(The following text is an article that the esotericist Franz Hartmann wrote in
homage to Blavatsky when she died.)
H.P.B. AND HER MISSION
H. P. Blavatsky is dead, but the
great soul that was embodied in her form, still lives. The woman, called “the
Sphinx of the nineteenth century”, because she was understood only by a few,
has given up the ghost; but the great soul (the Maha Atma) dwelling within that
mortal form and using it as an instrument for shedding rays of spiritual light into
this era of mental darkness, has only left its habitation, and returned to a
more congenial home, to rest from its labors.
It is doubtful whether there ever
was any great genius and savior of mankind, whose personality while upon this
earth, was not misunderstood by his friends, reviled by his enemies, mentally
tortured and crucified, and finally made an object of fetish-worship by
subsequent generations. H. P. B. seems to be no exception to the rule.
The world, dazzled by the light
of her doctrines, which the majority of men did not grasp, because they were
new to them, looked upon her with distrust, and the representatives of
scientific ignorance, filled with their own pomposity, pronounced her to be
“the greatest impostor of the age”, because their narrow minds could not rise
up to a comprehension of the magnificence of her spirit.
It is, however, not difficult to
prophesy, that in the near future, when the names of her enemies will have been
forgotten, the world will become alive to a realization of the true nature of
the mission of H. P. B., and see that she was a messenger of Light, sent to
instruct this sinful world, to redeem it from ignorance, folly and
superstition, a task which she has fulfilled as far as her voice was heard and
her teachings accepted.
Then will the historian of those
times ransack the archives for the purpose of finding some bit of history of
the life of H. P. B., and unless all the vilifications that have been written
about her have found their way to the pile of manure from which they emanated,
it is not impossible that her memory may then be besmirched by scribblers of
the future, in the same way as the memory of Cagliostro, Theophrastus
Paracelsus, and other great souls, has been besmirched by irresponsible
scribblers of the present time.
It is for this and for other
self-evident reasons very desirable that something reliable in regard to the
life of H. P. B. should be published by some competent person having been well
acquainted with her, and being not a worshipper of personalities, but capable
of studying and describing the life of the inner man. The true life of every
spiritually awakened human being is not his external but his interior life.
To describe merely the events
that took place in the earth-life of an embodied genius and not to paint his interior
life, his thoughts and feelings, is to describe merely the history of the house
which that genius inhabited during its earthly career and to take no notice of the
inhabitant.
Thus even the best written
account of the life of H. P. B., that has been published, resembles a painting
of a bird of paradise after the bird has been stripped of its plumage and
dressed for the kitchen. It is the treatment of a highly poetical subject with
a careful avoidance of all poetry. But the feathers of a bird are as much an
essential part of the bird as its muscles and bones, and the poetical and ideal
part of a man is a more essential thing in his nature than the structure of his
physical body or the cut of his coat.
It is H. P. B.’s inner life, her
mode of thinking and feeling, that is of importance and ought to be understood;
all the rest belongs to external things that are not worthy the attention of the
true occultist.
Each person has a double nature,
an external and an internal life, and H. P. B. formed no exception to that
rule. She was neither wholly earthly nor wholly divine.
Some poet says:
Two natures are within each human being:
One
is a child of the clear light of day.
In
it is nothing dark, but all is seeing,
There
is all sunshine, nothing hid away.
Its
innermost thy eye may penetrate,
There
is no secret and no mystery;
In
it rule wisdom, justice, love and faith:
Spotless
as crystal is its purity.
The other is a being born of night,
Fill’d
with dark clouds that change and change again.
It
baffles reason and ignores the light:
It
is a stranger in its own domain.
Intangibly
it fills our daily life
With
mocking goblins; its discordant reign
Begetting
errors and discordant strife:
Tangling
the threads and spoiling the design.
Thus every person has at his
command a terrestrial and a celestial life. To the great majority entangled in
the meshes of this world of illusions, these illusions appear to be the reality
and the celestial life merely a dream: but there are others in whom the
interior life has awakened, and who find the celestial life the real one, and
this earthly life merely a dream or a nightmare.
