by Marion Meade
It was not until the first week of October that Henry signed the order officially sanctioning the Esoteric Section, but he could not help showing his hostility in the wording of the document. The E.S. was to be the sole property of H.P.B. and “has no official or corporate connection with the Exoteric Society.”87 Persons wishing to apply for membership should communicate directly with Madame. Because both of them realized that their feud looked bad to outsiders, they issued an announcement of a truce:
To dispel a misconception that has been engendered by mischief makers, we the undersigned Founders of the Theosophical Society, declare that there is no enmity, rivalry, strife, or even coldness between us, nor ever was... As we have been from the first, so are we now united in purpose and zeal, and ready to sacrifice all, even life, for the promotion of Theosophical knowledge, to the saving of mankind from the miseries which spring from ignorance.88
That this communique fooled no one is obvious from an article in which the Religio –Philosophical Journal felt obliged to provide an interpretation for its readers:
Since I, the President-Founder, was such an idiot as to pit Blavatsky’s skill as a trickster against the investigation of the Psychical Research Society, and since Hodgson exploded our psychic and mahatmic fakes; and moreover, since the old Bourbon, Blavatsky, is not amenable to reason any more, it is useless longer to work the phenomena branch of our business. Hence I will turn it over to Madame as her share of the assets; then I will depreciate her stock and belittle her occultism, for thereby I shall get even with her and at the same time tickle the public and gain favour for my scheme which is no less a fake, but not so easily detected.89
The Journal’s reasoning may have been nastily phrased but it was not entirely inaccurate.
Twenty years later, in a character sketch of H.P.B. for his memoirs, a still bitter Henry would say that she could slather people with charm when she chose “and she chose it when she wanted to draw persons to her public work.” When it came to himself and Helena’s intimate colleagues, “I should not say she was either loyal or staunch. We were to her, I believe, nothing more than pawns in a game of chess, for whom she had no heart-deep love.”90 The only human beings who won her love and loyalty, he said, were her Russian family and the Mahatmas.
This was very nearly true: even to those whom she owed a great deal, like Countess Wachtmeister, she generally presented her worst possible side: when Edmund Russell persuaded her to be photographed at the studio of Vander Weyde in Regent Street, she carried on like Queen Elizabeth about to set off on a royal progress, and it was the countess who had to bear the brunt of it. When the day of the appointment dawned rainy and windy with scurries of autumn leaves, Helena refused to go, claiming that the awful weather would cause her death. Besides, since she never went outside, she did not even own a cloak. For five hours a cab was kept waiting while the countess cajoled and pleaded and improvised a makeshift outfit by bundling H.P.B. in furs and shawls, some of them borrowed from the servants. Outfitted against the weather, Helena refused to leave after all, remaining stolidly in her chair like a stubborn Buddha.
“I will not go,” she muttered. “I cannot step on the wet stones.”
At her wit’s end, Constance ordered carpets laid from the door of the house to the carriage, but even then the wind was gusting so heavily that they threatened to blow away; in the end Constance had to hold them down. Afterward she told Russell that when she had first lived in London as an ambassadress, “in Hyde Park two powdered footmen followed me. If my poor husband could know the day had come when I held down carpets for another woman to tread on he would turn over in his grave.” She spoke with a smile, however, because as Russell pointed out, “she would have lain herself down for Madame to walk on.”91
More than the weather, H.P.B. was held back by the prospect of having her image preserved on film. Every reference that she now made to her physical appearance suggests self-loathing: “This loathsome, old ruined body,” and “an old, rotten, sick, worn-out body.”92 Her face had grown increasingly unattractive: due to her illness, her complexion yellowed almost to a coffee color; the formerly lovely eyes were also marred by jaundice, and the face scored by a thousand wrinkles. The crinkly hair, now iron-gray, was gathered into an untidy knot at the nape of her neck and stuck through with a broad comb. Only her hands, with their lithe, tapering fingers, remained remarkably beautiful; she always made sure they were visible in her portraits by propping her double chin on one hand.
