Madame Blavatsky will instruct me in the Seven Sacred Trances

Thomas Stearns Eliot · Blavatsky Tributes Series · 3 pages

T.S. Eliot's "A Cooking Egg" first appeared in his second collection, Poems, in 1919, beneath an epigraph from François Villon — that by the thirtieth year of his life he had drunk up all his shame. The poem proceeds through a series of stanzas in which the speaker, sitting at a distance from the unremarkable Pipit, enumerates the things he will not want in Heaven: honour, capital, society. Each is dismissed because some more illustrious companion will supply it — Sir Philip Sidney, Coriolanus, Sir Alfred Mond, Lucretia Borgia.

Madame Blavatsky appears in the stanza concerning Pipit herself, named as the figure who will provide instruction in the Seven Sacred Trances, with Piccarda de Donati of Dante's Paradiso to conduct him. The reference is characteristically Eliot — dry, allusive, and entirely unexplained — but its inclusion is telling. Writing in 1919, less than thirty years after her death, Eliot could set her name beside Sidney, Dante and the Borgias and expect an educated reader to catch it without a footnote. The page reproduces the poem in full, with notes on its epigraph and sources.

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