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© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden,  DOI: 10.1163/156798911X581252 ARIES .(

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden,  DOI: 10.1163/156798911X581252 ARIES .() – ARIES www.brill.nl/arie The Kabbalah, the Philosophie Cosmique, and the Integral Yoga. A Study in Cross-Cultural Inﬂuence Peter Heehs Independent Scholar Abstract Certaines traditions ésotériques de l’Occident revendiquent des origines orientales. Moins nombreuses sont les traditions ésotériques de l’Orient ayant été inﬂuencées par une tra- dition occidentale. La «philosophie cosmique» de Max Théon (?–) doit certains de ses éléments à la kabbale de l’école d’Isaac Luria (–). En , Mirra Alfassa (–), qui avait fait partie de l’entourage de Théon, se rendit en Inde et rencon- tra Sri Aurobindo (–). On trouve dans le «yoga intégral» d’Aurobindo, basé principalement sur les Upanishad, plusieurs idées qui rappellent celles de la philosophie cosmique, et d’autres qui évoquent les doctrines de l’école de Luria. Comment expliquer ces ressemblances? Par Mirra Alfassa, Aurobindo eut connaissance de plusieurs termes et concepts «cosmiques», dont certains avaient probablement des antécédents kabbalistiques. Mais d’autres ressemblances ne peuvent s’expliquer ainsi. Il faut alors leur attribuer une origine indépendante. Keywords Sri Aurobindo (Aurobindo Ghose); Mirra Alfassa; Max Theon; philosophie cosmique; kabbalah; yoga . Introduction Many forms of Western Esotericism claim Eastern roots or inﬂuence. Some of these claims have little historical basis, as in the “pseudo-Egyptianism” of seventeenth-century Hermetic writers such as Robert Fludd, Michael Maier, and Athanasius Kircher.1 In other instances the Oriental inﬂuence is well 1) Yates, Rosicrucian Enlightenment, , . For Renaissance Egyptomania in general, see Dijkstra, ‘Mysteries of the Nile’, –.  Peter Heehs / ARIES .() – attested, as in the Sabbatean reinterpretation of the kabbalah by Sabbatai Zevi and Nathan of Gaza during the seventeenth century.2 Helena Petro- vna Blavatsky drew on Egyptian, Indian and other sources in writing the primary texts of the Theosophical Society at the end of the nineteenth cen- tury. Cases in which the inﬂuence ﬂowed in the other direction, that is, in which a form of Western esotericism had some impact on an Eastern occult or spiritual teaching, are more rare. I leave out of consideration modern reinterpretations of Indian, Islamic or Chinese teachings by Western exegetes and practitioners. Such reinterpretations are legion; they began with the European discovery of Oriental knowledge in the eighteenth century and continue to this day.3 Much less common are cases in which the formulator of a signiﬁcant Eastern teaching was directly or indirectly inﬂuenced by Western esoteric ideas or practices. The case I study in this paper may be the only one in which ideas with a kabbalistic pedigree left some trace on the writings of a notable Indian spiritual teacher. Whether this trace can rightly be characterized as inﬂuence depends on how the term inﬂuence is understood, and I will look into this question in the concluding section of the paper. The Indian ﬁgure whose teachings I will examine is Sri Aurobindo (birth name Aurobindo Ghose, –). Best known today as a spiritual leader with a large following, Aurobindo is also remembered as a revolutionary politi- cian, a poet, and a philosopher. Born in Calcutta, he was sent to England at the age of seven, and received a solid classical education at St. Paul’s School, London, and King’s College, Cambridge. Returning to India in , he immersed himself in the Indian cultural tradition, reading the classics of San- skrit literature and later the foundational texts of Hinduism: the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, and the Rig Veda. He wrote later that his own phi- losophy ‘was formed ﬁrst by the study of the Upanishads and the Gita’, but insisted that the primary source of his ideas was personal spiritual experience, accompanied by ‘knowledge that ﬂowed from above when I sat in medita- tion’.4 2) Scholem, Major Trends, –. 3) In recent years, many critiques of such reinterpretations have been published. See, for example, David Gordon White’s studies of Tantrism, notably Kiss of the Yogini; Joseph S. Alter’s works on yoga, notably Yoga in Modern India; and Donald J. Lopez’s reconsid- erations of Tibetan Buddhism, notably Buddhism and Science. 4) Aurobindo, Autobiographical Notes, . Peter Heehs / ARIES .