The Case of the Theosophist’s Egg: Haeckel, Blavatsky, and the East-West Dichotomy - Simon Magus скачать в хорошем качестве

The Case of the Theosophist’s Egg: Haeckel, Blavatsky, and the East-West Dichotomy - Simon Magus

International Theosophical History Conference 2021 The German philosopher-physician Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) is most famous for his Law of Biogenesis, ‘Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny’, presenting the erroneous hypothesis that all vertebrate species pass through earlier stages of evolution in embryo. In addition, he stated that all vertebrate embryos were identical at an early stage of development. Whilst opposed to Haeckel’s thought in a number of aspects, in her Esoteric Instructions (1889), Helena Blavatsky appears to have taken him at his word, presenting an image of an early embryo as human when structurally it is clearly that of a different species. This paper uses this example as a springboard to analyse the under-explored interface and exchange between Romantic Science and Esotericism. Focusing on Haeckel’s Natürliche Schöpfungsgeshichte (‘The History of Creation’) (1868), and Die Welträtsel (‘The Riddle of the Universe’) (1895-99), it examines the imbrication of biological and spiritual evolutionism, and Naturphilosophie in Haeckel’s oeuvre, alongside the conceptual exchange with Blavatsky’s Theosophy. Expanding upon this domain, the paper problematises and analyses the East-West dichotomy and globalisation in terms of Blavatsky’s syncretic mélange of a quasiVedantic philosophy with Western science in the form of Romantic embryology