Quest Magazine

The Light of the Russian Soul: A Personal Memoir of Early Russian Theosophy

By Elena F. Pisareva

Originally printed in the SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2008 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Pisareva, Elena F. "The Light of the Russian Soul: A Personal Memoir of Early Russian Theosophy." Quest  96.5 (SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2008):171-174.

The following extracts are taken from a new translation by George M. Young of a never before published account of Theosophy in Russia before and until the Russian Revolution. The author, Elena Pisareva, focuses especially on the early leader of Russian Theosophists, Anna Kamensky, some of whose activities these extracts describe. 

 

Tolstoy and Theosophy 

 

Search and Seizure 

 

Escape from Soviet Russia 

 

---

George M. Young, Ph.D., is a Slavicist who has taught Russian and Comparative Literature at Grinnell and Dartmouth Colleges, although for many years he ran a fine arts and auction business. He is the author of many articles and books on Russian literature and religious philosophy. Young currently teaches English literature at the University of New England. These excerpts are from his translation of Elena Pisareva's journal, The Light of the Russian Soul: A Personal Memoir of Early Russian Theosophy (Quest Books, 2008).

---

 

---

By Coleston Brown

Originally printed in the Spring 2009 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Brown, Coleston. "Explorations: Healing the Rift: Working with the Power of the Land." Quest  97. 2 (Spring 2009): 70-71.

Although their expressive forms are continually filtered through cultural patterns, at heart native spiritual traditions retain a unity that transcends local idiosyncrasies. Generally speaking, these traditions are rooted in a set of power centers in the land—an inner-land matrix, a unified field of forces that underlie and underpin physical reality. It is these forces that modern magical work with the land aims at contacting.

One major problem encountered by those who attempt to work with the power in the land of North America is what I call "the Rift." This shadowy layer of energy that shrouds entry to the inner-land matrix is largely the result of the sudden occlusion of the native mystery current. It is a side-effect of the forcible suppression of American Indian cultures and traditions. The Rift lies like a wound upon the land and is as real an obstruction for those who are of Native American descent as it is for those who are not—though each type reacts in a different manner.

Perhaps the most common symptom among non-Native Americans who contact the Rift is a powerful feeling of guilt, a great shame over events, actual or assumed, perpetrated by an invading culture upon the aboriginal inhabitants of this land. Often these non-Indians feel that somehow they do not really belong here, that their roots are elsewhere. Sometimes they even feel remorse for the fact that they cannot "become native." In extreme cases, some people will have a fear of being overwhelmed by powerful archaic forces, leading to a strong aversion to the whole area of sacred magic and the native traditions. Or they may attempt to imitate an earlier stage of consciousness by identifying with the immature and falsely idealized notion of the "noble savage."

Such reactions are simply part and parcel of coming to terms with a collective karmic debt. A tremendous amount of psychic stress has led to the formation of the Rift over the past 500 years or so. It should therefore be no great surprise that this tension constitutes a hefty stumbling block to further spiritual development or that it initially tends to release in powerful and unbalanced ways when one attempts entry into the deeper psychic levels of the land.

Fortunately, a number of magical groups and individuals have worked to alleviate these difficulties, particularly in the past thirty or forty years (though complete release is an ongoing and long-term process). Much of this work has involved working with sacred Dreamers, who are presences in the landscape. They are often mentioned in local traditions in connection with features such as hills, mountains, rivers, lakes, stones, and trees. Another mode of work, particularly with groups, has been to forge inner links with the inner powers and spiritual presences of native traditions in other parts of the world. Such efforts have resulted in the creation of buffers that grant access to the inner-land power with minimal negative reaction, even for relatively inexperienced hands.

Initially, this access is best gained by moving through the sacred magical and mythological patterns of our territorial ancestors. Magicians make extensive use of forms and patterns from the past, yet this should never be done in a reactionary mood; we should primarily be looking forward, not back. After all, the purpose of making this kind of contact is to regenerate and rechannel the power within the landscape into forms appropriate for the future development of a unified spiritual identity.

Forms of contact with the powers of the land range across a surprisingly broad spectrum of experience, of which there are three main bands, which we can simply categorize as individual, national, and international.

Individual contact with the land results in an awareness of being closer to nature, of being earthed and balanced. Many magical workers form elemental contacts as a means of maintaining psychic equilibrium.

Properly trained and dedicated magical workers are channels for the spiritual power in the land on which they live. And they will inevitably be called upon to mediate this power in order to help in the healing of the national soul. The inner-land power centers situated within the territorial boundaries of a nation have a potent influence on that nation's identity, helping to form its unique character. Old World mystery groups used to focus a tremendous amount of their energies on the healing and development of the soul of the nation in which they lived. Unfortunately, this kind of national healing is sadly lacking in the annals of magical work in North America. And yet, experience shows that an inadequate or an exclusive focus on the national level tends to breed a parochial, nationalistic egotism.

