The Pernicious Sophistry of Hypocrisy

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Elizabeth Montagu · Black versus White Magic Series · 12 pages

The epigraph does most of the work, and it comes from an unexpected place — a letter of Elizabeth Montagu, the eighteenth-century bluestocking, printed in 1809. While every vice is hid by hypocrisy, every virtue is suspected to be hypocrisy: which excuses the bad from imitating virtue, the ungenerous from rewarding it, and the suspicious from trusting it. Because credulity is folly, suspicion passes for wisdom — as if it were not as necessary a part of wisdom to know what to believe as what to reject.

Blavatsky's own contribution takes that observation into the nineteenth century and presses it hard. Deceit and hypocrisy are at work for dear self's sake in every nation as in every individual; selfishness, whether it breeds ambition for territory or competition in commerce at a neighbour's expense, can never be counted a virtue. The middle classes are described as honeycombed with false smiles and mutual treachery, religion as a thin veil thrown over the corpse of spiritual faith, and the age itself as boastful, cruel and dissembling — with more hypocrites in a square yard of civilised soil than antiquity bred on all its idolatrous lands. The falsification she notes runs from moral food to eatable food, which in the 1880s was not a metaphor.

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