The Ensouled Violin

Hillarion Smerdis and H.P. Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 30 pages

One of the few pieces of fiction in the library, and it earns its place in a series on black magic by being about exactly that. The story appeared in The Theosophist in January 1880 under the name Hillarion Smerdis, F.T.S., and was either written by the Adept of that name or by Blavatsky in collaboration with him. It opens on Paganini, whose playing made Rossini weep and reduced the Princess Eliza of Lucca to fainting, and on the rumour that the souls of two women he was said to have murdered had been made to pass into his Cremona.

What follows is the tale of a rival violinist who takes that rumour as an instruction, with results the reader can guess and would rather not. Boris de Zirkoff's note explains the textual situation: this is the first and shorter version, which Blavatsky rewrote at much greater length shortly before her death, the longer form appearing in Lucifer and in Nightmare Tales in 1892. Both are reproduced here for the sake of historical accuracy, and the thirty pages contain the two of them. Read side by side they show what twelve years did to her prose.

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