The Mother of all Religions

Buddhism Series

“App’s achievement is staggering. He has done what no one else dared: traced, chronologically and obsessively, every book, article, and letter Blavatsky ever wrote, cross-referencing them with the sources she borrowed from—often without acknowledgment, occasionally without understanding. The result is a forensic map of Theosophy’s textual DNA, claiming that Blavatsky’s spiritual edifice was built not on Himalayan revelations but on a library of 19th-century curiosities, spiritualist pamphlets, and Orientalist misfires.”

Massimo Introvigne

“Theosophy’s Literary Skeletons: Urs App and Madame Blavatsky’s ‘MentalFurniture’” November 2025

“App’s book is a triumph of exegesis. It is indispensable for anyone studying Theosophy, Orientalism, or the intellectual history of modern spirituality.”

Massimo Introvigne

“Theosophy’s Literary Skeletons: Urs App and Madame Blavatsky’s ‘MentalFurniture’” November 2025

“Just finished this splendid new book by the Swiss scholar Urs App (whom I already knew from a previous book about The Birth of Orientalism). Finally, somebody has done all the hard historical-philological work that is required to uncover the true foundations of Helena P. Blavatsky’s Theosophy, one of the most influential esoteric movements of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century. […] The result is a thrilling piece of historical detective work.”

Wouter J. Hanegraaff

“Blavatsky Stripped Bare by a Buddhologist, Even.” (September 2025)

Overview

THE MOTHER OF ALL RELIGIONS

The Genesis of Blavatsky’s Theosophy: Ancient Theology, Orientalism, and Buddhism by Urs App

Wil / Paris: UniversityMedia, 2025
Hardcover ISBN 978-3-906000-36-7
Paperback ISBN 978-3-906000-35-0

The Story of Helena Blavatsky’s Invention of Primeval Religion

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–91), the “grandmother of the New Age,” not only inspired artists such as Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Scriabin, Mahler, Sibelius, T. S. Eliot and Kahlil Gibran but also founders of spiritual movements such as Rudolf Steiner and George Gurdjieff. In 1875 Blavatsky co-founded the Theosophical Society in New York, and in the remaining sixteen years of her life she authored all fundamental works of modern Theosophy. Already in her lifetime, her Society had hundreds of branches in India and all over the world, and even today sections and subsections of the movement are active in many countries of Asia and the West.

Blavatsky is an extremely controversial figure. Hailed by some as the most extraordinary woman of the 19th century, she was denounced by others as history’s greatest charlatan. Her central claims were that she enjoyed direct contact with members of an esoteric, Buddhism-associated brotherhood in Tibet who had initiated her to secret doctrines transmitted from the dawn of humanity, and that she had access to the world’s most ancient religious scripture: the Book of Dzyan.

Urs App, the author of The Birth of Orientalism (2010) & The Cult of Emptiness (2012), and editor of Blavatsky on Buddhism (2023), describes how Blavatsky–much inspired by Romantic orientalist views of Buddhism–invented the world’s primeval wisdom religion. Instead of regarding Blavatsky as an adept with superior powers and an initiate of unchanging secret doctrines transmitted from remote antiquity, App studies her as one would any modern intellectual author by investigating the historical development of her thought. What did she read and when, what key ideas did she pick up from what sources, and how did she combine, digest, and transform such information into a Buddhism- and Orientalism-inspired Ancient Theology?

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Table of Contents and Introduction

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Review by Prof. Wouter J. Hanegraaff (University of Amsterdam) of Urs App:
The Mother of All Religions. The Genesis of Blavatsky‘s Theosophy: Ancient Theology, Orientalism, and Buddhism
(Wil / Paris: UniversityMedia, 2025). xii + 460 pp.

ISBN 978-3-906000-36-7 (hardcover);
978-3-906000-35-0 (paperback)

Source: http://wouterjhanegraaff.blogspot.com/2025/09/blavatsky-stripped-bare-by-buddhology.html

BLAVATSKY STRIPPED BARE BY A BUDDHOLOGIST, EVEN.

I just finished reading this splendid new book by the Swiss scholar Urs App (I already knew him from a previous book about The Birth of Orientalism). Finally, somebody has done all the hard historical-philological work that is required to uncover the true foundations of Helena P. Blavatsky’s Theosophy, one of the most influential esoteric movements of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century. App’s method rests on some simple and quite traditional but essential foundations. (1) Take the time to carefully study all the relevant primary sources, i.e. not just some part of what HPB wrote, but really everything she wrote; (2) consistently place those sources in a strict chronological order, if possible even on a day-to-day basis, so that you can see exactly how her thinking develops over time; (3) don’t be satisfied by just scanning “the discourse” in general terms, as is common in academia today, but analyze her ideas; and finally (4) do whatever you can to identify the exact written sources from which she drew those ideas at any moment in that chronological sequence.

This empirical-historical method – bottom-up historiography and textual criticism – allows Urs App to establish beyond a shadow of doubt that Blavatsky did not have any first-hand familiarity with Tibetan Buddhism, as she famously claimed; that she invented her famous Mahatmas and those mysterious occult orders in which she said she had been initiated; that her ideas about Oriental Wisdom were based not on the Indian or more specifically Buddhist traditions she encountered in India but on Western Spiritualist and Orientalist literature about those traditions; and that her entire oeuvre is based on one single obsession – to prove the existence of a primordial wisdom tradition, “the mother of all religions,” which she imagined as a kind of Buddhism prior to and independent of historical Buddhism. Of course, most modern scholars of Theosophy already assumed or suspected most of these things (pioneering work having been done by specialists such as Joscelyn Godwin, Michael Gomes, or Pat Deveney), but the difference is that App succeeds in demonstrating them so completely and so conclusively that these debates can now be considered settled once and for all. It is not just a question of countless and usually unacknowledged borrowings, plagiarisms, or paraphrases from whatever book Blavatsky happened to have in front of her at the time she was writing. At least as important is her reliance on dictionaries of Oriental languages to build up a Theosophical vocabulary that, unfortunately, shows again and again that she did not know those languages and made countless elementary mistakes (in sharp contrast, of course, with her own claims of having “translated” many textual passages from mysterious Oriental sources). None of this is speculation on App’s part. Again, he does not just suggest it but demonstrates it, at a great many instances, by precise comparisons between HPB’s statements and what you actually find in those dictionaries and other sources if you just take the trouble to look them up – and of course, if you actually know something about Buddhism and its history, and can read the languages.

The result is a thrilling piece of historical detective work, beginning with Blavatsky’s early exposure to Allen Kardec in 1858 (a neglected topic, for while HPB was fluent in French, many modern scholars are not), from there to the crucial years 1874-1875, when she began creating her system in New York, and then all the way up to her period in India and her return to Europe and finally her death. Devastating as the conclusions may be to true believers in Theosophy, it would be mistaken to think of this book as just another exercise in “debunking Blavatsky” by exposing her as a fraud. On the contrary, App is doing the work that historians of religion are supposed to do, quite similar to how the discipline of biblical criticism inevitably undermines traditional Christian doctrine – not out of some desire to destroy religious or esoteric beliefs but simply out of a commitment to truth. Certainly, Blavatsky was continually deceiving her readers, and probably herself as well, and yet there’s little doubt that she believed sincerely in her primordial wisdom tradition. Her sources might be fabricated and she might have been manipulating her readers and everybody around her; but she seems to have believed that this ultimately did not matter, because the doctrine itself was true, her intentions were good, and the results of her “pious deceptions” would ultimately benefit humanity. The end justified the means. Be that as it may, App is perfectly right to finish his book by reminding his readers of a basic Theosophical tenet: no religion higher than truth.