak was an accomplished scholar of ancient Hindu sacred literature. As indicated by Joscelyn Godwin, it is not known whether the knowledge of astrology Tilak learned from Shivapuri included the essentials of the theory he published later in his first astronomical work, Orion, or Researches into the Antiquity of the Vedas, in 1893.[119] Tilak proposed that the positions of the heavens mentioned in the Vedas could be dated precisely with reference to the precession of the equinoxes, consequently placing the oldest Vedic period around 4500 BC, which was much earlier than the British scholars had determined.[120] Saint Yves wrote that according to Agartha’s gnosis, the souls of the departed rise to Orion from the North Pole.[121] Tilak credited Rev. Dr. William F. Warren (1833 – 1929) for anticipating his theory.[122] Warren, President of Boston University and member of several learned societies, restated the theory of the polar origin in a book of 1885, Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole. Its thesis was “That the cradle of the human race, the Eden of primitive tradition, was situated at the North Pole, in a country submerged at the time of the Deluge.”[123] Warren placed Atlantis at the North Pole, as well as the Garden of Eden, Mount Meru, Avalon and Hyperborea.

In articles published in the newspaper he ran, Tilak exploited the Bhagavad Gita as justification for violent uprisings against the British colonial government. When, in 1897, two of his readers acted on his words and killed two colonial officials, Tilak was tried and convicted of inciting murder. He served twelve months of an eighteen month sentence, which transformed him into a nationalist hero. Thanks to the intervention of his friend Mar Müller, who had accepted the dedication of Warren’s book, Tilak was allowed to spend his sentence in the further study of the Vedas.[124] Tilak had drafted his ideas as The Arctic Home in the Vedas in 1898, but he did not publish it until 1903, in which he argued that the Vedas were composed in the Arctic, and that Aryan bards had brought them south after the onset of the last ice age. Tilak’s ideas about the Hyperborean origins of the Aryan race would become the basis for the racist theories of SS member Herman Wirth, founder of the Ahnenerbe, René Guénon, Julius Evola, and the esoteric Hitlerism of Savitri Devi and Miguel Serrano.

 


[1] Helena P. Blavatsky. The Theosophical Glossary (Krotona, CA: Theosophical Publishing House, 1973), p. 170.

[2] Helena P. Blavatsky. Collected Writings, Vol. XII (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1980), p. 418.

[3] David Smith. Religions in the Modern World: Traditions and Transformations, third ed. (Linda Woodhead, 2016), p. 57.

[4] Jessica Harland‐Jacobs. “All in the Family: Freemasonry and the British Empire in the Mid–Nineteenth Century.” Journal of British Studies 42: 4 (2003), p. 473.

[5] Sussex to John Grant, 2 July 1842, UGLE Historic Correspondence HC 17/D/28; cited in Jessica Harland-Jacobs & Jan A.M. Snoek. “Freemasonry and Eastern Religions.” In Henrik Bogdan & Jan A.M. Snoek (ed.). Handbook of Freemasonry (Leiden: Brill, 2014), p. 262.

[6] Robert A. Yelle. “Comparative Religion as Cultural Combat: Occidentalism and Relativism in Rajiv Malhotra’s Being Different.” International Journal of Hindu Studies, 16: 3 (2012), p. 338.

[7] Richard King. Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and “The Mystic East” (Routledge, 2002), p. 135.

[8] Gerald James Larson. “The Issue of Not Being Different Enough: Some Reflections on Rajiv Malhotra's Being Different.” International Journal of Hindu Studies, 16 :3 (2012), p. 313.

[9] “Rudyard Kipling.” Masonic Biographies (Universal Co-Masonry). Retrieved from https://www.universalfreemasonry.org/en/famous-freemasons/rudyard-kipling

[10] Morals and Dogma, p. 718

[11] Harland-Jacobs & Snoek. “Freemasonry and Eastern Religions,” p. 260.

[12] Fabio Venzi. “Swami Vivekananda: The Mysticc and Freemason Apostle of Universal Brotherhood.” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 136 (2023), p. 227. Retrieved from http://www.glri.it/pdf/gm/Swami_Vivekananda.pdf; citing R. Génon. Simoli della scienza sacra (Milan: Aldelphi, 1990).

[13] Harland-Jacobs & Snoek. “Freemasonry and Eastern Religions.,” p. 271.

