Madame Blavatsky's Obituary by William Quan Judge

William Quan Judge · Blavatsky Tributes Series · 5 pages

Published in Lucifer in June 1891, a month after her death, and later gathered into Echoes of the Orient, this is less an obituary than a memoir written by someone still inside the loss. Judge takes his opening from the way she habitually closed her letters to him — yours till death and after — and admits at once that while everyone is committing to paper some account of the departed teacher, what he feels is not recollection but the continuing presence of a resistless power, like a mighty rushing river, which those who wholly trusted her always came to understand.

He recalls first meeting her in New York in 1874, in her rooms in Irving Place, at her own request conveyed through Colonel Olcott — surrounded then, as through the remainder of her stormy career, by the anxious, the intellectual, the bohemian, the rich and the poor. It was her eye that arrested him, the eye of someone he felt he must have known in lives long past; she looked at him in recognition in that first hour, and the look never changed afterwards. He came, he insists, not as a questioner of philosophies nor as one groping for light, but as someone who had been seeking the friends who could show where the designs for the work had been hidden. Judge is frank that others looked with suspicion on an appearance they could not fathom, and equally frank that he considers them simply to have been blind.

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