Madame Blavatsky Pays Tribute to Eliphas Levi

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 7 pages

Seven pages introducing the first of a series of previously unpublished writings by Eliphas Levi, printed in The Theosophist in July 1881. She calls him one of the great masters of the occult sciences of the century in the West — an assessment worth setting beside her long critique of his cosmogony in the Blavatsky Speaks section, which takes him apart in detail. Both judgements are hers, and holding them together is the point.

The biography is given in two sentences and a verdict. An ex-Catholic priest, he was unfrocked by the ecclesiastical authorities at Rome — who, she writes, tolerate no belief in God, Devil or Science outside the narrow circle of their dogma, and anathematise every creed-crushed soul that succeeds in breaking its mental bondage. Carlyle is quoted for the general principle that as knowledge increases faith diminishes, so that those who know the most always believe the least; and her conclusion follows from it: Levi knew much, far more than the privileged few even among the greatest mystics of modern Europe, and was traduced by the ignorant many in proportion. The frontispiece is the Baphomet, glossed here as an emblem of baptism or initiation into wisdom.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.7 MB, 7 pages)