[14] G.L. Beck. “The Hindu Square and Compass: Patterns of Response and Readjustment to the Presence of Freemasonry in Colonial India.” Quarterly Review of Historical Studies (Calcutta). 31: 4 (1992), p. 22; cited in Harland-Jacobs & Snoek. “Freemasonry and Eastern Religions,” p. 271.

[15] Mark Bevir. “Theosophy and the Origins of the Indian National Congress.” International Journal of Hindu Studies, 7 (2003), p. 104.

[16] “Thomas Babington Macaulay History of England.” Age of the Sage. Retrieved from http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/history/historian/Thomas_Macaulay.html

[17] “A minute to acknowledge the day when India was ‘educated’ by Macaulay.” India Today (September 17, 2019). Retrieved from https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/gk-current-affairs/story/a-minute-to-acknowledge-the-day-when-india-was-educated-by-macaulay-1160140-2018-02-02

[18] “Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education.” History of English Studies (University of California, Santa Barbara). Retrieved from https://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/rraley/research/english/macaulay.html

[19] Deschamps. “Masonic Ritual and the Display of Empire in 19th-Century India and Beyond.”

[20] The Freemason (1887), p. 7; Cited in Deschamps. “Masonic Ritual and the Display of Empire in 19th-Century India and Beyond.”

[21] Robert Freke Gould. The History of Freemasonry: its Antiquities, Symbols, Constitutions, Customs, etc.: Embracing an Investigation of the Records of the Organisations of the Fraternity in England, Scotland, Ireland, British Colonies, France, Germany, and the United States derived from Official Source, Vol. IV (London: Caxton, 1900), pp. 136–37; cited in Deschamps. “Masonic Ritual and the Display of Empire in 19th-Century India and Beyond.”

[22] Cited in Deschamps. “Masonic Ritual and the Display of Empire in 19th-Century India and Beyond.”

[23] The Freemasons’ Quarterly Review (December 1845), p. 115; Cited in Deschamps. “Masonic Ritual and the Display of Empire in 19th-Century India and Beyond.”

[24] Laying the foundation stone, 6; Cited in Deschamps. “Masonic Ritual and the Display of Empire in 19th-Century India and Beyond.”

[25] The Freemason (October 1885); Cited in Deschamps. “Masonic Ritual and the Display of Empire in 19th-Century India and Beyond.”

[26] Wilhelm Halbfass. Philology and Confrontation: Paul Hacker on Traditional and Modern Vedānta (SUNY Press, 1995), p. 9, 21 n. 33.

[27] “Thomas W. Arnold.” Making India. Retrieved from https://www5.open.ac.uk/research-projects/making-britain/content/thomas-w-arnold

[28] J. N. Farquhar. Modern Religious Movements of India (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1915), p. 29.

[29] K.N. Panikkar. “Three phases of Indian renaissance.” Frontline: The Hindu Group (March 3, 2017). Retrieved from https://frontline.thehindu.com/the-nation/three-phases-of-indian-renaissance/article64755628.ece

[30] Alan D. Hodder “Emerson, Rammohan Roy, and the Unitarians.” Studies in the American Renaissance (1988), p. 136.

[31] Ibid., p. 314.

[32] Sivanath Sastri & R. Lethbridge. “The Introduction of English Education into Bengal; and the Early History of the Hindu College.” In A History of the Renaissance in Bengal: Ramtanu Lahiri: Brahman and Reformer (1972), pp. 40–52.

[33] Hodder “Emerson, Rammohan Roy, and the Unitarians,” p. 134.

[34] Ibid., pp. 137–135.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Kalidas Nag & Debajyoti Burman (ed.). The English Works of Raja Rammohan Roy, 6 parts, (Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 1945), 5:4; cited in Elizabeth De Michelis. A History of Modern Yoga (New York, NY: Continuum, 2008), p. 137.

[37] Hodder “Emerson, Rammohan Roy, and the Unitarians,” pp. 137–139.

[38] Christian Register (November 23, 1821); cited Hodder. “Emerson, Rammohan Roy, and the Unitarians,” p. 134.

[39] Hodder “Emerson, Rammohan Roy, and the Unitarians,” p. 140.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Ibid., pp. 145–146.

[42] Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 315.

[43] Linda C. Gugin & James E. St. Clair (eds.). Indiana’s 200: The People Who Shaped the Hoosier State (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2015), pp. 269–70.

