The Rainbow of Hope

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

Two pages translated from the French original published in La Revue Théosophique between May and August 1889, republished in English in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume XI as part of "The Beacon of the Unknown." The whole file is built around one quoted passage from an old book of occult studies, heavily footnoted.

The passage is an extended sea metaphor. Gupta-Vidyā, the secret science, is called an attractive sea but stormy and full of rocks, on which any navigator who is not wise and experienced will be wrecked on one of a thousand submerged reefs. Great billows the colour of sapphires, rubies and emeralds, full of beauty and mystery, are described as ready to carry the voyager off towards numberless beacon-lights burning in all directions — and these are the danger, because they are false lights, will-o'-the-wisps lit by the sons of Kāliya for the destruction of those who thirst for life. A footnote explains the term for readers who do not know it: the ignis fatuus or foolish fire seen over bogs at night, which recedes if approached and draws travellers off the safe path. Happy, the passage says, are those who remain blind to these deceiving lights, and happier still those who never turn their eyes from the one true beacon whose eternal flame burns in solitude in the depths of the waters of sacred science. The conditions for reaching it are stated in three demands that give the file its character: the swimmer must cease to be a number and become all numbers; must forget the illusion of separateness and accept only the truth of collective individuality; and must see with the ears, hear with the eyes, and concentrate his six senses in his seventh. The epigraph supplies the title — that the beacon-light of occult truth is Nature without the illusory veil of the senses, the Rainbow of Hope and our only hope.

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