On October 20, she said goodbye to Henry, who was returning to India in the company of Charles and Vera Johnston and Richard Harte, a New York newspaperman they had known in their Lamasery days. Harte, the new editor of the Theosophist, was a replacement for Alfred Cooper-Oakley, who had won H.P.B.’s enmity by subtly denigrating her in print. That she had been able to persuade Olcott both to dismiss him from the staff and to expel him from the Society was a small but significant victory.
On the very morning of their departure, the first volume of The Secret Doctrine came off the press at Allen Scott and Company, with the second volume to follow in December. An eager Richard Harte sent a courier to 30 Bouverie Street, thus winning for himself the distinction of getting a copy before H.P.B. herself, and wrote in blue pencil on the flyleaf, “This is the first copy ever issued. I got it from Printer by special Messenger on the morning of 20 Oct. ‘88 as I was leaving the house 17 Lansdowne Road.”93 Presumably Helena and the rest of the household got their copies within hours. Constance Wachtmeister recalled that “H.P.B. was happy that day. It was the one gleam of sunshine amid the darkness and dreariness of her life.”94 In a prophesying mood, Madame told Constance that the book would be studied by only a few during her lifetime but would be fully appreciated in the twentieth century.
The two-volume, fifteen-hundred-page Secret Doctrine is an epic search for the beginnings of civilization, written at a time when everything on the subject was thought to have been said. Momentous in length, weight, complexity, and subject, it is an account of how the universe is created, where it came from and where it is going, what force fashioned it, and what it all means. In supplying these answers H.P.B. would re-zone heaven in so compelling a manner that today, ninety-two years later, the work is still selling in complete and abridged editions and is still being read and analyzed by students of the occult.95
The work rests on the premise that life is eternal, without beginning or end. Its one absolute attribute is eternal, ceaseless motion, which esoterists call the “Great Breath.” Eternal life exhales and inhales periodically, producing universes and withdrawing them. The terms “Days” and “Nights” of Brahm describe this swinging back and forth of the Life Force between periods of activity (Manvantara) and periods of rest (Pralaya). The Eternal Parent (God), that which was, is, and will be whether or not there is a universe, is Space and it is space from which the universe emerges and into which it disappears.
The Secret Doctrine is based on three fundamental principles:
1. The omnipresent and eternal reality on which all speculation is impossible since it transcends the power of human conception and can only be dwarfed by any human expression. It is the unthinkable and unspeakable, the infinite cause, the rootless root.
2. The absolute law of periodicity, of flux and reflux, ebb and flow, that governs the universe and all its creatures.
3. The fundamental identity of every individual soul with the universal oversoul, the microcosm within the macrocosm, and its obligatory pilgrimage through the cycle of incarnations in accordance with the law of cause and effect (karma).
Forming the skeleton of Volume One (cosmogenesis) are seven stanzas from the secret Book of Dzyan, the original of which is written in Senzar, the sacred language of the Initiates. Stanza One describes the Night of Brahm when the worlds were not, time was not, mind was not, matter was not; and Stanza Two continues this account to the point of reawakening when the Cosmic Egg is fertilized.
In Stanza Three, the vibrations of et
ernity begin to thrill through boundless space, sounding the cockcrow of a new Manvantaric daybreak as the universe reawakens to life after Pralaya.
Stanza Four shows this primordial essence splitting itself into seven “Sons” or Rays, who frame, shape and ultimately create the universe. They are the intelligent beings, generically known as the Dhyan Chohans, who employ the universal agent Fohat (electricity) to create and evolve our world.
Stanzas Five and Six describe the creative process of world-formation: first diffused cosmic matter, next the fiery whirlwind, and finally the formation of a nebula that condenses before passing through various transformations to form a solar universe, a planetary chain or a single planet. The progress of life is measured by Rounds, Root Races, and Sub-Races, and also by the number seven (seven rounds, seven races, et al.). The earth must pass through seven rounds, the first three taking it through the process of materialization, the fourth crystallizing and hardening it, the last three taking it gradually out of the physical, back to ethereal and finally spiritual form.
