There Is No Need for Expensive Funerals

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 10 pages

From The Theosophist of June 1883, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings IV as The Efficacy of Funeral Ceremonies. The position is stated at the head without softening: that funerals originated among theocratically governed nations and are an afterthought of the priest, an outgrowth of theological and clerical ambition seeking to impress on the laity a superstition and a well-paying awe of a punishment of which the priest himself knows nothing beyond speculative and often illogical hypotheses.

The letter she is answering is printed first, and it is a serious question rather than a complaint. Its writer accepts the account of Devachan given in the Fragments of Occult Truth — that the Ego born there after gestation is unconscious of what passes on earth, and that only the shell formed of the fourth and lower fifth principles remains wandering in Kama-Loka, appearing under certain conditions in the séance room. What the Fragments do not explain is how far that shell is conscious of its past existence, and whether it consciously suffers for past misdeeds in any shape — a question, the correspondent notes, of the highest importance to Hindus and Parsis, whose funeral rites assume an answer to it. The reply is the substance of the file.

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