Who Should Be Invited to Theosophical Meetings?

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 8 pages

Eight pages from the Collected Writings volume XII, pages 59 to 63, published there as "The Facts Brought Before Masters". The frontispiece is Betty by James Durden, from the Keswick Museum and Art Gallery. *It is the most domestic document in the section* — a report on an evening's entertaining — and it is the more interesting for that.

The party the previous Monday, she writes, consisted of between forty-seven and fifty theosophists, each having been asked to bring friends. The Countess and one other member invited most of them, and of those she finds two-thirds of the guests interested in theosophy and half of them having accepted tickets for the Thursday meetings. All the home theosophists spoke theosophy, each trying to interest his own group; she is told they worked admirably, and next Thursday will show the results. The bookkeeping is exact, and that is the point: this is somebody counting whether an evening's effort produced anything. The question the file's title asks — should an invitation be extended to the rich and famous? — is the one the arithmetic is meant to settle, and it is a practical dilemma any small organisation will recognise: whether to court people whose names bring attention, or to work on whoever is genuinely curious. The running heading gives the conclusion she draws from the count: no effort is ever lost. Read beside the doctrinal files in this section it is a useful corrective, showing the movement as it actually operated — a few dozen people in a London drawing room, hoping some of their guests would come back on Thursday.

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