Old Doctrines Vindicated by New Prophets

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 8 pages

From The Theosophist of May 1881, and built around a case the German press of the day could not explain. Dr Rudolf Falb, editor of the Leipzig popular astronomical journal Sirius, had been publishing meteorological and seismic predictions of such accuracy that they read, she says, less like scientific conjecture than like infallible prophecy — and the papers felt themselves betrayed by one of their own camp, a materialist of exact science.

The record she sets out is specific and checkable, which is what makes the piece work. Falb foretold the Zagreb earthquake of the previous year; at the beginning of 1868 he predicted an earthquake in Peru for 13 August, and it came on that day; in his Elementary Theory of Earthquakes and Volcanic Eruptions of May 1869 he foretold violent earthquakes at Marseilles, in Utah, along the Adriatic coast, in Colombia and in the Crimea, all of which followed five months later; in 1873 he predicted the northern Italian earthquake. The conclusion drawn is the one in the headnote: that nature's workshop is one vast clockwork guided by immutable laws, in which there is no room for the caprices of special providence — so that a man who has found the law can forecast, and no miracle is involved.

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