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Theosophy and Culture: Nicholas
Roerich
Anita Stasulane
Interreligious and Intercultural
Investigations Series, Volume 8, 2005. Gregorian
Research Centre on Cultures and Religions.
(Editrice Pontificia Universita Gregoriana,
Piazza della Pilotta, 35 – 00187, Roma, Italia.
Email: editricepugpib-gi@biblico.it.) ISBN
88-7839-035-6 (trade paperback) $25.00. 336
pages.
Reviewed by
Joseph P. Szimhart
If you look at an American
one-dollar bill, you will find a pyramid with an
“eye” on top. The Great Pyramid is often
associated with Freemasonry, and many of the
American founding fathers were Freemasons.
The symbol comes from the Great Seal of the
United States designed in 1782 by Charles
Thompson. In 1934 the Secretary of Agriculture
Henry Wallace convinced Secretary of the Treasury
Henry Morgenthau to place it on the dollar. It
appeared in 1935. Morgenthau did not know
at the time that Wallace made the suggestion at
the behest of his guru Nicholas Roerich. To
Roerich, the eye represented the gaze of
mahatmas, or super-evolved beings that guide the
affairs and spiritual evolution of humanity.
Roerich (d 1947) and his wife Helena (d 1955)
followed the Theosophy teachings of the colorful
19th century occultist, Helena P.
Blavatsky (1831–1891). By 1925, the Roerichs had
established a new theosophical group called Agni
Yoga in New York and London, and later in Latvia,
Russia, and India. Like Blavatsky, the Roerichs
believed that mahatmas had chosen them as
messengers to an elite core of mankind.
Roerich died the year I was
born, so by the time I encountered his art and
Agni Yoga teachings in 1975, his legacy had faded
considerably in America. For example, as late as
the mid-1980s, Agni Yoga did not make it into an
impressive list of new religious movements
established by the Institute for the Study of
American Religion. Roerich’s greatest achievement
in America was, through President Franklin
Roosevelt, to have 21 nations in the Pan-American
Union sign the Peace Pact, also known as the
Roerich Pact, in 1935. The Pact was intended
to preserve cultural creativity in hospitals,
museums, and significant religious sites in time
of war. For his effort, Roerich was nominated for
a Nobel Peace Prize; he did not win.
In a way, Roerich, who was
an accomplished artist, and his wife Helena, who
“transmitted” the Agni Yoga spiritual teachings,
were my favored gurus from 1975 to 1982. I
mention this because I gained an intimate insight
into their work, history, and devotees. I met
with the last two directors (both gracious
individuals) of the Roerich Museum in New York
many times. I also had occasion to study several
offshoot groups that used the Agni Yoga teachings
in their core doctrine. The largest of these was
the Church Universal and Triumphant cult that
used Roerich art images and teaching without
permission from the Agni Yoga Society. The second
largest of these groups in America was the
Aquarian Educational Group founded by Torkum
Saraydarian.
All this brings me to
Theosophy and Culture: Nicholas Roerich,
published last year by a Roman Catholic press
associated with the Vatican. Why, I asked, would
the Catholic Church bother to publish an
extensive study on a new religious group rarely
even mentioned by religious scholars in America?
My answer came when I discovered through Internet
resources that the author had written this study
initially in 1997 as a student dissertation
(under the direction of Dr. Michael Fuss) to
address the phenomenal growth of the “Rerikh
societies and groups” throughout the Russian
Federation since the late 1980s. According to the
author Anita Stasulane, a religious scholar from
Latvia, the Roerich teachings have “captivated
the minds of millions” in the former Soviet
Union.
Anita Stasulane has done a
remarkably even-handed job delineating essential
aspects of the Roerich approach to theosophy and
culture at large. I can hardly imagine how
someone not familiar with Helena Blavatsky might
appreciate this study, but it contains just
enough essential information to give most readers
a good grounding to understand Roerich in
context. The text is heavily footnoted with a
majority of Russian-language references. Some of
the text is in French, especially when it quotes
René Guénon, an esoteric scholar who was critical
of Blavatsky’s writings and claims. In that
regard, the study would better suit the religious
scholar or a student familiar with languages than
the average American reader.
Stasulane points out that
the “Rerikh” groups “differ enormously throughout
the world but they fulfill the longing in atheist
Soviet society for something that is
simultaneously highly intellectual, scientific
and mystical.”
[i] Prior to the Bolshevik
takeover, Russian seekers were already imbued
with what later became the New Age explosion of
beliefs in America in the decades after 1960.
That explosion includes astrology, Theosophy,
occultism, vegetarianism, Buddhism, Indian
religions and yoga, and messianic expectations.
It is no surprise, therefore, that a significant
portion of post-Soviet seeker society has
embraced the culture’s native mystics in
Blavatsky and the Roerichs. It is important to
remember that Agni Yoga per se, as offered by the
Agni Yoga Society, has sustained a rather benign
history for the past half century. Stasulane
states:
Totalitarian sects pass away like illnesses, but
the Rerikh movement is alive and well all over
Russia, even after accusations in the press that
the Rerikhs collaborated with the NKVD [communist
secret police], and even after the Russian
Orthodox Church has anathematized it.
[ii]
The author quotes
extensively from primary source texts of Agni
Yoga and the two volumes of published Letters
of Helena Roerich to define for the reader
exactly what the Roerichs teach and believe.
Stasulane demonstrates that the Roerichs teach
that the great religions, including Christianity
and Indian religions, have distorted the pure
teachings of their founding prophets. With Agni
Yoga, or the “Teaching,” the Roerichs viewed
themselves as emissaries of the master Morya and
other mahatmas who will draw enlightened seekers
toward the one Truth or Ancient Wisdom. Despite
the Roerichs claims to “the highest”
spirituality, Stasulane shows that the Russian
couple defines or reduces religion, whether
Buddhist or any other, to a version of
“Blavatskaya’s” theosophy. The latter’s genius
was to apply a spiritual form of evolutionary
theory to human destiny supported by stringing
together a myriad of 19th century
occult teachings. The result in both Theosophy
and Agni Yoga, as the author demonstrates, is a
highly suggestive, vague notion that we are
destined to return to the impersonal Source of
being after efforts in many incarnations. The
real, unvarnished Truth is thus hidden, or
occulted, from the uninitiated or ignorant.
With the richness of thought
and lofty efforts of the Roerich agenda for
humanity, Stasulane’s study should impress any
reader. She shows that, among theosophists,
Nicholas Roerich stands out mightily as a
particularly accomplished artist and teacher. In
the end, she writes that Roerich in 1926 visited
and approached the Kremlin with his blessings for
the communist regime. The author does not mention
this, but Roerich did praise Lenin at the time as
a “mahatma” on the order of his Morya. In the
author’s opinion, Roerich believed that
Theosophy, as a “theosophocracy,” would be the
proper route for the people in a “New Russia.”
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