Chinese Beliefs about the Human Soul

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 27 pages

From Lucifer of November 1891, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings VII as Chinese Spirits, and notable for saying where its material comes from. Part is from an old work by a French missionary who lived in China over forty years; part from a curious unpublished work by an American gentleman who lent his notes; part from information given by the Abbé Huc to Gougenot des Mousseaux and the Marquis de Mirville, for which she makes those two responsible; and most of the facts from a Chinese gentleman then residing in Europe.

The scheme reported is that man is composed of four root-substances and three acquired semblances — which she takes to be the magical and universal occult tradition, dating from an antiquity that has its origin in the night of time, and which she finds independently in a Latin poet's line that twice-two are the things of a man: ghosts, flesh, spirit, shade, each received by its own place, earth covering the flesh. The septenary man of the theosophical scheme is set out alongside as the synthesis of a triple emanation of the unintelligible divine essence and the lower quaternary that is the vehicle of life. The illustrations are of Zhong Kui, the Chinese conqueror of ghosts and wicked spirits.

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