Evil Omens and Mysterious Diseases

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Living the Life Series · 13 pages

A thirteen-page compilation under the running head “The Last Song of the Swan,” with an epigraph from Theodore Parker's Human Misery on hewing a path among thorns and laying one's bones in a crevice of the broken way, so that men in better times may stand where the speaker fell.

The claim placed at the head is the sharpest statement of priority anywhere in this section: that before any work of practical Theosophy, religion and dogma, theological and scholastic differences — and, it adds, even esoteric knowledge itself — are but secondary accessories and accidental details. All of these must give precedence to and disappear before altruism, described as the real Buddha- and Christ-like altruism rather than the theoretical twaddle of the Positivists, as the flickering tongue of gas light in a street lamp pales and vanishes before the rising sun. The Parker epigraph supplies the temper in which that is meant: work undertaken by someone who does not expect to see its result. From this the article turns to its titular subject, the evil omens and mysterious diseases of the age — treating the physical and moral epidemics of the day as symptoms of the same condition, in the manner of the epidemic-diseases compilation held in the Down to Earth series, and reading them as belonging to the closing of a cycle rather than to medicine alone.

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