Madame H.P. Blavatky (graphic by Gaia.com)

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VIDEO: “Most Mainstream Historians Are Trained in a Conformist Mindset”

Why I write history of the occult and esoteric

Mitch Horowitz
3 min readDec 14, 2023

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“Most mainstream historians have no idea what to make of a figure like occultist Madame H.P. Blavatsky (1831–1891). They think of her as some huckster or carnival performer or worse. They don’t know where to look for a deeper sense of history.

“And even if they could be shown where to look, they’re bored with the topic; they don’t want to pursue it with rigor.

“So, for example, Mahatma Gandhi in his letters and diaries was very plain that Madame Blavatsky as a person, and Theosophy as a principle, had an enormous, formative effect on the Indian independence movement. India today is the largest democracy in the world.

“Gandhi traced his earliest influences back to Madame Blavatsky — and this gets lost within mainstream history because most mainstream historians are trained in a kind of conformist mindset, as we all are, to regard certain things as serious, certain things as nonsense — and it dawned on me that…

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Mitch Horowitz
Mitch Horowitz

Written by Mitch Horowitz

"Treats esoteric ideas & movements with an even-handed intellectual studiousness"-Washington Post | PEN Award-winning historian | Censored in China

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