When Paths May Have Crossed: José Rizal and Helena Blavatsky in 1888 London

London, 1888. José Rizal had rented a room in Primrose Hill, a short walk from Regent's Park, and was spending his days annotating a three-hundred-year-old Spanish chronicle of the Philippine Islands. A few miles west, in Holland Park, Helena Blavatsky was finishing The Secret Doctrine, a two-volume attempt to unify every spiritual tradition on earth into a single story of cosmic evolution. Both of them made regular visits to the British Museum's Reading Room. Whether they were ever in that building at the same time is something the record doesn't tell us.

There's no letter, no diary entry, no account from anyone who might have seen them share a table or exchange a glance. What exists is proximity and circumstance. And yet I keep returning to it, not because proximity proves anything, but because when you actually look at what each of them was doing, the overlap in their thinking turns out to be harder to explain than the overlap in their location.

The Reading Room was the kind of place where that kind of convergence felt possible. Under its iron-and-glass dome, scholars from across the empire sat for hours at long radiating desks, pulling from a collection that was, by that point, one of the largest anywhere. Marx had written Das Kapital there. George Eliot had done her research there. It functioned something like a telephone exchange for Victorian intellectual life: ideas from completely different traditions passing through the same physical space, even when the people carrying them never spoke. Rizal was disciplined, kept schedules, corresponded with scholars across Europe. Blavatsky was the opposite by most accounts, nocturnal and somewhat chaotic, but she drew heavily on the museum's collections and said so herself when describing how The Secret Doctrine came together.

What each of them was actually doing in those months is worth slowing down for. Rizal wasn't annotating Morga as an academic exercise. The Spanish colonial narrative had for centuries presented the Philippines as a civilization lifted out of barbarism by Christian evangelism, and Rizal understood that as long as Filipinos accepted that story, they would keep accepting their own subjugation. He was doing something closer to archaeological excavation than scholarship, digging backward through a distorted colonial record to recover what had been buried underneath it. Blavatsky's project was different in scale and stranger in character, but it came from a recognizably similar impulse. She believed that modern Western civilization had lost access to something ancient and real, that both the Church and the materialist establishment of her era had worked, deliberately or not, to suppress it. Recovery of suppressed knowledge was driving both of their projects at exactly the same moment, even if one was working at the level of national history and the other at something approaching cosmic history.

There's a passage in a letter Rizal wrote to a group of Filipino women where he's unusually direct: "You know that the will of God is not that of the priests; that religiousness does not consist of long periods spent on your knees, nor of endless prayers, big rosaries, and grimy scapularies, but of good conducts, firm intention and honest judgment."[1] Blavatsky, in Isis Unveiled, was less pastoral about it. She wrote that if the Church and its priests could vanish from public life entirely, it would be a good day for humanity.[2] Rizal's critique was practical, aimed at a specific institutional machinery doing specific damage. Blavatsky's was more theatrically contemptuous. But the object was the same: both had drawn a firm line between institutional religion and genuine moral or spiritual life, and both were willing to say plainly that the institution was causing harm.

This is where the question of whether they actually met starts to feel like the less interesting question. The convergence in their thinking runs deep enough that a chance encounter in the Reading Room would make a satisfying story, but the story would be doing work that the facts are already doing on their own. The most defensible explanation for why two people working in adjacent rooms arrived at such similar critiques is that they were drawing from the same currents of European liberal and radical thought circulating through the 1880s. That explanation is almost certainly correct and doesn't require them to have exchanged a single word.

Still, I keep wanting to put them in the same room. And I should be honest about why: the image is almost too good. Two exiles in the world's largest imperial capital, burrowed into the same domed library, each trying to dismantle a different kind of authority using whatever documents they could find. Rizal was one of the most remarkable minds the nineteenth century produced in Southeast Asia, trained in medicine and law, fluent in multiple languages, capable of writing a novel that would outlive the empire it criticized. Blavatsky was eccentric and, on matters of her own biography, sometimes unreliable, but she was genuinely learned, and what she built would eventually carry Eastern spiritual ideas into Western culture in ways that are still unfolding. The image of them glancing at each other across those radiating desks is irresistible, which is exactly why I keep trying not to reach for it. Irresistible images have a way of displacing more complicated and less cinematic truths, and the truth here is that the historical record gives no reason to expect we'll ever know whether they spoke.

What the record does give us is this: two people, foreign to London and working against received authority in their respective domains, present in the same building during the same months, producing books that would outlast the century. Whether they ever spoke remains genuinely open. What I find harder to leave alone is the convergence in their thinking, which runs through their critiques of colonial authority and institutional religion in ways that geography alone doesn't fully account for, and which suggests that whatever intellectual current was moving through that reading room in 1888, both of them were somewhere inside it.

