Join us for this four-part series focusing on four key figures in Western Esotericism.

Class 1
Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality

Often referred to as the single most important and influential figure in modern occultism Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the madcap Russian adventuress who founded the Theosophical Society in NYC in 1875. HPB – as she was known – surfaced in Manhattan’s immigrant community after travelling around the world and studying ancient Buddhist mystical teachings in a hidden monastery in Tibet. Her Masters, Koot Hoomi and Morya, charged her with the mission of restoring the lost knowledge of the ancients to the modern world. In the process she influenced art, literature, religion, society, politics and just about everything else. W.B. Yeats, Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Gandhi were only a few of the important players in modern culture who sat at her considerable feet, and practically all the major figures in 20th century occultism were influenced in some way by her major works Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. This talk, based on Lachman's book Madame Blavatsky: Mother of Modern Spirituality, will look at her life and influence on the modern world.

Class 2
Who Was Rudolf Steiner?

The most successful figure of the early twentieth century occult revival was also its most enigmatic–the ‘spiritual scientist’ Rudolf Steiner. Before emerging in the early 1900s as a remarkable esoteric philosopher and leader of a new spiritual movement, Anthroposophy, Steiner kicked around Vienna, Berlin, and points in between as an all-purpose Germanic professor, lecturing on Hegel or Nietzsche at working men’s colleges, loitering in cafes, and for the most part keeping under wraps his strange ability to see spirits and speak with the dead. Starting out as a Goethe scholar, after a lecture to the Berlin Theosophical Society, Steiner re-invented himself as the charismatic, inspiring herald of a modern mystery school, that would have remarkable practical results in agriculture, architecture, education, medicine, the arts and even politics. Who was Rudolf Steiner? This lecture based on Lachman's book Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to His Life and Work, will go some way to answering that question.

Class 3
Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, and the Fourth Way

In 1915 a mysterious figure appeared in Moscow and soon gathered a core of devoted followers, all students of his strange system of esoteric doctrine and psychological development. This remarkable man Gurdjieff had travelled in the east in search of ancient wisdom, and by his own account had found it. When the journalist and theosophist P.D. Ouspensky came into Gurdjieff’s orbit, one of the most compelling and dramatic narratives of spiritual adventure began, played out against the backdrop of WWI, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War. When Ouspensky arrived in London in 1922, he was feted by literary lights such as T.S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley, and when Gurdjieff opened his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France, much of the cultural crème de la crème crossed the Channel to be put through his particularly strenuous mill. What is the Fourth Way and is it true that we are, as Gurdjieff, said, really nothing but machines? Make a super-effort to attend and see. This talk, based on Lachman's books In Search of P.D. Ouspensky and Maurice Nicoll: Forgotten Teacher of the Fourth Way, will trace the compelling psycho-history surrounding one of the most influential esoteric teachings in modern times.

Class 4
Jung the Mystic?

Among the crowd of faces on the cover of the Beatles’ ground-breaking album, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, was the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, who died in 1961, just on the cusp of the 1960s revolutions. With Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler, Jung was one of the Big Three of modern psychology, and throughout his career Jung presented himself as a scientist and empiricist, mapping out the contours of the psyche. But Jung had the occult in his DNA. His mother spoke in tongues and held seances in which she communicated with her dead father, and Jung started his career with a study of the paranormal performances of his cousin. Jung broke with Freud because of his occult beliefs – at one point scaring the wits out of Freud by manifesting a poltergeist – and his “descent into the unconscious” following their split revealed to him the secrets of the “collective unconscious,” the reservoir of ancient symbols and images whose archetypes come alive each night in our dreams. As early as 1940, Jung was talking about a coming Age of Aquarius, and anyone who knows they are an introvert has Jung to thank for that. UFOs, out of the body experiences, Near Death Experiences, the I Ching and the “meaningful coincidences” he called synchronicities are only some of the unusual phenomena that the”sage of Kunsnacht” explored in his long career.