Amazing Stories, and the Two Ways of Dismissing Them

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 12 pages

From The Theosophist of April 1881, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings III as Nature's Human Magnets, and built on a neat observation. Anyone who relates a weird experience meets two classes of objector who gag him with the same gag from opposite directions. The scientist says he has unravelled all Nature's skein, that the thing is impossible, and that this is no age for miracles. The Hindu bigot says that this is the Kali-Yuga, the spiritual night-time of humanity, and that miracles are no longer possible. The one from conceit and the other from ignorance reach the same conclusion — with the difference that the Hindu believes miracles once occurred and the scientist does not.

The bigoted Christians are handled separately and get no better: for them this is not a Kali-Yuga but a golden era of light in which the Gospel illuminates humanity, and since they base all their faith on miracles they claim that miracles are still being worked by God and the Virgin, principally the latter. Against all three Blavatsky states her own view, which cuts across the whole argument: that she does not believe a miracle ever did or ever will occur, but does believe that strange phenomena falsely styled miraculous always did occur, are occurring now, and will to the end of time. The rest of the file is the evidence, and the account of what such phenomena actually are.

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