289
LODGES OF MAGIC
MADAM,
I have only two remarks on your notes to my letter published in the December Number of Lucifer.—(1) I do not “hope” to see spooks by the help of the Theosophical Society. My baser part sometimes desires manifestation, but I recognize such desire to be impure. I earnestly trust no Member of the Society will ever indulge in the evocation of phenomena, whether for curiosity, or for the gratification of the intellect.
(2) I asked if the worship of the One God in spirit and in truth was the aim of the Society. You reply with the motto of the Society. But your real answer appears to be in the opening article of the Magazine on Denunciation. I candidly think the formation of the Society was a mistake. Not a mistake in motive, but a mistake in generalship. The speed of the slowest ship marks the rate of progress of a fleet. The weak ones of the Society mark its position in the world. But if the Society has only helped one brother to right living, then it has done much to justify its existence, and I have naught to say.
My real reason in again addressing you is to call your attention to a Novel written by A. de Grasse Stevens.[1] At page 141 is a reference to yourself as a Russian spy who was ejected from India by Lord Dufferin.
I have never before seen this curious slander in print, and, although you may consider it beneath contempt, I think it a pity to allow it altogether to escape notice.
The reprehensible conduct of the Publishers in allowing an Author to libel a living person, and that person a woman, is such that I do not care to express my opinion on paper more fully than in this letter.
I am, your most faithful servant,
A. E.
290
The Theosophical Society has “helped “ many and many of its “brothers” to “right living”—and this is its proudest boast.
I thank our Correspondent for his kind remarks about me. With regard to publishers in general, their “reprehensible conduct” may perhaps find an excuse in the great law of the “struggle for life”; this species having always been known to feed and thrive on the carrion of murdered reputations. As to the authoress of this would-be politico-social novel, a rather green than young American, it is said, her exceptional claim to distinction from other trans-Atlantic writers of her sex, would seem to be an intimate acquaintance with the lobby and the back stairs of politics.
Apart from the half-dozen living people whose reputations she slaughters on a single page, what this political Amazon invents is that:—
“. . . . Mme. Blavatsky, for many years carried on a secret correspondence with Monsieur Zinovief [?!], chief of the Asiatic Department,” and that “but for Lord Dufferin’s clear-sightedness Madame might still be carrying on her patriotic work”—presumably in India.
LIES from the first word to the last. I never knew a “Monsieur Zinovief,” nor corresponded with one at any time. I defy any government in the world to produce the slightest evidence, even inferential, that I have ever been a spy, or corresponded secretly with any Russian authority. As to Lord Dufferin he reached India only after I left it. As I have answered fully the infamous libel in the Pall Mall Gazette of January 3, I hope the public will leave this fresh lie to share the fate of the many that preceded it—in the waste-paper basket of literature.
H. P. BLAVATSKY.
Footnotes
- ↑ [Entitled: Miss Hildreth.]