This fact of a double existence has
been recognized by every sage and saint and is known to every one in possession
of the divine knowledge of self. It is referred to in many places in the
Bhagavad Gita and in the Bible. It is that double life of the initiated, to
which the apostle refers, when he says:
-
“We live upon the earth, but our consciousness is in heaven.”
There may be those in whom the
light has entirely swallowed up the darkness: those in whom there exists no
more “body of sin.” They are the fully developed Adepts, and as such a one St.
Paul presents himself in his letter to the Romans, chap. vii., vv, 5 and 6,
where he says:
« When we were in the
flesh, the motions of sins which were by the law, did work in our members, to
bring forth fruit unto death: but now we are delivered from the law —that being
dead, wherein we were held— that we should serve in newness of spirit and not
in the oldness of the letter. » (1)
Such sages and saints are the Buddhas and Arhats and the “Masters of Wisdom” with whom H. P. B. claimed to
have become acquainted, and with whom everyone may become acquainted, if he
outgrows his own narrow little self and rises up to their plane.
The circumstance that modern
society does not know anything about the existence of holy persons and that
modern science has not yet discovered any saints, does not invalidate the
theory that there are human beings in whom the germ of Divinity contained in
every person has become so much unfolded, that a higher realm of spiritual knowledge,
unattainable by those who cling only to earthly things, has become revealed to
them, and that the souls of such persons, having become self-conscious in the
light of the Spirit, are in possession of extraordinary faculties.
Of such regenerated ones the
Bible states that they cannot sin, because they are born of God. (1 John iii. 9).
And in 1 Peter i. 33, we read that such souls having been purified in obeying
the truth through the spirit of unfeigned, love, are “born again, not of
corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the Word of God” acting in them.
H. P. B. never made any claims of
wanting her personality to be regarded as a god, saint or adept, and in a
letter to the author of these notes she expressly repudiates such claims,
saying that she is travelling on the Path, but has not yet attained the goal.
There was still a merely human
nature even in H. P. B.; she could still rejoice with the joyful, and sympathize
with the sorrowing, and this part of H. P. B.’s nature was made the continual
object of criticism by the “ psychic researcher ”, who knowing nothing about
divinity in humanity, saw in her only his own animal image reflected.
By such critics every nebulous
spot in her nature was investigated and magnified by means of their own morbid
imagination; but the sunny side of her nature they did not perceive, because
there was no light in themselves.
The sum and substance of what
they discovered, if shorn of what their own fancy added to it, was that H. P. B.
was kind and generous even to a fault: that she was impulsive and energetic and
sometimes allowed herself to be carried into extremes by her noble impulses.
They found that she smoked
cigarettes, that she spoke her thoughts without much ceremony, and absolutely
refused to be like these smooth-faced, sly and hypocritical saints, going about
in continual disguise and being looked upon by the world as the pillars of
church and state; while behind their sanctimoniousness is hidden nothing but
rottenness and conceit.
The screech owls of scientific sophistry
that came to interview the eagle of the Himalayas found that they could not
follow its flight to mountain summits that were entirely beyond the range of
their limited vision, and as they could not clip its wings, their envy became
aroused and they hooted and chattered, hurling calumnies at the royal bird.
In many instances these
calumniators overdid their work, and the extraordinary vituperance of their
vilifications contains sufficient evidence of the character of the spirit that
inspired such writings, so as to render any refutation quite unnecessary.
Some such writers charged her
with having committed immoral practices, and all such stories, as soon as they
were invented, found their way into print and were always readily taken up and
circulated by those intrepid newspaper-writers who are ever on the alert,
anxious to increase the circulation of their papers, by giving to their readers
something spicy and sensational.
Such stories were often exquisitely
absurd and caused no little hilarity among those who were acquainted with the
facts. Thus I remember that while I was in India, a story made its round
through some English and American papers, saying that a row had occurred among
the Theosophists at Adyar, because H. P. B. had become jealous of Col. Olcott, on
account of Madame Coulomb, and that Mr. Coulomb had in his rage refused to
furnish any more funds to carry on the business of the Theosophical Society.
