Madame Blavatsky interviewed by Charles Johnston

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Charles Johnston · Blavatsky Tributes Series · 14 pages

In the spring of 1887, shortly after Madame Blavatsky's arrival in London from Ostende, the young Irish Sanskritist Charles Johnston called at the house her disciples had taken in Norwood, within sight of the glass nave and twin towers of the Crystal Palace. The account he wrote of that first meeting, and of the conversations that followed, was published in The Theosophical Forum between 1900 and 1901 and later gathered into Blavatsky Collected Writings. Boris de Zirkoff, introducing it, is careful to note that the text is not from Blavatsky's own pen — but includes it nonetheless, because it carries a great many points of teaching and bears obvious marks of authenticity.

What emerges is a portrait rather than a doctrine: the woman her friends were all made to call "H.P.B.," finishing her day's work while a visitor waits upstairs with the volunteer secretary who gave up everything for her cause and was stormed at unremittingly for seven years in return. Johnston writes with a novelist's eye — London at its grimy best, the squares scented with lilac, the smoke-pall thinned to a grey veil — before turning to the substance of her teaching: Universal Cosmic Night when Time was not, the Luminous Sons of Manvantaric Dawn, the Armies of the Voice, the Black Magicians of lost Atlantis, the Sons of Will and Yoga, and the Ring Pass-Not. It remains one of the most vivid first-hand records of Blavatsky in her final London years.

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