Blavatsky died on May 9, 1891,
and in tribute William Judge, who had been his main collaborator, wrote this
article which was published the following month in Lucifer magazine.
H.P.B. ∴
A LION-HEARTED COLLEAGUE PASSES
On the shore stood Hiawatha,
Turned and waved his hand at parting;
On the clear and luminous water
Launched his birch canoe for sailing,
From the pebbles of the margin
Shoved it forth into the water;
Whispered to it:
“Westward! Westward!”
And with speed it darted forward.
And the evening sun descending
Set the clouds on fire with redness,
Burned the broad sky, like a prairie,
Left upon the level water
One long track and trail of splendor,
Down whose stream, as down a river,
Westward, Westward Hiawatha Sailed
Into the fiery sunset,
Sailed into the purple vapors,
Sailed into the dusk of evening.
. . .
Thus departed Hiawatha,
Hiawatha the Beloved, . . .
To the Islands of the Blessed.
(Note: this is an excerpt from the poem "The Song of
Hiawatha" by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.)
That which men call death is but a change of location for the Ego, a mere
transformation, a forsaking for a time of the mortal frame, a short period of
rest before one reassumes another human frame in the world of mortals. The Lord
of this body is nameless; dwelling in numerous tenements of clay, it appears to
come and go; but neither death nor time can claim it, for it is deathless,
unchangeable, and pure, be yond Time itself, and not to be measured. So our old
friend and fellow-worker has merely passed for a short time out of sight, but
has not given up the work begun so many ages ago — the uplifting of humanity,
the destruction of the shackles that enslave the human mind.
I met H.P.B. in 1875, in the city of New York, where she was living in Irving
Place. There she suggested the formation of the Theosophical Society, lending
to its beginning the power of her individuality and giving to its President and
those who have stood by it ever since the knowledge of the existence of the
Blessed Masters. In 1877 she wrote Isis
Unveiled in my presence, and was helped in the proofreading by the
President of the Society. This book she declared to me then was intended to aid
the cause for the advancement of which the Theosophical Society was founded. Of
this I speak with knowledge, for I was present and at her request drew up the
contract for its publication between her and her New York publisher. When that
document was signed she said to me in the street, “Now I must go to India.”
In November, 1878, she went to India and continued the work of helping
her colleagues to spread the Society’s influence there, working in that
mysterious land until she returned to London in 1887. There was then in London but
one Branch of the Society —the London Lodge— the leaders of which thought it
should work only with the upper and cultured classes. The effect of H.P.B.’s
coming there was that Branches began to spring up, so that now they are in many
English towns, in Scotland, and in Ireland. There she founded her magazine Lucifer, there worked night and day for
the Society loved by the core of her heart, there wrote The Secret Doctrine, The Key
to Theosophy, and The Voice of the
Silence, and there passed away from a body that had been worn out by
unselfish work for the good of the few of our century, but of the many in the
centuries to come.
It has been said by detractors that she went to India because she merely
left a barren field here, by sudden impulse and without a purpose. But the
contrary is the fact. In the very beginning of the Society I drew up with my
own hand at her request the diplomas of some members here and there in India
who were in correspondence and were of different faiths. Some of them were
Pārsīs. She always said she would have to go to India as soon as the Society
was under way here and Isis should be finished. And when she had been in India
some time, her many letters to me expressed her intention to return to England so
as to open the movement actively and outwardly there in order that the three
great points on the world’s surface —India, England, and America— should have
active centers of Theosophical work.
This determination was expressed to me before the attempt made by the Society
for Psychical Research on her reputation —of which also I know a good deal to
be used at a future time, as I was present in India before and after the
alleged exposé— and she returned to England to carry out her purpose even in
the face of charges that she could not stay in India. But to disprove these she
went back to Madras, and then again rejourneyed to London.
That she always knew what would be done by the world in the way of
slander and abuse I also know, for in 1875 she told me that she was then
embarking on a work that would draw upon her unmerited slander, implacable
malice, uninterrupted misunderstanding, constant work, and no worldly reward.
Yet in the face of this her lion heart carried her on. Nor was she unaware of
the future of the Society. In 1876 she told me in detail the course of the
Society’s growth for future years, of its infancy, of its struggles, of its
rise into the “luminous zone” of the public mind; and these prophecies are
being all fulfilled.
Much has been said about her “phenomena,” some denying them, others
alleging trick and device. Knowing her for so many years so well, and having
seen at her hands in private the production of more and more varied phenomena
than it has been the good fortune of all others of her friends put together to
see, I know for myself that she had control of hidden powerful laws of nature
not known to our science, and I also know that she never boasted of her powers,
never advertised their possession, never publicly advised anyone to attempt
their acquirement, but always turned the eyes of those who could understand her
to a life of altruism based on a knowledge of true philosophy.
If the world thinks that her days were spent in deluding her followers by
pretended phenomena, it is solely because her injudicious friends, against her
expressed wish, gave out wonderful stories of “miracles” which can not be
proved to a skeptical public and which are not the aim of the Society nor were
ever more than mere incidents in the life of H. P. Blavatsky.
Her aim was to elevate the race. Her method was to deal with the mind of
the century as she found it, by trying to lead it on step by step; to seek out
and educate a few who, appreciating the majesty of the Secret Science and
devoted to “the great orphan Humanity,” could carry on her work with zeal and
wisdom; to found a Society whose efforts —however small itself might be— would
inject into the thought of the day the ideas, the doctrines, the nomenclature
of the Wisdom Religion, so that when the next century shall have seen its 75th
year the new messenger coming again into the world would find the Society still
at work, the ideas sown broadcast, the nomenclature ready to give expression
and body to the immutable truth, and thus to make easy the task which for her
since 1875 was so difficult and so encompassed with obstacles in the very
paucity of the language — obstacles harder than all else to work against.
William Q. Judge.
(The Path, June
1891, p.65-68; Echoes I, p.191-194)
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