The Operation of Karma in European History

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Second Proposition Series · 18 pages

Eighteen pages carrying "Karmic Visions," first published in Lucifer in June 1888 and republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume IX, with long introductory notes by Boris de Zirkoff. The frontispiece is Thomas Lea's painting The 2,000 Yard Stare of 1944.

De Zirkoff's introduction supplies the key the narrative itself withholds. He describes the piece as a remarkable and prophetic study of the workings of karmic law in European history from the fifth century onwards, written twenty-six years before the First World War — and states what the story never says explicitly: that it depicts the life and sufferings of the Emperor Frederick III of Prussia, held to be the same individual who had earlier inhabited the body of Clovis, King of the Franks. The circumstance of its publication is given as evidence of its timing: it appeared in the very month Frederick III died, after a reign of only ninety-nine days. The introduction then sets it against Blavatsky's own New Year editorials on either side. In January 1888 she had written that little happiness or prosperity was likely for those living for the truth under so dark a number, though the year was heralded by Venus-Lucifer shining brightly enough to be mistaken for the star of Bethlehem. In January 1889 she looked back and claimed the year had proved so: almost every nation visited by some calamity, and Germany prominent among them, reaching virtually the eighteenth year of its unification and losing two of its emperors during what she calls the fatal combination of the four numbers 8 — planting, in her phrase, the seeds of many dire karmic results. The story itself follows, opening on the lines about men's piteous wounds and horrid gashes, and about death gorged with devouring lives.

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