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leave in me the smallest doubt as to its genuineness and reality. Deception or
fraud in this particular case are really out of the question."
CHAPTER IV FROM SPIRITUALISM TO THEOSOPHY
1 It seems that she had been in Peru and Brazil in 1857, according to her later
statement to A. P. Sinnett as found on page 154 of the Letters of H. P.
Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett. A sentence in Vol. I, of Isis Unveiled makes mention
of her personal knowledge of great underground labyrinths in Peru.
2 Not assuredly of the séance-room type. She is obviously using the term here in
the wider sense that it came to have in her larger Theosophic system, as
expounded in this chapter.
3 Old Diary Leaves, Vol. I, p. 12.
4 Ibid., p. 13.
5 Ibid., p. 68.
6 Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten, herself a medium and among the foremost
Spiritualists of her day-also a charter member of the Theosophical Society-made
a statement to the same effect to Col. Olcott in 1875. See Old Diary Leaves,
Vol. I, p. 83.
7 Quoted in William Kingsland's The Real H. P. Blavatsky (J. M. Watkins, London,
1928), p. 123.
8 Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett (New York, Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1924), p.
289.
9 The Theosophist, Vol. I, 1879.
10 Isis Unveiled, Vol. I, p. 13.
207
11 Ibid., p. 53.
12 Ibid., p. 489.
13 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 586.
14 Old Diary Leaves, Vol. I, p. 110.
15 Page 27.
16 That H. P. B. was by no means alone in predicating the existence of other
than human spirits denizening the astral world is shown by Col. Olcott, who (Old
Diary Leaves, Vol. I, p. 438), cites Mrs. Britten's statement printed in an
article in The Banner of Light, as follows: "I know of the existence of other
than human spirits and have seen apparitions of spiritual or elementary
existences evoked by cabalistic words and practices."
17 Isis Unveiled, Vol. II, p. 636. 18 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 67
19 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching (London, T. F. Unwin, Ltd., 1919).
20 Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett, p. 101.
21 Old Diary Leaves, Vol. I, p. 119. From notes taken at the meeting by Mrs.
Emma Hardinge Britten, and published a day or two later in a New York daily.
22 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 119.
23 He was in active command of the Army of the Potomac at the Battle of
Gettysburg, following the death of General Reynolds on the 1st of July until the
arrival of General Meade.
24 He devised the modern game of baseball.
25 Old Diary Leaves, Vol. I, p. 399.
26 Ibid., Vol. I., p. 400.
CHAPTER V ISIS UNVEILED
1 Old Diary Leaves, Vol. I, p. 203.
2 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 33.
3 The term Chaldean in these titles is thought by modern scholars to veil an
actual Greek origin of the texts in question. The existence of Chaldea and
Chaldeans appears to be regarded as highly uncertain. Of the Chaldeans Madame
Blavatsky says in The Theosophical Glossary: "Chaldeans, or Kasdim. At first a
tribe, then a caste of learned Kabbalists. They were the savants, the magians of
Babylonia, astrologers and diviners." Of the Chaldean Book of Numbers she says:
"A work which contains all that is found in the Zohar of Simeon Ben-Jochai and
much more. . . . It contains all the fundamental principles taught in the Jewish
Kabbalistic works, but none of their blinds. It is very rare indeed, there being
perhaps only two or three copies extant and these in private hands."
208
4 Scholars have thrown doubt on the Persian authorship of this book. Madame
Blavatsky in the Glossary describes it as "a very ancient Persian work called
the Book of Shet. It speaks of the thirteen Zoroasters and is very mystical."
5 It is clear that Madame Blavatsky was not a literary person before the epoch
of the writing of Isis. She herself, in the last article for Lucifer that she
wrote before her death in 1891, entitled My Books, wrote:
1. When I came to America in 1873 I had not spoken English-which I had
learned in my childhood colloquially-for over thirty years. I could understand
when I read it, but could hardly speak the language.
2 I had never been at any college, and what I knew I had taught myself; I
had never pretended to any scholarship in the sense of modern research; I had
then hardly read any scientific European works, knew little of Western
philosophy and sciences. The little which I had studied and learned of these
disgusted me with its materialism, its limitations, narrow cut-and-dried spirit
of dogmatism and air of superiority over the philosophies and sciences of
antiquity.
3. Until 1874 I had never written one word in English, nor had I published
any work in any language. Therefore:--
4. I had not the least idea of literary rules. The art of writing books,
of preparing them for print and publication, reading and correcting proofs, were
so many closed secrets to me.
5. When I started to write that which later developed into Isis Unveiled,
I had no more idea than the man in the moon what would come of it. I had no
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