Madame Blavatsky Rebuffs the Accusations of Arthur Lillie

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 23 pages

Twenty-three pages of sustained self-defence, and one of the few places where she gives a direct account of her own early years in America. Arthur Lillie, the writer on Buddhism, had used Colonel Olcott's People from the Other World against her; her answer begins by defending Olcott rather than herself. He wrote what he then thought was the truth, honestly and sincerely, and — having a determined object in view — she did not seek to disabuse him too rudely of his dreams. He learned the whole truth only after the Society was formed in 1875.

The specific misquotation she fastens on is worth the download. Olcott had written plainly that instead of being controlled by spirits to do their will, it was she who controlled the so-called spirits — and Lillie had made him say the reverse. On John King she is more forthcoming than anywhere else: she had known him since 1860, and identifies him as the form of an Eastern adept who has since gone for his final initiation, passing through Bombay in his living body on the way. The rest is a demolition of Lillie's standing to cross-examine her — he knows nothing of initiation, nothing of Tibet even exoterically, and nothing of esoteric Buddhism — with a prediction that before the controversy is settled he will have laid bare the last shreds of his supposed oriental learning.

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