A Cypriot Adept on the Oldest Armenian Monastery

Hillarion Smerdis, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · The Masters Speak Series · 10 pages

Ten pages carrying a letter first published anonymously in The Theosophist in July 1881, signed only "X . . . F.T.S.", with Blavatsky's own footnotes and a long introductory note by Boris de Zirkoff. Surb Ohannes is the name of the oldest Christian monastery in Armenia.

The introduction is a piece of detective work, and it is the reason the file is worth having in this form. The authorship of the letter remained unknown for decades. It came to light only when a manuscript on Zoroastrianism in Blavatsky's own hand, held in the Adyar archives, was transcribed and published in The Theosophist in 1958: in it she mentions this letter and identifies its author definitely as the adept known as Hillarion, or Hillarion Smerdis, who at one time lived on Cyprus. De Zirkoff adds what else is known of him — that he collaborated with Blavatsky on her occult stories, among them "The Ensouled Violin," which is actually signed with his name; that both Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott recorded his having gone for his final initiation, passing through Bombay in his physical body on the way; and that the first part of Light on the Path, recorded by Mabel Collins, is attributed to the same brother. The letter itself is an elegy for a vanishing history. Its opening explains why it was written: that the Zoroastrian fellows of the Society would gladly hear a page of their own history torn out of the book of popular memory and woven into legend — a book, full of the glories of their forefathers, from the time when they were not merely a proud and independent nation but many nations linked by one religion, one polity and one civilisation, and which is now rapidly fading out.

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