Madame Blavatsky on the Harmonics of Smell

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 8 pages

Eight pages of scientific commentary, and a good example of Blavatsky welcoming a piece of orthodox research rather than attacking it. In 1882 William Ramsay — then at University College, Bristol, and later a Nobel laureate — communicated to Nature a theory that smell is due to vibrations similar to, but of a lower period than, those giving rise to light and heat. She reprints his account and calls the old proverb exemplified again, that truth is stranger than fiction.

Ramsay's mechanism is set out in his own terms: the sensation is provoked by contact with the terminal organs of the olfactory nerves spread over a mucous membrane in the upper nasal cavity, the proximate cause being minute hairlets connected to the nerves through spindle-shaped cells; it is never excited by a liquid or a solid but always by a gas, even in the case of metals, which give off a subtle vapour at ordinary temperatures; and intensity rises with molecular weight. The part that interested her is his analogy for quality — that as the tone of a violin differs from that of a flute by its overtones, so the character of a smell may depend on the harmonics of its vibration. The occult reading placed alongside it is that this is one sense being described in the terms the tradition uses for all of them.

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