Madame Blavatsky on the Fabricators of Magic Mirrors and Their Motives

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 7 pages

This began as an editorial note appended to something else. The Theosophist of December 1883 had printed a long extract from Colonel Stephen Fraser's Twelve Years in India describing his encounters with the Muntra Wallahs — a sect of Mohammedan magicians — and their magic mirrors, with a vivid account of the incantations and rituals attending the preparation of the substance they smeared on certain pieces of glass. Blavatsky's note follows the extract, and it is her note that this file preserves.

What interests her is not whether the mirrors work but who makes them and why. The distinction the running head draws — the mirrors and their fabricators — is the one the whole series turns on: an instrument is neither black nor white, and the question worth asking of any occult practice is what the practitioner wants from it. Fraser's description of the ritual is left standing; it is the motive behind it that she examines. Seven pages, republished in the sixth volume of the Collected Writings.

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