Mediumship and Adeptship Are Poles Apart

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 9 pages

This is the argument on which the Theosophical Society separated itself from the Spiritualist movement out of which many of its early members had come, and Blavatsky states it without softening. Occultists forget self in favour of other selves; Spiritists, she writes, doom other selves to an unremitting recollection of their shameful existence — and it is no wonder, on her reckoning, that Spiritualism has yet to produce a single Adept.

The technical distinction beneath the polemic is about control. Mediums lack it; their raison d'être is to transmit thoughts and passions that are unquestionably alien to them, which makes them, in her phrase, blind worshippers of dead thoughts decomposing — and those decomposing remnants vampirise the medium and the living alike. The Adept, by contrast, is defined by retaining the self-possession the medium surrenders. She adds a note of method that is easy to overlook: theosophists are cautious in ascribing mediumistic communications to any foreign source at all, which is a more sceptical position than either side of the contemporary argument occupied.

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