Madame Blavatsky on Herself

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Tributes Series · 5 pages

In its June 1878 number the Paris journal La Revue Spirite reprinted, in good faith, an article on the Theosophists drawn from a story that had appeared the previous year in the New York World. Returning from a journey, Madame Blavatsky found it, and wrote to correct the record. The journal published her letter that October with an apology of its own, conceding that its correspondent had plainly misinterpreted a woman he hardly knew. The French text was later translated and annotated by Boris de Zirkoff and republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings under the title "The Real Madame H.P. Blavatsky".

The correction itself occupies little space; what follows is one of the most quoted passages of invective she ever wrote. There exists, she observes, a race of bipeds — a recent production of a century of steam and iconoclasm — which the Academies of Science have so far neglected to classify under Teratology, the science of human monsters. These creatures are called reporters. The American variety differs from its transatlantic cousin as the wild buffalo differs from the domestic bull: where one damages a neighbour's fence, the other destroys whole forests in his furious career. No lock is sufficiently patented, she adds, and no family secret sacred enough, to keep them out. For readers who know Blavatsky only through her metaphysics, the piece is a useful corrective — a reminder of how formidable a polemicist she was.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.4 MB, 5 pages)