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WAS BLAVATSKY A SPIRITIST?

 
 
(Note: at this time spiritualism and spiritism were considered the same thing.)
 
 
Several historians consider that Blavatsky before founding the Theosophical Society was a professed spiritist who was essentially guided by the spirit of John King, a well-known character in professional mediumship séances in both hemispheres, and it was only later that she showed herself publicly hostile towards spiritism and used deliberate lies to hide her spiritist past.
 
The arguments of these historians are mainly based on the book “A Modern Priestess of Isis” wrote by Vsevolod Solovyov, but as I am going to show you below, this assetion is false.
 
To begin, it has been demostrated that Vsevolod Solovyov wrote intentionally many lies in his book to discredit Blavatsky (see link).
 
And while it is true that Blavatsky was communicating with John King, you should know that she was not communicating with an elementary posing as John King, but sometimes it was an astral entity that Blavatsky manipulated, and sometimes it was the Adept Hilarión who sometimes he posing as "the spirit of John King" (see link).
 
 
So what was Blavatsky's position towards spiritism?
 
 
Blavatsky's position regarding spiritism is expressed in a letter she wrote to Professor Hiram Corson on February 16, 1875 (seven months before founding the Theosophical Society):
 
« I am here in this country [The United States] sent by my Lodge on behalf of Truth in modern spiritualism, and it is my most sacred duty to unveil what is, and expose what is not.
. . .
When I became a spiritualist, it was not through the agency of the ever-lying, cheating mediums, miserable instruments of the undeveloped Spirits of the lower Sphere, the ancient Hades.
 
My belief is based on something older than the Rochester knockings, and springs out from the same source of information that was used by Raymond Lully, Picus della Mirandola, Cornelius Agrippa, Robert Fludd, Henry More, et cetera, etc., all of whom have ever been searching for a system that should disclose to them the "deepest depths" of the Divine nature, and show them the real tie which binds all things together. I found at last, and many years ago, the cravings of my mind satisfied by this theosophy.
. . .
In my eyes, Allan Kardec and Flammarion, Andrew Jackson Davis and Judge Edmonds, are but schoolboys just trying to spell their A B C and sorely blundering sometimes»
(www.theosociety.org/pasadena/corson/cors-lt1.htm)
 
 
 
 
In a letter written to Dr. Franz Hartmann on April 3, 1886, Blavatsky reiterated what she had written to Professor Hiram Corson:
 
« I was sent to America on purpose and sent to the Eddies. There I found Olcott in love with spirits, as he became in love with the Masters later on. I was ordered to let him know that spiritual phenomena without the philosophy of Occultism were dangerous and misleading.
 
I proved to him that all that mediums could do through spirits, others [with their developed powers] could do at will without any spirits at all; that bells and thought-reading, raps and physical phenomena, could be achieved by anyone who had a faculty of acting in his physical body through the organs of his astral body; and I had that faculty ever since I was four years old, as all my family know. I could make furniture move and objects fly apparently, and my astral arms that supported them remained invisible; all this ever before I knew even of Masters. Well, I told him the whole truth»
(www.blavatskyarchives.com/blavatskyhartmann6.htm)
 
 
 
 
And in this regard Colonel Olcott in his "Old Diary Leaves" commented:
 
« Strolling along with my new acquaintance, we talked together about the Eddy phenomena and those of other lands. I found she had been a great traveller and seen many occult things and adepts in occult science, but at first she did not give me any hint as to the existence of the Himalayan Sages or of her own powers. She spoke of the materialistic tendency of American Spiritualism, which was a sort of debauch of phenomena accompanied by comparative indifference to philosophy.
. . .
H.P.B. tried her best to make me suspect the value of William Eddy’s phenomena as proofs of the intelligent control of a medium by spirits; telling me that, if genuine, they must be the double of the medium escaping from his body and clothing itself with other appearances; but I did not believe her. I contended that the forms were of too great diversities of height, bulk, and appearance to be a masquerade of William Eddy; they must be what they seemed, viz., the spirits of the dead. Our disputes were quite warm on occasions.
. . .
I thought it a veritable John King then, for its personality had been as convincingly proved to me, I fancied, as anybody could have asked. But now, after seeing what H.P.B. could do in the way of producing mayavic (i.e., hypnotic) illusions and in the control of elementals, I am persuaded that “John King” was a humbugging elemental, worked by her like a marionette and used as a help towards my education. Understand me, the phenomena were real, but they were done by no disincarnate human spirit. Since writing the above, in fact, I have found the proof, in her own handwriting, pasted in our Scrapbook, Vol. I.
 
