De Zirkoff on the Dream That Never Dies

Boris de Zirkoff · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 10 pages

Ten pages carrying a speech rather than an essay — *and it is the one file in this batch in which de Zirkoff speaks in his own voice about what he believed, rather than editing or annotating someone else. He gave it at the Centenary World Congress of the Theosophical Society in New York on 17 November 1975, six years before his death; it was first published in The Theosophist in January 1976 and later collected in The Dream That Never Dies*, San Diego: Point Loma Publications, 1983, pages 30 to 33. The frontispiece is by Richard Hoedl.

That collection is itself worth knowing about, and the file explains it: fifty articles from Theosophia, the independent theosophical journal de Zirkoff edited from its first issue in May 1944 until his death on 4 March 1981 — nearly thirty-seven years of it. The address opens by telling the audience what they are: all of us here, assembled in this hall in ties of brotherhood, are a partial embodiment of a noble dream — a dream of ancient days, living in the hearts of men from ages past, implanted in man's mind by his original guides and divine instructors. The dream is then named in the three terms that give the piece its shape: a united mankind, a rebirth of esoteric wisdom, and a world at peace. What follows traces that hope backward rather than forward, arguing that from the immemorial past, as far as tradition can tell, the noblest men and women of every age have carried the same thing. Read beside the biographies elsewhere in this batch, it shows the editor of the Collected Writings at the end of a long working life, summing up what the whole undertaking had been for.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.6 MB, 10 pages)