Madame Blavatsky on the Malignant Fever of Unsound Scepticism

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 40 pages

Forty pages, and one of the two substantial pieces of fiction in this series. Its proper title is "A Bewitched Life", and its subject is stated in the file's own heading: lives made wretched by doubt, distrust and unsound scepticism. The tale proceeds through a sequence of named movements — the stranger's story, the mysterious visitor, psychic magic, a vision of horror, the return of doubts, and a departure that is not made alone.

The narrative is a vehicle for an argument Blavatsky made in plainer form elsewhere: that scepticism held past the point of honest inquiry is not a neutral position but an active condition, corrosive to the one who holds it, and that the man who insists on explaining away what he has seen may find the explanation costs him more than belief would have. Boris de Zirkoff's editorial notes open the file and set the publication history in place. For readers who find the doctrinal essays heavy going, this is the same case made as a story.

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