Blavatsky on the Antiquity of the Vedas

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 8 pages

From the very first number of The Theosophist, in October 1879, and effectively a statement of editorial position. A journal interested in archaeology, archaic religion and the occult in nature, she writes, has to be doubly prudent: bringing exact science and metaphysics into direct contact might cause as much disturbance as throwing a piece of potassium into a basin of water. Being pledged to show that some of the wisest Western scholars have been misled by the dead letter of appearances places the paper under a ban from the start.

The test case is the dating of the Vedas. An infinitude of study had been spent on chronology, she notes, and yet the affirmations about the relative antiquity of the great pre-Christian religions remained little more than plausible hypotheses — with Max Muller himself confessing that how far back the Vedic period extends is impossible to tell, while still tracing it to a period before 1000 BC. The methodological claim in the title follows from that: the inductive method bequeathed to modern scientists by Aristotle assumes false premises and can only lead, on her account, to crass materialism.

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