IN their paper on 'Modern medicine and its non-modern critics', Ashis Nandy and Shiv Visvanathan (N. and V.) turn their attention to what they call 'the feminist-theosophist-occult writings' of Helena Blavatsky and Annie Besant. The authors explain that in the context of what they call the 'dissenting western imagination in alliance with indigenous knowledge systems in India', Theosophy represents the most important archives (N. and V., 1990, p.155). They point out that the founder of the Indian National Congress, A.O. Hume, was a theosophist; and Annie Besant (1847-1933), the second President of the Theosophical Society, was a leader of the Home Rule movement and elected President of the Indian National Congress. They note that Maria Montessori (1870-1952), who played an important role in shaping the nationalist education policy in India, 'also had strong theosophical leanings' (N. and V., 1990, p.156). Dr Montessori in fact spent a good part of the war years at Adyar, the international headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Chennai, developing what later became the Montessori Method, and instructing the late Norma Sastry in that method of teaching-which Mrs Sastry put to good use in her years as Governess to the children of the Maharaja of Gwalior. If we add to all this the fact that H.P. Blavatsky's voluminous works represent a sustained critique of modern western science, it is clear why the theosophical archives might be regarded as such a rich source in the history of the 'dissenting Western imagination'. Hence, the title of my paper.

In their critique of western medical practices, the theosophists concentrated upon vivisection, but also emphasized the importance of homeopathy, herbs, vegetarianism, and alternative or holistic systems of healing in general (N. and V., 1990, p.166). At the beginning of the twentieth century, theosophical editorials warned that human vivisection would soon follow the vivisection of animals-as criminals, paupers, and hospital patients gradually joined the ranks of the 'other'. By way of example, The Theosophist cited a proposal to legalize the vivisection of criminals sentenced to capital punishment in Ohio (Cuttings and comments, The Theosophist, vol.24, Mar/June 1903), (N. and V. 1990, p.165). What was of most interest to Nandy and Visvanathan however was the fact that:

Parallel to the opposition between white and black, the colonizer and the colonized, was a deeper dialogical encounter in which the western participants saw in India a possibility to be lived out. India to them was a place within which the other West of William Blake and Paracelsus could be revived. (N. and V. 1990, p.156)

Reviving that 'other West' was HPB's lifelong aim. Her 1889 essay 'The Tidal Wave' referred to:

...the great psychic and spiritual change now taking place in the realm of the human Soul...the Spirit in man, so long hidden out of public sight, so carefully concealed and so far exiled from the arena of modern learning, has at last awakened. It now asserts itself and is loudly re-demanding its un- recognized yet ever legitimate rights. (Blavatsky, 1980, p.1)

That spirit attracted to the Theosophical Society, among many others, William Butler Yeats, who once fittingly remarked: 'I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance-the revolt of the soul against the intellect-now beginning in the world' (quoted in Graf, 2000, p.13). From her writings it is clear that Madame Blavatsky had her finger on the pulse of that renaissance: a feat that now seems more remarkable than materializing the odd tea cup-because that voice is, after all these years, still just reawakening, still attempting to assert itself, and still largely unrecognized; at least within the hard core of mainstream academia. Philosophy has been described as a footnote to Plato, yet the discipline reads Plato with very materialistic eyes; and this, in spite of the fact that Plato himself believed (with Blavatsky) that ultimately, Nature-'Unsullied by the hand of matter...shows her treasures only to the eye of Spirit-the eye which never closes' (Blavatsky, 1889/1984, p.16). That is a quotation from Blavatsky's The Voice of the Silence but it would not be out of place in Plato's Republic.

Writing in the year 2001, Susan Murphy, Zen teacher and Research Fellow at the University of Western Sydney, testifies to the fact that the voice of the spiritual 'other' has yet to assert itself fully. In an article on ideological and cosmological radicalism, Murphy refers to a series of 'recessive genes' traceable in western thought. She describes these as:

...impulses of thought and imagination that present radical alternatives to the prevailing way of mind. They carry a subversive 'strain' of thought to the dominant paradigm(s), surfacing now here, now there....Present, but not given any form of 'diplomatic recognition'.... (Murphy, 2001, p.37)

Elsewhere I have referred to this strain of thought, or trait, as the eternal counterculture (Tatray, 2002) in an attempt to highlight both the counter- culture aspect of the perennial philosophy, and the perennial traits of the counterculture. It seems useful to regard the perennial philosophy as, in some respects, a universally diffused voice of dissent; never dominant but almost always present. And I believe, with Dr Murphy, that 'A great source of energy of thought lies relatively dormant there' (Murphy, 2001, p.37). One of the roles of colloquia such as this is to make that voice more active.

