The Spirit Within Is the Personal God of Each Mortal

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 13 pages

First published in French in La Revue Spirite in January 1879 and given here in the English of Blavatsky Collected Writings II, under the heading Erroneous Ideas Concerning the Doctrines of the Theosophists. It is a reply to Monsieur Rossi de Justiniani, printed by that journal with a pointed editorial note that it expressed no opinion on the doctrines expounded and that the Smyrna brother might reply.

Her account of how the misreporting arose is the substance. The Theosophical Society of New York, founded in 1875 and later entirely reconstructed on the orders of its heads in India, is established on the plan of every secret society, so its doctrines plainly cannot be common property; and yet the American press, above all the spiritualist papers, incessantly dissected and ridiculed as the doctrines of the Theosophists what were nothing but their own conjectures. What little it was permissible to reveal was set out as clearly as the English language allows — a language she calls rather poorly adapted to metaphysical ideas. Her complaint about the reception is sharper: not only was a deaf ear turned to the explanations, but as soon as the critics began to be answered the doors of the papers were politely shut. The doctrine defended is the one the title states, with the dual soul held to be only semi-divine.

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