Madame Blavatsky on the Trials and Triumph of Initiation

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 66 pages

The central study of the section, and the one the five Drawings further down the list illustrate. It opens historically: in the Golden Age esoteric knowledge was common property, and initiation arose later only from the necessity of limiting the number of those who knew — the initiate's maxim being all for the people and with the people. The old initiates are described as real philosophers, priests and healers who commemorated their secrets in hieroglyphics, admitting only those whose purity allowed them to look on Isis unveiled.

The second part supplies the machinery behind the vocabulary this library uses constantly. Vishvakarman, the Hierophant or Logos Demiourgos, cuts off seven locks of the neophyte's hair — the second Sun's rays — and replaces them with a crown of brambles, making him Vikartana, shorn of his rays. The neophyte who survives the trials, on the cross of his own worldly passions, dies in the Chrestos condition, freed from the clutches of matter, before his second and triumphant birth in spirit as Christos. That distinction between Chrestos and Christos is the hinge of the whole series, and this is the document that sets it out at length.

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