Madame Blavatsky on Egyptian Magic, Good and Bad

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 27 pages

Originally printed as a section of the posthumous third volume of The Secret Doctrine in 1897, and among the more substantial historical studies in the series. Its account of the Mysteries is a high one: initiation taught men to live a better life and to die with better hope; the Mysteries were known to unveil the operations of nature and to lead to the contemplation of celestial powers; and magic itself was held a divine science, leading to a participation in the attributes of divinity.

The claim that gives the study its point comes at the end of that passage and runs against the usual telling. It was black magic, Blavatsky argues, that led finally to the abolition of the Mysteries — not Christianity, as is often erroneously thought. The institutions decayed from within before they were suppressed from without, and the suppression found little left worth defending. Twenty-seven pages, republished in the seventh volume of the Collected Writings, with a frontispiece by Mohamed Taaeb. Read beside the study of Egypt in the Atlantean Realities series, it gives the other half of that argument.

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