The Mahatmas Are the Most Wise of All Men

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

From Blavatsky Collected Writings VI pages 213–17, under the heading “Mr. Lloyd's Questions to Mohini.” The frontispiece is by 8bitSunshine. The text is an article, or draft of one, in Blavatsky's handwriting held in the Adyar Archives, first published in The Theosophist of January 1926 and republished there in June 1954 with revision of uncertain readings and a facsimile of the manuscript's first page.

The document consists of three questions put by Francis Lloyd to Mohini Mohun Chatterji, with Blavatsky's answers. Boris de Zirkoff's preamble supplies the history without which the replies would be hard to place, and it is the more useful half of the file. The London Lodge, founded in 1878, was the first branch chartered by the parent Society and had worked more or less successfully for several years. In 1883 A.P. Sinnett gave up the editorship of the Pioneer in India and settled in London, and his arrival gave the Lodge fresh impetus — but also, de Zirkoff notes, became a source of difficulty, because two distinct groups formed within it. The larger, led by Sinnett, was drawn to the Oriental and Tibetan teachings as set out in his The Occult World and Esoteric Buddhism. The smaller, led by Dr Anna Bonus Kingsford and Edward Maitland, was attracted instead to a revival of mystical and esoteric Christianity, the Kabbalah and Hermetic philosophy. The clash between the two is what Lloyd's questions arise from, and Blavatsky's answers are directed as much at the division as at the questions themselves.

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