() –  Whatever its source, Aurobindo’s knowledge deﬁnitely went beyond things found in Indian texts. The most obvious example of this is his knowledge of the theory of evolution. His own concept of spiritual evolution, a central part of his philosophy, cannot be traced to any Indian source. He at times suggested that the idea of evolution had been adumbrated in certain texts of the Sankhya and Tantric traditions, but he also acknowledged the European origin of the modern theory. As a classical scholar, he had little knowledge of modern science, but he did not have to read The Origin of Species to be exposed to the idea of evolution in England during the s and s. There are other concepts in Aurobindo’s philosophy that have no clear equivalents in the Indian tradition. Some of them—the importance of the individual, for example—can be traced back to his English education. Others seem like glacial erratics that have been deposited in the ﬁeld of his thought from remote sources. In what follows I will show that some such ideas may have come to him from Lurianic kabbalah by way of the Mouvement Cosmique, an early-twentieth-century esoteric group based in France and Algeria. The link between Aurobindo and this group was Mirra Alfassa (–), a Frenchwoman of Sephardic Jewish extraction who met him in India in  and later became his chief collaborator. . The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor Mirra Alfassa was an active memberof the Mouvement Cosmique from around to . During this period she came into close contact with the leader of the movement, Max Theon (birth name Louis Maxmillian Bimstein, (?– ), and his wife, an Englishwoman whose name at birth was probably Mary Chrystine Woodroﬀe Ware (?–). These two had met in England around when both were signiﬁcant ﬁgures in the British esoteric scene, Woodroﬀe Ware as the founder of the Universal Philosophic Society, Theon as one of the founders of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, generally referred to as the H.B. of L. Since the H.B. of L. can be viewed retrospectively as a predecessor of the Mouvement Cosmique, and because the H.B. of L., now little known, is of some interest in the history of esotericism in late-nineteenth- century England, I will brieﬂy survey its development and teachings before going on to the Mouvement Cosmique, Alfassa, and Aurobindo. The second half of the nineteenth century was a time of great interest in various forms of esoteric practice and lore in Europe and the United States. The modern spiritualist movement may be said to have begun with the table- rapping heard in Hydesville, New York, in . In the years that followed,  Peter Heehs / ARIES .() – people from all walks of life tried their hand at spirit-communication. Many went to séances for an evening’s amusement, but others were serious seekers of truths that had till then been regarded as the prerogative of religion. Dozens of groups were formed that claimed to be modern representatives of ancient and mediaeval esoteric traditions: Egyptian, kabbalistic, Hermetic, Masonic, Rosicrucian, Indian. The most successful of these was the Theosophical Society, founded in New York in . Its leading ﬁgure, H.P . Blavatsky, disdained commerce with spirits, claiming instead to be in touch with mahatmas or Adepts who directed the spiritual evolution of the universe.5 In a hitherto unknown occult society announced its existence in England: the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. Neophytes learned that the group was only apparently new. In a letter of , one of the group’s founders, Peter Davidson (–), revealed that its inner circle had been ‘formed into a distinct and Hermetic order in consequence of a division that took place in the ranks of the Hermetic Initiates years prior to the year of our present era’.6 More historically, the H.B. of L. was presented as an outgrowth of the Brotherhood of Luxor, a group mentioned by Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled ().7 This was disputed by the Theosophists, one of whom wrote that ‘the gudgeon-trap called “The H.B. of L.”’ had simply ‘pilfered’ the name.8 The H.B. of L. presented itself as an order of practical occultism. Its use of mystical techniques to open the way to inner experience was something of a novelty at the time. Most esoteric groups, including the Theosophical Society, were content simply to disseminate secret doctrines. The practical techniques of the H.B. of L. consisted mainly of rituals of sacred sexuality and the use of “magic mirrors”. It is not known how eﬀective these techniques were, but the popularity of the practical approach encouraged the Theosophical Society to open its own “esoteric section” in . By that time the H.B. of L. had ceased to operate in England. It transpired in that one of its founders, a man who called himself Thomas Burgoyne (birth name Thomas Henry Dalton, –) had been convicted of advertising fraud in Leeds.9 Threatened with exposure, Burgoyne and Davidson left for the United uploads/Philosophie/ the-kabbalah-the-philosophie-cosmique-and-the-integral-yoga-a-study-in-cross-cultural-influence-pdf.pdf