Madame Blavatsky: The Group Of Seven And Emily Carr Connection

I own two portraits by A.Y. Jackson and J.E.H. MacDonald in my house. I like it a lot even though someone once told me the Group of Seven are a "figment of our nationalism." Whatever that means. I don't know much about art. All I know is I know what I like. Sometimes. It's sort of like how you like a song but can't articulate it. It just resonates deep within you. That's all you need.

The Walrus explores how Madame Blavatsky influenced Canadian artists. A few excerpts:

The Group were, were [...]students of Theosophy. Concerned with the recovery of secret wisdom and “underground mysteries,” the Theosophical Society was established in 1875 by a mysterious Russian prophetess named Madame Blavatsky, who claimed to receive mental transmissions from dead Tibetan mahatmas[...]

[...] (Author) Housser, for his part, was convinced that the Rockies were a northern Atlantis whose peaks hid troves of lost wisdom; he pored over the creation myths of Canada’s First Nations in search of secret teachings, believing they held the key to the country’s spiritual destiny. Even the group’s name was a nod to Blavatskyan numerology[...]

[...]The beliefs of the Group of Seven seem strange to us in part because the artists straddled the ages of Victorian Christendom and modern multiculturalism. They spoke in a spiritual creole, a mishmash of East and West, old and new. The vocabulary was Vedic — nirvana instead of heaven, karma rather than sin — but the plot remained roughly Biblical. The millennial kingdom that Jonathan Edwards dreamed would descend upon the New World had simply retreated north, where it still twinkled like a shining beacon on a hill, inviting stronger souls to pursue their errand in what Housser called “that infinite unfathomable thing — the wilderness.” North was the new West. And artists like Lawren Harris and Emily Carr were Canada’s answer to Emerson — homegrown prophets who glimpsed in the country’s vast landscapes a faint evocation of Nature’s nation[...]