Madame Blavatsky on Plato's Timaeus

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 17 pages

Boris de Zirkoff's note gives this its interest: it may be an introduction written for a third volume of the Secret Doctrine that never appeared in her lifetime. It opens on the axiom that power belongs to him who knows, and on the observation that knowledge is available only to those who have freed themselves from prejudice and conquered their conceit — of whom there are very few, since the majority judge a work by the prejudices of its critics, who are guided in turn by the popularity of the author rather than by the book's own merits.

The named target is Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol and the great Victorian translator of Plato, who had found the Timaeus obscure and repulsive; the epigram quoted against him is the famous Oxford rhyme — my name is J-W-TT, there's no knowledge but I know it, I am Master of this College, what I don't know isn't knowledge. Her wider charge is that the age is a paradoxical anomaly, pre-eminently materialistic and pre-eminently pietistic at once, in which no statement can hope for a fair hearing unless it runs along lines already accepted by official science or orthodox theology. The frontispiece shows Plato's olive grove dedicated to Athena.

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