Blavatsky’s case for a meatless diet as spiritual practice
What the Work Is
Esoteric Vegetarianism is a work by Helena Blavatsky, the Russian-born writer, occultist, and theosophist who, with others, founded the Theosophical Society and helped spread the movement known as theosophy. The catalog record for this work gives its first publication as 2021. Blavatsky’s best-known books are Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, published in 1875 and 1888 respectively.
What the Book Is About
The work concerns vegetarianism understood in an esoteric register — that is, the abstention from eating meat treated not merely as a dietary or ethical choice but as a matter bound up with spiritual and occult practice. Its subject places it within a broader current of theosophical and esoteric thought in which the question of what one eats is connected to the development of the inner life.
Key Ideas and Themes
The central theme of the work is the relationship between diet and spiritual development as conceived within esoteric and theosophical circles. Vegetarianism, in this framing, is presented as a practice with significance beyond health or ordinary ethics: it belongs to the domain of esoteric discipline and the cultivation of the spiritual life.
The work belongs to a milieu in which vegetarianism and the cause of animals were closely intertwined with esoteric and theosophical commitments. Blavatsky’s contemporary Anna Bonus Kingsford (1846–1888), an English theosophist, was a researcher of esoteric Christianity, an advocate of women’s rights and of vegetarianism, and a fervent opponent of vivisection and animal experimentation. Kingsford’s career illustrates how, within this circle, dietary reform, animal welfare, and esoteric religion were pursued together. Blavatsky herself spoke of Kingsford in admiring terms, calling her a theosophist — a true theosophist at heart — and a leader of spiritual and philosophical thought endowed with the most exceptional psychic attributes.
Significance and Influence
The work belongs to the literature of theosophy, the movement Blavatsky helped to found and to spread. Its interest lies in the way it connects the question of diet to the esoteric worldview that theosophy promoted, a worldview in which the material and the spiritual are understood to be interwoven. Within that framework, the choice of what to eat becomes an expression of one’s orientation toward the spiritual life rather than a matter of mere preference or custom.
Blavatsky was born Helena von Hahn in Yekaterinoslav on 12 August 1831 and died in London on 8 May 1891. After a brief marriage to Nikiphor Blavatsky, she adopted the name Helena Petrovna Blavatskaya.
Kingsford’s Career and Positions
Kingsford graduated in medicine in 1880 in Paris, and three years later attained the presidency of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society. Opposed to the Theosophical Society’s orientalist turn, she objected to certain concepts advanced by Alfred Sinnet in Esoteric Buddhism and promoted the study of the Western Tradition, especially Hermetism and Christianity. Kingsford also claimed to receive mystical inspiration and revelations, which were compiled years later by her collaborator Edward Maitland. The situation of the Theosophical Society led her to create a new organization, which she called the Hermetic Society, in 1884. Her work The Perfect Way is a classic of Christian esoteric literature.
