Retributive Justice in the Cave of the Echoes

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Second Proposition Series · 14 pages

*A story rather than a study — fourteen pages carrying "The Cave of the Echoes," first published in the Boston Banner of Light in March 1873 and republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume I. It has its own contents page listing eight short chapters*: starting on a long journey, the echoes, a marriage, a mysterious traveller, a loving nephew, unravelling the mystery at last, magical wonders, and the phantom.

The framing is done in the first paragraph and is worth noting because it is sociological rather than supernatural. In the older countries of Europe and Asia, it says, examples of interference by the dead with the living occur frequently, and the experience of many generations has taught higher and lower classes alike to accept that intervention as a fixed fact — with the difference that the educated, while acknowledging the reality of the phenomena, find a convenient loophole in attributing them to strange coincidences so as to escape ridicule, while the uneducated, having less learning, do not. American spiritualists are described as comparative strangers to the whole class of event. What follows is a tale of retributive justice inflicted by an earthbound spirit, and it is placed in this section because it dramatises the law the rest of the section states abstractly: a wrong is done, and the adjustment comes, by an agency the murderer had not counted on. Read as fiction it is a Victorian ghost story with a Russian setting; read as it is offered here it is an illustration of karma working through what looks like coincidence.

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