Mysteries Are Sacred Truths, Hidden from the Profane

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 11 pages

Eleven pages with a contents page and abstract, revised in February 2025. *It gives a historical explanation for secrecy rather than simply asserting it*, which makes it the natural companion to "Mystery is not unrevealed knowledge", also in this batch.

The account runs like this. Owing to the rapid spread of vanity and selfishness — named as the twin causes of sin and suffering, and as what hinders nature's ultimate possibilities — truth was concealed in symbols, an imperative necessity both to protect it from desecration and to forestall brutality in men. The veil used at first was thin, and had to be gradually thickened to stem the tides of personality and immorality; and it was that thickening which led to the establishment of the Mysteries, to safeguard sacred truth against profanation by the multitude. The reason given for the danger is stated in one line: divine magic makes of man a God, while human magic creates a new fiend. The file then looks forward rather than back. When the veil of Isis is finally lifted, it says, the Spirit of Truth will inspire audibly the pure in heart — the word used is Theopneusty — paving the Royal Road to divine magic or theurgy. The Mysteries are called the heirloom of archaic wisdom, and the metaphor is worked out carefully: as every heavenly and human body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, so the Mysteries are the temple of the Earth, and the temple of devotional love, Bhakti, is the secret heart in every man, the sanctuary of his innermost divine intuitions. A closing historical claim places the transmission — the sublime mysteries of what is today called, so unphilosophically, creation, were divulged to the elect of our fifth root-race, the Aryan, progeny of the preceding fourth, the Atlantean.

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