Hungry Serpents Bringing Out Compassion

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Second Proposition Series · 4 pages

*The shortest file in this section at four pages*, from Esoteric Section Instruction No. III in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume XII. It records a single episode from her own life and the answer she was given about it.

The episode is told plainly and without self-flattery. When Madame Coulomb came to her in Bombay with her husband asking for bread and shelter, Blavatsky gave them everything they needed although she had met the woman in Cairo and knew her to be treacherous, wicked and lying — because, she says, such was her duty. In time she saw that the woman hated her, envied her position and influence, and slandered her to her friends while flattering her to her face, at which her human nature revolted. The material circumstances are given as part of the problem: they were very poor then, both the Society and themselves, and keeping two enemies at their expense seemed hard. She therefore applied to her teacher, three days' distance from Bombay, and submitted the question whether it was right and theosophical to keep two such serpents in the house, since the woman at least threatened the whole Society. The reply is quoted verbatim and opens with an aphorism from the Book of Precepts: that if you find a hungry serpent creeping into your house seeking food and, fearing it will bite you, turn it out to suffer and starve instead of offering it milk, you turn away from the path of compassion — and that so acts the fainthearted and the selfish. The message then addresses her own position directly: that she is personally threatened, but has still to learn that so long as there are three men worthy of the blessing in the Theosophical Society, it can never be destroyed. Anyone who knows what the Coulombs went on to do will find the file the more striking for the advice having been given, and taken, in advance.

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