Blavatsky on the Monsoon

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 6 pages

Six pages of travel writing, and the least doctrinal thing in the section. It survives by accident: the text is reprinted from a clipping in one of General Abner Doubleday's scrapbooks, held in the archives of the Point Loma Theosophical Society. No date is attached, but other clippings in the same book place it in 1879. It began as a private letter from Bombay which the Banner of Light was allowed to extract.

The tone is conversational and unbuttoned throughout. Do you know what the monsoon is, she asks, and are you prepared to say you know all its peculiarities and its results upon humanity in general and lymphatic, slow-blooded folks in particular? Her archaeological opinion, offered in the same breath, is that it was one of these monsoons that Father Noah — whom she suspects of having been a low-caste Hindu — mistook in some fit of intoxication for the universal deluge, thereby perplexing geology for ages. The description that follows is precise where it matters: eight months without a drop of rain, then four months from mid-June during which the streets, yards, gardens, compounds and even the rooms of the houses are flooded. It can no more be called rain, she writes, than Niagara can be called a shower.

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