Validating the spiritual 'other' in our civilization was one of Blavatsky's chief aims in compiling Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, in which she gathered together the relevant teachings scattered throughout thousands of volumes of Asian and early European religious texts. What she tried to prove was that: '...underlying every ancient popular religion was the same ancient wisdom doctrine, one and identical, professed and practised by the initiates of every country, who alone were aware of its existence and importance....' (Blavatsky 1877/1972, p.99). Isis Unveiled was also an attempt to give credit where the author believed credit was due. In her words again, it was 'a plea for the recognition of the Hermetic philosophy, the anciently universal Wisdom-Religion....' (Blavatsky, 1877 /1972, p.vii). Writing in the 1870s, she felt that Hermeticism was unduly denigrated, while modern western science was credited with some of the former's achievements. Subsequent research into the history of science shows her to have been prescient. The history of science-which like most histories has been written by the conquerors-has been forced to correct the bias a little in favour of the Hermetic tradition. For example, in Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, it was envisaged that in the new world, elite 'Brethren', assisted by an underclass of labourers, would uncover the principles of Nature and devise useful technologies for the state (Martin, 1991). It turns out, that along with a number of other foundational notions of modern science, this idea of an elite, alone possessing true knowledge, is directly traceable to Hermetic beliefs: in this instance, to the Hermetic ideal of the prisci theologi, a select group possessing the highest knowledge (Johannisson, 1988).

What was to be considered knowledge in the New Atlantis was redefined by Bacon as that which was gleaned solely by way of the officially sanctioned and state controlled experimental method; whereas the Emerald Tablet, and various Rosicrucian tracts, held out to all prepared to undergo the required discipline the possibility of lifting the veil on the mystery of life and revealing the nature of Nature. The Hermeticist believed that by various psycho-spiritual and alchemical means, undergirded by a strict regime of self-discipline and character development: 'you shall have the glory of the whole world and thereby all obscurity shall fly from you'-as it is put in the Emerald Tablet (Dobbs, 1988).

An example of writing the history of science to exclude Hermeticism, is the marketing of Isaac Newton as an Enlightenment rationalist par excellence. Professor B.J.T. Dobbs points out that during his lifetime, Newton worked hard to stem the tides of materialism and mechanism (Dobbs, 1994, p.643), and he spent most of his time and expended the greatest of his energies on interests such as the chronology of the ancient kingdoms, Church history, theology, prophecy and alchemy (Dobbs, 1975/1983, p.6). But when Newton's papers were examined after his death in 1727, the alchemical papers were marked 'not fit to be printed' and put back in their boxes, where the approximately 650,000 words in his handwriting languished in their con- signed grave, largely unknown, until in 1936 the descendants of Newton's niece decided to sell the alchemical, theological and other papers in their possession (Dobbs, 1975/1983, p.13).

The first major biography of Newton was written by Sir David Brewster in 1855. The author was forced to report that among the great man's papers had been found an autographed transcript of John de Monte Snyder's The Metamorphosis of the Planets; pages and pages of alchemical verse from Thomas Norton's Ordinall of Alchimy; Basilius Valentinus' Mystery of the Microcosm; as well as a heavily annotated copy of Eiraneaus Philalethes' Secrets Reveal'd, or an Open Entrance to the Shut Palace of the King (Dobbs, 1975/1983, p.10). Brewster was too honest a biographer to ignore the evidence to hand, but he treated Newton's interest as an anomaly to be explained away. According to Professor Dobbs, he did this by distinguishing the alchemy of Isaac Newton, John Locke and Robert Boyle, from what he called common alchemy, which he described as 'commencing in fraud and terminating in mysticism' (quoted in Dobbs, 1975/1983, p.11). This is the sort of thing that Blavatsky hoped to correct by bringing the Hermetic tradition out of the shadows of its more successful cousin, and showing it in a truer light.

Evidence to support many of her assertions abounds in the works of such authorities as Newton's foremost disciple, Colin Maclaurin, and Neo-platonists like Henry More and Ralph Cudworth. But debunkers of Hermeticism like Isaac Casaubon were not looking for evidence in favour of either the antiquity or veracity of the Hermetic tradition, largely because in terms of the pedigree of various religions, the stakes are high. Who said what to whom first, matters-at least to those concerned with establishing the primacy of the Christian dispensation. When the Calvinist philologist Isaac Casaubon read in the Divine Pymander the sentence, 'This is the mystery that was hidden until this day'-he re- marked: 'Note that if this is true, and this fellow wrote before Moses, then God revealed his mysteries through him, not through Moses' (quoted in Grafton, 1991, p.149). And elsewhere: 'I am moved above all by the fact that it seems contrary to God's word to think that such deep mysteries were revealed more clearly to Gentiles than to the people that God chose as peculiarly his own' (quoted in Grafton, 1991). So motivated, the Casaubon thesis sought to establish that the Hermetic texts were not as old as they purported to be, and not Egyptian; they were Greek forgeries. And although his thesis is full of holes, no one has taken the trouble to extricate the Hermetic texts once and for all from what Anthony Grafton has referred to as their 'real context': 'as part of the pullulating mass of pseudo-ancient, pseudo-Eastern literature' (Grafton, 1991, p.153). Five minutes with a group of sceptical academics and Blavatsky undoubtedly would attend to the matter herself.