Those who are acquainted with the
persons referred to, and know that the Coulombs were penniless and were
suffered to remain at Adyar for charity's sake, will appreciate the roar with
which this “news” was received by the Chelas.
There would have been no end of
writing and wasting of time, if all the slanders about H. P. B., that were
circulated by the pious missionaries of Madras and elsewhere, had had to be
refuted, especially as it is far easier to make a calumnious assertion, than to
disprove it.
Some of these calumnies may
however have been made with the best of intentions; for instance certain
persons threw doubts upon H. P. B.’s veracity, for the same reason that
prompted a certain African king to order the beheading of a European traveler:
because the latter had told the king, that in certain parts of Europe and at
certain seasons, the water of the rivers and lakes became so firm that one
could walk upon it; whereupon the king decided that such a liar should not be
suffered to live.
I would have but little regard
for the truth, if I were to attempt to claim that none of the accusations
brought forth against H. P. B. had any foundation in facts; but the principal
cause that brought troubles without end upon her, was her entire want of judgment
in regard to the manner in which worldly affairs must be conducted, a childlike
trust that the world would look at things in the way they appeared to her; an
entire disregard as to what the public would say or think about her; a desire
to shield her followers from the consequences of stupidities committed by them,
etc., etc.
What H. P. B. wanted she thought,
and what she thought she said, and what she said she acted, regardless of any
consequences. In her, as in an innocent child, thoughts, words and acts were
one and in harmony.
If we were to attempt to solve the
mystery of the “Sphinx of the nineteenth century” and give a history about the
true Ego of H. P. Blavatsky, we would first of all have to learn who is the
individuality, the “new creature” (2): that was embodied in the form of H. P. B., and know something of its
previous lives, so as to be able to understand what caused it to appear in a
woman's form upon this earth.
We would then have to accept the
theory that the soul of the regenerated is capable of living and acting beyond
the limits of the physical form which is its dwelling and instrument for
outward manifestation, and that the spiritual soul of such a person may be in
an ethereal astral form in some distant country (say in Tibet)-while the
physical body is still living and acting consciously and intelligently in
Europe and America.
But the world is not yet ripe
enough to receive a serious history, containing facts which are still a terra
incognita to Europe and science, and whose correspondences are to be found only
in the Acta Sanctorum, which
now-a-days are regarded even by the church as being “legendary and fabulous,”
or (to express it less politely) as being a tissue of lies.
Such a history would require
readers acquainted with the doctrines of Reincarnation and Karma; readers that
had themselves conquered their own nature, and by their own experience had been
enabled to realize what it means to be in the world but not of it.
But although the Bible says: that
“except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” {John iii. 3),
nevertheless the terms “rebirth” and “regeneration” have become words without
any meaning to the modern religionist, and absurdities to the scientist.
The religious visionary flatters
himself with believing that he is already regenerated and has attained
immortality. He does not know that regeneration in the spirit is accompanied
with an opening of the spiritual senses, and that his “regeneration” cannot
have taken place as long as he is blind to the light of the truth and deaf to
the “voice of the silence”.
“Re-generation” now-a-days is a word
without meaning to the man of the world, and to the churchman it means at best
a change of belief and an improvement of morals. The modern “Christian” has no understanding
for such passages of his Bible, as the following:
-
“My little children, of whom I travail in
birth again until Christ be formed in you." (Galat. iv. 19.)
-
“In Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth
anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.” (Galat. vi. 15.)
-
Etc., etc.
They do not believe what their
teacher says of his true followers, that the regenerated ones, those in whom “the
Son of God has come to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephes. iv. 13) will do the same
wonderful things that he performed himself.
They do not believe that no one
can possibly be in possession of conscious immortality, unless the “new
creature” has been born in him, and they flatter themselves in presuming that
their spirit is already immortal. But the Spirit immortality of the Spirit of
God will not render their souls immortal, if their souls refuse to be
fructified by that Spirit of God and to bring forth the divine child.
