Two Journals Devoted to the Brotherhood of Man

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 10 pages

Ten pages, first published in Lucifer volume I number 1, September 1887, pages 77 to 79, and republished in the Collected Writings volume VIII. The frontispiece is by Jean Joseph Xavier Bidauld. *It is a pair of magazine notices*, and it is useful for placing the journals that so many files on this site are drawn from.

The first is The Theosophist, described in its own subtitle as a magazine of oriental philosophy, art, literature and occultism, conducted by Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, published at Madras and sold in London by George Redway of 15 York Street, Covent Garden. Her account of why it is worth reading is a claim about sources rather than about opinions, and it is a good one: it is the oldest of the Society's periodicals, and it has a distinct feature of its own in the number of Hindu, Buddhist and Parsi contributors among the most learned of British India. No journal, she argues, is more reliable in the occasional information it gives on the sacred tenets and scriptures of the East, since that information is derived first hand and comes from native scholars well versed in their own cults — and she notes that from time to time The Theosophist has respectfully corrected mistakes made by Western Orientalists. That is the same argument made throughout this section about who is entitled to speak on these subjects, here applied to a magazine's contributor list. The second notice covers the companion journal. Together they explain a good deal about where the material in this whole library originally appeared and why the compiler cites those two titles more than any others.

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