Widely considered to be one of the most influential occultists of modern times, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–91) was equally a cultural critic and theorist of religion. This essay examines Blavatsky’s reading practices and the interpretive protocols she followed in challenging the hegemony of certain knowledge structures, whose origin she located in religious orthodoxy. A key point of her critique was that dominant religions consigned competing theories of the world to oblivion by denouncing them as heresies or blasphemies. These so-called heresies were, for her, lost or esoteric knowledge, just as magic was a placeholder for religious debates erased from the historical record. Maintaining that the dislocated past can only be salvaged by nonrational experiences, Blavatsky shifted the weight of truth from the exoteric to the esoteric, thereby creating a space for the recovery of core meanings through such eclectic means as memory, imagination, and the paranormal faculties.

中文翻译：

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寻找布拉瓦茨基夫人

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky（1831-91）被广泛认为是现代最有影响力的神秘学家之一，同样是文化批评家和宗教理论家。本文考察了布拉瓦斯基的阅读实践以及她在挑战某些知识结构霸权时遵循的解释性协议，这些知识结构的起源是她在宗教正统中的定位。她批评的一个关键点是，主流宗教通过谴责它们是异端或亵渎神灵，从而使世界的竞争理论被遗忘了。对她来说，这些所谓的异端是迷失或深奥的知识，就像魔术是从历史记录中抹去的宗教辩论的占位符一样。布拉瓦茨基坚持认为，流离失所的过去只能通过非理性的经验来挽救，因此将真理的重心从深奥的人转移到了深奥的人，