Theos-Talk Archives (April 2005 Message tt00263)

Hey,

The new book The Lost Land of Lemuria by Sumatha Ramaswamy from the 
University of California Press:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?
userid=JV1i5GxANJ&isbn=0520244400&itm=2

is the most recent academic study I know of that devotes attention 
to Theosophy. The author borrows the term and idea "labors of loss" 
from Georges Bataille, but adapts it to her own purposes. She 
defines labors of loss as "those disciplinary practices, 
interpretive acts, and narrative moves which declare something as 
lost, only to "find" them through modernity's knowledge protocols, 
the very act of discovery and naming constituting the originary 
loss."

Ramaswamy's main interest is in the labors of loss surrounding 
Lemuria in Tamil culture since HPB's time. She starts out surveying 
Lemuria as a scientific construct based on a need to explain 
geological facts in terms of lost continents. Then she goes on to 
its occultist adaptations, with HPB as the original "loss laborer" 
and Cayce as a more recent one. But the bulk of the book focuses on 
Tamil notions of a lost Tamil homeland that extended for thousands 
of miles into the Indian ocean.

I recommend the book for anyone interested in those topics, but am 
posting about it to extend the "labors of loss" model to other 
aspects of Theosophy. Theosophy itself is a labor of loss, that is, 
HPB defines "ancient wisdom" as lost and then "finds" it. One can 
apply the model to Judeo-Christianity, with Eden as a lost paradise 
and salvation through Christ the way to "find" our way back. Many 
other religions can be interpreted in light of this model.

But it also applies to other areas, for example historical 
reconstruction of the mainstream variety. I find myself focusing on 
the "lost" civilizations of eastern North Carolina, that is "free 
mulattos" who became "white" but retained memories of Indian 
ancestry, or Unionists whose descendants "submerged" all memory of 
their fight for the Union against the Confederacy, only for another 
generation to "find." And so on...

It can be said that any explanatory scheme that explains everything 
explains nothing. But for the time being I will be thinking mainly 
about how it applies in the very narrow subject area of my current 
research. However, I would also suggest that "labors of loss" is 
what we see on theos-talk a lot of the time. Blavatskian 
teachings "lost" under piles of Leadbeaterian, Baileyite, etc. 
reinterpretations, but "restored" by the labors of present-day 
rediscovers. Or, in the shorter term, the 1980s hopes and dreams of 
young Theosophists envisioning revival/reform, "lost" after a 
generation of organization inertia, "found" in the recollections of 
those now-middle-aged reformer/revivalists.

Cheers,

Paul