The Sacred Rays of the Sun Are Emanations of the Divine Monas

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Atlantean Realities Series · 6 pages

This one begins with a letter. A correspondent writing from Fresno, California, describes exploring Copán and Quirigua in Honduras and Guatemala, and a discovery made there among the four-sided sculptured columns that are the most prominent monuments at Copán — most of which carry a large figure in high relief on one face, with ornament and undeciphered glyphs on the others. One pillar, not previously described, carries only hieroglyphics, arranged on all four sides, and appears to be a record of some kind, whether of laws or of events.

The feature that prompted the letter, and Blavatsky's reply, gives the piece its running title: the seventeen-rayed sun. The paper first appeared in The Theosophist in May 1883 and was republished in the Collected Writings as "The Seventeen-Rayed Sun-Disc". Its interest is partly the argument — the sun's rays read as emanations of the Divine Monas — and partly the glimpse it offers of how such material reached her: an amateur explorer's letter from Central America, printed and answered in a Madras journal, and folded into a doctrine of correspondences.

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