Madame Blavatsky on the New Year and False Noses

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 9 pages

Written in French for La Revue Theosophique of Paris in January 1890 and translated for the Collected Writings. Its starting point is a phrase rather than an idea: annum novum faustum felicemque tibi, the greeting exchanged across the Roman Empire on the first of January for centuries before the Christian era, and still heard in Paris. It woke the echoes in the palaces of the Caesars, cheered the hovel of the slave, and rose in the galleries of the Colosseum.

The image that gives the piece its title comes from the same source. In honour of the double-faced Janus, everyone assumed on that day a more or less prominent false nose of goodness, frank cordiality and sincerity — and the New Year greeting she then offers her readers turns on it. Happiness and prosperity to every one of them; let it be light to our enemies and traducers; and to theosophists everywhere, an appeal to discard for one day at least all our respective false noses, in order to wish each other health and success and a little more cordial mutual understanding than in the year 1889, now happily defunct. The wider point is the one the series makes repeatedly: that the New Year, like every other festival, is a legacy to Christian peoples from an older world.

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