Quacks and Charlatans Are the Scoffers of Theosophy and the Enemies of the Sick

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

Two parts, and the second is the better. The first is Blavatsky on the charlatans of her own day: those who plagiarise the sacred science and philosophy, shamelessly deceive the credulous, and in doing so bring Divine Wisdom into disrepute — a charge she pressed with particular energy because such people were routinely confused with theosophists, and because the confusion damaged the sick most of all.

The second part hands the argument to Paracelsus, and it becomes something more durable. The successful physician, on his account, is free of ambition, vanity, envy, pomposity and self-conceit — not because these are unattractive qualities but because they are incompatible with the Light of Wisdom by which alone he should be working. It is a description of professional character that would sit comfortably in a modern code of medical ethics, arriving from a sixteenth-century alchemist by way of a nineteenth-century occultist, and it makes the piece worth more than its polemical half would suggest.

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