Blavatsky H.P. - A Society without a Dogma: Difference between revisions

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Beyond doubt, much of this subsidence of the disturbed elements is clue to our armed neutrality. But still, I judge that the gradual spread of a desire to learn something more as to the cause of the phenomena must be taken into account. And yet the time has not quite come when the lion (Spiritualism) and the lamb (Theosophy are ready to lie down together—unless the lamb is willing to lie inside the lion. While we held our tongues we were asked to speak, and when we spoke—or rather our President spoke—the hue and cry was raised once more. Though the popgun fusillade and the dropping shots of musketry have mostly ceased, the defiles of your Spiritual Balkans are defended by your heaviest Krupp guns. If the fire were directed only against Colonel Olcott there would be no occasion for me to bring up the reserves. But fragments from both of the bombs which your able gunner and our mutual friend, {{Page aside|302}} “M. A. (Oxon.),” has exploded, in his two letters of January 4th and 11th, have given me contusions—under the velvet paw of his rhetoric I have felt the scratch of challenge!

At the very beginning of what must be a long struggle, it is imperatively demanded that the Theosophical position shall be unequivocally defined. In the last of the above two communications, it is stated that Colonel Olcott transmits “the teaching of the learned author of Isis Unveiled, the master key to all problems [?].” Who has ever claimed that the book was that, or anything like it? Not the author, certainly. The title? A misnomer for which the publisher is unpremeditatedly responsible; and, if I am not mistaken, “M. A. (Oxon.)” knows it. My title was the Veil of Isis, and that headline runs through the entire first volume. Not until that volume was stereotyped did any one recollect that a book of the same name was before the public. Then, as a dernière ressource, the publisher selected the present title.

“If he [Olcott] be not the rose, at any rate he has lived near it,” says your learned correspondent. Had I seen this sentence apart from the context, I would never have imagined that the unattractive old party, superficially known as H. P. Blavatsky, was designated under this poetical Persian simile. If he had compared me to a bramble-bush, I might have complimented him upon his artistic realism. “Colonel Olcott,” he says, “of himself would command attention; he commands it still more on account of the store of knowledge to which he has had access.” True, he has had such access, but by no means is it confined to my humble self. Though I may have taught him a few of the things that I had learned in other countries (and corroborated the theory in every case by practical illustration), yet a far abler teacher than I could not in three brief years have given him more than the alphabet of what there is to learn before a man can become wise in spiritual and psycho-physiological things. The very limitations of modern languages prevent any rapid communication of ideas about Eastern philosophy. I defy the great Max Müller himself to translate Kapila’s Sûtras so as to give their real meaning. We have seen what the {{Page aside|303}} best European authorities can do with the Hindu metaphysics and what a mess they have made of it, to be sure! The Colonel corresponds directly with Hindu scholars, and has from them a good deal more than he can get from so clumsy a preceptor as myself.

<center>HENRY STEEL OLCOTT</center>

<center>1832-1907</center>

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And that no one that makes this search may suppose that we Theosophists send him to a place where there are no pitfalls for the unwary, I quote from the famous Commentary on the Bhagavad-Gîtâ of our brother Hurrychund Chintamon, the unqualified admission that “In Hindostan, as in England, there are doctrines for the learned and dogmas for the unlearned; strong meat for men, and milk for babes; facts for the few, and fictions for the many; realities for the wise, and romances for the simple; esoteric truth for the philosopher, and exoteric fable for the fool.” Like the philosophy taught by this author in the work in question, the object of the Theosophical Society “is the cleansing of Spiritual truth.”

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{{HPB-CW-comment|[ {{SB-page|v=4|p=176|text=Page 176}} of H.P.B.’s Scrapbook, Vol. IV, is occupied with various cuttings dealing with the Masonic Diploma granted to H.P.B. The Providence Journal announces on Feb. 4, 1878, that the Franklin Register will have a discussion of the genuineness of being a Freemason. To this H.P.B. remarks in pen and ink:]}}