Mahatma Letter No. 10: A Master of Wisdom on God

A Himalayan Master of Wisdom · The Masters Speak Series · 13 pages

Thirteen pages carrying Mahatma Letter No. 10 — K.H.'s notes on a preliminary chapter headed "God" written by A.O. Hume — in *an edited version made specifically to show where its words came from. A note by the series editor, dated June 2009, explains why. The letter had been published here in February 2009 under the title "Master KH on god and evil," after which a student pointed out that it contains extensive but uncited quotations from Baron d'Holbach's The System of Nature of 1770. In this version the verbatim quotations from d'Holbach are highlighted in green*, paraphrases are marked too, and d'Holbach's own text is given in the footnotes so the two can be compared line by line, with page numbers keyed to the 1835 translation.

The letter's own position is stated in its first line and not softened afterwards: neither our philosophy nor ourselves believe in a God. What the presentation adds is a second subject laid over the first — the question of where an authoritative text gets its language. The editorial note is scrupulous about the limits of its own case: one citation in the letter, to the loup garou or werewolf as an imaginary power ascribed to God by theologians, is attributed to d'Holbach but could not be traced in The System of Nature, though at least four other references to imaginary powers occur there, and the phrase is found in a different book of his. Publishing the letter in this annotated form, rather than quietly correcting or defending it, is the point of the file, and a reader coming to it should know that what he is getting is the letter with its sources exposed rather than the letter alone.

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