Papal Dispensation for Murder and Mayhem

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 22 pages

Twenty-two pages on the Society of Jesus, and no attempt at even-handedness. The overview states the position at once: Theosophy and Jesuitism are two opposite poles, one far above and the other far below even the stagnant marsh between them — one the power of Light, the other of Darkness. Theosophists, she adds, are slandered and reviled by the Jesuits and their adherents everywhere, which supplies part of the motive.

The charge behind the title concerns the doctrine of dispensation and what Blavatsky held the Order to have done with it — an argument she made repeatedly in the 1880s, drawing on the long anti-Jesuit polemical literature of Catholic and Protestant Europe alike. Her wider verdict on Roman Catholicism is that it is a name rather than a Church, a phantom of the past. The document belongs in this series because of the reading it applies: not merely institutional corruption, but a deliberate and organised inversion of a genuine spiritual technique — which is what the series means by black magic.

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