Massimo Introvigne’s Bitter Winter online magazine ran a review of Urs App’s book “The Mother of All Religions.” It begins:
Urs App’s “The Mother of All Religions: The Genesis of Blavatsky’s Theosophy. Ancient Theology, Orientalism, and Buddhism” (Wil and Paris: UniversityMedia, 2025) is a book that arrives with the force of a scholarly thunderclap—and the tact of a bull in a metaphysical china shop. It is, at once, a meticulous reconstruction of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s literary career and a gleeful autopsy of her intellectual credibility. Admirable? Absolutely. Irritating? Frequently.
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.
Read the entire review:
