The Karmic Effects of Invasion and Civilization

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 6 pages

An extract from Civilization, the Death of Art and Beauty, published in Lucifer in May 1891 and reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings XIII; the full text is held in the Down to Earth series. The passage is unexpectedly modern in its concerns. Owing to the triumphant march and invasion of civilisation, she writes, Nature as well as man and ethics is sacrificed and is fast becoming artificial: climates are changing and the face of the whole world will soon be altered.

The specifics are given as they stood in 1891. Under the hand of the pioneers of civilisation the destruction of whole primeval forests is leading to the drying up of rivers; the opening of the Suez Canal has changed the climate of Egypt as the Panama Canal will divert the course of the Gulf Stream; almost tropical countries are becoming cold and rainy, and fertile lands threaten to become sandy deserts. The aesthetic complaint that follows is as sharp as the ecological one: that within a few years no rural spot within fifty miles of the large cities will be inviolate from vulgar speculation, that scarce a landscape in England is not desecrated by advertisements for Pears' Soap and Beecham's Pills, and that the pure air of the country is polluted with smoke and the smells of railway engines. The running head the file gives the passage is The cause of global warming.

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