Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (The Theosophical Society), The Secret Doctrine (1888)

Abstract

Abstract This chapter focuses on Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1888). Blavatsky, the chief ideologist of the Theosophical Society, was the first person to present a positive understanding of Satan in an exclusively esoteric or religious (as opposed to literary or political) context. She argues that Satan—or Lucifer, or the Devil, as she often uses the names interchangeably—brought humankind spiritual wisdom by offering us the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. He is therefore “the spirit of Intellectual Enlightenment and Freedom of Thought,” and the so-called Fall of Man was in fact a positive event, an initiation into esoteric knowledge. An important building block in Blavatsky’s construction of Satan was contemporary (semi-) scholarly understandings of ancient Gnosticism.