Occult Laws Entrusted Only to Those Who Live the Life

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Living the Life Series · 8 pages

First published in Lucifer, Vol. VIII (48), August 1891, pages 441–44, and reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings XIII pages 215–18 under the heading “The Blessings of Publicity.” The title-page illustration, Daffy Dark, is by P.J. Elliott. The running head states the position: nature yields her secrets only to the elect.

The article answers a specific challenge and quotes it at length first. A well-known public lecturer and distinguished Egyptologist had argued that it is a delusion to suppose there is anything in the experience or wisdom of the past whose ascertained results can only be communicated from beneath the cloak and mask of mystery; that explanation is the soul of science; that occultists will tell you we cannot have their knowledge without living their life; and that public experimental research, the printing press and a free-thought platform have abolished the need of mystery, so that science need no longer take the veil for security as she once did. Blavatsky's reply concedes part of it and refuses the rest — the view is called very mistaken in one aspect, with the immediate qualification that the secrets of the purer and profounder life not only may but must be made universal. The distinction she is drawing is between the ethical teaching, which she says should be published as widely as possible, and the operative knowledge, which cannot be transferred by publication because the condition of receiving it is a manner of living rather than an act of reading — the requirement stated in the head-note as being pure, unexpecting and harmless.

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