Theological Anthropomorphism Is the Parent of Materialism

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 19 pages

Nineteen pages of correspondence, which is a form Blavatsky was unusually good at. Readers wrote to Lucifer with questions and she answered them in the editorial columns, and the result is more concrete than the essays because she is always answering someone in particular. Five sets of questions are gathered here, on Kama-loka, on what books a beginner should read and how root-races and elementals stand, on cosmogenesis and deductive reasoning, on the life conducive to spiritual development, and on the after-death states.

The best-known passage is the reply on Kama-loka: there can be no conscious meeting there and therefore no grief, since we meet those we loved only in Devachan — and the comparison she reaches for is a green-room one, Kama-loka being the dressing-room in which the actor divests himself of the costume of the part he has just played before becoming himself again. The title comes from the third answer, where she states flatly that materialism is the offspring of theological and dogmatic anthropomorphism, and that once form is understood as a temporary perception dependent on our senses, the illusion that a formless cause cannot produce forms will vanish. The fourth answer is the sharpest: virtuous living alone, uninformed by philosophy, cannot lead to interior communion with God — with John Stuart Mill offered as the example.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.9 MB, 19 pages)