Animated Statues, Trophies of the Black Art

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 16 pages

Published in The Theosophist in November 1886, this is Blavatsky on the speaking and moving statues reported throughout the ancient world — and on what she takes them to have been. The framing is uncompromising: illusive shadows belonging to neither earth nor heaven, employed by sorcerers and other adepts of the Black Art to assist in the persecution of victims, to hallucinate the minds of honest and well-meaning people who fall prey to the mental epidemics such practitioners arouse, and to obstruct the work of the guardians of mankind, whether divine or human.

Much of the evidential material is drawn from the Marquis Eudes de Mirville's Pneumatologie, a Catholic study of spirit manifestations — an unusual source for her to lean on, since de Mirville's conclusions run in the opposite direction from her own. That is part of the method: the phenomena are conceded on the testimony of a hostile witness, and only their interpretation is contested. Republished in the seventh volume of the Collected Writings, with a frontispiece by Michael Cheval.

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