Theosophical Society
THE HIMALAYAN BROTHERS
Article by H. P. Blavatsky
SIR,--
"On
the authority of an adept" (?) "they" (the
Theosophists and Madame
Blavatsky)
"are all mediums under the influence of the lower spirits." Such is
the sentence used by you in an editorial review of
Mr. Sinnett's Occult World
(Spiritualist,
June 17th). Doubtful as its pertinency might appear,
I personally
found nothing very objectionable in it, the more so,
as elsewhere you do me the
honour to express your conviction that (whether
controlled by good or bad
spirits) I yet am a "strong physical
medium"--that term precluding at least the
suspicion of my being a regular impostor. This
letter then is not directed
against you, but rather against the pretensions
of a would-be "adept." Another
point should be also attended to before I proceed, in
order that the situation
may be as clearly defined as possible.
Finding
myself for the period of nearly seven years one of the
best abused
individuals under the sun, I rather got accustomed
to that sort of thing. Hence,
I
would hardly take up the pen now to defend my own character. If people,
besides forgetting that I am a woman, and an old
woman, are dull enough to fail
to perceive that had I declared myself anything in
creation, save a Theosophist
and one of the founders of our Society, I would
have been in every
respect--materially as well as socially--better
off in the world's
consideration, and that therefore,
since, notwithstanding all the persecution
and opposition encountered, I persist in remaining
and declaring myself one, I
cannot well be that charlatan and pretender some people
would see in me--I
really cannot help it. Fools are unable, and the wise
unwilling to see the
absurdity of such an accusation, for as
Shakespeare puts it:
Folly
in fools bears not so strong a note
As
foolery in the wise, when wit doth dote.It is not
then to defend myself that I claim space in your columns, but to answer one
whose ex-cathedra utterances have revolted the sense of justice of more than
one of our Theosophists in India, and to defend them--who have a claim on all
the reverential feeling that my nature is capable of.
A
new correspondent, one of those dangerous, quasi-anonymous individuals who
abuse their literary privilege of hiding their true personality and thus shirk
responsibility behind an initial or
two, has lately won a prominent place in the
columns of your journal. He calls himself an
"adept"; that is easy enough, but
does or rather can he prove it?
To
begin with, in the sight of the Spiritualists as much as in that of sceptics in general, an "adept," whether he hails
from Tibet, India, or London, is all one. The latter will persist in calling
him an impostor; and the former, were he even to prove his powers, in seeing in
him either a medium or a juggler. Now your "J.K." when he states in
the Spiritualist of June 24th, that "the phenomena attendant upon real adeptship are on an entirely different plane from
"Spiritualism" risks, nay is sure, to have every one of the above
expletives flung in his face by both the above-mentioned classes.
Could
he but prove what he claims, namely, the powers conferring upon a person the
title of an initiate, such epithets might well be scorned by him.
Aye,--but I ask again, is he ready to make good his claim? The language used by
him, to begin with, is not that which a true adept would ever use. It is
dogmatic and
authoritative throughout, and too
full of insulting aspersions against those who
are not yet proved to be worse or lower than
himself; and fails entirely to
carry conviction to the minds of the profane as of
those who do know something of adepts and initiates--that it is one of such proficients who now addresses them.
Styling
himself an adept, whose "Hierophant is a western gentleman," but a
few lines further on he confesses his utter
ignorance of the existence of a body
which cannot possibly be ignored by any true adept! I
say "cannot" for there is
no accepted neophyte on the whole globe but at
least knows of the Himalayan
Fraternity.
The
sanction to receive the last and supreme initiation, the real
"word at low breath" can come but through those
fraternities in
and Thibet to one of
which belongs "Koot Hoomi
Lal Singh." True, there is
"adept" and adept, and they differ, as there are adepts
in more than one art and
science. I, for one, know in
"an adept in the high art of manufacturing Parisian cothurns." J.K. speaks of
Brothers
"on the soul plane," of "divine Kabbalah
culminating in God," of "slave
magic,"
and so on, a phraseology which proves to me most conclusively that he is but
one of those dabblers in western occultism which were so well represented some
years ago, by French-born "Egyptians" and "Algerians," who
told people their fortunes by the Tarot, and placed their visitors within
enchanted circles with a Tetragrammaton inscribed in
the centre.
