Éliphas Lévi on Death and Satan, Annotated by a Master

Éliphas Lévi, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 16 pages

Two of Lévi's essays, on Death and on Satan, first published in The Theosophist of October 1881 and reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings III — but the reason this file exists is what happened to those printed pages afterwards. An editorial note explains it: as appears from a letter of Master K.H. to A.P. Sinnett received on 2 February 1883, at some point after publication the Master precipitated remarks and comments onto a couple of pages of The Theosophist containing the two articles, and underlined certain passages in Lévi's text, suggesting in the covering letter that Sinnett reflect on particular words used — drones among them.

Those annotated pages are among the so-called Mahatma Papers held by the British Museum, and this file reproduces the layers together: Lévi's text, Blavatsky's editorial notes, and the Master's annotations, so that a reader can see where each intervenes. The doctrinal conclusion drawn on the second essay is stated in the contents — that Satan is merely a type and not a real personage, which is the same position argued from the Egyptian side in Osiris and Typhon elsewhere in this batch. The companion file Blavatsky on three essays by Éliphas Lévi, in batch 1 of this section, prints three further unpublished pieces with her footnotes.

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