Madame Blavatsky, the spiritual tat merchant who kick-started Western guruism by founding theosophy, owned a stuffed baboon named after a prominent Darwinian. This was a dangerous icon, Peter Washington maintains in Madam Blavatsky’s Baboon (Secker & Warburg, £12.99, ISBN 0 436 20273 5), because the rise of science over such bargain-basement mysticism gives Darwin the last laugh. And in his trawl through ersatz theosophical notions and the antics of the mad, bad or simply vague 20th-century “prophets”, Washington lands some big fish. But in the end – after 400 pages – he protests too much and one is reminded that (to paraphrase the 13th-century Turkish mystic and poet Jalal Din ar-Rumi) counterfeits exist because there is real gold.
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