Centennial Efforts and Counter-Efforts
of the Millennium

by Govert Schuller

Introduction

With the closing of the millennium it might be of interest to present an esoteric retrospective of a 1000 years of efforts by individuals and groups, which tried to make the world we live in better and/or worse. The guiding principle is Blavatsky's idea that in the last quarter of every century the Adepts,or Masters of Wisdom, send one or more of Their representatives to enlighten humanity. This idea has been worked out in a small measure by Theosophist John R. Wilkinson in his 1930 article The Theosophical Society In Western History. This article will serve as a general introduction to the body of this presentation tilted Correlations between Spiritual Developments and Historical Events, which consists of timelines, diagrams and little biographies. It's more or less a puzzle, but with the help of The Centennial Efforts-diagram and the The Counter-Efforts-diagram it will hopefully become clear what historical patterns and surprising connections I found emerging from all the collected data, which mostly have been culled from books mentioned in the Bibliography.

This presentation will try to lay-out correlations between spiritual developments and historical events in mainly the last 1000 years of European and American history. The idea of this correlation also comes from Blavatsky. In her Key to Theosophy, she positively correlates the success of the Theosophical Society, which is a spiritual movement, with the possibility of a transformed human society, which would be a remarkable historical event.

She wrote:

" ...if the Theosophical Society survives and lives true to its mission, to its original impulses through the next hundred years--tell me, I say, if I go too far in asserting that earth will be a heaven in the twenty-first century in comparison with what it is now." (307)

The correlation is presented not as an accident, but as being related in a causative way: the spiritual development causing a specific historical outcome. This view of historical causation is quite different from what academic historians find acceptable. As Joscelyn Godwin notes:

"Conspiracy theory is anathema to the historian, but indispensable to the history of occultism. It is of the very essence of the occult world view that earthly events are not the result of material cause and effect alone, but that they are influenced by other levels of being. The occultist automatically seeks for a higher cause, both in the general happenings that change the course of world history, and in small happenings... "

The pivotal point of this research is the esoteric-historical interconnectedness of the spiritual and historical events in the years 1929-1930. The three most important events being:

To find out how these disparate events are meaningfully related, and how the underlying pattern has its historical precedents, you have to emerge yourself in the labyrinth of the main document.

The puzzle-like structure of the main document is as follows: It starts with identifying six main spiritual developments between 1875 and 1935. They are:

These six spiritual events are each presented as archetypal and each is subsequently connected with historical events for which they might have been predominant, or at least important, causative factors.

Each of these six spiritual developments are also presented as having precedents in the last 1000 years with their own historical consequences. So, each of the 6 spiritual events have

Not all of these developments have been worked out systematically. I intend this presentation to be open-ended. Nothing is fixed and I am open to new facts, ideas and patterns.