Evil Is an Illusion Caused by the Circle of Necessity

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 14 pages

Published in Lucifer in October 1887 as "The Origin of Evil", and the more metaphysical of the two studies of evil in this batch. The Buddha's doctrine, on Blavatsky's reading, locates evil not in matter — which is eternal — but in the illusions matter creates, and in the changes and transformations by which matter generates life; because those changes are conditioned, and the life they produce is ephemeral.

From that follows the formulation the essay is remembered for: as life is death, so death is life, and the whole great cycle of lives forms but one existence — the worst day of which, she adds, is on our planet. The running head names the position more briefly still: evil is a karmic necessity. What the argument sets out to avoid is the two answers Blavatsky regarded as equally useless, a personal devil on one side and the denial that evil is real on the other; what it offers instead is evil as an artefact of conditioned existence, neither substantial nor imaginary. Frontispiece by Igor Morski.

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