Blavatsky on a Case of Obsession

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 8 pages

From The Theosophist of May 1880, and unusual in the series for being a clinical case rather than an argument. An English medical man wrote in about a patient who had attended a few seances to witness materialisation and had since been subject to persistent control — his thoughts forced into channels he had not chosen, his bodily functions overruled, made to bite his tongue and cheeks while eating, and subjected to a train of petty afflictions the doctor says he cannot put in writing.

Blavatsky's reply begins by explaining, for Indian readers to whom the phenomenon was unfamiliar, what materialisation in Europe and America actually amounted to: apparitions seen under what were often good test conditions, walking about, writing messages to absent friends, speaking audibly in languages the medium did not know, and dressed as they had been in life. She notes in the same breath that many cases of fraudulent personation had been detected. The interest of the piece is that she takes the doctor's account seriously as a medical problem with an occult cause, rather than dismissing it or celebrating it — which is the position the whole series argues for.

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