The Wurzburg manuscript
The Wurzburg
manuscript is a partial copy of the first draft that Blavatsky wrote between
1885 and 1886, when The Secret Doctrine was intended to be an improved version
of Isis Unveiled, but later this project was scrapped when the masters decided
it would be a new work more complete.
The first edition
The first
edition was first published in 1888 in two volumes. The first volume is
subtitled Cosmogenesisand was published on October 20, 1888. The 500 copies were sold before date of publication to advance
subscribers. The second volume is subtitled
Anthropogenesis and was published towards the end of
the year.
The two
volumes on their first pages have a table of contents, and at the end of the
second volume there is an index of the two volumes.
Its editors
were:
-
The Theosophical Publishing Company. London.
-
William Q. Judge, 117, Nassau Street, New York.
-
The Manager of The Theosophist, Adyar, Madras.
And it was
printed by Allen, Scott and Co., 30 Bouverie Street, EC, London.
Cover of the first publication
Note:
Blavatsky and several of his collaborators assured that the Secret Doctrine will
have a total of four volumes. The third volume was already ready to be printed
and would deal with the lives of various adepts and occultists. The fourth
volume was in preparation and it would deal with practical occultism. But the
manuscripts of those next two volumes (3rd and 4th) disappeared and it is no
one knows what happened to them.
The second edition
The sales of
the first publication were so great that this same year 1888 a second printing
was requested immediately, but this was incorrectly called the second edition when in reality it was only a reprint of the
original with some small inaccuracies corrected.
The third edition
In 1893 (two
years after Blavatsky's death) Annie Besant who was the new leader of the
theosophical movement in Europe published a new edition in two volumes, known
as the "Third Revised Edition", although strictly speaking it was the
second edition. And this review
was mainly carried out by academic George Mead who was the ex-secretary of Mme.
Blavatsky and also Annie Besant participated a bit.
The original
text was considerably modified by these two individuals, and many theosophists
have criticized the enormous amount of changes they have made (more than
40'000), the vast majority of those changes being futile, such as change upper
case to lower case, or change italics and punctuation.
But there
were also more substantial changes such as incorporating footnotes into the
main text, and any reference to the third and fourth volumes that Blavatsky had
enunciated was also removed.
Therefore,
this edition cannot be considered as a completely faithful reproduction of the
original as Blavatsky wrote it. But despite this, this third edition is the one
that has had the most circulation and from which most of the translations have
been made.
It was
published by:
- The
Theosophical Publishing Society, London.
- The Path Office, New York.
- The Theosophist Office, Adyar.
And it was
originally printed by HPB Press, London, and was later reprinted by the Adyar
Theosophical Society in 1902, 1905 and 1908.
Index to the
third edition
A larger and
more complete index of the original index was published as a separate book in
1895, which was prepared by Alfred J. Faulding who was an important member of
the British section; and since the pagination of the original edition had been
changed, a key was included for those who had the original edition.
The editors
were:
-
The Theosophical Publishing Society, London.
- The
Path Office, New York.
-
The Theosophical Publishing Society, Benares.
- The Theosophist Office, Adyar.
Later an
index of the third volume was also incorporated and this book was reprinted in
1902, 1905, 1908, 1911, 1913, 1918 and 1921.
The third volume
In June 1897
Annie Besant published a book entitled " Occultism " pretending that it was the "Third Volume of
the Secret Doctrine" (and this is how she already titled it in the second
printing in 1910), and it is also known as "The Occultism of the Secret
Doctrine”.
But this is
not the third volume that Blavatsky had enunciated. In reality it is an
unfinished set of articles that Blavatsky had left on her desk after she died
and which Annie Besant collected.
But since
these texts were a very small volume, Annie Besant added other documents: part
of the Wurzburg manuscript and part
of the instructions that Blavatsky gave to her Esoteric Section.
Unfortunately Annie Besant also made many alterations in these texts.
