03 Nov., 2025
last change: 29 Nov., 2025
Dissertations, homeworks, etc.
Mainly in English and German language
„Esotericism stands for the single most neglected and misunderstood domain of research in the humanities, as least as far as Western culture is concerned. […] In contrast to the first edition, I speak not of “Western Esotericism” but of “Esotericism in Western Culture,” and you will see that this difference is by no means trivial.”
– Woulter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism in Western Culture, vii, 4. His website.
2025: Urs App: The Mother of all Religions. The Genesis of Blavatsky’s Theosophy: Ancient Theology, Orientalism, and Buddhism. Preview.
“Given the fact that even before the publication of her first major work (Isis Unveiled) Blavatsky referred to Buddhism as the “wisdom religion” underlying “all religions in their purity,” it is surprising that numerous authors write about a single “oriental shift” that supposedly took place after Blavatsky’s arrival in India in early 1879.”
Review by Woulter J. Hanegraff: “This empirical-historical method – bottom-up historiography and textual criticism – allows Urs App to establish beyond a shadow of doubt that Blavatsky did not have any first-hand familiarity with Tibetan Buddhism, as she famously claimed; that she invented her famous Mahatmas and those mysterious occult orders in which she said she had been initiated; that her ideas about Oriental Wisdom were based not on the Indian or more specifically Buddhist traditions she encountered in India but on Western Spiritualist and Orientalist literature about those traditions; and that her entire oeuvre is based on one single obsession – to prove the existence of a primordial wisdom tradition, “the mother of all religions,” which she imagined as a kind of Buddhism prior to and independent of historical Buddhism.”
Review by Massimo Introvigne: Theosophy’s Literary Skeletons: Urs App and Madame Blavatsky’s “Mental Furniture”
“App’s achievement is staggering. He has done what no one else dared: traced, chronologically and obsessively, every book, article, and letter Blavatsky ever wrote, cross-referencing them with the sources she borrowed from—often without acknowledgment, occasionally without understanding. The result is a forensic map of Theosophy’s textual DNA, claiming that Blavatsky’s spiritual edifice was built not on Himalayan revelations but on a library of 19th-century curiosities, spiritualist pamphlets, and Orientalist misfires.”
“Some of these sources are familiar—Allan Kardec, for instance, whose influence on Blavatsky’s early spiritualism, appropriately, elevates. Others are more obscure, like Godfrey Higgins, whose obsession with a primordial religion becomes, in App’s telling, Blavatsky’s own idée fixe. She called it “Budhism with one d,” “the mother of all religions,” a mythical ur-faith predating historical Buddhism, corrupted by priests and institutions, and glimpsed only through the foggy lens of esoteric speculation. It was, for Blavatsky, the mother of all religions. For App, it was the mother of all misreadings.”
“But App is not content to merely list sources. He animates them. Louis Jacolliot, the flamboyant fraudster; Heinrich August Jäschke, whose Tibetan dictionary became Blavatsky’s linguistic crutch and sometimes comic foil; and a parade of Orientalists whose reputations have faded but whose fingerprints remain on Theosophy’s sacred texts. App revives these characters with flair, showing how their ideas—sometimes brilliant, often bizarre—were repurposed by Blavatsky into a spiritual system that claimed to be ancient but was, in fact, aggressively modern.”
“App argues, with prosecutorial zeal, that not only did Blavatsky plagiarize, but so did the Mahatmas—the mysterious Oriental adepts who allegedly wrote letters to Theosophists. These letters, App insists, are riddled with errors about Hinduism and Buddhism, and borrow liberally from Western Orientalist literature. He believes the conclusion is inescapable. The Mahatmas were figments of Blavatsky’s imagination, dressed in robes and footnotes, and paraded as divine authorities in a grand act of spiritual theater.”
“This is where the irritation sets in. App’s scholarship is unimpeachable, but his tone is less so. He claims neutrality, but his narrative drips with judgment. Blavatsky is not just mistaken; she is deceptive. The Mahatmas are not just mythical; they are fraudulent. And Madame’s system is not just syncretic; it is intellectually bankrupt.”
