Henry Steel Olcott and his Fucked Up Legacy

Sri Lankans SinhalaBuddhists (as opposed to Sinhala and Buddhist) have a massive wet spot for Colonel Henry Steel Olcott. Part of it is because he promoted and supported Anagarika Dharmapala the famous Buddhist revivalist, chauvinist, and racist. Part of it is probably because he was a White Man saying good things about us poor darkies.

Now, please note, what I am writing here is based on my view of what happened in that time. I may look at it with a jaundiced and cynical eye, and you are welcome to not share this opinion.

Opinions are like assholes; everyone has one, and they all stink.

The Theosophical Society

Let's start at the very beginning (not really, but hey, this is a good point to kick off), let's start with the Theosophical Society.

In these days they would be considered kooks and weirdos. Up there with the Pyramid Power people, Flat Earthers, and people who believe that your day-to-day affairs are affected by planets and stars millions of kilometres away. Those days they were considered visionaries.

At best they were a harmless bunch following pseudoscience in an attempt to understand the world from a different point of view from the systems hey had grown up in. At worst, they were racist (though they claimed not to be) and eugenicists.

The Root Race Philosophy

You see, the Theosophists believe in the idea of Root Races. A kind of weirdly fucked up take on evolution. Olcott and his co-founder of the Theosophical Society Helena Blavatsky believed that there were five "root races" in the world, and three of them are the progenitors of modern human races, each one more "advanced/better" than the last. (NOTE: Look, this is the short version, and even this is fucking long. Follow the Wikipedia link from Root Races, and go down that rabbit hole. You may learn something. You will definitely ask "Did people actually believe this crap?" And yes. Yes they did.)

Let's ignore the two First Races (they died off, and had no connection to "modern" humans), and talk about the last three races. First off, we have the Lemurians, who lived in Lemuria, and as Lemuria sank under the sea, they went off to Africa, Australia, and South India, where they became the Negroes, the Aborigines, Veddahs, and the Dravidians.

You know, the darkies.

Some of these Lemurians (some would say the best of them) went off to start a new civilisation in (where the fuck else?) Atlantis. And those guys were the precursors of the Native Americans (North and South), the Middle Easterners (the "Semites"), the darker Europeans (you know, the Spanish and the Latins), and the Mongolians (who went on to become the East Asians and the Malayans (aka the "slant-eyed" people).

Are you seeing a pattern here? Keep looking.

Then Atlantis fell. And from there rose the fifth and greatest human race of them all ... The Aryans. They were the greatest human race. The zenith of human civilisation. And they went on to become the Europeans and the North Indians. Now you see what makes it such a good story for a certain group of Sinhalese. Not only are they the most superior race (and higher than those Lemurian-descent Dravidians), but -- and this is important -- a white person said so!

Coming to Ceylon

So Olcott and Blavatsky show up in Ceylon. Ostensibly to make contact with the Sinhalese, but they also believed that the descendants of those previous races were also, well, inferior.

The intellectual difference between the Aryan and other civilized nations and such savages as the South Sea Islanders, is inexplicable on any other grounds. No amount of culture, nor generations of training amid civilization, could raise such human specimens as the Bushmen, the Veddhas of Ceylon, and some African tribes, to the same intellectual level as the Aryans, the Semites, and the Turanians so called. The 'sacred spark' is missing in them and it is they who are the only inferior races on the globe, now happily – owing to the wise adjustment of nature which ever works in that direction – fast dying out.

Fucking charming innit?

So you have Blavatsky and Olcott hanging out in Ceylon and "proving" that Aryans are better than Lemurians, and therefore Sinhalese are superior to Tamils (and Middle Easterners). Ever wonder where Dharmapala got his schtick from? Now you know. And where did the little man with the mustache get his ideas? Same source.

The Buddhism Link

Of course, people absolutely love to talk about all the good things that they did for Buddhism. And they're right and wrong. The Buddhism of the Theosophical Society is no the Buddhism that you know. It is "ancient knowledge" that comes from "Ascended Masters of Ancient Wisdom". Ancient knowledge that has been passed on to them by "Astral Transference." One of the books of the Society is called [Esoteric Buddhism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_Buddhism_(book)) and was one of the first to mention this entire "roots of Man" bullshit.

Look, I understand them. They were looking for something to believe in, and so they latched on to something "exotic" from the Far East, and decided that was what they were going to go with. They took it, fucked around with it in a big way, and then -- and this is the fucked up part -- came back and sold it to the people they got it from!

Is this spiritual colonisation, or cultural appropriation? Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.

And Then, Ananda

So Olcott comes in. Meets Dharmapala, who gets some new ideas in his head, and a good schtick to spin. And decides to start a school. People want to say it was about Buddhism. But, I keep wondering which flavour of Buddhism was it? We don't know what was taught. We don't know what was in the curriculum, and what was extra-curricular.

What I believe is that Blavatsky and Olcott came to Ceylon to continue their "study" to prove that Aryans are better than Lemurians and Atlanteans. Sri Lanka had both (and the irredeemable Veddahs too). They were also probably espousing the Theosophical Society's own version of "Ancient Teachings" to anyone who would listen (there is still a Theosophical Society in Adyar, Chennai, India). He may or may not have shifted his path to a more "mainstream" form of Buddhism later, but one can never tell. And he definitely influenced Dharmapala and the rhetoric he used.

We can blame Bandaranayake. We can blame Dharmapala. But it cannot be denied that Olcott's teaching also helped.