Isis Unveiled Is a Treasure of Light and Knowledge

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott, Alexander Wilder, Boris de Zirkoff · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 90 pages

*Ninety pages, the second largest file in this batch, revised in February 2025. It is the fullest account on the site of how Isis Unveiled* came to be written, compiled by Boris de Zirkoff from introductory and historical notes on the trans-Himalayan Adepts and the other people involved in its literary production. Anyone interested in the book's composition rather than its doctrine should start here.

The account opens with the title itself: Isis is Divine Wisdom beheld by the pure in heart, and the symbol of abstract Mother-Nature personified as Virgin — with the Rosicrucian Rose, an anagram of the Orphic Eros, offered as a parallel. The estimate that follows is unabashed, calling it the most influential book of modern times and a revolutionary act of brotherly love and sympathy with every creature, including the gnat that dances in the rays of the sun. Then the history proper begins, and it is precise about time and place: in the summer of 1875 Blavatsky began sketching a plan for unveiling Isis, the lunar goddess, and the work of revealing the secrets of nature began in a small flat in a modest district of New York, directed and overseen by Masters of Eastern occultism. The collaborators are named, down to William Q. Judge's younger brother John, who prepared the manuscript for the printer. The most substantial section is the one that explains what the file means by collaboration, and it turns on a Tibetan term. Tulku is defined as delegated authority: an adept can transfer part of his consciousness to a disciple-messenger or mediator so that the latter may carry out a task on his behest in the outer world, or teach — the messenger doing his Master's bidding by mutual consent. Two careful qualifications follow, and they are the heart of the file's argument. In Tulku there is no loss of consciousness; on the contrary, the mediator remains lucid and self-conscious throughout the transmission. And where the medium of the séance is a hapless and helpless instrument of erratic and vagrant astral forces, the mediator in Tulku is a willing intermediary — which is the distinction the whole account of the book's authorship depends on.

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