Blavatsky Cuts Down to Size a Carping Critic of Heterodoxy

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 16 pages

A rare pamphlet, published in London by the Theosophical Publication Society around October 1889 at a price of twopence, and reprinted in the Collected Writings under the title The Thersites of Freethought — Thersites being the son of Agrius, remembered as the ugliest and most impudent talker among the Greeks at Troy. The target is G.W. Foote, the secularist editor, and the occasion his attacks on Annie Besant for joining the Theosophical Society.

Blavatsky's defence of Besant is the warmest thing in it: a noble heart like hers listens to no voice save the inner voice of Truth, to which Foote is deaf and blind — and since he dares not turn his rage on Besant, he turns instead and slanders another woman he expects to have nothing to fear from. The rest is sustained demolition, and the metaphors are worth the download: he is a very brutal but not skilful fencer, whose arguments are as blunt as the foils that hit but hurt not; his work is that of an accomplished charlatan; he repeats what he hears others say and manages to confuse even that. Underneath the invective there is a real argument about materialism's claim to the last word of science, and about the difference between theoretical and practical altruism.

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