Was Sir Edwin Arnold an Initiate?

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 16 pages

Two reviews of the same poet, printed together so the change of view can be followed. The first appeared in the opening number of The Theosophist in October 1879 and is warm: a timely work in poetical form whose subject, however perfect the outward clothing, is sure to provoke bitter criticism. Edwin Arnold had spent years in India as principal of the Deccan College at Poona and had, she says, evidently studied his theme con amore.

The praise is real — Lord Buddha excels other men, in the line she quotes, as the Himalayas excel other peaks in height — but the question in the title is answered no. Death, she notes, is the penalty for an initiate who divulges even unconsciously the constitution of the Sun, and Arnold had divulged nothing because he had nothing to divulge; what he may have caught were occult glimpses from the Astral Light. The second half turns to his later poem The Light of the World and is much harder on it, on the principle stated at its head: that truth alone can make us free, and not fiction, however poetical.

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