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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Ken Wilber and
H.P. Blavatsky

Strange Bedfellows of the Spirit

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

When we look at the history of modern esoteric thought, two names stand out—though rarely side by side: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), co-founder of the Theosophical Society and grand dame of esoteric synthesis, and Ken Wilber (1949– ), architect of Integral Theory and self-proclaimed cartographer of consciousness. On the surface they belong to different centuries, different sensibilities, and different publishing industries. But on closer inspection, they share a peculiar family resemblance—equal parts illuminating and problematic.

The System Builders

Blavatsky and Wilber are both system builders of a sweeping kind.

Blavatsky drew on Hinduism, Buddhism, Neoplatonism, and occultism to weave a grand cosmogony that explained the universe in terms of rounds, root races, and planes of existence. It was a cosmic soap opera, populated with Masters of Wisdom, astral worlds, and karmic cycles.

Wilber, a century later, raided psychology, philosophy, mysticism, and systems theory to produce AQAL—“all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all types.” His goal was not so much to tell a story about root races as to provide a meta-map of reality that could include science, spirituality, and everything in between.

Both sought nothing less than total frameworks for understanding existence. And both often bit off more than they could chew.

Borrowers Extraordinaire

Neither was shy about borrowing.

Blavatsky claimed her doctrines were the secret wisdom of the ages, transmitted by mysterious Mahatmas in Tibet. Modern scholars, however, have shown her sources were far more terrestrial: Orientalist scholarship, esoteric novels, and a heavy dose of imagination.

Wilber, too, has been accused of selective reading. He presents his integral synthesis as including “all the known disciplines,” but in practice it leans heavily on certain schools (e.g., perennial philosophy, developmental psychology) while brushing aside anything that doesn't fit his ladder-like ascent toward Spirit.

Both promised universality, but often delivered partiality disguised as completeness.

Science and Its Discontents

Here the contrast sharpens.

Blavatsky was openly hostile to modern science, denouncing materialism as a dead end and claiming occult science as its superior. Evolution, for her, wasn't Darwinian tinkering but spiritual unfolding guided by cosmic law.

Wilber, by contrast, courts science—up to a point. He wants to include empirical knowledge within his integral framework, but on the condition that science recognize the higher truths of meditation, subtle states, and mystical insight. Like Blavatsky, he smuggles purpose and Spirit into evolution, though with more contemporary jargon.

Both end up in tension with mainstream science: Blavatsky as its outright foe, Wilber as its condescending critic.

The Allure of Higher Planes

Another family resemblance lies in their fascination with higher realms.

For Blavatsky, the astral, mental, and spiritual planes were as real as chairs and tables. The afterlife was populated, reincarnation was the rule, and clairvoyants were trusted reporters.

Wilber translates this cosmology into subtler terms: gross, subtle, causal, nondual. He downplays the Victorian occult drama, but still insists that higher states and subtle dimensions are ontologically real, not just subjective metaphors.

Strip away the rhetoric, and both offer a vertical universe where matter is only the basement of a grand cosmic high-rise.

Psychology and the Missing Western Esoteric Thread

After Blavatsky's death, later Theosophical leaders such as Annie Besant tried to modernize and psychologize the movement. Besant absorbed the psychology of her day, engaging with thinkers like William James and interacting with currents from the Society for Psychical Research. This gave Theosophy, for all its speculative flights, some dialogue with the emerging sciences of mind and altered states.

Wilber, paradoxically, seems to have overlooked precisely this Western esoteric tradition. He frames his project as “all-inclusive,” yet shows little sustained engagement with the occult and psychical research movements that shaped early modern spirituality. His map includes mystical states and developmental stages, but largely bypasses the very Western experiments with mediumship, clairvoyance, and esoteric psychology that bridged science and spirituality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In this sense, his Integral framework is strangely selective, giving prominence to Asian contemplative systems while sidelining the esoteric heritage closer to home. Ironically, it was the Theosophical Society itself that published two of Wilber's early books, making his later neglect of this tradition even more conspicuous.

Critics Old and New

Neither figure escaped strong criticism.

Blavatsky was targeted by skeptics during her lifetime, most famously in the 1885 report by the Society for Psychical Research, which accused her of fraud. Another formidable critic was William Emmette Coleman, an American Orientalist who painstakingly documented her borrowings from earlier works. Coleman accused her of extensive plagiarism in Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, and although much of his research was lost in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, his charges significantly shaped scholarly opinion about Blavatsky's originality.

Wilber has likewise drawn fire, most memorably from Geoffrey Falk, whose books Stripping the Gurus and Norman Einstein skewer Wilber's intellectual posturing and exposes the problematic cult-like dynamics around certain spiritual leaders he endorsed. Falk's irreverent critique echoed Coleman's in tone: puncturing grandiosity with a mixture of ridicule and fact-checking. [See for example some of Falk's writing in the Reading Room]

That both Blavatsky and Wilber inspired such caustic critics suggests a pattern: sweeping metaphysical architectures tend to attract equally sweeping rebuttals.

Personality and Performance

Blavatsky was a larger-than-life character—chain-smoking, sharp-tongued, scandal-ridden. She made up for her lack of academic credentials with charisma and audacity.

Wilber, by contrast, comes across as more scholarly and monk-like, surrounded not by parlors of occult devotees but by seminars of earnest readers and podcast hosts. Yet he, too, exudes certainty and grandiosity, often brushing aside critics with impatience.

Both turned personality into part of their teaching. Their charisma was as crucial as their content.

Legacies

Blavatsky launched a movement. Theosophy splintered into endless societies, influenced New Age spirituality, inspired Gandhi, and provided raw material for esoteric subcultures.

Wilber launched a brand. Integral Theory has influenced therapists, educators, and spiritual seekers, but has remained more niche than movement—partly because his system is more diagram than myth, less exciting than Blavatsky's cosmic drama.

Still, both leave behind ambitious architectures of meaning that fascinate followers and exasperate skeptics.

Conclusion: Cousins Across Time

So what happens when we put Blavatsky and Wilber side by side? We see two visionaries separated by a century but united in ambition: to construct a “theory of everything” that rescues spirit from materialism. Both did so by weaving eclectic sources into dazzling tapestries—compelling to admirers, dubious to critics.

Blavatsky gave us occult melodrama; Wilber, developmental diagrams. One told stories about Atlanteans; the other about holons. But both demonstrate the enduring human urge to climb beyond science into metaphysical skyscrapers.

The difference? Blavatsky wrote Victorian fantasy; Wilber writes postmodern prose. In the end, the resemblance may be more instructive than the distinction: the perennial temptation to explain too much, too soon, with too little evidence—and too much confidence.