The Hermetic Fire of the Mind Is the Key to the Occult Sciences

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 34 pages

Thirty-four pages whose real subject is the boundary between what science of the 1880s could measure and what it declined to. The quarrel she states at the outset is precise: it is not with the materialists' soulless forces so much as with their denial that there is any force-bearer at all — any noumenon behind light or electricity. Science, she allows, has made wonderful discoveries on the objective side of physical phenomena; where it goes wrong is in seeing in matter alone, and in only the matter known to it, the alpha and omega of all phenomena.

The middle of the document is documentary and unusually concrete. It covers mesmerism and hypnotism in France, with a sharp aside on Charcot of Paris as the illustrious discoverer of the hysterical cock, and then reproduces Alexander Aksakoff's account of six thought-transmission experiments between Monsieur Donato and Mademoiselle Lucile, numbered and described one by one so a reader can judge the protocol. A section on the substantial nature of magnetism follows, and Boris de Zirkoff closes with biographical and bibliographical notes on Aksakoff, who was among the most careful of the Russian investigators of the period.

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