Hartmann on the Harmonical Society

Franz Hartmann, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 20 pages

Twenty pages with a contents page of key concepts. *It is the most unusual thing in this batch* — a theosophical fable by Franz Hartmann which Blavatsky then continued and concluded herself, with explanatory notes by Boris de Zirkoff. Fiction, commentary and editorial apparatus in the same file.

The fable's question is who might attune his consciousness to the Music of the Spheres, and its second section is headed, ruefully, A forlorn hope? Blavatsky's commentary follows and changes register sharply. Part of it is a dressing-down of a newly knighted lecturer who had pontificated about theosophy without seeing the difference between Rāja-Yoga and Hatha-Yoga, and who cast aspersions she thought unworthy of a true scholar. Part of it is a compressed comparison — Christianity relies upon God's mercy, Buddhism on self-deliverance from evil — which is one of the shortest statements of that contrast anywhere on the site. But the passage that gives the file its weight is the last, and it is a piece of self-criticism rather than polemic: there never was real harmony in the Theosophical Society, she writes, but rather personal and individual selfishness, and it is the members unlearned in things occult and spiritual who are now disintegrating it. Coming at the end of a fable about a harmonical society, the judgement lands with some force. The Hierarchy of Compassion drawing is reproduced within the file, and a page of suggested reading closes it.

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