A Chant for the Neophytes after Their Last Initiation

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 11 pages

Eleven pages on a fragment with an unusually strange provenance, printed in Lucifer in December 1888 as The Dirge for the Dead in Life. The chant itself was sung over the entranced body of a neophyte about to become an initiate — dirges having been used first in the Mysteries over the apparently lifeless bodies of the mystai who were made epoptai, the dead in life, and only later over the actually dead.

The account of how the text was obtained is what makes the document remarkable, and Blavatsky states it plainly enough that a reader can weigh it. The verses came, she says, by automatic writing: the medium a young lady who knew nothing about the subject and was much puzzled by what she had written, including the signature Sepher given to her. The original had been found in Egypt among the wrappings of a mummy by the grandfather of a Mason from whom the Society obtained it. The claim is not that the young woman knew the text but precisely that she did not — which is why the piece was printed as one of the most remarkable instances of the phenomenon she had seen.

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