Boris de Zirkoff pays homage to Madame Blavatsky

Boris de Zirkoff · Blavatsky Tributes Series · 5 pages

Written in May and June of 1947 and later collected in The Dream That Never Dies, this brief piece is not biography but invocation. Boris de Zirkoff — who would devote the greater part of his life to editing Blavatsky's Collected Writings — begins from the initials themselves: a magic name with a power all its own, with a meaning deeper than speech, a name with a Cosmos in it. The power of a name, he argues, lies in the ideal it represents, the thought it embodies and the inspiration it brings forth.

What H.P.B. represents, on his reading, is the renunciation of self-love and tireless labour for the spiritual liberation of humanity from the bondage of material existence; what it embodies is the noblest thought the Seers and Sages of all times have proclaimed, the essential Unity of all that is; and what it inspires is the conception of a beginningless and endless evolution along the spiral pathways of the Universe. He goes on to describe a woman born in a country whose chaotic genius resembled her own until the fire of her will had shaped her inner life into a Cosmos — misunderstood, persecuted, victimised, standing undaunted amidst a heartless world and silencing her foes by the mere power of her being. At five pages it is the shortest tribute in this series and the most purely rhetorical.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.7 MB, 5 pages)