True Theosophists Are Always Under the Master's Eye

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 22 pages

Twenty-two pages carrying Esoteric Section Instruction number III, from the Collected Writings volume XII, pages 581 to 599. *The story of the text is the reason this file matters*, and it is told at the front. The preliminary explanations were written at the time of a grave crisis — or rather a series of crises — through which the Society passed in 1889 and 1890: treachery within the Esoteric Section itself, and persistent attacks on the Society from without, especially in America, which made it necessary to strike a fresh keynote and close the ranks.

When the instructions were reprinted in London in 1890 and 1891, certain portions of those explanations — the parts dealing with the details of the matter — were purposely omitted by the pupils who had been made editors, on the ground that they were of too personal a character to remain. The note records exactly when and how that happened, and it is not a neutral account: it was done while Blavatsky was too ill to supervise, without her sanction, and, as she afterwards said, much against her wishes. *This file prints the explanations exactly as they originally stood*, with the previously omitted portions restored in square brackets and, in this edition, highlighted in colour so a reader can see at a glance what was cut. That makes it one of the most useful documents in the section for anyone interested in what the crisis of 1889 actually consisted of, since the removed passages are precisely the specific ones. The instruction itself is a private document of the Esoteric Section — headed strictly confidential and to be returned on demand — and it is reproduced here as a historical text long since published rather than as anything still restricted.

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