Madame Blavatsky's Obituary by the New York Daily Tribune

New York Daily Tribune · Blavatsky Tributes Series · 4 pages

Two days after Madame Blavatsky's death, the New-York Daily Tribune — the paper founded by Horace Greeley — devoted an editorial to her, and it is a far more generous assessment than a mainstream American newspaper of 1891 might have been expected to produce. Few women in our time, it begins, have been more persistently misrepresented, slandered and defamed; yet though malice and ignorance did their worst upon her, there are abundant indications that her life-work will vindicate itself, that it will endure, and that it will operate for good. The text reproduced here is taken from Sunrise magazine of August–September 1985.

The Tribune declines to rehearse the vicissitudes of her career, confining itself to what it takes to be the substance. For nearly twenty years she had devoted herself to disseminating doctrines of the loftiest ethical character; however Utopian it might appear to attempt, in the nineteenth century, to break down the barriers of race, nationality, caste and class prejudice, the nobility of the aim could be impeached only by those who repudiate Christianity itself. It notes that she held the regeneration of mankind must rest on the development of altruism, and credits her, in a second and separate judgement, with having done more than anyone of her generation to reopen the long-sealed treasures of Eastern thought to a West brought up in the insular belief that the East had produced nothing but crudities and puerilities in speculative thought.

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