May 20

Vasco da Gama and India's Influence on Western Magic

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He was looking for spices, and yet he found something considerably more consequential.

On May 20, 1498, after eleven months at sea—rounding the Cape of Good Hope, up the East African coast Indian Ocean, Vasco da Gama dropped anchor at Calicut, on the Malabar Coast of southwestern India. He was the first European in history to reach India by sea. He’d broken the Arab monopoly on the spice trade, opened a direct maritime route between Europe and the East, and set in motion a colonial enterprise whose consequences are still unfolding more than five centuries later.

But there was a consequence no one anticipated, and it would take four hundred years to fully manifest: the slow, complex, transformative collision between European occultism and Hindu philosophy. The landing at Calicut was the first link in a chain that would eventually run through a nearly unintelligible Latin translation of the Upanishads, a profoundly strange German philosopher who kept a copy of that translation on his desk until the day he died, a Russo-American occultist with spectacular hair and even more spectacular ambitions, and a secret magical order in Victorian London that began using Hindu elemental symbols to train its members in astral projection.

The Spice Route

The world da Gama sailed into was not a blank space waiting to be discovered. Calicut—known today as Kozhikode—was one of the great trading cities of the medieval world, a cosmopolitan port where Arab, Chinese, Jewish, and Indian merchants had conducted commerce for centuries. The Zamorin, the Hindu ruler who received da Gama’s delegation, was politely unimpressed by the Portuguese’s gifts, which the Arab merchants at court pointedly noted were inadequate for a king of his stature. The meeting was tense, but the route was open. The Portuguese pressed through it. Over the following century, their trading posts and fortresses spread along the Indian coast, and with the merchants came the missionaries, the scholars, and—eventually—the curious. The Jesuits, attempting to convert the Brahmins, found themselves instead engaged in serious philosophical exchange with one of the most sophisticated intellectual traditions in human history. The Vedas, the Upanishads, the vast architecture of Hindu metaphysics—texts that had been entirely unknown to European thought—began to slowly migrate to Western readers.

It was not a gentle migration; the colonial context ensured it never was going to be particularly easy. But ideas don’t respect the intentions of the people who carry them—and the ideas that came back from India, however distorted in transit, were unlike anything European philosophy had encountered. A tradition that described consciousness not as something housed temporarily in a mortal body, but as the fundamental substance of the universe. A metaphysics that located the divine not in a transcendent creator-god but in the interior of each individual perceiving mind. A cosmology in which the material world was not fallen creation but maya—the great play of appearances, neither evil nor false, but understood only when seen through its own surface.

The Oupnek’hat

The Upanishads—the philosophical crown of the Vedic tradition, composed between roughly 800 and 200 BCE—didn’t reach European readers directly. Rather, they came through a labyrinth of translations: from Sanskrit into Persian by the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh in 1657, and then from Persian into an extraordinarily ungainly mixture of Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Sanskrit by the French Orientalist Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, published in Strasbourg in two volumes in 1801 and 1802 under the title Oupnek’hat, id est, Secretum Tegendum—“The Secret to Be Kept.” It was, by all accounts, nearly impenetrable. One contemporary scholar described it as requiring “the lynxlike perspicacity of an intrepid philosopher” merely to locate the thread of sense running through its labyrinthine jargon.

That philosopher soon emerged. Arthur Schopenhauer encountered the Oupnek’hat as a young man and never recovered. He kept a copy on his desk for the rest of his life. He described it as “the consolation of my life” and “the most profitable and sublime reading that is possible in the world.” He called the Upanishadic doctrine of Atman—the proposition that the individual self and the universal consciousness are ultimately identical—the most profound philosophical insight he had encountered anywhere, in any tradition. His own philosophy of the Will, his concept of the world as representation, his insistence that the suffering of existence could only be transcended through the dissolution of individual ego—all of it bears the unmistakable imprint of his afternoons with that ungainly Latin translation.

Schopenhauer fed directly into Nietzsche, into Wagner, and, ultimately, into the Romantic tradition that shaped the intellectual climate in which the Victorian occult revival would flourish. The Upanishads had arrived in European thought through the back door, in bad Latin, badly translated from Persian, and they’d proceeded to quietly rearrange the furniture.

