Forlorn Hopes: A Rich Life without the Trappings of Mammon

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 13 pages

From Lucifer of December 1890, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings XII as Forlorn Hopes, and one of the few pieces in this section written to an occasion. It opens on the turn of the year — one year more at its eleventh hour, a grain of sand on the brink of eternity preparing to fall and disappear in the fathomless sundial of Father Kronos, with a fortnight left before 1890 gives way to 1891.

Her stocktaking of the departing year is unsparing and includes her own movement in the charge: that it gave little to remember it by save evil, disappointment and sorrow; that born in the lap of Dame Influenza its days rolled on in the mephitic atmosphere of political and personal strife and, she adds, of very unseemly squabbles among Theosophists; that men have lived it more in envy and bitter hatred than in brotherly love, and the sister nations passed it in arrogant glorification of self and vilification of others. Against that the constructive argument of the title is set — what a rich life would consist of if it were not measured by the trappings of Mammon. Two epigraphs frame it: Feltham on hope without action being a barren undoer, and Carlyle on there being a path from the lowest depth to the loftiest height.

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