Madame Blavatsky on the Trans-Himalayan Fraternity

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 9 pages

A letter to The Spiritualist of London in August 1881, written in reply to a single sentence in that paper's review of Sinnett's Occult World: that on the authority of an adept, the Theosophists and Madame Blavatsky are all mediums under the influence of the lower spirits. She professes to find nothing very objectionable in it, particularly since the same review had done her the honour of granting that, controlled by good spirits or bad, she was at least a strong physical medium.

The passage the document is remembered for is the description of what the training actually requires, and it is one of the fullest statements of it anywhere in the library: not only many years of the severest study, lit by a superior intelligence and an audacity bent by no peril, but as many years of retreat in comparative solitude, associating only with students pursuing the same object, in a place where nature herself preserves an absolute and unbroken stillness. The conditions she specifies are physical as well as moral — air free for hundreds of miles of all mephitic influence, atmosphere and human magnetism absolutely pure, and no animal blood spilt. The frontispiece is by Nicholas Roerich.

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