Blavatsky first major work, a sprawling two volume attack on both scientific materialism and dogmatic religion in the name of a hidden ancient wisdom underlying all traditions. It surveys magic, spiritualism, comparative religion, and the occult sciences to argue for a perennial esoteric truth. It laid the groundwork for the Theosophical worldview.
Facts
Origins
Era of Composition Era of CompositionWritten in under a year while Blavatsky was living in New York, drawing, by her own account, on a personal library plus material she said was conveyed to her by her Theosophical Masters, a claim of dictated authorship modern scholarship treats as belied by the book's traceable debts to identifiable contemporary printed sources. 1 Origin of the NameIts title invokes the Egyptian goddess Isis as a figure of hidden nature disclosed to the initiate, a framing device rather than a claim that the book's content derives specifically from Egyptian sources. 1 Attributed Author / CompilerHelena Petrovna Blavatsky 1 Scholarship
First PublishedFirst published in New York in 1877 by the bookseller J.W. Bouton, in two volumes; the first printing reportedly sold out within days. 1 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteModern scholarship, following the nineteenth century critic William Emmette Coleman's source by source comparison, reads the book as compiled extensively from other printed occult and scientific works of the period rather than as an original channeled revelation, a reading the Theosophical movement itself has never fully accepted. 1 Text
Literary Form Structure
StructureDivided into two volumes, Science and Theology, the first surveying magic and psychic phenomena against materialist science and the second surveying world religions against dogmatic Christian theology. 2 Transmission
Manuscript TraditionComposed in under a year in New York; modern scholarship traces its claimed dictated material to identifiable contemporary printed sources rather than to any independent manuscript line. 1 Learn More
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.
Two Volumes, Against Two Opponents
Isis Unveiled is organised as an attack on two fronts, and its two volumes are titled accordingly. The first is directed at science, arguing that the materialism of the period had excluded a range of real phenomena by definition rather than by investigation. The second is directed at theology, arguing that Christianity had inherited and then disowned an older wisdom, and reading comparative religion as evidence that all traditions descend from one source.
The method throughout is accumulation. Blavatsky piles up citations from Egyptology, Indology, classical authors, church fathers, mesmerism and contemporary science reporting, and the effect is of an argument made by sheer weight of material rather than by demonstration.
That method is what left the book open to the charge treated in the other article on this page. It is also why the book was influential: it made a case that the esoteric was a subject with a literature, at a moment when educated readers were being told it was not.
The doctrinal content that Theosophy became famous for is largely absent here. The root races, the septenary constitution and the Masters as a structured hierarchy arrive with The Secret Doctrine eleven years later.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Blavatsky's first major work; laid the groundwork for the Theosophical worldview.
Attributed To
Isis Unveiled (1877) is the first major work of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.
Originates in Language
Sources
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