Tuesday Teaser: The Lost City of Z

Here’s a bit of what I’m reading today from The Lost City of Z by David Grann:

“While Madame Blavatsky continued to practice the arts of a medium, she gradually turned her attention to more ambitious psychic frontiers. Claiming that she was a conduit for a brotherhood of reincarnated Tibetan mahatmas, she tried to give birth to a new religion called Theosophy, or “wisdom of the gods.” It drew heavily on occult teachings and Eastern religions, particularly Buddhism, and for many Westerners it came to represent a kind of counterculture, replete with vegetarianism. As the historian Janet Oppenheim noted in The Other World, “For those who wanted to rebel dramatically against the constraints of the Victorian ethos––however they perceived that elusive entity––the flavor of heresy must have been particularly alluring when concocted by so unabashed an outsider as H.P. Blavatsky.”