Let such “Christians” reflect
about the meaning of the words of the Bible, where it says:
« Marvel not that I said
unto thee, ye must be born again. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and
that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit. Except a man be born of water and
of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. »
(John iii., 5.)
Little will it serve the
sanctimonious to believe that their spirit is immortal, as long as they have no
spirit which they can properly call their own; because their soul contains no
divine love or spirit, and therefore cannot generate the “new creature” which
can claim immortality in the Christ.
This union of the mortal soul
with the immortal Spirit is the end and object of all Occultism and Theosophy.
It was this regeneration that H. P. B. taught; for “spiritual
regeneration" and “initiation” are synonymous terms.
But a doctrine which does not flatter
men’s vanity by making men believe that they are already immortal, owing to the
merits of a person that lived in the past, but claims that immortality is a
boon, gained only by heroic efforts in battling with the lower elements in our
nature, which prevent the action of divine grace within ourselves, is not
welcomed by those who prefer to run after money and pleasures and expect to
ride after death into heaven upon the back of another man; and therefore the
history of a regenerated soul would be believed or understood only by few.
Much easier would it be to clothe
such a history in the fictitious form of a novel, that makes no claims for
belief and in which everyone may believe as much as he is capable of understanding
and put away the rest. (3)
To understand the true mystery
that surrounded H. P. B., it will first be necessary to understand the mystery
called “Man”: for the Initiate, compared with the vulgar, is like a bird in
comparison with an egg. The bird knows of eggs and their history, but the eggs
know nothing of the existence of birds.
To solve the great mystery called
man, mankind will have to crawl out of the “philosophical egg” and, by becoming
free, attain the noble self-knowledge of Divinity in Humanity; but at the
present time there seem to be few, even among the so-called “Theosophists”,
having the faintest conception of what “divine self-knowledge” means.
Owing to the universal
misconception existing in regard to the true nature of man and the ignoring of
all that is divine in that nature, H. P. B. has been universally misunderstood
and misrepresented.
After a long and patient
observation, a conviction which I persistently refused to accept forced itself
upon me, namely, that in this respect far more harm has been done by H. P. B.'s
over-zealous friends and admirers, than by her enemies.
H. P. B. never asked to be
deified, and denied the possession of miraculous powers; but there were many of
her followers carrying on a fetish worship with her person, making the wildest
and most extravagant statements on her behalf, which on investigation were
found to be worthless, and thus only brought discredit upon her and her Theosophical
Society, while, with very few exceptions, these enthusiastic friends were the
first ones to desert her or become her enemies, when the illusions, which they
themselves had created, exploded.
According to the stories,
generated, believed and circulated by such admirers, H. P. B. was continually attended
by spirits; invisible “Masters from Tibet” danced attendance on her; they
either verbatim dictated her writings to her or “precipitated” her manuscripts
while she was taking her nap. (4)
Gnomes, sylphs, undines and salamanders
were at all times at her command, carrying her letters and superintending the
kitchen. There was nothing going on in any part of the world which —according
to their statements— H. P. B. did not know: but it was only too evident to outsiders,
that H. P. B. did not know everything, and that even in her greatest troubles
the fairy post did not work; but that for receiving information she, like other
mortals, had to depend upon terrestrial mails and telegraphs.
The fact is, that at the bottom
of all such statements there was a certain amount of truth, but the facts were
exaggerated beyond all limits by her over-enthusiastic friends.
H. P. B., according to her own
confession, was not a learned woman. She was not even clever. On the contrary,
all the great things she did were performed by her and some of her associates
in the most bungling possible manner, which often spoiled the good result, and
in calling her “the greatest impostor of the age” the agent of the Soc. Psych.
Res., who presented her with that title, merely certified to his own incapacity
to judge about character, for H. P. B. —as all who were acquainted with her
will testify— was never capable of disguising herself, and any imposture, great
or little, which she could have attempted, would have immediately been found out,
even by a child.
