Blavatsky Refutes Arguments Against Theosophy

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 19 pages

Nineteen pages with an abstract and train of thoughts, built around what the file calls Madame Blavatsky's first letter to The Spiritualist. *The tone is combative and the writing is some of her sharpest*, which makes it more readable than its subject might suggest.

She opens with two images for her opponents' case. The arguments against theosophy are like a verdant moss which displays a velvety carpet of green, without roots, and with a deep bog below; and the anonymous "Scrutator" is a sort of literary chiffonier, a rag-picker probing the dust-heap of the language for bits of hard adjectives to fling. Abuse pure and simple, she concludes, is the only weapon of partisans. The doctrinal substance follows and is mostly about what survives death and in what state. When a man has lived in crime, his astral cadaver holds him prisoner and seeks again the objects of his passions, desiring to resume its earthly life — tormenting the dreams of young girls, bathing in the vapour of spilt blood, and wallowing about the places where the pleasures of his life flitted by. A careful terminological point is made about elementary and elemental, the first applying to a primary substance and the second to what pertains to the four elements of the material world, with elementaries defined as the earth-bound incarnated thoughts of evil men who have passed away. On the other side of the same doctrine, spirit is said to be latent rather than active in the grain of sand as in each atom of the human body — the atom vitalised and energised by spirit without being endowed with distinct consciousness — spirit and matter being co-existent, inseparable, interdependent and convertible into each other. That leads to a complaint about language which is worth quoting for its own sake: European tongues are too materialistic to make room for such metaphysical ideas, and it is a copious vocabulary indeed that has but one term for God and for alcohol, where Sanskrit has twenty words or more to render one idea in its various shades of meaning. The closing sections turn on Christendom and the fetishism it believes it has outgrown.

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