Death Has No Terrors

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 18 pages

The subject is what happens to perception as a person dies, and the file gathers corroborated presentiments of death as its evidence. It opens on the mysterious moral influences constantly exercised by one human being over another, for attraction or repulsion — among the workings of the inner life we may experience but cannot explain — and moves from there to the claim that the book of futurity, wisely closed to every mortal eye, opens its pages to many at the end.

The mechanism proposed is that the unfolding of the inner faculties increases as the life-blood becomes more stagnant: during the dissolution of the etheric double the darkness of our ignorance begins to be dispelled, so that the nearer some people approach death the brighter their long-lost memory becomes and the more correct their previsions. Two targets are handled along the way. Modern astronomy is charged with profiting by the works of ancient astrology and then kicking it out of sight. And modern science and spiritualism are called two opposite poles, life and death being as much a mystery to the man of science as to the spiritualist and the profane unbeliever — the materialistic scientists unweaving the rainbow, the unconscious necromancers rejecting every philosophy but their own. The conclusion is the title, with a rider: that people make too much fuss over death, and too little over the birth of every new candidate for it.

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