Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: theosophy and the emergence of the western guru - Peter Washington

The New Age is not so new. Peter Washington traces its roots yo just before the dawn of the twentieth century, when a mysterious renegade Russian aristocrat named Madame Blavatsky appeared in America claiming that Darwin was wrong, that man was descended not from apes but from spirit beings. Theosophy, the movement she founded, spawned competing gurus and sects—Steiner, Ouspensky, Krishnamurti—that has particular appeal to women, to influential intellects of the day (Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Frank Lloyd Wright, Katherine Mansfield, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood), and to a host of colorful adventurers, uncertifed lunatics, wealthy and lonely spinsters, charlatans, and lost souls.

What they had in common—and share with the millions who make up the "alternative religions" of today's New Age—is a hunger for the key to what makes everything fit together, a hunger that has not been satisfied by either mainstream religion or science.

Well-researched, though-provoking, and often hilarious, Madame Blavatsky's Baboon provides a fascinating and helpful perspective on the hopes and fears of our own day as well as those of a century ago.