Blavatsky on a Heavy Curse

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 6 pages

Six pages, most of them given over to a single document reproduced verbatim. In April 1883 The Theosophist printed a bull of excommunication sent by the Pope to various bishops to be read to their parishioners, and hurled by the Archbishop of Santander against spiritualists in general and certain editors in his diocese in particular. Blavatsky introduces it as a specimen of condensed and concentrated episcopal malice, and notes that the accursed are men whose only crime was to prefer civil and religious liberty to priestly rule.

She translated it verbatim from the original as found in the St Petersburg journal Rebus, and the effect of printing it whole is greater than any commentary — a cataloguing curse that runs through waking and sleeping, eating and drinking and fasting, speech and silence, home and abroad, land and water, and asks that no seed of them be left upon the surface of the globe. Her framing is two sentences of dry irony: that this latest inspiration claimed to have been received through the Holy Ghost deserves a prominent place beside the bulls against liberals collected by Gladstone, and that she dedicates her translation to her good friends of the Society of Jesus.

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