Hypocrisy: Diagnoses and Palliatives

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Living the Life Series · 17 pages

First published in Lucifer, Vol. VI, No. 35, July 1890, pages 353–64, and reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings XII pages 239–56 under the heading “Diagnoses and Palliatives.” A footnote identifies the passage quoted at the head as coming from the only letter ever received from the Mahā-Chohan — described there as of spiritual attainment superior to that of Masters K.H. and M., and to whose insight, in Master K.H.'s phrase, the future lies like an open page.

Two propositions stand at the head. The first defines the subject: that immorality does not consist in physical acts alone but, on the contrary, in liberating oneself from the moral obligations such acts impose — which turns the article from a survey of conduct into an examination of evasion. The second states the position on which the whole diagnosis rests, and it places responsibility firmly: that female dissimulation, worldliness and vice are the handiwork of generations of men whose brutal sensuality and selfishness drove women to seek reprisals. The quotation from the Mahā-Chohan then widens the frame. That the world is in such bad moral condition is called conclusive evidence that none of its religions and philosophies — those of the civilized races least of all — has ever possessed the truth; the right explanations of the great dual principles of right and wrong, good and evil, liberty and despotism, pain and pleasure, egotism and altruism are said to be as impossible to them now as they were eighteen centuries earlier. Blavatsky's own comment is that one need not belong to the Society to be struck by the correctness of the remark, and the article proceeds from that concession to the diagnoses and palliatives of its title.

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