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[1] Teodoro Locsin, Rizal (1996), 72.

[2] H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, vol. 2, p. 586.

A Walk Down Buray Avenue

September 12, 2021

Past an hour in the middle of Sunday, I decided to walk home under the hesitating sun which occasionally peeks from thick dark clouds like Peter Pan. I walked past the White House where Divine Master once lived. It is almost old and unattended. But minor patches or recent innovations now lie fallow and unfinished. I wished it was preserved so that people could visit it just like the house of Jose Rizal in Calamba. I can see the side, or its outside walls worn by the tides of space and time. If walls could speak or if walls could record those voices and whispers of long ago, what a joy to listen through time!

Divine Master… Of course, who would not have thought with melancholy and gladness the moments and times of His life. I never met Divine Master. When he crossed over, I was in my elementary days, and I lived far from here. Blessed are those who saw him, felt him, and being blessed by him. I do not know why but I am sure that this man whom they call the ‘mysterious superstar of the South’ is no ordinary man.

I’ve read a lot of books. I’ve read a lot about those controversies and acts of Jesus which as of now are called myths by scholars. I’ve read a lot of those theologies, religions, physics, and epistemologies but I’ve never read about any man who can transfer his powers of healing and miracles to any man who would follow him. Pythagoras could not. Moses could not nor Elijah nor Apollonius of Tyana. Not even the sainted Comte de St. Germain nor Cagliostro. I’ve never read any man who could readily transfigure himself from his young feature to an old man—who is a child in the morning, a vigorous young man in the middle of the day, and an old Man in the afternoon.

Bi-location was from many instances displayed by saints and adepts. Sages displayed their siddhic powers too. Possessing also these magical powers, only one man, if he is properly called to be a man, could raise the dead back to life; only one man could release a newborn baby out of nowhere called ‘reincarnated’. Only one man so far as I know could perform such feats. If Jesus Christ the Galilean Master could turn water into wine, Ruben Ecleo changed seawater into gasoline. He calmed raging seas and winds. He could even stay underwater for hours!

Once a young girl cried because her toy was destroyed, Master Ruben approached the child with a smile. He opened his closed hand and suddenly a bird appeared out of nowhere giving it to the crying child. He also made the blind see, the lame walk, and the deaf restored their hearing. With the magnetic passes of his hands over barren wombs, women miraculously conceived. He could predict future lives, and future events, and not one of them, not even a single of them failed. He is a mysterious man among the many. Professionals could not fathom him. He is a mystery.

These were my thoughts as I walked down past Buray Avenue. Random but nostalgic. The middle of the day is silent. You can see the road all the way down towards the sea. I look around not even a stir you hear. Most of the folks inside I’m sure are taking naps; some lazied themselves in front of their TVs while most of the kids stooping busy with their phones. It is a long history down the memory lane. But that is a secondhand memory passed down to me or shared with me whose content is from the stories of people who met him; from the people who were eyewitnesses to his miracles and deeds; from people who shared their secret thoughts and their experiences like Canterbury tales.

But what is beautiful even now is that all those folks who are living witnesses are still alive. Some have gone but some still remain. I even had the chance to talk to Tatay Cuper Edera years before who is also an eyewitness to the three men from a yacht anchored at Cabilan Island. If in ancient times, the disciples were troubled complaining about the lack of books to write the deeds of the Galilean Master, we now have all the resources but alas, we lack the writer whose pen could muster his deeds!

I once dreamt of a book whose title is “The Life and Times of the Divine Master”. I never saw its contents. Maybe I opened it and read but I didn’t remember upon waking up. All I saw was the book and title. Maybe it was an Akashic record only to be read in the spiritual realm.

These were my thoughts as I walked down Buray Avenue. I was totally melancholic about the things that passed in the past which I wished in my heart I was there to see it. I never saw the Divine Master. I never heard his voice nor saw how he walked or his gestures. Even I do not know why I should feel it like this.

I walked down past Buray Venue. I walked all the way down even though my troubled knees ached (it has been since last year). I can see on the right a large black boulder, a remnant of the past still intact with the houses up and down nearby. I can see beautiful concrete houses well-tended and flowered against the backdrop of gray and torn residences. A man sitting on a bench under the shade of a tree half naked passing his time for some fresh air; a ladder leaning on a street post possibly the lineman stopped for a lunch break; stores different and many of them; establishments, shops all lined down. This is the same street where his feet once trod. It is easy to walk down towards the sea but that means your back against the shrine.

I hate to break it but once I passed by and saw the Admin Building, I missed Grand Master and everything that is all there is to it.