Comm.: Those pundits miss three points, 1. that the selection of then current Western texts are not the doctrines itsself, but the try to build a bridge, an offer and a signpost, not the path itself, therefore are not syncristic, but comparative approaches; 2. The adepts do not know anything about copyright and nobody of them makes personal claims, they deal rather with knowledge than forms, they focus on the fruit, not its peel; 3. They assume that Blavatsky’s possession of secret doctrines implys that she a priori must have been able to express them in a Western language which has no words and terms to express it. The three points were mentioned by Blavatsky and her teachers themselves, but are overlooked by the Western pundits until today. Why?
2025: Woulter J. Hanegraaff: Esotericism in Western Culture: Counter-Normativity and Rejected Knowledge
“Rejecting this “rejection of rejected knowledge” means restoring the suppressed to its legitimate place in history and cultural analysis.”
2025, Univ. of Exeter: Tim Rudbøg,: H. P. Blavatsky’s Theosophy in Context: The Construction of Meaning in Modern Western Esotericism
2022: Bernadett Bigalke: Tempeltanz der Seele, in: Goetschel, E. (Hrsg.): Fidus-Bilder. Zürich: Montsalvat. 2022. S. 103–120.
2021: Wouter J. Hanegraaff: Western Esotericism and the Orient in the First Theosophical Society (2021), in: Theosophy across Boundaries. Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Modern Esoteric Movement. Edited by Hans Martin Krämer and Julian Strube. Comm. by Prof. Hanegraaff: “I have to say I’m quite proud of this piece, which is about how strongly the “First Theosophical Society” differed from the international organization that it became after 1879. As I’ve noticed there are some misperceptions floating around about how I look at such topics as the “West” and the “East”, Orientalism, or Theosophy and esotericism as a global phenomenon, hopefully this article will put them to rest.”
2020-2023, Univ. of Heidelberg: Jessica Albrecht: Theosophie und englischsprachige Frauenbildung im kolonialen Ceylon. Eine Untersuchung zu Genderfragen im Kontext von Religion und Nation in globalgeschichtlicher Perspektive
2021, Univ. of Heidelberg: Ulrich Harlass – Die orientalische Wende der Theosophischen Gesellschaft: Eine Untersuchung der theosophischen Lehrentwicklungen in der Zeit zwischen den Hauptwerken Alfred Percy Sinnetts. Augmended edition of the 2019 dissertation. Preview.
2020, Univ. of Erfurt: Isabella Schwaderer, Katharina Waldner (Hg.): Annäherungen an das Unaussprechliche. Ästhetische Erfahrung in kollektiven religiösen Praktiken
2020, Univ. of Heidelberg: Jovana Perovic and Jessica A. Albrecht: Writing biographies on female religious leaders: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Annie Besant between a “search for truth” and “self-discovery”’, En-Gender! 2:1 (2020), pp. 49-62.
2020, Univ. of Vienna: Prof. DDr. Rudolf Leeb & Dr. Astrid Schweighofer: Die Geburt der Moderne aus dem Geist der Religion?
2020: Oxford University Press: Tim Rudbøg und Erik Reenberg Sand (editors): Imagining the East: The Early Theosophical Society
2020, Univ. of New York Press: Hans Martin Krämer und Julian Strube (editors): Theosophy Across Boundaries: Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Modern Esoteric Movement
2020, Univ. of Tübingen, Bernadett Bigalke: Krankheitslehren, Heilkonzepte und therapeutische Praktiken in Theosophie und Mazdaznan in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts
2019: Bernadett Bigalke: Healthy, Happy, Holy: ‚Yoga‘ und Selbstverhältnisse um 1900 und um 1970, in: Siegfried, D.; Templin, D. (Hrsg.): Lebensreform um 1900 und Alternativmilieu um 1980.
2017, Univ. of Cape Town (UCT): Dewald Bester: H. P. Blavatsky, Theosophy, And Nineteenth-Century Comparative Religion
2017, Correspondences: Julie Chajes: Reincarnation in H. P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine
2017, Univ. of Amsterdam (UvA), Correspondences: Wouter J. Hanegraaff – The Theosophical Imagination (2017)
2016, Univ. of Erfurt: Bernadett Bigalke: Lebensreform und Esoterik um 1900: Die Leipziger alternativ-religiöse Szene am Beispiel der Internationalen Theosophischen Verbrüderung (Dissertation), 573 pp.
2013: Woulter J. Hanegraaff: Western Esotericism. In his second, revised and augmended edition 2025 he declared this first edition als obsolete. Instead of Western Esotericism he now sees Esotericism as globally and this brings him closer to Helena P. Blavatsky.
