A Thirsty Horse-Leech Pleading Admission to the T.S.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 9 pages

Nine pages, first published in The Theosophist volume IV number 12, September 1883, pages 312 to 313, and republished in the Collected Writings volume V under the blunter title "Genteel Beggars". The frontispiece is by Lúthien Leerghast. It was revised as recently as June 2024.

The file exists to make one point, and it makes it by publishing the evidence. An Anglo-Indian theosophist of high rank — a man, the editorial note says, whose generous disposition is unfortunately too well known — forwarded to the journal a letter he had received, one of many, from a young man seeking admission to the Society in the evident hope of worldly advancement. He asks that it be printed without the writer's name, so that while the youth gets the castigation he deserves the occasion can be used to reiterate the fact that nobody need join the Society hoping thereby to obtain advancement of any kind. His covering letter is quoted at length, and it is the most human part of the file: he describes another correspondent who has never ceased, since becoming a theosophist, to worry him to do something for him, and who, when finally told plainly that he was a mere self-seeker using theosophy as a stepping stone, replied by quoting Shakespeare and calling all the gods to witness how shameful it was for one brother thus to defame another. The rejoinder — that he acknowledged no brotherhood with sham theosophists, who are the people that bring discredit on a society — is the position the whole piece defends. The title's horse-leech is from Proverbs, the creature whose daughters cry Give, give.

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