Import and Potency of Numbers as Symbols

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 18 pages

Eighteen pages with a contents page and train of thoughts. *Despite the title, the file is mostly a warning rather than a study of number symbolism*, and a reader looking specifically for the numbers should know that before opening it.

The warning is aimed at several groups at once and is delivered without much diplomacy: those who plagiarised from theosophical books; those who set up sham schools of magic; those who ambushed seekers after truth by deceiving them with holy names; those who misused and desecrated the sacred science by using it to get money by various means; and, in a final sweep, all charlatans, fortune-tellers and self-styled adepts. The section that follows takes its heading from scripture — the false prophets shall become wind, for the Divine Word is not in them — and turns to the spiritualist movement of the day, observing that with the spread of the spiritualistic cult the Messiah craze has vastly increased and men and women alike have been drawn into its whirlpools. The sharpest line in it concerns liberty and appetite: liberty to love according to the impulse of the senses is called the most profound slavery, since from the beginning nature has hedged that pathway with disease and death. A more measured passage explains why sincerity is not enough — to distinguish the white rays of truth from influx from the astral sphere requires a training that ordinary sensitives, avowed spiritualists or not, do not possess — followed by the observation that ignorance emboldens, and the weak will always worship the bold. The positive test the file offers against all this is the one worth carrying away: in the face of genuine spiritual growth and true illumination, the theosophist grows in power to befriend and help his fellow man, while becoming the most humble, the most silent and the most guarded of men.

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