Hair Is the Retainer of Prana

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 11 pages

The claim is physiological before it is symbolic: that hair is closely connected with many brain functions, and that old people, as they lose their hair, lose much of their memory and grow weaker. From this follows the practice the running head names — that the Yanadi seer grows his hair and lets no razor pass his head — set against the observation that fashion, which has somehow succeeded in making respectability its queer ally, forbids civilised society to wear their hair long.

The scriptural reading follows the same principle. Samson, personification of the sun and the Jewish Hercules, speaks of the seven locks whose cutting will deprive him of physical strength — killing the material man and leaving only the spiritual — and Blavatsky's point is that the Bible purposely conceals the esoteric truth that those seven locks symbolise the septenary physical man, the same reading given in Samson and Hercules in the Buddhas and Initiates series. The historical argument closes it: that the Roman Church abandoned the tradition the Greek Church preserved when it adopted the solar tonsure, which she takes as evidence that Rome wandered farthest from the religion of the mystical Christ. Illustrations include the aura of a yogi in trance, from The True Colours of Man.

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