Theosophy Is Our Only Deliverer and Saviour

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 7 pages

Seven pages from the Collected Writings volume XII, pages 260 to 261, published there under the title "Modern Apostles and Pseudo-Messiahs". The frontispiece is by Ambrosius Bosschaert. *It is a short piece with a very concrete subject* — the people who were, at the time of writing, publicly claiming to be reincarnations of Buddha and of Christ.

She sets the scene without naming them: there is an avowed reincarnation of Buddha in the United States and an avowed reincarnation of Christ; both have followers, both have been interviewed and said their best; they and others like them have had signs, illuminations, knowledge not common to men, and events pointing in a marked way to their final destiny — there has even been a whisper here and there of supernatural births. Her diagnosis is not that the experiences were invented but that they were misread: what these people lacked was the clear-seeing eye that could reduce the facts to their right order and interpret them aright. The image she closes the description with is memorable — kings and potentates appear, and dreamers of dreams, but there is never a prophet or Daniel in their midst, and the result is sorry to behold, for each seems to be putting the crown upon his own head. What follows is her claim for what theosophy contributed, and it is put modestly: if theosophy had done nothing else, it would have earned human gratitude by placing the truth and falsehood of these psychic experiences plainly before the people and explaining their rationale. Two specific things are credited to it. It showed, and proved to a number of persons, a plane of manhood transcending any power of the inspirational psychic who imagines himself a messenger to the world. And it placed personal purity at a level which barred nine-tenths of these claimants from all thought of their presumed inheritance.

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