Blavatsky Defends Blavatsky

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 10 pages

Ten pages carrying a single letter, from the Collected Writings volume VI, pages 281 to 284. *The story of the document is nearly as interesting as its contents, and Boris de Zirkoff's introductory note tells it: the original manuscript in Blavatsky's handwriting is preserved in the Adyar archives, and although it was addressed to Light in London it was never published there. She appears to have held it back after withdrawing her resignation at the urgent request and solicitation of friends, and it was printed for the first time in The Theosophist* of August 1931 — forty years after her death. The title is her own.

The letter announces that on 27 September she formally resigned office in the Theosophical Society, and says she does it from a deep sense of duty to the Society, before whose interests all private consideration must give way. What follows is her account of why. She dates the trouble precisely — to the day when, in her phrase, she overstepped the legal boundaries and gave out the secret of her whole life, namely what she knew about occultism and its custodians. Since then, she writes, she seems to have awakened against theosophy all the fiends of the nether world now domiciled on earth: persecution, suspicion and opposition ranging from simple cavilling at words to the expression of the most malignant hatred, dogging their steps wherever they are directed. The reasoning behind the resignation is the part worth reading, because it is not self-pity: had she to face the attacks alone, in her personality and private capacity, she says she might have borne them — the resignation is offered on the ground that the attacks reach the Society through her office, and that removing the office removes the target. Read beside the other files in this section on the same period, it is a first-hand document of the crisis of 1884 and 1885 rather than a doctrinal statement.

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