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DR. HÜBBE SCHLEIDEN'S ACCOUNT OF THE MAKING OF THE SECRET DOCTRINE



Dr. Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden was a prominent German scholar who contributed greatly to the formation of the Theosophical Society in Germany, and about the experiences he had during the making of The Secret Doctrine, he mentioned the following:


« When I visited Madame Blavatsky in October, 1885, she had just begun to write it, and in January, 1886, she had finished about a dozen chapters.

While I occupied myself chiefly with Babaji, who was then living with her, she was writing at her manuscript almost all day, from the early morning until the afternoon and even until night, unless she had guests. At that time she wrote articles for The Theosophist as well.

(And this despite the fact that Colonel Olcott had expelled her from Adyar.)

But she had scarcely any books, not half a dozen, and I had to procure for her an English Bible, either to quote some text correctly or to control the correctness of some quotation.

In many respects her work was then carried on in a very similar way to that which Col. Olcott describes in Chapter XIII of his "Old Diary Leaves," in the April number of The Theosophist. I also saw her write down sentences as if she were copying them from something before her, where, however, I saw nothing.

I did not pay much attention to the manner of her work from the standpoint of a hunter of phenomena, and did not control it for that purpose; but I know that I saw a good deal of the well-known blue Kuthumi handwriting as corrections and annotations on her manuscripts as well as in books that lay occasionally on her desk. And I noticed this principally in the morning before she had commenced to work.

I slept on the couch in her study after she had withdrawn for the night, and the couch stood only a few feet from her desk. I remember well my astonishment one morning when I got up to find a great many pages of foolscap covered with that blue pencil handwriting lying on her own manuscript, at her place on her desk.

How these pages got there I do not know, but I did not see them before I went to sleep and no person had been bodily in the room during the night, for I am a light sleeper.

I must say though that the view I took then was the same that I hold now. I never did and never shall judge of the value or the origin of any mental product from the way and manner in which it is produced. And for this reason I withheld my opinion then, thinking and saying:

-      "I shall wait until The Secret Doctrine is finished and then I can read it quietly; that will be the test for me, the only one that will be any good."


This is the reason why on the night of my last parting from Blavatsky, the two certificates, which were printed for the first time in the last April number of The Path, page 2, were given tome.

At least I found them in my copy of Hodgson's S.P.R. Report after I had left her. I am the person who showed them to Mr. Judge in London last August. From the advice given me in the one signed K.H. I was not to publish them, but Mr. Judge was authorized to do so by the instructions which he received.



In concluding I will repeat that I consider The Secret Doctrine to be a book of the utmost importance, for I have not the least doubt that it really does contain the Secret Doctrine, the sacred wisdom of all sages and of all ages. In it are given the only true and useful (expedient) keys which can solve the riddles of existence as well of the macrocosm as of the microcosm.

I find it, however, very desirable, if not necessary, that explanatory abstracts should be written to it, in order to turn the contents to better use for present readers. That is the reason that I wrote my abstract from it in 1891, which I called "Lusty Leid und Liebe," which confined itself to the language and to the terms of Darwin, Haeckel and modern philosophy, with the purpose of putting a key to The Secret Doctrine into the hands of the leading scientists. My effort found no grace with the English public, but some in Germany.

Finally, I think it is an absolutely useless question, who wrote Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine. It was written with her pen: but whether she was the adept herself, or some other adept or adepts wrote it through her and with her, is quite immaterial for the work itself and its indisputable value. »


(Reminiscences of H. P. Blavatsky and The Secret Doctrine by the Countess Constance Wachtmeister, appendix 6, p.112-114)





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