2013, various Univ.: Olav Hammer & Mikael Rothstein: Handbook Of The Theosophical Current
2012, Univ. of South Africa: Dewald Bester – The veil of Egypt… as portrayed in The Secret Doctrine
2012, Univ. of Ontario: Irene van Kessel – All is One – Toward A Spiritual Whole Life Education
2012, Cambridge University Press: Wouter J. Hanegraaff: Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture
2010, Univ. of Tübingen: Bernadett Bigalke: Von Aurenforschung und Reinkarnation – Die Theosophen
2010, Univ. of Vienna: Kavita Sandhu: Das Bild Indiens in der schwedischen Literatur
“Die Schriften des Hinduismus und Buddhismus waren nach theosophischer Sicht als die Quelle uralter Weisheit zu verstehen, die im Westen verloren gegangen und in Vergessenheit geraten sei und nun wieder neu in Erinnerung gerufen werden müsse.” 154 Vgl. Lütt 1998: 9.” – Comm.: Both Sandhu and Lütt (as most other academics, who do not understand Blavatskys arguments) put words in her mouth, suggesting that she had equated the ancient wisdom with hinduism and buddhism, meanwhile she declared all religions more or less faulty, but the aforementioned the less faulty. They intermix the presented fragmentary evidences for these ancient wisdom with the ancient wisdom itself and then cry: “syncretism”, while in Blavatsky’s view it is quite the other way round.
2009, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen: A.E. Hartog: Moderne deutsche figürliche Bildhauerei. Umrisse einer Tradition
2009, Univ. of Richmond, Jennifer Proch: Henry Steel Olcott: from Civil War veteran to Sinalese Buddhist nationalist, a case study in international religious activismnationalist, a case study in international religious activism
2009, Univ. of Tübingen: Bernadett Bigalke: Warum soll sich ein Theosoph vegetarisch ernähren? Vom “Astralleib” und “Magnetismus des Fleisches”, in: Mauss, Buddhismus, Devianz, 2009, Seiten: [265]-282.
2009, Univ. of Tübingen: Bernadett Bigalke: Der Theosoph Hermann Rudolph: ein Lehrer aus Berufung
2009: Bernadett Bigalke, B. & K. Neef: Mitleiden oder Energie sparen? Buddhismus und Monismus in Leipzig um 1900, in: Leipziger Stadtgeschichte. 2009. S. 205–236.
2008, Donner Institute for Research: Tore Ahlbäck & Björn Dahla (Editors): Western Esotericism
2008, Södertörns högskola: Martin Englund: Uråldrig visdom och samtidens förfall – En diskursanalys om framställningen av Indien i Teosofisk tidskrift 1891-1894.
2008, Univ. of Tübingen: Bernadett Bigalke – Frischobst und Okkultismus als Heilswege
2008, Oxford Univ. Press: Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: The Western Esoteric Traditions. A Historical Introduction
2004: UC Berkeley: Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: Helena Blavatsky – Preview
2004, Univ. of Halle: Björn Seidel-Dreffke: Die Theosophie E. P. Blavatskajas: Exemplarische Untersuchungen (A. Belyj, M. A. Vološin, V. I. Kryžanovskaja, Vs. S. Solov’ev) (Dissertation), Website, Ch. Einführung
1998, Univ. of Sydney (USYD): Alfred John Copper: The Letters of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky 1862 – 1882, 2 vols.
1998: Eszter Zalczer: Strindberg och Georg Ljungström. En teosofisk bekantskap, in: Strindbergiana 13 (1998). Stockholm: Strindbergssällskapet. S. 37-48.
1996, Uitgeverij Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen: Herman Arij Oscar de Tollenaere: The Politics of Divine Wisdom. Theosophy and labour, national, and women’s movements in Indonesia and South Asia, 1875-1947.
1995, Univ. of Munich: Renate Seifarth: Anthroposophie und Nationalsozialismus
1992, State Univ. of New York Press (SUNY): Joscelyn Godwin: The Theosophical Enlightenment
1986, Univ. of Sydney (USYD): Gregory John Tillett: CHARLES WEBSTER LEADBEATER 1854-1934. A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY. Volume I. A Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
1985-2005: Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: Occult Roots of Nazism
1907, Univ. of Kiel: Wilhelm Bruhn: Theosophie und Theologie (Dissertation)