Matter Is the Uncreated Pythagorean Monas

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 7 pages

Seven pages from The Theosophist of July 1883, republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume IV under the title "From Theosophy to Shakespeare." It takes the form of a reply to a letter from Henry C. Atkinson, printed with the editorial explanation that this esteemed correspondent labours under certain erroneous impressions about theosophy and will pardon them for correcting him in public.

Two propositions are stated on the title page before the correspondence begins, and they are the substance of the file. The first is that spirit is the highest state of matter, and that whatever is neither matter nor any of its attributes is no-thing — a formulation which cuts against the ordinary opposition of the two words and is meant to. The second is that matter manifests itself in seven states, of which four were then known to modern science and three remained to be discovered. The exchange that follows arises from Atkinson having forwarded a copy of The Theosophist to Professor Tyndall, and from his surprise that a remark of Tyndall's had not been taken as the compliment he and his friends read it to be. The file is short and its interest is partly documentary — a nineteenth-century argument conducted by letter between people who knew each other — and partly in the long footnote on its first page, which describes a spot in the heart marked by a tiny violet light, said to be the first spot that lives in the foetus and the last to die, containing potentially mind, life, energy and will, and to remain alive in a yogi buried in trance for as long as he can be resurrected.

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