De Zirkoff on Three Eminent Theosophists

Boris de Zirkoff · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 17 pages

Seventeen pages holding three biographies in one file, each with its own numbered section and page reference: Archibald Keightley, 1859 to 1930; Julia Wharton Keightley, 1851 to 1915; and Bertram Keightley, 1860 to 1944. *The long opening footnote is the one place in this section where de Zirkoff himself is given a biography*, and it is worth reading before the three that follow.

That footnote records that Boris Mihailovich de Zirkoff, 1902 to 1981, was a Russian-born American theosophist, editor and writer, born in Saint Petersburg on 7 March 1902; that his father was Mihail Vassilyevich de Zirkoff, a Russian general, and his mother Lydia Dmitriyevna von Hahn, a second cousin to Helena Petrovna Blavatsky; that the Russian Revolution forced the family to flee in 1917 to Stockholm by way of Finland; and that he studied at European universities, specialising in languages and classics, before meeting a Russian American, Nikolai Romanoff, at Baden-Baden, and learning from him of the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society at Point Loma near San Diego — which is how the editor of the Collected Writings came to America. The three Keightleys were among the closest of Blavatsky's London circle in her last years, and Archibald and Bertram are the two who worked on the manuscript of The Secret Doctrine with her. Because the three sections are separately headed and paginated, the file can be used to look up one of them without reading the others; a page of suggested reading from this series closes it.

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