With the Adepts, by Franz Hartmann

Franz Hartmann, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 73 pages

*The longest single work in this section at 73 pages — Franz Hartmann's With the Adepts, an Adventure among the Rosicrucians complete, in nine chapters with the author's own preface, an appendix on a Rosicrucian institution in Switzerland, and a page of suggested reading. It is prefaced by Blavatsky's book review of it, first published in Lucifer* in October 1887 and republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume VIII.

The chapters run: The Excursion, The Monastery, Unexpected Revelations, The Refectory, Recollections of Past Lives, The Alchemical Laboratory, The Higher Self, Black Magic, and The End. The frame is a walking tour in the Tyrol during which the author dreams his way into a monastery of adepts, and the book proceeds by conversation — the visitor asking and the brothers answering — so that the doctrine arrives in dialogue rather than exposition. Blavatsky's review, which opens the file, describes it as a strange and original little story, charmingly fantastic but full of poetic feeling and, more to the point, of deep philosophical and occult truths for those who can perceive the groundwork it is built on. She singles out the opening as a fresh Eclogue of Virgil, describing Alpine scenery with shining glaciers glistening like vast mirrors in the light of the rising sun, deep ravines with streams dancing between the cliffs and blue slumbering lakes. Several shorter files in this same section quote from this book — "Resist without Resistance," "Matthew on the Kingdom of Heaven" and "Touch any man and you touch Heaven" all take passages from it — so a reader who has met it in fragments will find the whole of it here.

Read the full text (PDF, 1.0 MB, 73 pages)