Theosophical Karma as Toxic Synthesis

Moloch has a good article up discussing the concepts of karma and the "threefold law" as put forth by many Wiccans. I would expand that scope a bit, since the concept of karma he's talking about reaches much of the modern esoteric scene. For example, the vast majority of New Agers seem to subscribe to it as well, and their numbers are much larger than those of Wicca. Furthermore, a lot of modern witches eschew the concept entirely, or treat it as a guideline rather than a law.

Moloch covers how this concept of karma made its way into Western esotericism by way of Theosophy and how it doesn't actually make much sense and gets applied in silly ways. I agree with all of that. But let me be clear - I'm not writing this to denigrate the concept of karma as it actually exists in Eastern religions such as Buddhism. In fact, the Theosophical version of karma is entirely different. It's what I call a toxic synthesis, a combination of Eastern and Western ideas that results in something far worse than the principles that it combines.

In Buddhism, karma simply refers to the law of cause and effect. Buddhism teaches emptiness of phenomena as the key to avoiding attachment. But karma points out that, for example, even if you can "realize the emptiness" of a bus speeding towards you, it's still likely to kill you if you don't get out of the way. Likewise, you can "realize the emptiness" of polite social interaction, but if you treat other people badly they'll eventually decide that you're an asshole and start avoiding you. So this form of Buddhist karma is eminently practical. It has nothing to do with mysterious retribution wreaked by "the universe" for misdeeds.

That's where Theosophy comes in.


Theosophical thinkers basically decided that they could make karma better by combining it with the Christian idea of sin. This resulted in the form of karma that most Westerners talk about today. "I helped an old lady across the street yesterday, so today I got a bonus at work," or "I was upset and yelled at my kids yesterday, so today my car won't start." Unless the old lady you helped was a friend of your boss and put in a good word for you, or your kids went out and sabotaged your car after you yelled at them, there's no connection between these events. But a lot of New Agers would argue otherwise.

Theosophical karma works like a gloss over Christian sin. There's a list of good actions, and a list of evil ones. In conventional Christianity, believers contend that God rewards good actions in the afterlife and punishes evil ones. But this is softened by the concept of faith, which is also instrumental to salvation and allows for the forgiveness of sin. In Theosophical karma, good actions are rewarded with unrelated positive experiences and evil ones with unrelated negative experiences in the here and now, and the concept of forgiveness is nowhere to be found.

This sort of "karma" gives rise to the insidious belief that people who find themselves in bad circumstances have only themselves to blame, because if they were good people, "the universe" would be rewarding them instead of punishing them. Replace "the universe" there with "God," and the theological system you have is essentially the prosperity gospel, one of the worst corruptions of Christian teaching that exists in the modern world. It twists the message of Jesus who was very concerned with the plight of the poor into the assertion that the poor deserve their poverty and rich Christians deserve their riches.

New Agers have continued to tweak the concept, trying to work out how to explain it. That's a difficult problem, because it doesn't make much sense. The latest popular incarnation seems to be the "Law of Attraction," which tries to explain it using the mechanism that negative thoughts attract negative experiences and positive thoughts attract positive ones. But as I see it, the fact that thoughts are, by themselves, neither positive nor negative undermines this model considerably. Also, while thoughts can influence events, they do not control them in a deterministic fashion.

The other big problem with Theosophical karma is the idea that wrongdoers will be "prosecuted" by the natural course of events, and as such we don't need to take action against them. This is nothing more than an excuse for laziness. In reality, we are the agents of karma. Serial killers aren't struck down by lightning bolts out of the blue; they're apprehended by law enforcement, who act as agents of karma when they work at solving cases. Likewise, there are plenty of more common circumstances where sitting back and letting "the universe" take care of a problem is the worst thing you could possibly do.

In magick, references to Theosophical karma are particularly dumb. There's no reason why a harmful spell like a curse would "rebound" on the caster if performed correctly. If you don't use a proper containment structure to isolate you from your target it's possible that you could be affected by the spell as well, but the solution is not to start invoking karma, but rather the use of a proper containment structure. I rarely employ curses myself, but sometimes they are necessary - and I've never had one "rebound" on me.

Ethics are not technology. The failure to understand this is at the heart of both Theosophical karma and the "threefold law." As a magical practitioner, I don't throw curses around willy-nilly because I'm an ethical person, not because I'm afraid that God or "the universe" will punish me in some fashion. I see the latter as fundamentally cowardly and not particularly ethical at all. How ethical is it, really, to only refrain from harming others out of fear?

As with Christians who claim that without the fear of God they would be raping and murdering people, I can't respect anyone who would spend all their time hurting others if not for the threat of karmic retribution. Such individuals are not ethical people, just fearful ones.