Accepted and Lay Chelas on the Fifth Rounders

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Higher Ethics and Devotion Series · 7 pages

First published in The Theosophist, Vol. IV, No. 9, June 1883, pages 231–32, and reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings IV pages 538–40 under the heading “Cosmical Rings and Rounds.” The occasion was a letter from “A Student of Occultism” about No. VII of the Fragments of Occult Truth by Lay Chela — a series begun in The Theosophist of October 1881, whose authorship a long footnote from Boris de Zirkoff traces through A.O. Hume and A.P. Sinnett.

The correspondent raises what he calls a difficulty he and others would be glad to have explained, citing statements that appear inconsistent with the earlier teaching of the Brothers about Fifth Rounders — in particular the sentence that the obscuration of the planet on which the races of Fifth Round men are now evoluting will be behind the few avant-couriers now here. Blavatsky's reply is unusually modest in its claim, and the modesty is the point of the piece: she says she hopes not to be accused of attempting to reconcile the difficulty entirely, and offers instead a single suggestion — that inserting the word full between “The” and “Obscuration” might remove part of the apparent contradiction. Having been taught that the earliest and latest races of humanity evoluted and died out during and with the dawn and the twilight of every obscuration, she sees no contradiction in the sentence as quoted. The exchange is a small example of how the doctrinal questions of the period were handled in print — the objection printed in full, the answer offered as a reading rather than a ruling.

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