The Secret

Relying on Blavatsky’s fawning biographers for a chronology of her life is like trying to pick up medieval history from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. This much can be said: she was born in the Ukraine in 1831, exposed to a variety of occult teachings as a youth, and fled for Constantinople as a teenager in 1849 after being married off to an older man. For the next twenty-four years, she wandered around Europe and the Middle East, possibly making it as far as Egypt and supporting herself as a medium, before turning up in New York in 1873. Two years later, she co-founded the Theosophical Society with Henry Steel Olcott, an American lawyer she met while investigating paranormal activities in Vermont. In 1878, she left with Olcott for India and converted to Buddhism. After a scandal involving some Society friends, who accused her of fraud, Blavatsky removed to London, where she wrote her magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, before dying in 1891.

For a secret society, the Theosophical Society enjoyed healthy growth following Blavatsky’s death. By 1888, there were about two dozen lodges in the US and an aggregate membership of about 460. The first Canadian lodge opened in Toronto in 1891; by 1922, the city had no fewer than three. Whereas Transcendentalism went viral through the democratic medium of Whitman’s poetry, Theosophy operated more like a private club. It was the Kabbalah of its day, attracting A-list celebrities, artists, activists, and other cultural elites with a hodgepodge of Eastern wisdom, self-help psychology, and the belief that the same universal truth turns up perpetually in every culture and epoch.

Artists in particular were drawn to the new religion, in part because they got the best seats. On the seven-storeyed mountain of mystical ascent, art occupied the “Buddhic” plane, just below nirvana. The artist was the vanguard of man’s spiritual evolution, a prophet who tore aside the translucent veil of matter and penetrated the hidden depths of ultimate reality. Yeats was gaga for Blavatsky; so was Wassily Kandinsky, who credited Theosophy for his aesthetic theories; in The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot described his Blavatsky proxy, Madame Sosostris, as “the wisest woman in Europe”; even Elvis carried her book The Voice of the Silence in his back pocket and recited from it to his audiences.

When Emily Carr was whisked from relative obscurity in Victoria to the artsy inner circles of Toronto high society, she was struck by the new religion’s popularity. “They are all Theosophists,” she wrote in her diary. And Harris, especially, took his spiritual struggle to the easel. His 1922 work Above Lake Superior has been described by one scholar as “reasonably orthodox Theosophy, with the white light of Divine Knowledge streaming down from above, the world of phenomena reduced to essential forms, the distant and glimmering suggestion of a world of absolute ideas behind this phenomenal world.”

Over time, Harris amended his technique according to theosophical principles, thinning the paint until the pigment seemed to shed all mass. In Lake Superior, the last piece in the Expanding Horizons exhibit, paint levitates off the canvas. His subjects became increasingly remote and austere: from Superior, Harris ascended to the Rockies, eventually conquering the land of light itself, the Arctic Circle. In these serene, static wastelands, detail was surrendered to simplified shapes laden with allusions to Blavatsky’s symbology of spheres, cubes, and upward-facing triangles — a Canadian Da Vinci Code, without the homicidal albino monk.

In the 1930s, when Harris became one of the first Canadian artists to embrace abstraction, the transition was the smoothest in art history. For years, he’d been painting a world of heavenly forms free of the stubborn particulars of place, as if he couldn’t see the forest for the Tree. Without particulars to paint, however, art inevitably becomes more about the artist. Indeed, following the theosophical theory that cooler hues demonstrate a higher degree of enlightenment (pale azure, for example, indicates “self-renunciation and union with the divine”), Harris gradually migrated away from warm colours. In works such as Icebergs, Davis Strait, his subject rendered as a rhythm of triangular blue striations, it’s tempting to think that he wasn’t simply striving to channel the “psychic energy” seething within a block of ice — he was executing a self-portrait of the artist as a young god.
In the writings of mystics, it’s common for the line between self-surrender and self-divinization to become blurred. In such cases, it can be hard to tell whether the mystic is an egoless saint or a raging narcissist. Harris may have been both. One friend described the handsome, well-heeled heir of the Massey-Harris fortune as “self-centred, rather wanting to be courtiered, especially in his own studio.” Another wrote that he “carried his head as if he wore a crown.” But if Harris thought himself a god, he was a saint to Carr. Despite her new-found acceptance in Toronto and Ottawa, insecurity continued to dog her, and Harris took her under his wing, initiating a prolific correspondence that included a steady stream of theosophical philosophizing.

Over the next five years, Carr dabbled in the occult and wove its lessons into her paintings of the British Columbia landscape. With a renewed sense of purpose, she set to work by screwing up her eyes, which she felt brought “the spiritual into clearer focus,” and stripped her totem poles to bare geometries. “Seek ever,” she reminded herself in her journal, “to lift the painting above the paint.” But whereas Harris stressed stasis and serenity, Carr sought struggle and movement. Her trees and mountains became writhing demons, a dynamic spirit world lurking behind the phenomenal, manifestly ambivalent. In her 1929 work Indian Church, a primal pine forest rampages about the canvas, threatening to overwhelm a small white church in a tempest of greens and browns; yet the delicate structure, like a storm-tossed ship or a beleaguered lighthouse, remains unconquered, beating back Nature’s rawest rhythms with a steady inner light. Harris told her it was the best thing she’d ever done.

What he couldn’t have fully appreciated was that the ambivalent, restless energy in Carr’s new work had something to do with her uneasy relationship with Theosophy. While attracted to its syncretism, she bridled at the elitism and smugness it seemed to breed. She especially hated how her new friends in Toronto were constantly belittling Christianity. Their long-winded parsings of theosophical dogma bored her stiff; it seemed all head and no heart, and she found herself missing the warmth of a personal Jesus.

Then, in January 1934, she attended a lecture by Raja Singh, a Christian Hindu, and felt her heart leap in her chest. “Oh, this is live, vital religion,” she wrote. She wanted to see life “dipped in love” through communion with a personal divinity. “God as love,” she wrote, “is joyous.” Though she feared the disapproval of Harris and the rest, she was relieved by her decision to “go back sixty years to where I started.” In language reminiscent of Emerson’s assault on the “corpse-cold” rationalism of New England theology a century before, Carr attacked Theosophy as “bloodless,” a “cold storage of beautiful thoughts,” and heaved Blavatsky’s work into the fire.

To see Icebergs, Davis Strait in the National Gallery of Canada, visitors climb a long ramp that winds through the bowels of a glass mountain. At the summit is the light-filled Great Hall, a secular temple to Harris and his vision of Canada as the “replenishing North.” So it may surprise Canadians to hear that nationalism for Harris was but a lever of transcendence, a step on the path to “cosmic consciousness,” a phrase coined by the psychiatrist and Whitmanite Richard Bucke, whose Cosmic Consciousness Harris hailed as the greatest book ever written by a Canadian. As one Theosophist put it, “Internationalism follows nationalism — that stage must complete itself — before we can safely go on to the next.”