Blavatsky on the Difference Between Soul and Spirit

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 13 pages

Thirteen pages carrying a letter first published in The Spiritualist of London on 8 February 1878, pages 68 to 69, republished in the Collected Writings volume I, pages 290 to 300. The frontispiece is by Michael Cheval. *She describes herself in it as appearing in those columns for the first time*, which makes this an early document of her public career in English.

It is a reply to a correspondent, Mr J. Croucher, who had asserted that had the theosophists thoroughly comprehended the nature of soul and spirit and their relation to the body, they would have known that if the soul once leaves the body it cannot return — the spirit can leave, but the soul, once gone, is gone for ever. Blavatsky's objection is first to the ambiguity: unless he uses soul to designate only the vital principle, she takes him to be falling into the common error of calling the astral body spirit and the immortal essence soul, which is the reverse of theosophical usage. Her second objection is to his confidence. It is hardly to be supposed, she writes, that theosophists or anyone else thoroughly comprehend the nature of soul and spirit and their relation to the body; such an achievement is for omniscience, and theosophists, treading the path worn by the footsteps of the old sages in the moving sands of exoteric philosophy, can only hope to approximate the absolute truth. She doubts his own credentials to do better, inspirational medium and sitter with the best trance mediums though he may be, and leaves the vindication to time and to spiritual philosophy — closing on the image the file is remembered for, that when some Œdipus of this century or the next solves the eternal enigma of the Sphinx-man, every modern dogma, not excepting some pets of the spiritualists, will be swept away as the Theban monster leapt from his promontory into the sea.

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