The Sparkle of “Light on the Path” Dimmed

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 35 pages

A thirty-five page compilation opened by an abstract and train of thoughts with page references, gathering material from Lucifer, Light and elsewhere, and closing with an addendum by W.Q. Judge. It is the fullest of the three files in this section dealing with the press campaign against the Society; the other two are “Truth is exiled from the press” and “The Religio-Philosophical Journal is neither religious nor philosophical.”

The dispute concerns Light on the Path and the claims made about how it came to be written. The opening correction is precise and small: that Mabel Collins may have been studying Madame Blavatsky for a time but never studied under her, as she claimed. The counter-position is then stated — that Blavatsky is the origin and fountainhead of the esoteric knowledge in question and has the means and the necessary knowledge to teach. The second thread follows Elliott Coues, who proclaimed himself Perpetual President of the Esoteric Theosophical Society of America and then began casting slurs upon Blavatsky and upon the Section she headed, in order, as the abstract puts it, to destroy one through the other. Supporting extracts from the periodicals are reproduced at length so that a reader can follow the exchange in its own words. The abstract pauses over what it takes to be the strangest feature of the affair: that a woman should confess to the world that she had been deliberately deceiving it for years, simply for the pleasure of fathering the deception upon a supposed enemy — called there a psychic riddle in itself. A timely witness, Mrs C.A. Passingham, is introduced, and Judge's closing addendum draws the two threads together, contrasting the one who publicly proclaimed her own untruthfulness in order to slander an enemy with the other who took the opportunity to gratify his wounded vanity at the cost of breaking his pledge and his word.

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