Madame Blavatsky on the Luminous Circle

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 11 pages

Published in The Sun of New York on 2 January 1876 under the pen name Hadji Mora, and cast entirely as a traveller's anecdote. The party of the story had reached Constantinople from Greece a week earlier and spent fourteen hours a day running up and down the hills of Pera, visiting bazaars, climbing minarets and fighting through the armies of dogs who were the traditional masters of the streets of Stamboul.

The narrative hinges on the loss of a dog. Her spaniel Ralph had behaved as a well-educated quadruped for three days, drawing in his tail at every attack from his Mohammedan fellow creatures and seeking protection under the wing of the party; satisfied of his discretion, she relaxed her watch, and the last she saw of him was his bushy tail vanishing round the corner of a crooked street. What the search leads to is the subject of the newspaper's own subheadings — a magic moon, what was seen therein, the dervishes of Constantinople, and a dwarf's transformation. It is one of the very few pieces in the library written for a general newspaper readership rather than for a theosophical one, and it reads accordingly.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.4 MB, 11 pages)