Pages from The Caves and Jungles of Hindostan

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 21 pages

Twenty-one pages taken from the travel narrative she wrote in Russian for the Moscow Herald, and the most readable prose in this batch. Four passages are selected: on Gupta-vidya as a two-edged weapon, on a materialist's self-perception after death, on Methora and Kleisovora as descendants of Buddha and Ella, and on Olympus being nearer to the Himalayas than anyone supposes.

The first is the one that carries the book's argument. The Thakur, the Indian companion of the narrative, is asked what the secret sciences are, and answers that to those who have given their lives to them they contain the key to all nature's places of concealment and to the worlds both seen and unseen — but that the key is far harder to find than his questioner imagines. Gupta-vidya is a two-edged weapon which cannot be approached without sacrificing at the outset all earthly things, and even reason itself, since she overwhelms anyone who fails to subdue her. In antediluvian Aryavarta, he adds, you will find the Sphinx as in Egypt, and for every single Oedipus there are thousands of victims — which is why he hesitates to grant his European companions even a period of probation.

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