Madame Blavatsky on the Rationale of Fasts

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 5 pages

Five pages, and among the most practical documents in the section. The rationale of fasts, she writes, lies on the surface: if one thing more than another paralyses the will and paves the way to physical and moral degradation, it is intemperance in eating — gluttony, of seven deadly sins the worst. The institution of fasts goes hand in hand with the institution of feasts, and exists to correct the second. When too severe a strain is placed on the digestive machinery, the remedy is to let it rest, as exhausted ground must lie fallow before it can yield another crop.

The comparative point is the one worth carrying away: Buddhist priests have no institution of fasts at all, being enjoined instead to observe the middle course and so to fast daily all their lives — which she treats as the better arrangement, since it removes the need for correction. The second half turns to the psychic effect of different foods, and is careful about the reasoning. There is a real difference between nitrogenous food such as flesh and non-nitrogenous food such as fruit and green vegetables; beef and beans have long been interdicted to students of occultism, and she is explicit that this is not because either is more or less holy than anything else, but because their magnetism was held to be deadening and obstructive.

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