By Stanza Seven the descent of life has been traced down to the appearance of humans at the beginning of the Fourth Round.
The second volume (anthropogenesis)96 chronicles the evolution of the human race from its advent on this globe several hundred million years ago to the year 1888: there have been four races on earth before the present one, and there will be two more after ours disappears. The first of the seven races inhabited the “Imperishable Sacred Land,” an unnamed continent lying in a undesignated sector of the globe where the climate was suitable. These first entities would not be recognizable as human, for they were boneless, formless spiritual essences without physical bodies. The Imperishable Sacred Land finally sank into the ocean after some great cataclysm.
The Second Race, called Hyperboreans, were also bodiless. They lived near what is now the North Pole but, owing to the position of the earth’s axis, the climate at that period was mild, even tropical.
Lacking dense physical bodies such as exist today, these first two races were obviously sexless. First Race entities possessed only astral shells, and reproduction, if it can be called that, was merely a matter of periodic spiritual rejuvenation when an entity simply revivified itself by its own will. Among the Hyperboreans, reproduction continued to be spiritual, but of a form that might accurately be described as asexual; the process, H.P.B. explained, approximated what biologists would call “budding.” However, during the latter Second and continuing into the early Third races, procreation evolved further with entities becoming first oviparous and hermaphroditic and finally androgynous. In the first stage of androgynous development, reproduction took place by a modified budding process; extruded spores separated from and then grew into a copy of the parent. Later, instead of mere miniature copies, these extruded spores would develop into an egg or embryo. However, these beings were not fully androgynous because procreation did not require fertilization by a specialized male organ. After further evolution, the entity would contain within itself both the ovum and the male organs necessary to fertilize it.
It was not until the middle of the Third Root Race, some eighteen million years ago, that human life as we know it can properly be said to have begun. At that time, during the Fourth Round, certain Kumaras or “princes”— beings living on spiritual planes who yearned to taste physical experience— made their descent and stepped down (the “Fall”) into earthly encasement. True physical beings with bony structures, they were still somewhat unevolved physically, emotionally and mentally, possessing, for example, only three senses: hearing, touch and sight. Taste would not appear until the Fourth Root Race, smell not until the Fifth. For the first time separation of the sexes occurred, and gradually our present method of reproduction was developed. The cradle of the Third Race, the vast continent of Lemuria, is said to have been in the Pacific Ocean and to have stretched through what is now Central Africa. Remnants of Lemuria still remained, one being Australia and another Easter Island. The continent was destroyed mainly by fire and what remained was sucked into the ocean.
With the sinking of Lemuria, its successor rose in the Atlantic Ocean and became the dwelling place of the Fourth Race some eight hundred and fifty thousand years ago. This was the fabled Atlantis alluded to by Plato and other ancient writers and affirmed by Madame Blavatsky. Like the last of the Lemurians, the Atlanteans were a compound of mind, body and spirit, and as such its men and women would be easily recognizable as human today. In psychic and technological respects, the Atlanteans were more highly developed than are we; they invented airplanes and understood how to tap electric and super-electric forces. In the early centuries of the Fourth Race civilization, human beings were gigantic in stature, a fact that accounts for certain colossal forms of architecture such as Druid temples and the pyramids. Because the Atlanteans misused their knowledge, the race began to degenerate and portions of the continent gradually began to submerge; the surviving remnants of the race, living in the land called Poseidon, met their watery doom only eleven thousand years ago. This final cataclysm was the basis for the deluge myth.