Fortunately, this can be counterbalanced by excursions into planetary or international magic. International magic is aimed at the healing and development of the planetary soul—that of the earth as a whole. The potential scope for international magic has been greatly expanded by the advances in world communications of our current era. It is, however, an area of work presently fraught with difficulty. Again, much of the problem stems from karmic stumbling blocks rooted in the history of international affairs. There is a further difficulty in that inner planetary work requires people to be willing and able to sacrifice a portion of their participation in the national psyche of their home country while simultaneously maintaining a strong link to the currents of power in the land. To say the least, this kind of balancing act requires a rare combination of experience and spiritual fortitude.

Be this as it may, such work does go on, and important international linkups are being made through which the inner-land powers of different countries are cross-fed and even merged into one another.

Whatever our Old World roots may be, the ancient American Indians are our territorial ancestors. As such, their traditional material can supply us with the means to forge important spiritual contacts with the land. Now I am not suggesting that you go out and take courses in Native American shamanism, perform pipe ceremonies, attend sweat lodges, or imitate other culturally specific practices. In fact, such things raise a host of issues, ethical and otherwise, that are too complicated to address here. Rather what I'm suggesting is a simple tuning of consciousness to certain places and patterns of sacred lore. One useful example of the kind of lore I mean is the legend of "The Stone That Gives All Story," a Seneca tradition that tells of "Orphan," who sets off into a forest on a journey of initiation. In the course of his journey, Orphan comes upon a glade where there is a tall stone. He sits on it to rest. This is no ordinary stone, however. It speaks, and Orphan soon finds himself listening to wondrous stories. (For a fuller account, see E. Ella Clark, Indian Legends of Canada, [Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977]). Although expressed in a specific, localized tradition, the tale contains images and motifs that are transcultural and which can thus be used as entry points to the inner-land matrix in many places.

To connect with the presence and stream of power behind the stone, you can use techniques such as recitation (ritually telling the story) and empowered vision (building the main images of the story in your imagination). I give a version of this tale in the form of a visionary practice, with operational notes, on my Web site.

You can also set up your own stone in your home or yard, or you can find one in a local park. It need not be large or obtrusive, just a focus to link you in when you do the visionary work mentioned above. These small efforts can establish a meaningful and lively relationship with the land you live on and will give you access to energies that will benefit you, your family, friends, and local community. Beyond this, if you are called to them, are acts of spiritual service to the earth and all its creatures.

---

Coleston Brown is the author of Magical Christianity: The Power of Symbols for Spiritual Renewal  (Quest Books, 2007). He is committed to practicing and teaching the Magical Way, which he defines as a transreligious spiritual path of personal and planetary transformation. He has a Web site at www.magicalways.com .

---

By Andre Clewell

Originally printed in the Spring 2009 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Clewell, Andre. "Sustaining Nature." Quest  97. 2 (Spring 2009): 60- 63.

When Nelson Mandela assumed leadership of South Africa's post-apartheid government in 1994, he was faced with two seemingly intractable problems. One was pervasive poverty among the nation's black population. The other was the rapid spread of trees from Australia—eucalyptus among them—that were planted in plantations a century earlier to augment scarce supplies of lumber. These alien trees were now reseeding everywhere and replacing native ecosystems.  Their deep roots removed soil moisture. Water tables were lowered, and farmers could scarcely grow crops as entire landscapes dried out.

Mandela's government seized an opportunity to resolve both issues simultaneously. The nation's poor were hired in a massive public works program called Working for Water. A civilian army spread out across the countryside, cutting down every invasive tree in sight. More than a million acres have been cleared. In 2005 alone, 32,000 people participated. Enough water has been saved to fill a reservoir on a medium-sized river each year.

Positive environmental stories like Working for Water are sparingly reported by our news media, which thrives on disaster stories like global warming and sea level rise. But there are other big success stories waiting to be reported.

One is occurring not far to the west of the Theosophical Society Headquarters at Adyar, India, where depleted forests have been overtaken by brush. People in many tribal villages of this region became impoverished, because their former forests could no longer sustain them economically with wood, thatching material, foods, and medicinal plants. These forests once served as natural "sponges" that absorbed rainfall that was later tapped by people for their potable water supply. Now rainfall runs off the brushland and is lost as flow during flash floods, leaving little to drink in the prolonged annual dry season. Personnel from the Forest Department of the State of Tamil Nadu stepped in with a program for people to restore their former forests, their water supply, and thus their economies.

The foresters presented workshops in every town, where citizens learned about forest degradation, the importance of healthy forests to their well-being, and how they could restore forests as community projects. People gathered seeds of native trees and grew them in village nurseries that the Forest Department established. Then teams of citizens spread across the countryside to plant these young tree sprouts. They constructed small reservoirs to retain water until the forest recovered.

