Ingratitude Is a Vice in Society and a Crime in Occultism

Masters of Wisdom, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, William Shakespeare, et alii · The Masters Speak Series · 6 pages

*A short anthology rather than an essay — six pages, largely white space and a frontispiece, gathering brief passages under the names of those who wrote them: Masters M and K.H., Blavatsky, Shakespeare, and others. The frontispiece is Quiet Moment of Gratitude* by Christi Belcourt.

The passages are arranged so that the same judgement is heard from several directions. The first, on Blavatsky herself, is the most striking: that the Theosophical Society should perish rather than be ungrateful to her — followed by the acknowledgement that until the day of final triumph someone has to be sacrificed, though only voluntary victims are accepted, and that the ungrateful task laid her low in the ruins of misery, misapprehension and isolation, for which she will have her reward hereafter. Two short lines from K.H. state the position from the other side: that they were never yet ungrateful for services rendered, and that ingratitude is not among their vices. Blavatsky's own formulation is the one the title takes: ingratitude is a crime in occultism. Shakespeare supplies the literary counterpart, with the song from As You Like It — blow, blow, thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind as man's ingratitude — and the running heading of the file takes another of his phrases, ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend. The file is short by design; its purpose is to put a handful of sentences side by side rather than to argue a case.

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