Everyone's Life Is in His Hands and Heart

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 3 pages

Three pages from the New Year piece first published in Lucifer in January 1888 and republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume IX, prefaced by an abstract picking out its two claims — that whoever draws the breath of life affects the mental and moral atmosphere of the world, and that the astral life of the earth is young and strong between Christmas and Easter.

It begins as a New Year greeting and then refuses the usual terms of one. Readers are not wished a happy or prosperous year, on the frank ground that not much of either is likely for those living for the truth under so dark a number as 1888 — but the year is said to be heralded by Venus-Lucifer, shining so brightly it has been mistaken for the star of Bethlehem, and the wish offered instead is that readers make the year worthy of its herald. The substance is a claim about ordinary influence. Thoreau is cited for the observation that there are artists in life, people who can change the colour of a day and make it beautiful for those they meet; to that is added the claim that there are also adepts, masters in life, who make it divine as in any other art. The reason it is called the greatest of the arts is that it works on the atmosphere everyone lives in: every person who draws the breath of life affects the mental and moral atmosphere of the world and helps to colour the day for those about him. The consequence drawn is uncompromising — those who do not help to elevate the thoughts and lives of others must of necessity either paralyse them by indifference or actively drag them down — and at that point, the text says, the art of life is converted into the science of death.

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