Theosophy Is Religion Itself and a Code of Ethics

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Boris de Zirkoff · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 58 pages

*Fifty-eight pages, the largest file in this batch and one of the most important documents in the section. Its centre is the Original Programme* manuscript, presented with introductory notes and supporting documents by Boris de Zirkoff — including a letter from Blavatsky to W.Q. Judge and another to Mr and Mrs A.P. Sinnett, printed in full so a reader can see the manuscript in its correspondence.

The Original Programme is the statement of what the Theosophical Society was founded to do, written by one of its founders when she believed it had drifted from that purpose — which makes it at once a founding document and a corrective one. The section headed Theosophy first and organization after states its priority in four words, and it is the argument the whole manuscript exists to make: that the movement's machinery was never meant to become its object. Chatterji and Gebhard on theosophical organisation are printed alongside, so the practical question of how a body without dogma should be run is argued by more than one voice. A section of daily-life counsel from a Master of Wisdom follows, containing the observation that the majority of the public Areopagus is generally composed of self-appointed judges who have never made a permanent deity of any idol save their own personalities and their lower selves. The last movement of the file returns to the motto that stands over this whole website — there is no religion higher than truth — and works out what it commits one to: that there is, and can be, but one absolute truth in Kosmos, followed by an address to the readers of Lucifer. For anyone who wants to know what the Society was for, in the words of the person who founded it, this is the file.

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