Madame Blavatsky remembered by Henry Travers Edge

Henry Travers Edge, compiled by Boris de Zirkoff · Blavatsky Tributes Series · 10 pages

Henry Travers Edge (1867–1946) was a personal pupil of H.P.B. during her London period, and this compilation by Boris de Zirkoff, drawn from Blavatsky Collected Writings, sets his recollections alongside an account of the life that produced them. Born at Cubbington near Leamington in Warwickshire, the son of a Church of England clergyman, Edge was educated at Malvern College and King's College, Cambridge, where in 1889 he took high honours in the Natural Sciences Tripos in chemistry, physics and geology. He studied a year in Germany, taught in various English institutions, and in 1899 resigned his post as Demonstrator in Practical Physics at the Royal College of Science in South Kensington to accept Katherine Tingley's invitation to join the Theosophical headquarters staff at Point Loma, California, where he died.

The most valuable part of the compilation is Edge's own description of how he came to Theosophy, quoted at length. Of a pronounced nervous temperament, he had begun devouring scientific books at a very early age; he lacked the concentration for assiduous study but possessed a quick mind and a retentive memory. To that scientific skein was added a conscientious and religious disposition, and then, at about eighteen, a third element — the mystical, concerned with the occult and the supernatural. His materialism received what he calls a rude shock from reading Catherine Crowe's The Night Side of Nature, a collection of ghost stories whose cumulative evidence convinced him that such accounts, once the trash was filtered off, were essentially facts. It is an unusually candid account of a scientifically trained mind changing its ground.

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