[44] Elizabeth W. Fisher. “‘Prophesies and Revelations’: German Cabbalists in Early Pennsylvania.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 109:3 (1985).

[45] Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 190.

[46] Ibid., p. 173.

[47] Ibid., p. 194.

[48] Ibid., p. 191.

[49] Hodder “Emerson, Rammohan Roy, and the Unitarians,” p. 146.

[50] “Rammohun Roy (1772 – 1833).” The Brahmo Samaj. Retrieved from https://www.thebrahmosamaj.net/founders/rammohun.html

[51] Scott Manelbrote & Michael Ledger-Lomas. Dissent and the Bible in Britain, c. 1650–1950 (Oxford University Press, 2013). p. 160.

[52] William H. Gilman & Ralph H. Orth, et al. (ed.). The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 16 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960-82), 1: 11–12; cited in Hodder “Emerson, Rammohan Roy, and the Unitarians.,” p. 135.

[53] Justin M. Hewitson. “Emerson’s Indian Awakening and Religious Dissent: Thomas Moore’s ‘Veiled Prophet of Khorassan’ in Emerson’s Early Writing and the Divinity School Address.” The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture, 13: 2 (June 2020), p. 130–131.

[54] Hodder “Emerson, Rammohan Roy, and the Unitarians,” p. 140.

[55] Ibid.

[56] Ibid., pp. 137–147.

[57] Gilman & Orth, et al. (ed.). The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 146.

[58] Julian Strube. Global Tantra (Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 8.

[59] Ralph Waldo Emerson & Edward W. Emerson. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Centenary Edition, Vol 4. (Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1903-1904), p. 49; cited in Patrick Horn. “The Hidden History of Vedanta in the West.” American Vedantist (June 15, 2018). Retrieved from https://americanvedantist.org/2018/articles/hidden-history-of-vedanta-in-the-west/

[60] De Michelis. A History of Modern Yoga, p. 55.

[61] Henry David Thoreau. Walden (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1854). p. 279.

[62] Blair B. Kling. Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India (University of California Press, 1976), pp. 90–91.

[63] “Dwarkanath Tagore.” The British Museum. Retrieved from https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG165059

[64] Amrit Kumar Nandi. Bratyajaner Rani Rashmoni (Kolkata: Kamalini Prakashan, 2017)

[65] Stanley A. Wolpert, The New Mughals (New York : Oxford University Press), p. 221.

[66] Krishna Dutta & Andrew Robinson. Rabindranath Tagore: the Myriad-Minded Man (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 23.

[67] Ibid.

[68] Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 180.

[69] James Esdaile. Letter to James Braid (Braid, at Braid, 1852), pp. 78-80.

[70] Krishna Dutta & Andrew Robinson. Rabindranath Tagore: the Myriad-Minded Man (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 23.

[71] Ibid., p. 24.

[72] Ibid., p. 25.

[73] Ibid.,), p. 32.

[74] Wendy Doniger. On Hinduism (Oxford, 2014), p. 17.

[75] Ibid.

[76] Bevir. “Theosophy and the Origins of the Indian National Congress,” p. 104.

[77] Hugh B. Urban. Tantra Sex, Secrecy, Politics, And Power In The Study Of Religion (Dehli: Motilal Banarsidass, 2007) p. 68.

[78] Ibid., p. 65.

[79] Ibid., p. 66.

[80] Walter G. Neevel. “The Transformation of Ramakrishna.” In Bardwell L. Smith (ed.). Hinduism: New Essays in the History of Religions (Brill Archive, 1976), p. 74.

[81] Rasipuram Ramabadran. Sri Ramakrishna: Personification of Gods and Goddesses (Lulu, 2016).

[82] Swami Chetanananda. Ramakrishna As We Saw Him (St. Louis: Longmans, Green and Co., 1990), p. 195.

[83] Swami Prabhavananda. Religion in Practice (Routledge, 2019).

[84] “Chrstianity.” The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. Retrieve from https://www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info/gospel/introduction/christianity.htm

[85] Gospel of Ramakrishna, Introduction.

[86] Walter G. Neevel. “The Transformation of Ramakrishna.” In Bardwell L. Smith (ed.). Hinduism: New Essays in the History of Religions (Brill Archive, 1976), p. 74.

[87] “Vivekananda, Swami (1863-1902).” Puronokolkata (June 22, 2013).

