Why the Secrecy of Initiates?

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 27 pages

An answer to the question the whole section keeps raising. The argument begins from the first semi-divine, pure and spiritual race of humanity, which had the truths of God and lived up to them, and could preserve them so long as there was hardly any evil and so scarcely any possible abuse of that knowledge. But evolution and the gradual fall into materiality is itself one of those truths and one of the laws of God; and as mankind became with every generation more of the earth, earthly, the individuality of each temporary Ego began to assert itself.

Personal selfishness is where the argument locates the danger: it is what develops and urges man on to abuse of his knowledge and power, and it is called a human building whose windows and doors stand ever open for every kind of iniquity to enter the soul. Few men in the early adolescence of mankind, and fewer now, would act on Pope's declaration that he would tear out his own heart if it had no better disposition than to love only himself and laugh at his neighbours — hence, she concludes, the necessity of gradual concealment. The file is arranged as an overview of the main ideas, then the secrecy of initiates at length, then some reasons for secrecy, and closes with an endnote by Boris de Zirkoff on James Ralston Skinner's unpublished manuscript.

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