Magic Is the Occult Knowledge of Natural Law

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 11 pages

One of the earliest things Blavatsky published, from the Spiritual Scientist of October 1875, and written in a temper. The editor of the Banner of Light had run a piece denying that magic either exists or has ever existed, with veiled hits at her and open ones at Colonel Olcott. She replies, and the tone of the opening is worth the download on its own: she notes that were she to argue only from what she had seen herself in India and Africa she would risk being called an irresponsible woman, and that this would not be the first time.

So instead she goes to the authorities, and the article becomes what its later title calls it — a case that magic is the occult knowledge of natural law, supported from sources her opponent could not easily dismiss. Along the way she takes up his suggestion that humbugging spirits may be fooling aspirants into believing in magic, and agrees with more of it than he would have liked: she is perfectly certain that spirits calling themselves by famous names have been doing exactly that. The article was pasted into her scrapbook and later annotated in her own hand, and those pen-and-ink additions are reproduced here as footnotes.

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