H. P. B. was neither clever nor
“smart”, but she was in possession of that in which most of her critics are
sadly deficient, namely, soul-knowledge, a department of “science” not yet
discovered by modern scientists and would-be-philosophers. The soul that lived
in her was a great soul, a Mahatma (from Maha, great, and Alma, soul).
This great soul, and not the
dress which H. P. B. used to wear, should be the object of our investigation,
not for the purpose of gratifying scientific curiosity — but for profiting by
the example
Now, it appears to me that I hear
a thousand voices ask the question:
What is the knowledge of the soul, and how can it be obtained?
Is there any other knowledge than that of the reasoning brain?
Can we know of any other thing than what we have been taught in our
school, what we have read in books, or what we remember of having heard?
To this we would answer:
Woe to the people that does not
know by heart that which is good and beautiful. Woe to those who have no
interior perception for justice and truth; who cannot feel true love, hope and faith, and who have to
study the encyclopedia to find out the meaning of the terms benevolence, charity,
generosity, spirituality, virtue, etc., etc.
All these things are not creations
of the imagination, nor products of the physical body; but spiritual living
powers, endowing with their qualities the soul that is in possession of them.
If these powers are permitted to grow and to become unfolded, then will their
true nature become clear to the mind, but no amount of intellectual speculation
will enable him who possesses them not, to realize what they are.
The study of these powers and the
art of developing them by practice formed the science of the soul, which Madame
Blavatsky taught. All the rest of her doctrines, regarding the constitution of
man, the evolution of worlds, etc., etc., were merely accessories to facilitate
self-knowledge; to destroy bigotry and superstition, and by freeing the mind
from prejudices, to give it a wider range of ennobling thought, and enable it
to form a grander and higher conception of God, Nature and Man.
What can such a study have to do
with the ghost stories, psychic researchers, coffee pots, trapdoors, and other
tomfooleries, that haunt the minds of those who seek in external things for
tests of the existence of things which they ought to possess themselves, before
they can truly deserve to be called men made in the image of God?
Verily those who became her
enemies because she could not gratify their curiosity ought to be blamed
themselves for their willful rejection of divine truth.
The first thing necessary for the
acquisition of soul knowledge is the possession of a soul, which means the
power to feel. Among the opponents of H. P. B. very little of the soul element
is to be found. They seem to exist entirely on the plane of the mind, that part
of man which only reasons and speculates; but which has no actual knowledge,
and which the ancient writers compared with the cold moonshine, because there
is nothing in it of the warm sunshine of love.
The element of the soul is the
will, and the divine will is universal love; such as creates a paradise — not
in the imagination, but in the hearts of those who are in possession of it.
When the morning star of divine love arises within the soul, peace enters with
it.
Therefore it is not said, that
the angels at the time when the Christ is born within the human heart sing: “Glory
be to those who are well versed in science and sophistry”; but they are said to
sing: “Glory be to that God who is universal Love, and peace to all men who are
of good (i.e. divine) will”,
Notes
- The Bible quotations contained in this article are not intended to imply that my views are based upon speculations on the sayings of the Bible: but are merely added as corroborative evidence for those who attribute any importance to them.
- Galat. vi. 15.
- In the “Talking Image of Urur” such facts have been portrayed. There the “Master of the Image” represents the true Ego, the regenerated soul, while the Image itself is merely the elementary body, the personality, through which the true Ego acts.
- After the above was written, Lucifer magazine of May 15th comes to my hands, where I find this statement singularly corroborated by herself on page 243.
(This article was published in Lucifer magazine, July 1891, p.365-373; and later in the book HPB: in memory of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, 1891, p.58-67)
OBSERVATION
It is interesting to note that several things mentioned
by Franz Hartmann about Blavatsky and little known by the public, were also reported
by Blavatsky's sister in the biography she subsequently wrote about her, such
as:
- That Blavatsky was not a learned person and she was very surprised to be able to argue with erudite sages and she did not know where this knowledge came from.
- O also that many individuals first adulated her, but when they saw that Blavatsky was not going to offer them what they wanted from her, then they became his fierce enemies.
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