The Star of Love Thrills the Noble Heart

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Higher Ethics and Devotion Series · 14 pages

A fourteen-page gathering of what the file describes as hitherto unpublished spiritual insights of Madame Blavatsky, with two of the three pieces given in the original French alongside the English. The running head of the opening section names its subject: the liberating power of choice.

The compilation is in three movements. The first asks what exactly the moment of choice is, and states the claim the file turns on — that the moment of choice is the price of all our miseries. A section follows holding that only through her night star can a woman be truly happy, and another places the reader at the threshold of the two paths, the image that recurs throughout this section. The second movement is the Légende sur la Belle de Nuit, a tradition of the steppes, given first in French and then in English as the Legend of the Night Flower, and drawing the conclusion that a woman's love, loyalty and gratitude will always belong to her night star. The third is a short poem, À une Étoile, again in French and then in English as To the Star of Love. Presenting the French beside the English lets a reader judge the rendering, which matters here more than usual since the pieces are short and turn on their phrasing; and the mixture of essay, folk legend and lyric in fourteen pages makes this one of the least formal documents in a section otherwise given over to precept and argument.

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