Madame Blavatsky's Open Letter to Her Correspondents

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 9 pages

One of the earliest things she published, in the Spiritual Scientist of Boston in September 1875, two months before the Theosophical Society was founded. It exists because she was receiving more letters than she could answer: people writing to ask the best way of getting information about occultism and its relation to modern spiritualism. Rather than reply to each, she named in print the principal works on magic and the mysteries of the modern Hermetists.

The warning attached to the list is the part worth having. Would-be aspirants must not lure themselves with the idea that they can become practical occultists by book-knowledge, because the works of the Hermetic philosophers were never intended for the masses. She quotes Charles Sotheran of the Societas Rosae Crucis on Gabriele Rossetti's demonstration that the art of writing in a language bearing a double interpretation is of very great antiquity — practised by the priests of Egypt, carried by the Manichees, passed to the Templars and Albigenses, and spread across Europe. The single book she recommends most warmly is Hargrave Jennings's The Rosicrucians, which she calls the ablest ever written on symbols and mystic orders.

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