I
do not say J.K. is one of the latter, I beg him to understand. Though quite
unknown to me and hiding behind his two initials, I will not follow his rude
example and insult him for all that. But I say and repeat that his language
sadly betrays him. If a Kabbalist at all, then
himself and his "Hierophant" are but the humble self-taught pupils of
the mediaeval, and so-called "Christian" Kabbalists;
of adepts, who, like Agrippa, Khunrath, Paracelsus,
Vaughan, Robert Fludd, and several others, revealed
their knowledge to the world but to better conceal it, and who never gave the
key to it in their writings. He bombastically asserts his own knowledge and
power, and proceeds to pass judgment on people of whom he knows and can know
nothing. Of the "Brothers" he says: "If they are true adepts,
they have not shown much worldly wisdom, and the organization which is to
inculcate their doctrine is a complete failure, for even the very first
psychical and physical principles of true Theosophy and occult science are
quite unknown to and unpractised by the members of
that organization--the Theosophical Society."
How
does he know? Did the Theosophists take him into their confidence? And if he
knows something of the British Theosophical Society, what can he know of those
in
body and is a traitor. And if he does not, what has
he to say of its
practitioners, since the Society in
general, and especially its esoteric
sections that count but a very few "chosen
ones"--are secret bodies?
The
more attentively I read his article the more am I inclined to laugh at the
dogmatic tone prevailing in it. Were I a
Spiritualist, I would be inclined to
suspect in it a good "goak"
of John King, whose initials are represented in the
signature of J.K. Let him first learn, that mirific Brother of the "Western
Hermetic
Circle in the soul-plane," a few facts about the adepts in general,
before he renders himself any more ridiculous.
(1)
No true adept will on any consideration whatever reveal himself as one, to
the profane. Nor would he ever speak in such terms
of contempt of people, who
are certainly no more silly, and, in many an
instance, far wiser than himself.
But
were even the Theosophists the poor misled creatures he would represent them to
be, a true adept would rather help than deride them.
(2)
There never was a true Initiate but knew of the secret Fraternities in the
East. It is not Eliphas
Levi who would ever deny their existence, since we have
his authentic signature to the contrary. Even P. B.
Randolph, that wondrous,
though erratic, genius of
knowledge in the East, had good reasons to know of
their actual existence, as
his writings can prove.
(3)
One who ever perorates upon his occult knowledge, and speaks of practising
his powers in the name of some particular prophet,
deity, or Avatar, is but a
sectarian mystic at best. He cannot be an adept in
the Eastern sense--a Mahatma,
for his judgment will always be biased and
prejudiced by the colouring of his
own special and dogmatic religion.
(4)
The great science, called by the vulgar "magic," and by its Eastern
proficients Gupta Vidya, embracing as it does each and every science, since
it
is the acme of knowledge, and constitutes the
perfection of philosophy, is
universal: hence--as very truly remarked--cannot
be confined to one particular
nation or geographical locality. But, as Truth is one,
the method for the
attainment of its highest proficiency must
necessarily be also one. It cannot be
subdivided, for, once reduced to parts, each of
them, left to itself, will, like
rays of light, diverge from, instead of converging
to, its centre, the ultimate
goal of knowledge; and these parts can rebecome the Whole only by collecting
them together again, or each fraction will remain
but a fraction.
This
truism, which may be termed elementary mathematics for little boys, has to
be re-called, in order to refresh the memory of
such "adepts" as are too apt to
forget that "Christian Kabbalism"
is but a fraction of Universal Occult Science.