Its editors
were:
-
The Theosophical Publishing Society, London and Benares
-
Theosophical Book Concern, Chicago
It was
reprinted numerous times in different formats as I detail below.
The Pasadena Theosophical Society Edition
It 1909 the
Aryan Theosophical Press of Point Loma, California (since then moved to Covina,
California, and known as Theosophical University Press) under the direction of
Katherine Tingley reprinted the original 1888 edition with some modifications:
A scholarly transliteration of Sanskrit words
according to an accepted standard, some corrections of faulty Greek and Latin
and of obvious typographical errors, and the occasional substitution of square
brackets in place of parentheses for clearness. No changes were made in H. P.
Blavatsky's language and no passages were eliminated. This is the standard
edition still being published by the Theosophical University Press, Covina.
·
Online
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PDF
The second
edition took place in 1917, but it is the same text only bound in four volumes.
The third edition took place in 1925 bound in two and four volumes. In both
cases were published by the Aryan Theosophical Press.
The fourth
edition was published by Theosophical University Press in 1947 as a reprint of
the 1925 edition. The 1952 edition is verbatim
with the original 1888 edition. This was reprinted in the Netherlands in 1963
and 1970, and in the United States in 1974.
Adyar's three-volume edition
In 1911 the Theosophical
Society Adyar decided to republish the third revised edition together with the third
volume, and was reprinted in 1913, 1918, 1921 and 1928.
Photo of the three volumes plus the index that was
sold separately
The United Lodge of Theosophists edition
The members
of the United Lodge of Theosophists did not like the modifications that the
other Theosophical organizations made, and that is why in 1925 their publishing
house The Theosophy Company of Los Angeles published a photographic facsimile of the two original volumes,
bound in a single volume.
This edition
provided the opportunity to re-study Blavatsky's work exactly as she had
published it, without changes or corrections, although typographical errors
remain there. And in the following years several editions were published.
The Six Volume Fourth Edition of Adyar
In 1938 to
celebrate fifty years of the Secret Doctrine, the Theosophical Society Adyar decided
to republish all its Secret Doctrine publications in a single set but
distributed them in more volumes:
-
The first volume of
the third revised edition was divided into two, forming volumes 1 and 2.
-
The second volume of
the third revised edition was also divided in two, forming volumes 3 and 4.
-
The third volume
became volume 5.
-
And the index of the
third revised edition plus a glossary became volume 6.
Some people believe
that these extra volumes correspond to volumes 3 and 4 that Blavatsky
enunciated, but that is incorrect.
Many of the
footnotes introduced into the text in the third revised edition were
restored as footnotes, and the few left in the
text were enclosed in square brackets.
It was
originally edited by the Theosophical Publishig House, Adyar; and published by
C. Subbarayudu in The Vasanta press, Adyar; and was later reprinted in 1946, 1950, 1952 , 1962 and 1971,
which are known as the 5th and 6th editions of Adyar and Wheaton.
·
(The
third volume I have not found)
The centenary
edition
In 1988 to
commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Secret
Doctrine, the Theosophical Society Adyar published a version that was edited by
Boris de Zirkoff in two volumes and an index, retaining the text and pagination
of the original edition, but where Zirkoff corrected the transcription of
oriental terms and increased the quotations that appear in the work. It was
reprinted in 1993.
Index of the Theosophical Society Pasadena
A more
complete and extensive index was prepared by John P. Van Mater and published in
1997 by Theosophical University Press.
·
Online
·
PDF
In summary
The Adyar
Theosophical Society spent a long time (until the 1970s) publishing the third
revised edition of Mead and Besant in various forms, but currently it only uses
the edition elaborated by Boris de Zirkoff.
The Pasadena
and Point Loma Theosophical Societies use the edition commissioned by Katherine
Tingley.
And the
United Lodge of Theosophists uses the original edition.
In the 21st
century, hardly anyone uses the altered edition by George Mead and Annie
Besant, and I personally find the improvements made by Zirkoff and Tingley
beneficial.
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