The Forest Department encouraged the formation of women's groups and made small loans to them to establish local businesses. Some women's groups are collecting palm fronds from the forest from which they make handicrafts for export. This local, forest-based industry has generated much-needed income for their villages.

There is another success story from the center of one of the world's hotspots.  As rivers go, the Alexander River does not match up to the grandeur of the Nile. In fact, it would not take an Olympian to broad-jump across it in places. It begins in Palestinian hills near Nablus in the West Bank and flows eastward into Israel and the Mediterranean Sea at Tel Aviv. In 1995, it was a dirty, polluted mess, from raw sewage and residues from olive presses and stone-cutting plants.

Palestinian and Israeli citizens got together to do something about it, including some environmental professionals who volunteered their expertise. It began as a low-key affair, with civic leaders from towns all along the river meeting quietly to make plans in a back room of the German embassy, away from the hysteria of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Then citizens from these towns volunteered their free time in a massive cleanup effort. In a spontaneous display of international unity, they made the water sparkle and turned the river's weedy flood plain into attractive public parks. The rare and spectacularly large Nile soft-shelled turtle returned to the river to the delight of everyone and as an apparent symbol of their success.

These three environmental vignettes from South Africa, India, and the Middle East share a common thread. They are bottom-up, community-based endeavors conducted by the people themselves. They were assisted by the government as they took charge of their own natural environments. In this manner local people participated in the natural processes of their own ecosystems and essentially became inseparable from nature. Such participation develops an appreciation and respect for nature. In turn, nature sustains people with clean water and other natural bounties. This union with nature can lead to nation-building, as it did in South Africa, and towards world peace, as in the miracle that happened along the Alexander River.

Ordinarily, we don't consider nature and economics in the same breath. Instead, we think of economic development and the environmental destruction it brings in its wake as the very antithesis of nature. But these three vignettes are telling us something else—that nature and economics are tightly intertwined. The byword is "sustainable development" whereby we take care of nature and nature takes care of us, indefinitely into the future. We need to treat nature as if people mattered, and treat economics as if nature mattered.

"Very good!" you may say, "But what do those vignettes from halfway around the world have to do with me here in the American heartland?"  The answer is, "Plenty!" In recent years, it seems like each spring brings headlines about floods along the Mississippi River and its far-reaching tributaries. A principal reason for these floods has been well known ever since the floods of 1993 that crept into suburbs of St. Louis and onto our television screens as we watched for weeks as people clung to rooftops of flooded homes. So what was the problem?

Thousands of farmers throughout the upper Midwest had converted small headwater marshes into croplands. Previously, the marshes served to retain snowmelt and spring rainfall, releasing it in increments throughout the rest of the year in to streams that eventually joined the Mississippi. Before those conversions to cropland began, the Mississippi River swelled each spring onto its natural flood plain, but not to the point that it threatened St. Louis and gave television crews sensational footage.

What was the remedy? We built more levees and attempted other expensive engineering solutions, but the floods keep returning. The permanent solution would be to restore those thousands of small marshes throughout the upper Midwest. Land that was taken out of production in a government subsidy program can be substituted without decreases in food production and farm income. But do we know how to restore these marshes? You bet we do! The cost would be high but no greater than the property losses that were suffered in the 1993 flood.

So where's the proof that we can restore Midwestern marshes? Next time you are at the TS's national headquarters, look out the back door of the Olcott Building. Just to the right of the labyrinth you will see a patch of restored prairie that staff member Jeff Gresko installed several years ago. Its perky display of bright yellow compass-plants, which rise above the tall Indian grasses, adds a vibrant splash of color to the grounds. In terms of plant species, this is a drier version of the same kind of prairie that was removed from those thousands of acres of marshlands in the upper Midwest. If Jeff Gresko can exercise his tall, lithe, compass-plant-like frame to restore prairie at Olcott, then it can be done elsewhere. It's not hard to do. It just takes gumption.

Precedents for native prairie restoration exist all over the greater Chicago region. A restored prairie occupies much of the campus of the College of DuPage near Olcott. Two dozen large prairies grace public parks that encircle suburban Chicago. All were restored by thousands of local volunteers who began their work about thirty-five years ago. Another restored prairie sits on top of the underground accelerator at the Fermi Lab—site of last year's excursion during Summer National Gathering.

Nature sustains us, as long as we sustain nature. From a Theosophical point of view, that's another expression of the principle of oneness. When we restore nature, in a real sense we become one with nature, and we also become one with those who have joined in common effort at a restoration project site. In this way (and with apologies to Annie Besant), I suggest that all who feel themselves as one with nature restored, know they are therefore one with every other.

---

Andre Clewell is a Theosophist from Ellenton, Florida. His latest book, Ecological Restoration: Principles, Values, and Structure of an Emerging Profession, was published in 2007 by Island Press. Contact him at clewell@verizon.net.

 

---