The Pith and Marrow of Occultism

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages holding a single passage from The Secret Doctrine, volume I pages 272-73.

The passage explains what kind of thing the secret doctrine is claimed to be, and how it was tested. It is called the accumulated wisdom of the ages, with a cosmogony described as the most stupendous and elaborate system even in its exoteric form in the Purānas — and the striking claim is about compression: that facts which occupied countless generations of initiated seers to marshal and set down are all recorded on a few pages of geometrical signs and glyphs. The reason offered is that the gaze of those seers penetrated to the kernel of matter and recorded the soul of things where an ordinary observer, however learned, would have seen only the external form; modern science, not believing in the soul of things, rejects the whole system on that account. The second half answers the obvious objection that such a system might be one man's fancy. It is described instead as an uninterrupted record covering thousands of generations of seers, whose experiences were used to test and verify traditions passed orally from one early race to another. The method is then given explicitly: for long ages the wise men of the Fifth Race, saved from the last cataclysm, passed their lives learning rather than teaching, checking and verifying the old traditions in every department of nature against the independent visions of great adepts — and no vision of any one adept was accepted until it had been confirmed by the independently obtained visions of others, and by centuries of experience.

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