[88] Hugh Chisholm (ed.) “Keshub Chunder Sen.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. 15, 11th ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1911). p. 759.

[89] De Michelis. A History of Modern Yoga, p. 81.

[90] Ibid., p. 81.

[91] Ibid., p. 75.

[92] “Mary Carpenter.” Making Britain. Retrieved from https://www5.open.ac.uk/research-projects/making-britain/content/mary-carpenter

[93] R.J. Saywell. Mary Carpenter of Bristol (The University of Bristol, 1964).

[94] Carol M. Martel, James Stuart Olson & Robert Sadle (eds.). Historical Dictionary of the British Empire (Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 783–784.

[95] Y. Masih. A Comparative Study of Religions (Motilal Banarsidass, 2000), pp. 198–199.

[96] De Michelis. A History of Modern Yoga, p.  70.

[97] Swami Vivekananda “Paper on Hinduism.” Addresses at The Parliament of Religions, Vol. 1. Retrieved from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Works_of_Swami_Vivekananda/Volume_1/Addresses_at_The_Parliament_of_Religions/Paper_on_Hinduism

[98] Swami Vivekananda “Response to Welcome.” Addresses at The Parliament of Religions, Vol. 1. Retrieved from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Works_of_Swami_Vivekananda/Volume_1/Addresses_at_The_Parliament_of_Religions/Response_to_Welcome

[99] Fabio Venzi. “Swami Vivekananda: The Mystic and Freemason Apostle of Universal Brotherhood.” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 136 (2023), p. 223. Retrieved from http://www.glri.it/pdf/gm/Swami_Vivekananda.pdf

[100] S. Vivekananda. “On Jnana-Yoga.” In The Complete Workds, Vol. V (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 2018), p. 271; cited in Fabio Venzi. “Swami Vivekananda: The Mysticc and Freemason Apostle of Universal Brotherhood.” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 136 (2023), 228. Retrieved from http://www.glri.it/pdf/gm/Swami_Vivekananda.pdf

[101] Urban. Tantra Sex, Secrecy, Politics, And Power In The Study Of Religion, p. 135.

[102] Geoffrey Samuel. The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 336.

[103] Urban. Tantra Sex, Secrecy, Politics, And Power In The Study Of Religion, p. 135

[104] Samuel. The Origins of Yoga and Tantra, p. 336.

[105] Kathleen Taylor. “Sir John Woodroffe, Tantra and Bengal: ‘an Indian soul in a European body?’” SOAS London studies on south Asia (Routledge, 2001), p.148.

[106] Arthur Avalon. Mahanirvana Tantra Of The Great Liberation (Kessinger Publishing, 2004).

[107] Urban. Tantra Sex, Secrecy, Politics, And Power In The Study Of Religion, p. 135.

[108] Kathleen Taylor. Sir John Woodroffe, Tantra and Bengal: “an Indian soul in a European body?” (Psychology Press, 2001), p.148.

[109] Suzanne Guerlac. Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 9.

[110] K.N. Aiyer. Professor Bergson and the Hindu Vedanta (Vasanta Press, 1910), . 36 – 37.

[111] Tudor Parfitt & Yulia Egorova (2005). “Genetics, History, and Identity: The Case Of The Bene Israel and the Lemba.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 29 (2): 206, 208, 221.

[112] Yulia Egorova. Jews and India: Perceptions and Image (2006). p. 85; Schifra Strizower. The Bene Israel of Bombay: A Study of a Jewish Community (1971). p. 16.

[113] Godwin. Arktos, p. 32.

[114] Orpa Slapak. The Jews of India: A Story of Three Communities (UPNE, 1995), p. 27.

[115] “Abraham bar Hiyya (Savasorda),” EJ; on links between Jews and Templars, see S. Baron, Social, IV, 37; X, 67, 331.

[116] Scholem. Kabbalah, p. 38.

[117] John G. Bennett & Thakur Lal Manandhar. Long Pilgrimage: The Life and Teaching of Sri Govinananda Bharati known as the Shivapuri Baba (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1965).

[118] Ibid.

[119] Godwin. Arktos, p. 32.

[120] Ibid., p. 32.

[121] Gourdon. “A French Prophet of India’s Resurgence in the Nineteenth century,”  p. 9.

[122] Godwin. Arktos, p. 32.

[123] Ibid., p. 32.

[124] Ibid., p. 32.

Divide & Conquer