Fall 2000
Volume 27, Number 1

By the late nineteenth century occultism had become the favorite sport of Britain's leisured classes. Table rapping, seances, and levitations offered new pursuits to those who, exhausted by the earnest stipulations of Victorian society, looked to other diversions that crossed the boundaries between finite and infinite planes of meaning and imagination. For urban cosmopolitans in particular, occultism afforded a mobility between different personae and worldviews increasingly denied or at least circumscribed by the mainstream morality of their times. The situation was even more extreme in the colonies, where, as E. M. Forster showed so brilliantly in A Passage to India, contact between the colonizer and the colonized was limited to bureaucratic transactions, with the result that whenever social occasions were contrived to overcome the divide, such as through the infamous Bridge Party depicted in the novel, they predictably ended in abject failure.1 Forster's novel focused on the alienation of a small group of Englishmen from the racial exclusivism practiced by the colonial bureaucracy. As teachers, missionaries, doctors, and other professionals they could not but be involved with Indians at a level of intimacy forbidden by colonial logic. Such contact, necessitated by the nature of their work as service professionals, did not necessarily mean they were all anticolonial activists, but it did put them in positions where their day-to-day transactions with colonized Indians gave them a more complex perspective on racialized encounters, resulting in far deeper questioning of the structure and style of existing bureaucratic relationships.

[...]

Yet even as the knowledge of the Eastern masters is normalized and made part of professional knowledge and therefore acceptable, a core part of the teachings remains inaccessible, as is evident in the deliberate strategies of adepts to subvert their colonial "masters'" ventriloquism. Fissures in the jointly produced texts of occult transmission are most transparent in the disjunctive visions of history, memory, time, and knowledge, pulling the texts in different directions and revealing them to be an uncertain composite of voices often at war with each other. The spiritual teachers' voices convey their refusal to accept a finite, secular view of history and the world, which is the only form in which their teachings can be absorbed by the structures of Western knowledge. The fact that the spiritual teachers' perspective is not suppressed but rather preserved reveals that these texts attempt to negotiate social relationships considered impossible under the normal conditions of colonial rule. We learn that what begins as a leisurely pastime for many urban cosmopolitans, drawn to occultism as an alternative to the regulated social practices of the time, thus becomes a very serious matter, as the astral world is reconstituted as the ground for a redefinition of colonial relationships. That adepts and their European initiates do not necessarily share a common definition shows the extent to which astral matters still continued to function as the last frontier, open to exploration but resistant to false appropriation.