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The author of the two portly elegantly printed octavos bearing this
mysterious title is Madame H. P. Blavatsky, who is said to have been
born in an Asiatic province of Russia, and professes to have made many
journeys into the less explored regions of Asia. She asserts that in
Thibet or Mongolia she learned, by initiation, the secrets of the Lama
religion, and afterwards extended her acquaintance to the Singalese of
Ceylon, the Brahmins and Sivaists of India, the votaries of
Somona-Kadom in Siam and Cambodia. She has also acquired a great
variety of recondite learning, with which her pages are plentifully
sprinkled. Out of all this she has constructed these volumes, which she declares
to be "a master-key to all the mysteries of ancient and modern science
and theology." The first volume is devoted to science, the second to
theology. In the first volume, purporting to be an analysis of
science, she agrees exactly with Wendell Phillips that the ancients
possessed many rare and wonderful arts that are now "lost." She also
insists that most of our newly-discovered sciences were familiar to
the ancients. She affirms the modern doctrine of evolution to have
been a dream likewise of the Greek philosophers and Hindu sages. Much
of the knowledge claimed in the West she declares to have been long
known in the East, hidden often in the ''vihar'' or the crypt, or
possessed only by men of rare moral excellence and thorough
discipline.
 
On the beaten field of Theology, the theme of her second volume, our
survey must necessarily be cursory. It is written in the same spirit
with the first, but embraces a different class of topics. Like Emanuel
Swedenborg, she believes that there exists "a Lost Word in Great
Tartary" of higher character and profounder wisdom than what is
contained in either Testament. There was a primitive faith, the
Doctrine or Religion of Wisdom, from which all more modern worships and
systems such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islamism, as to their more
vital elements, are descendants. The Vedic, Brahman, Persian and
Chaldean religions in this way were offshoots of the Wisdom-Religions;
but Gautama was its later apostle. The unparalleled efforts of King
Asoka, of Delhi or Magadha, to disseminate his doctrines, resulted in
their diffusion over all the West, as well as to the North, East and
South, and hence they became incorporated into Grecian philosophy as
well as in the religious systems of other countries. The worships of
Palestine, Egypt and Europe were modified and softened by it; and the
later religions of the New Testament and Al Koran exhibit its
influence. She has quoted from the Kabala and Talmud, the Hermetic
Tablets and Codex Nazareus, and has even cited alchemists and
magicians, Roger Bacon, Cornelius Agrippa, Theophrast Paracelsus,
Lully, Thomas Vaughn, Henry More and others. She believes in God,
the ''anima mundi,'' in spirits elemental, in men of divine powers, in
reincarnation, soul-death, and beyond all this, in Nirvana, not as
extinction but as perfected bliss. The mysterious ''Akasa,'' capable
of producing miracles, prolonging life indefinitely, and of remedying
bodily injuries otherwise mortal, is defined and its potencies fully
explained. Indeed, "seventy thousand years of experience," which these
veterans of Asia have had access to, ought to have done something for
them.
 
She says in her preface she expects to find arrayed against her all
Christians, scientists, broad churchmen, freethinkers, men of letters,
and the mercenaries and parasites of the Press, "who prostitute its
more than royal power, and dishonor a noble profession." So that, like
another Ishmael, she anticipates that every man's hand will be against
her, for the classes she enumerates compose pretty nearly every one
except herself. But however this may be, it is certain that her book
is curious and entertaining, and that she shows a singular combination
of extreme scepticism and extreme credulity.
 
J. W. Bouton, New York, publisher.




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