Madame Blavatsky on Hindu Widow-Burning

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 14 pages

Two connected pieces from The Theosophist of 1881, on suttee and on the remarriage of widows. The argument is a single one made twice: that the practices in question were introduced into the canon by selfish and unscrupulous priests as opportunity offered, for their own benefit, and are not to be read as expressions of the religion itself — with the marriage laws given as the second example of the same interpolation.

The opening is characteristically oblique, starting not with suttee but with cremation, which she calls eminently Hindu and describes as more dangerous to the Bible and to Bible Christians than any new revision of the sacred volume, since resurrection becomes impossible once the body is burnt. She reports with some enjoyment that even priest-ridden Italy has taken the lead in cremation, and quotes a Pall Mall Gazette correspondent on the cremation hall at Gotha, built by an association of learned Germans, where fifty-two people, five of them women, had chosen the method in two and a half years. The commentary that follows suggests the Brahmans might learn a lesson or two from what she calls their savage fellow-men of America.

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