Blavatsky's First Synthesis, and the Plagiarism Charge

Isis Unveiled (1877) was the first major work of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and the opening statement of Theosophy: a sprawling two-volume assault on both scientific materialism and dogmatic (especially Christian) religion in the name of a hidden "Wisdom-Religion," an ancient esoteric tradition said to underlie all faiths and to have been preserved by adepts. It ranges across magic, spiritualism, comparative religion and the occult sciences, and it set the template for the Theosophical claim that a single primordial truth stands behind the world's religions. Two cautions belong with it. First, its scholarship is of its period and its method associative rather than critical.

Second, and more seriously, the American writer William Emmette Coleman claimed in the 1890s to have identified thousands of passages copied, often without acknowledgement, from contemporary books, a charge of plagiarism that has coloured assessment of Blavatsky's sources ever since, though her defenders read the borrowings as the ordinary compilation of her day. Joscelyn Godwin and other historians of esotericism set the book in the wider nineteenth-century context from which it drew.