The Prophecy of General Yermolov: An Astral Prophet

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 10 pages

From Lucifer of June 1890, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings XII as An Astral Prophet. Alexey Petrovich Yermolov was one of the great military figures of the age and among the chief Russian commanders in the Caucasian wars against Shamil; the strange event narrated here is his own, translated verbatim from V. Potto's The War in Caucasus, from the chapter on his last years. The account of his death is given first — that on 12 April 1861 he died at Moscow in his eighty-fifth year, seated in his favourite armchair with one hand on the table and the other on his knee, having a few minutes before been tapping the floor with his foot as was his habit.

The framing matters as much as the story. The epigraph states the position that separates Blavatsky from both her usual opponents at once: that the materialising of an immaterial Spirit, a divine Breath, by the Spiritualists is on a par with the anthropomorphising of the Absolute by the Theologians, and that these two claims have dug an almost impassable abyss between the Theosophist-occultists and the Spiritualists on one side, and between the Theosophists and the Church Christians on the other. The general's vision is offered to students of psychology as a well-attested case rather than as a marvel, which is the same method used in Premature and phenomenal growths and A preponderance of fire elementals elsewhere in this section.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.4 MB, 10 pages)