Madame Blavatsky on Progress and Culture

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 17 pages

Seventeen pages testing the century's favourite word against its own record. The central distinction is stated early and repeated: real spiritual culture emanates from within outwards, while materially centred culture and so-called civilisation are no better than whitened sepulchres full of dead men decaying. Not one atom of moral improvement, she argues, is to be found in Christendom since the establishment of the religion — outward polish, inward roughness and rot.

The illustrations range oddly and deliberately wide. Table manners get a long paragraph: in the days of Lucullus the man who used his whole hand rather than three fingers to lift food from the dish offended as much as one who puts a knife to his mouth today, and Brahmans who use no forks bathe completely and change their clothes before dining. Against that she sets the substantial question — spiritual progress relates to the inner man, worldly progress to gadgets and gizmos — and closes on the comparison the last page is built around: from the Amazons' theo-astronomical dance around the Sun at the Mysteries, to women whirling round a ballroom in the arms of men who are neither their husbands nor their brothers, progress has been on a downward spiral. The final footnote of this document is what her remark about hating balls elsewhere in the series points back to.

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