Madame Blavatsky Defends Isis Unveiled

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 14 pages

Published in Lucifer in May 1891, weeks before her death, and reprinted in the Collected Writings as My Books. It begins with a story that had got back to her — that she had told an American visitor asking what to read, of Isis Unveiled, don't read it, it is all trash. She does not deny the substance, only the word: what she says she actually said was that of all the books she had put her name to, this one is in literary arrangement the worst and most confused.

What follows is one of the most disarming things she wrote. Isis is full of misprints and misquotations, useless repetitions, irritating digressions, apparent contradictions, and gross mistakes introduced in proof-reading; much of the matter ought not to be in it at all; it has no system, and looks as though a mass of unconnected paragraphs had been shaken up in a waste-basket, taken out at random, and published. She dates the realisation precisely — she first read the book through in India in 1881, four years after it appeared — and notes that saying so freely disgusted those who warned her she was spoiling its sale. The remainder explains how the book came to be written in the state it was, which is the part a reader of Isis actually needs.

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