Early Theosophical Doctrines Expounded by Blavatsky

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Alfred Percy Sinnett, Tallapragada Subba Row, Boris de Zirkoff · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 37 pages

*Thirty-seven pages, the largest text file in this batch*, and one of the better documents on the site for seeing how the early teaching was actually hammered out — by question and answer, in public, between named people. It is arranged in three parts and was revised in June 2024.

Part 1 is Boris de Zirkoff's account of the historical background to the questions that arose from A.P. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism. Part 2 is the inquiries themselves, put by an English Fellow of the Theosophical Society — identified as Frederic W.H. Myers, later of the Society for Psychical Research — and it includes a drawing of the planetary chain of seven rounds. Part 3 is Blavatsky's reply, with a preamble by the series editor. Her first move is to set a limit: the secrets of nature cannot be revealed to the profane, who will desecrate them and turn them into a weapon against humanity, and the secrets of the occult sciences can only be imparted to a regular chela of many years' standing, pledged to silence and secrecy through his successive initiations — such secrets, she says, do exist and are defended with one's life. A table of the semi-exoteric constitution of man is given at that point. The doctrinal substance that follows is about perception. Occult truth is defined as nature without the illusory veil of the five senses; reason is purely human while instinct is an endowment of Deity; and the sixth sense is described as reason over instinct, a mental fire which perceives and registers the other five. A careful distinction is then drawn between spiritual clairvoyance, which is normal and real, and psychic clairvoyance, which is called abnormal and counterfeit. The passage on science is characteristically sharp — that not before developing his sixth sense will the man of science concede the error of his theories about the solar spectrum — and the section closes on the maxim that appearances are deceitful, with the observation that the astronomer has elucidated the visible relations of the orbs of space and no more.

Read the full text (PDF, 2.6 MB, 37 pages)