And,
if they believe that they have nothing more to learn, then the less they
turn to "Eastern Adepts" for information
the better and the less trouble for
both. There is but one royal road to "Divine
Magic"; neglect and abandon it to
devote yourself specially to one of the paths
diverging from it, and like a
lonely wanderer you will find yourself lost in an
inextricable labyrinth. Magic,
I
suppose, existed millenniums before the Christian era; and, if so, are we to
think then, with our too learned friends, the modern
"
it was all Black Magic, practised
by the "Old firm of Devil & Co."? But together
with every other person who knows some-thing of what
he or she talks about, I
say that it is nothing of the kind; that J.K. seems
to be superbly ignorant even
of the enormous difference which exists between a Kabbalist and an Occultist.
Is
he aware, or not, that the Kabbalist stands, in
relation to the Occultist, as a
little detached hill at the foot of the
is known as the Jewish Kabbala of Simon Ben Jochai, is already the disfigured
version of its primitive source, the Great Chaldean Book of Numbers? That as the former, with its
adaptation to the Jewish Dispensation, its mixed international
Angelology
and Demonology, its Orphiels and Raphaels
and Greek Tetragrams, is a pale copy of the Chaldean, so the Kabbala of the Christian Alchemists and
Rosicrucians is naught in its turn
but a tortured edition of the Jewish. By
centralizing the Occult Power and
his course of actions, in some one national
God
or Avatar, whether in Jehovah or Christ, Brahma or Mahomet, the Kabbalist diverges the more from the one central Truth.
It
is but the Occultist, the Eastern adept, who stands a Free Man, omnipotent
through its own Divine Spirit as much as man can
be on earth. He has rid himself
of all human conceptions and religious
side-issues; he is at one and the same
time a Chaldean Sage, a
Persian Magi, a Greek Theurgist, an Egyptian Hermetist,
a Buddhist Rahat and an
Indian Yogi. He has collected into one bundle all the
separate fractions of Truth widely scattered over
the nations, and holds in his
hand the One Truth, a torch of light which no
adverse wind can bend, blow out or even cause to waver. Not he the Prometheus
who robs but a portion of the Sacred Fire, and therefore finds himself chained
to Mount Caucasus for his intestines to be devoured by vultures, for he has
secured God within himself and depends no more on the whim and caprice of
either good or evil deities.
True,
"Koot Hoomi"
mentions Buddha. But it is not because the brothers hold him in the light of
God or even of "a God," but simply because he is the Patron of the Thibetan Occultists, the greatest of the Illuminati and
adepts,
self-initiated by his own Divine
Spirit or "God-self" unto all the mysteries of
the invisible universe. Therefore to speak of
imitating "the life of Christ," or
that of Buddha, or Zoroaster, or any other man on
earth chosen and accepted by any one special nation for its God and leader, is
to show oneself a Sectarian
even in Kabbalism, that
fraction of the one "Universal Science"--Occultism. The
latter is pre-historic and is coeval with
intelligence. The Sun shines for the
heathen Asiatic as well as for the Christian
European and for the former still
more gloriously, I am glad to say.
To
conclude, it is enough to glance at that sentence of more than questionable
propriety, and more fit to emanate from the pen of
a Jesuit than that of a
Kabbalist, which allows of the supposition that
the "Brothers" are only a branch
of the old established firm of "Devil and
Co." to feel convinced that beyond
some "Abracadabra" dug out from an old mouldy MS. of Christian Kabbalism,
J.K. knows nothing. It is but on the unsophisticated profane, or a very
innocent
Spiritualist,
that his bombastic sentences, all savouring
of the Anche is son
pittore, that he may produce
some sensation.
True,
there is no need of going absolutely to Thibet or
knowledge and power "which are latent in
every human soul"; but the acquisition
of the highest knowledge and power require not
only many years of the severest
study enlightened by a superior intelligence and an
audacity bent by no peril;
but also as many years of retreat in comparative
solitude, and association with
but students pursuing the same object, in a
locality where nature itself
preserves like the neophyte an absolute and
unbroken stillness if not silence!
where the air is free for hundreds of miles around of
all mephytic influence;
the atmosphere and human magnetism absolutely pure,
and--no animal blood is
spilt. Is it in
such conditions can be found?
H. P.BLAVATSKY First published 1881
Theosophical Society
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