Madame Blavatsky's Last Words: Keep the Link Unbroken

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 5 pages

Five pages, and a small piece of source criticism rather than a devotional one. The words everyone quotes — keep the link unbroken, do not let my last incarnation be a failure — first appeared in print in a short biography of Isabel Cooper-Oakley written by W.Q. Judge for The Path in July 1894, three years after Blavatsky's death. The compiler's first observation is a correction: these were not strictly her last words, since she is recorded as having spoken them two nights before she died.

What the document does is set the evidence out so a reader can weigh it. The primary citation is Judge's account, which places the moment at three in the morning at 19 Avenue Road, when she suddenly looked up and spoke to Mrs Cooper-Oakley by name — who was out at the moment of the death itself and, recalled by telegram, arrived ten minutes late. The secondary citation is a minute from an Eastern School of Theosophy council meeting of 27 May 1891, recording that there was ample proof by witnesses that those were her last words in reference to the School and its work. Printing both, with their differences visible, is more useful than a single settled version would be.

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