Why Women Should Avoid the Church Like a Plague

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 13 pages

The title is combative and the contents are largely quotation, which is the point: much of the document consists of what the Church Fathers themselves wrote about women, set out at length so the reader can weigh it. Around that sit two arguments — that burning heretics and witches by the hecatomb is neither culture nor progress, and that the Church has been ungrateful to woman while woman has been no worse than a willing martyr to it.

The Series Editor's foreword takes a different route to the same place, and is the more interesting half. It offers three keys to the inner meaning of humility, which it calls purely astronomical and occult: the humiliation of the Spirit of Light descending into the darkness of matter, the play on Chrestos in Scorpio and Christos in Leo, and the astronomical fall and rise of the Sons of Light. From that it argues that the lowering of the sun into matter was anciently pictured by an emblem the profane read as death and the initiate as life — and that because death was held to be the greatest evil, the emblem became an object of hatred, whereupon ecclesiastical misogyny had its field day. Title-page illustration by Albert Bierstadt.

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