The Masque of Love

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · The Masque of Love Series · 44 pages

*The principal work of this series at 44 pages, and the file the section is named after. It opens with a full abstract and train of thoughts giving each question and claim with its page number, and much of the middle is set out as a sequence of questions and answers* — a student asking and the teaching replying — so it can be consulted a point at a time rather than read straight through.

The first part concerns the Hierarchy of Compassion. The spiritual sun is described as the link between Buddhas, Avataras and the other incarnations of the highest seven, and all world-saviours, Bodhisattvas and Avataras alike, are called trees of salvation grown from one seed, the Bija or Maha-Vishnu. The Bodhisattvic hypostases are then explained twice over, exoterically and esoterically: the Mahayana mystic system is reported as teaching that each Buddha manifests himself simultaneously in three worlds of being, and additional notes are keyed to the Hierarchy of Compassion drawing held elsewhere in this series. The long central section is a set of exchanges on the distinction between divine and sidereal hierarchies, and it is unusually candid about how easily the terms are confused. It asks what actually separates Dhyāni-Chohans, Planetary Spirits, Builders and Dhyāni-Buddhas; whether any of the six companion globes of our own chain were numbered among the sacred planets; which planets the sun and moon were substituted for, and what made those planets sacred or secret in the first place. It presses on to whether the Planetary Spirits of the seven sacred planets belong to a different hierarchy from the earth's — and, if so, whether they have anything to do with the earth except incidentally, or with the fifth principle, the higher Manas. The last of the exchanges concern the Builders: whether there are Builders of universes and of systems as there are Builders of our earth, whether the terrestrial Builders are therefore a Planetary Spirit like the rest but inferior in kind, and whether that inferiority is a matter of the size of the planet or of quality. The section closes on the Anima Mundi and on the real difference between the Dhyāni-Buddhas as orthodoxy conceives them and as the esoteric teaching does.

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