Presidential Authoritarianism Is an Affront to Brotherhood

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 23 pages

Twenty-three pages with a contents page and abstract of central ideas, revised in May 2024. *It is the sharpest constitutional document in this section*, and the two people named as its authors were the two founders of the Society, in open disagreement.

The occasion, as the contents page has it, was inflamed by the abnormal fancies and uncanny dreams of an acting editor of The Theosophist. The positions Blavatsky takes are stated flatly, one after another. The Esoteric Section is wholly apart from the Society and owes no allegiance to it; she alone is responsible for its members. Let the Society break away from the original lines and show disloyalty in its policy to the Cause and the Original Programme, and she will shake it off like dust from her feet. There is no such thing as a Parent Society: it has been abolished and replaced by an aggregate body of theosophical societies, all autonomous as the states of America are, and all under one Head-President. She does not owe the slightest allegiance to a Council which is liable at any moment to issue silly and untheosophical commands. And then the sentence that gives the file its title and applies the same rule to both founders at once — no more than she does has Colonel Olcott the right to exercise autocracy or papal powers, since both founders swore allegiance to the Fellows, whom they vowed to protect and to teach those who wished to be taught, and are not to tyrannise and rule over them. Whatever one makes of the quarrel, the principle she is defending is the one the Society's first object rests on: that an organisation founded on brotherhood cannot be run by command. The file prints Olcott's side as well as hers.

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