There Is a Road, Steep and Thorny

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

Two pages carrying one short and very well known passage, first printed in Lucifer in September 1891 and republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume XIII. Rather more than half the file is a headnote by Boris de Zirkoff on the *question of who actually wrote it*.

The headnote explains the doubt honestly. After Blavatsky's death Lucifer was edited mainly by Annie Besant, who opened the ninth volume with an editorial on the magazine's opposition to materialism and the philosophy it offered, ending by saying that it bends low to whisper in the ear of the patient seeker after the Hidden Wisdom — and then printed the passage below within quotation marks. Many students have taken it to be Besant's own; William Kingsland, who was with Blavatsky for a long time and whose opinion de Zirkoff rates highly, ascribed it to Blavatsky and used it as hers in The Real H.P. Blavatsky. De Zirkoff's own suggestion is that Besant may have used a passage from an unpublished manuscript and placed it in the mouth of Lucifer. The passage itself is six sentences. There is a road, steep and thorny, beset with perils of every kind, but a road nonetheless, and it leads to the very heart of the Universe; the speaker can tell the reader how to find those who will show him the secret gateway that opens inward only and closes fast behind the neophyte for evermore. Three assurances follow in the same rhythm — no danger that dauntless courage cannot conquer, no trial that spotless purity cannot pass, no difficulty that strong intellect cannot surmount. The reward for those who win onwards is named as the power to bless and save humanity, and for those who fail there are other lives in which success may come.

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