Theories about Reincarnation and Spirits

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 23 pages

Written at Ostend in October 1886 and published in The Path that November, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings VII. It answers a charge that had recurred through the Society's first decade: that a notable discrepancy exists between Isis Unveiled and the later teaching from the same pen and under the same master. In Isis, the objection runs, reincarnation is denied — an occasional return of depraved spirits being allowed, and beyond that rare possibility only three cases, abortion, very early death and idiocy, in which reincarnation on this earth occurs.

Her reply notes first that the charge was answered at the time, in The Theosophist of August 1882, and that the answer either failed to satisfy some readers or passed unnoticed — which is why she takes it up again at length. The epigraph states the position the whole file defends: that the doctrines of Theosophy are simply the faithful echoes of antiquity, that man is a unity only at his origin and at his end, and that the rabble has been the same in every age — superstitious, self-opinionated, materialising every noble idealistic conception and dragging it down to its own level. The middle chapters then work through what materialised spirits actually are, on the same principles set out in Post-mortem wanderings of the wicked soul elsewhere in this batch.

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