Blavatsky and Theosophy

The figure who most deliberately built the bridge between Hindu philosophy and Western esotericism was Helena Petrovna Blavatsky—legendary occultist and co-founder of the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875 (and relocated its headquarters to Adyar, near Madras, in 1882.) Blavatsky’s project was to demonstrate the fundamental unity of all the world’s esoteric traditions, and to argue that the oldest and deepest of them all was the Aryan-Hindu tradition preserved in the Vedas and Upanishads. Her two major works—Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888)—synthesized Hindu, Buddhist, Kabbalistic, Hermetic, and Neoplatonic sources into a single system she called the Ancient Wisdom or Perennial Philosophy. The result was, depending on your perspective, either a magnificent synthesis of the world’s mystical traditions or an intellectually chaotic mishmash of borrowed concepts—but in either case it was enormously influential. But the Theosophists didn’t just import Hindu ideas; they translated Hindu technical vocabulary into Western occult practice. Concepts like chakras, prana, akasha, karma, and the doctrine of subtle bodies entered the Western esoteric mainstream through Theosophical publications, lectures, and the extensive network of Theosophical lodges that spread through Europe, America, and the British colonies. The five Hindu elemental principles—the tattvas—arrived in this stream, filtered through Theosophical interpretation, and found their way to a group of Victorian magicians who were about to do something rather remarkable with them.

Tattwa Vision

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888, found its own influential use for specific facets of Hindu esotericism. Its founders—Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, William Wynn Westcott, and William Robert Woodman—were steeped in Kabbalah, Hermeticism, and Freemasonry. But they were also acutely aware of the Theosophical current, and from it they drew a practice that became one of the Order’s most distinctive techniques: the Tattwa Vision.

The tattvas—from the Sanskrit tat, meaning “thatness” or “essence”—are the five fundamental principles of reality in Hindu Samkhya philosophy: Akasha (Spirit or Ether), Vayu (Air), Tejas (Fire), Apas (Water), and Prithivi (Earth). Each has its corresponding geometric form and color: the black or indigo egg of Akasha, the blue circle of Vayu, the red equilateral triangle of Tejas, the silver crescent of Apas, the yellow square of Prithivi. The Golden Dawn mapped these directly onto their own elemental system—they corresponded neatly with the Western alchemical elements—and turned them into tools for astral clairvoyance.

The technique is elegantly simple: the practitioner gazes steadily at a colored tattwa symbol until an “afterimage” forms on the retina—then closes their eyes, focuses on that afterimage, and uses it as a doorway into astral vision. The afterimage of the red triangle of Tejas becomes a green triangle in the mind’s eye; the practitioner enters it, and what unfolds beyond is understood as a direct encounter with the elemental plane of Fire in its pure form. Israel Regardie, who preserved the Golden Dawn’s complete system in his monumental compendium, described “Tattwa Vision” as one of the most accessible and effective methods of exercising clairvoyant faculty available to the student—fast, precise, and requiring nothing but a set of colored cards and the willingness to look.

There are twenty-five cards in the full set: five primary tattvas, and twenty compound cards showing one tattwa nested within another—Tejas within Akasha (Fire of Spirit), Apas within Prithivi (Water of Earth)—each combination opening onto a distinct sub-plane of elemental reality.

Da Gama’s Esoteric Legacy

The chain that runs from Vasco da Gama’s anchorage at Calicut to a Golden Dawn initiate staring at a yellow square in a London flat is not a straight line. It passes through the colonial violence of the Portuguese Estado da Índia, through the philosophical salons of nineteenth-century Germany, through the eccentric genius of a Russian woman who may or may not have fabricated significant portions of her most important books, and through the creative eclecticism of a group of Victorian occultists who were constitutionally incapable of leaving any interesting idea unused.

The Upanishadic insight that consciousness is the ground of being—that the universe is not a mechanism observed by minds but a mind observing itself, and that the boundary between the individual self and the universal self is ultimately a construct—that insight traveled from the forests of ancient India to the spice-hungry ports of Europe, and it transformed the Western esoteric tradition in ways that still inspire today.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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