Oh, Divine Justice, How Blasphemed Has Been Thy Name!

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 71 pages

Seventy-one pages in two parts, both drawn from Isis Unveiled, volume II, chapter XI. Part 1 takes pages 543 to 586 and keeps the title of the file; part 2, "Primitive peoples have vanished into thin air", takes pages 529 to 587 and carries the subtitle that Primitive Wisdom-Religion still throbs in the heart of those who will, dare, and remain silent. A note in part 2 refers the reader onward for the continuation of the article, from pages 535 to 543 of the same volume. The frontispiece is Maitreya Buddha. An abstract of central ideas opens the file.

The subject of part 1 is the doctrine of vicarious atonement, and the objection raised against it is moral rather than textual. The case is put through examples: the murderer taken by human justice, prayed with, pronouncing the words of conversion and going to the scaffold pardoned, who would not have been prayed with at all but for the murder; and the seduction of a young girl, where the woman is ostracised by an instinct of social self-preservation while the man's offence goes unexpiated. The challenge put to those who claim the power to pardon is whether they also received the ability to obliterate the wrong — to restore life to the murdered, honour to the dishonoured and property to the wronged, and so force the scales back to equilibrium. From there the file turns historical, tracing the belief in the propitiatory efficacy of blood back through the oldest rites and arguing the precedence of Egypt over Israel in age and in religious practice. The soul brought before Osiris, Lord of Truth, decorated with the Egyptian cross as the emblem of eternal life, is set against the Christian judgement. Jesus is placed in Egypt and among the Essenes, and his doctrine located in the Sermon on the Mount rather than in the mythical Christ. Krishna and Apollo appear as Good Shepherds, and the Wisdom Religion is defined as a religion of reason — gnosis — rather than of authority. Part 2 is largely ethnographic and darker in material: blood evocation practised in Bulgaria and Moldavia, the Yakuts of Siberia and their light-shadows and dark-shadows, the Yezidis, secret societies in Haiti and a scene witnessed in Cuba, and nagualism surviving as it did in the days of Montezuma. Through it runs the file's own thesis, stated plainly: a compulsory religion can never breed anything but deceit, and the old religions are chapters of one volume of archaic mysteries however much they conflict in appearance.

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