Our present Aryan Race, the Fifth, began to develop in northern Asia and then spread south and west. The fifth Sub-Race of the Fifth Race is our own Anglo-Saxon, and the germ of the sixth Sub-Race was already beginning to take form in the United States at the time that The Secret Doctrine was being written. Eventually the Aryan Race will be swept away; as Lemuria succumbed to fire and Atlantis to water, the Aryans will be undone by subterranean convulsions of the earth’s crust. According to H.P.B., two more races are due to appear before the end of the Fourth Round, after which present humanity will have reached the end of its alloted cycle of evolution. Then the life impulse will withdraw and our globe will be left in a condition of Pralaya. When will this happen? “Who knows save the great Masters of Wisdom, perchance, and they are as silent upon the subject as the snow-capped peaks that tower above them.”97
It was to be expected that The Secret Doctrine would meet with a mixed reception. For Theosophists, it was a new revelation; those with a mystical inclination, like “JE” hailed it as the most stimulating work they had ever read. Reviewers in the secular press treated it as they had Isis Unveiled, that is, patronizingly or humorously; the U.S. periodical Science went so far as to call it one of the finest contributions to contemporary humorous literature. The New York Times rendered its verdict with a review titled “Ten Pounds of Occultism” and declared that Madame Blavatsky could not expect serious consideration of her work because it was unreadable, incomprehensible, and literally choked to death by “vast quantities of indigestible materials... So esoteric is her method, if not her matter, we rarely understand Madame Blavatsky for a whole chapter, and sometimes not for a whole page.” The review went on to suggest that she “is one of those whom much reading of weird, wild books has made mad.”98
If the general press could not be bothered with The Secret Doctrine, H.P.B. knew by now that she could count on serious critical attention from William Emmette Coleman, who gave her a five-part, pamphlet-length review in the Religio-Philosophical Journal. The book infuriated Coleman, who was a member of the Pali Text Society and the Royal Asiatic Society and considered himself an authority on Eastern religion. The Secret Doctrine is, he wrote, “a remarkable work of a remarkable person,” but what made it so was its gigantic pretensions. While he could not truthfully question its author’s intellectual vigor and untiring zeal, he thought it a pity that her “masculine intellect” should not have been used for the advancement of humanity instead of this propagation of delusion and untruth. As soon as he glanced at the Stanzas of Dzyan, he knew there was no such book in existence, that it was only an invention of the ingenious Madame herself. “Of course Madame Blavatsky does not believe any of the nonsense she compiles and fabricates. It is only her credulous followers who are foolish enough to seriously accept as eternal verities the extravagant absurdities with which she regales their infantile minds.”99
Mada
me, he charged, was grossly ignorant of Eastern philosophy. Not only did she misspell certain Sanskrit words—although he admitted her spelling had improved since Isis when she misspelled Bhagavad-Gita, but she also made some six hundred false statements relating to Hinduism, Judaism, Chinese literature, Egyptology, Assyriology, and Christianity. These appalling errors about the most simple matters, such as the date of the Trojan War, demonstrated that her “mahatmas are as mythical and their vast libraries and their god-instructed wisdom as mythical as their own existence.” Coleman’s most damaging criticism, however, was devoted to contradictions between Isis and Secret Doctrine on such basic theories as:
1. Reincarnation, which in Isis (Vol. 1, p. 351) she denied, except in the cases of infants and idiots, was presented as fact throughout The Secret Doctrine.
2. The nature of elemental spirits, which in Isis (Vol. 1, xxix) never evolved into humans, were described in The Secret Doctrine (Vol. 1, p. 277) as disembodied or future humans.
3. The septenary constitution of human beings. In Isis (Vol. 2, p. 367) she stated that they had six principles, but after going to India she learned they had seven. Actually, Coleman theorized, she got the idea of a seven-fold human from neither Buddhism nor Brahmanism, but from Paracelsus.
Even more devastating than Coleman was Oxford professor Max Muller, a distinguished Orientalist and translator of the forty-eight volume Sacred Books of the East. H.P.B., Muller believed, should be given credit for good intentions but
