Alice Leighton Cleather on HP Blavatsky: A Great Betrayal (1922)

Alice Leighton Cleather · Blavatsky Tributes Series · 105 pages

Published in Calcutta in 1922 as the companion to her Life and Work for Humanity, this second volume by Alice Leighton Cleather is, by its own subtitle, a protest — against the policy and the teachings of the Theosophical Society in the years following Madame Blavatsky's death. It is reproduced here as a complete facsimile of the original Thacker, Spink printing.

The book opens with a passage from a letter written to H.P.B. by her Master concerning her Esoteric Section students, setting out what is required of anyone approaching the Temple of Truth: a clean life, an open mind, a pure heart, an eager intellect, an unveiled spiritual perception, brotherliness towards one's co-disciples, a readiness to give and receive instruction, and a courageous endurance of personal injustice. That standard is the measure Cleather then applies to what followed. Her chapters take in William Kingsland on the crisis of 1906 and the assessments of Édouard Schuré and others, building a case that the Society had departed from the teaching it was founded to carry. It is a partisan document and an important one — the record of a first-generation pupil's dissent, written while the events were still recent.

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