The Spiritual Blindness of Anthropomorphism Is the Origin of Crass Materialism

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 16 pages

The first of three documents in this batch on the same theme, and the one that states the case most directly: that a god made in man's image, once disbelieved, leaves nothing behind but matter — so that anthropomorphism is not the opposite of materialism but its parent. Blavatsky calls the result fatally wedded to pessimism, atheism and despair, and materialism itself the mother of all vices, the negation of pure spirit issuing in brutality, hypocrisy, greed and selfishness.

The interesting move is that she does not stop at the churches. Modern science, she allows, can collect, classify and generalise upon phenomena — but the daring explorer who would probe the inmost secrets of nature must transcend the narrow limitations of sense and raise his Manas to the realm of noumena, and she concedes in the same breath that to run counter to the eminent exponents of science is to court premature discomfiture in Western eyes. Sections follow on the ancient belief in the Sun as the god of spiritual and terrestrial light, and on the materialist who denies the Soul of Kosmos yet trespasses on metaphysical ground, where he will soon come to an impasse. Astronomers and physicists, she concludes, are considerably more illogical in this than the physiologists.

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