The sidelining of Hermeticism and the perennial philosophy must sound like a rather antiquarian interest today; more pressing concerns demand our attention. But such attitudes also reflect the environment-the social space-in which the environmental problematic is playing itself out: and an insensitivity to religious or spiritual matters impacts on the environmental crisis in various ways. As it becomes more obvious that our present way of life is unsustainable, and the urgency of change consequently increases, the religious sensibility is gaining relevance. The interconnected principles of social justice, peace, and the environment are now matters of United Nations policy. But a fourth, equally indispensable element of a sustainable society, is the spiritual dimension; not in the form of any particular religion, but what the early theosophists used to refer to as religion itself. We tend to think of religion as an institution, as something imposed from without. But religion-or spirituality-is part of the human constitution. In theosophical literature, it is treated as a natural process of the unfolding of consciousness.

What now seems to be required is a widespread and thoroughgoing revival of such eternal values (Tatray, 2002, p.334). That is for many, an implication of the environmental crisis. And yet it is sometimes hard for those values to get a fair hearing. Either they are tarred with the 'born-again' brush, or guilty of keeping bad company with alchemists, hermeticists and the like. That greater renaissance which Yeats called 'the revolt of the soul against the intellect' (quoted in Graf 2000, p.13), and which Blavatsky referred to in 'The Tidal Wave' as the Spirit in man re-demanding its unrecognized rights-that revival of the 'other West' of Paracelsus and Blake, is not yet complete. Until it is, the religious impulse or its relevance to the twin crises of environmental and social degradation will not be understood.

My PhD research into the deep ecology movement and its links with the ancient wisdom tradition shows the deep ecology movement to be a casualty of the prevailing anti-religious attitude. Deep ecology struggles for legitimacy and acceptance, partly on account of its metaphysical and ends based bias which a number of critics, including political scientist John Barry, accuse of compromising the status of the political within the environmental movement (Barry, 1993, p.381). Many of the questions it raises are perennial questions, some of which figured prominently in the great debates of the seventeenth century. In fact philosopher and environmentalist George Sessions has described deep ecology as 'the new perennial philosophy' (Sessions, 1981, p.417).

What is known as the perennial philosophy-a phrase coined by Leibniz-is at once a metaphysic, a psychology, and an ethic, based on the doctrine of a Divine Reality substantial to the visible world, which is at the same time the innermost essence of the human being (Huxley, 1947, p.1). It is one of the primary sources and inspirations of the deep ecology movement, others being: eastern thought, especially Mahâyâna Buddhism, Taoism, and Advaita Vedânta; the wisdom of native Americans and other primal cultures; the Presocratic Greeks with their pantheistic process philosophy; modern process philosophy beginning with Alfred North Whitehead; the seventeenth century philosopher Spinoza; the later works of Heidegger, which were influenced by eastern thought; the European Romantics and American Transcendentalists; the science of ecology; and lastly, quantum physics.

When Arne Naess first coined the term 'deep ecology' in 1973, he did so in an attempt to describe what he saw as the state of environmental activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He witnessed what he called a 'shallow, but presently rather powerful movement, and a deep, but less influential movement' (Naess, 1973, p.95). Shallow ecology, he said, was chiefly concerned with the fight against pollution and the welfare of people in the developed countries, while the deep ecology movement rejected the dominant paradigm which had engendered the environmental crisis; and rejected its underlying metaphysic of man-in-environment (and thus man alienated from environment) in favour of what he called a 'relational, total-field image' (Naess, 1973, p.95).

What deep ecology gives to the perennial tradition is a stronger feeling for the Earth than has been expressed by any of its antecedents; what it takes from its philosophical forefathers is a well-formulated voice of dissent against the materialism, mechanism and short-sightedness of the age. It is, to borrow from Spinoza, a philosophy in the aspect of eternity.

The organizers of this conference were interested to hear whether I experienced any difficulties switching backwards and forwards between the methodologies and intuitions of Theosophy on the one hand and academia on the other. That would perhaps normally be the case, but given the philosophical sources of deep ecology, its roots in eastern metaphysics and alternative western philosophical and religious traditions, the overlap between it and the concerns of Theosophy should be obvious. One difficulty I routinely experience, however, is having first to try to prove the existence or bona fides of certain traditions like Hermeticism and perennialism before being able to proceed with whatever it is I intend to say. And certainly in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of New South Wales it is difficult if not impossible to use Helena Blavatsky as a source, in spite of the fact that Professor Theodore Roszak has explained that she presented the first model of psychological and spiritual evolution to appear in the modern West (Roszak, 1976, p.118).

But, in the main, if a subject is selected wisely, and parameters clearly set and agreed upon, there should be no difficulty in being able to discuss the sort of issues raised in this paper, and subject them to a much-needed dose of academic rigour. In practice, my supervisors pull me one way, and I pull them in a direction in which they never dreamt of going, and we meet somewhere in the middle. Somewhere in all that I try to make sure that my thesis, for what it is worth, does not, by compromising itself too much, contribute to a further eclipse of that 'other West' which has yet to be given full recognition.

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N. Sri Ram