She kept up the illusion for months—just how many I cannot recollect at this distance of time—and I saw numbers of phenomena done as alleged by John King—as, for example, the whole remarkable series at the Philadelphia residence of the Holmeses and that of H.P.B. herself, above referred to. He was first, John King, an independent personality, then John King, messenger and servant—never the equal—of living adepts, and finally an elemental pure and simple, employed by H.P.B. and a certain other expert in the doing of wonders.
. . .
Little by little, H.P.B. let me know of the existence of Eastern adepts and their powers, and gave me by a multitude of phenomena the proofs of her own control over the occult forces of nature. At first, as I have remarked, she ascribed them to “John King,” and it was through his alleged friendliness that I first came into personal correspondence with the Masters.
. . .
Some, like Damodar and H.P.B., have first seen them in visions while young; some have encountered them under strange guises in most unlikely places; I was introduced to them by H.P.B. through the agency that my previous experiences would make most comprehensible, a pretended medium-overshadowing “spirit.” John King brought four of the Masters to my attention, of whom one was a Copt, one a representative of the Neo Platonist Alexandrian school, one—a very high one, a Master of the Masters, so to say—a Venetian, and one an English philosopher, gone from men’s sight, yet not dead. The first of these became my first Guru»
(Vol. I, p. 6-19)
 
 
 
 
In a letter that Blavatsky wrote to William Quan Judge, she expressed her repudiation of spiritualism:
 
« The more I see of spiritist seances in this cradle and hotbed of Spiritism and mediums, the more clearly I see how dangerous they are for humanity. Poets speak of a thin partition between the two worlds. There is no partition whatever. Blind people have imagined obstacles of this kind because coarse organs of hearing, sight, and feeling do not allow the majority of people to penetrate the difference of being.
 
Besides, Mother-Nature has done well in endowing us with coarse senses, for otherwise the individuality and personality of man would become impossible, because the dead would be continually mixing with the living, and the living would assimilate themselves with the dead. It would not be so bad if there were around us only spirits of the same kind as ourselves, the half-spiritual refuse of mortals who died without having reconciled themselves to the great necessity of death.
. . .
And the wider the doors are opened to them the further the necromantic epidemic is spread; the more unanimous the mediums and the spiritists in spreading the magnetic fluid of their evocations, the more power and vitality are acquired by the glamour.
. . .
It stands to reason that this mere earthly refuse, irresistibly drawn to the earth, cannot follow the soul and spirit — these highest principles of man's being. With horror and disgust I often observed how a reanimated shadow of this kind separated itself from the inside of the medium; how, separating itself from his astral body and clad in someone else's vesture, it pretended to be someone's relation, causing the person to go into ecstasies and making people open wide their hearts and their embraces to these shadows whom they sincerely believed to be their dear fathers and brothers, resuscitated to convince them of life eternal, as well as to see them.
. . .
Oh, if they only knew the truth, if they only believed! If they saw, as I have often seen, a monstrous, bodiless creature seizing hold of someone present at these spiritistic sorceries! It wraps the man as if with a black shroud, and slowly disappears in him as if drawn into his body by each of his living pores»
(The Path, February 1895, p.379-381)
 
 
 
 
And in her scrapbook Blavatsky wrote with a pen:
 
« Orders received from T*** B*** [Tuitit Bey] through P*** personating J. K. [John King].
 
He ordered to begin telling the public the truth about spiritistic phenomena and their mediums. And now my martyrdom will begin! I will have all the Spiritists against me in addition to the Christians and the skeptics!
 
Thy Will, oh M . . . be done!
 
H. P. B»
(Vol. I, p.27 [35])
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
CONCLUSION
 
As you can see, Blavatsky produced mediumistic phenomena, but not because she was a spiritualist, but to show with real examples what spiritualistic phenomena consisted of and the reason why spiritism is dangerous and deceptive. But despite the evidence, many spiritists did not accept her explanations and rejected her.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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