The Need for a Metaphysico-Spiritual Vocabulary

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 8 pages

From The Theosophist of April 1882, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings IV as The Present Great Need of a Metaphysico-Spiritual Vocabulary, and the file that explains why a whole section of this library is given over to distinguishing words. The claim at its head is that only a thorough apprehension of the seven principles of the living man, each subdivided into seven more, can bring order into the chaos and confusion of terms and notions.

The occasion is a specific disagreement. C.C. Massey, writing in Light as "C.C.M.", had reported that on the recent teaching in The Theosophist the linga-sharira is dissolved with the external body at death — which he noted is quite opposed to Éliphas Lévi and many other authorities, and does not appear probable. Blavatsky's reply lists where he errs, and the list is itself an argument for a fixed vocabulary: in accepting Böhme as an authority; in taking no exception to a crude classification of souls that places the perfected spirit in the third class; in rendering "heavenly Essentiality" as "divine embodiment"; and in his terming of the doctrine. Massey's own essay on psychic bodies appears in batch 1 of this section, so both sides of the exchange are held here.

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