The Authentic Letters of
H.P.B., As Edited by One
Of the Main Founders of the
Theosophical Movement
William Q. Judge
H.P.
Blavatsky and W.Q. Judge
Introduction to Chapter 8
of the Present Online Edition:
In
the present Chapter, after some paragraphs in which H.P.B. describes a passing
state of relative happiness of her lower
self, the last paragraphs of the chapter show the extent of the solitude an
Initiate must face as he or she works
for mankind.
The Initiate sows loyalty and compassion, and harvests - loneliness. H.P.B. mentions as a true friend Mr.
Solovioff, who was to be in fact one of her judases. Being alone and
misunderstood - or even attacked by nearly everyone at the personality level -
may seem to be painful, but it prepares the Initiate (and the aspirant to
discipleship) for the next steps along the road to Detachment and Inner Freedom.
Probations teach the pilgrim to live
according to this motto:
“Intelligence is impartial: no man is your enemy: no man is your friend.
All alike are your teachers.”[1]
The paragraph starting with the words “In every country” is an
extraordinary description of the real theosophical movement, which soars above
“theosophical” bureaucracies, corporations and personalities.
H.P.B. mentions once more Mr. Hitrovo, who at the time was - as we have
seen in Chapter 7 - the Russian Consul General in Egypt. Mr. Mackenzie Wallace and
the Nubar Pasha of Cairo were already referred to, at the close of the previous
chapter. “Khedive” is the title used by the Turkish viceroys in Egypt from 1867
to 1914.
(Carlos
Cardoso Aveline)
NOTE:
[1] “Light on the
Path”, written down by M.C., Theosophy Company (India), Bombay (Mumbai), 1991, 90 pp., see p. 24.
Letters of H.P. Blavatsky [1]
Chapter VIII
[THE PATH, Volume X, New
York, July 1895, pp. 105-108.]
Writing from Suez, on November 30th, 1884, H.P.B. says:
“I sit in an hotel ‘by the sea and wait for the
weather.’ [2] -In
plain words I am waiting for our steamer, which is now busy crawling along the
canal. We arrived here direct from Cairo by rail, having spent ten days there,
which counts for much these days. That they mean much you will see for yourself
by the long telegrams from the London newspapers which I send to you. I am
beginning to be convinced that I actually am a celebrity when so much money is
paid for telegrams about me. The correspondent of the Daily Telegraph came
personally to interview me, and asked my permission to let his readers know of
my discoveries as to the antecedents of Mon. and Mme. Coulomb, and as to my own
‘movements’. In the telegrams as you see they are styled ‘blackmailers’ and ‘fraudulent
bankrupts’, hiding from several ordres d’arret. You will also
see that in Alexandria and Cairo I was ‘received very warmly by the Viceroy and
the cream of society’. And so I really was. You cannot imagine how much was
made of me. As soon as Hitrovo learned that I had arrived, he invited us to his
house and immediately began all sorts of dinners, lunches, picnics, till the
very sky was hot. Our Russian compatriots, Hitrovo, Abaza, Tschegloff,
gentleman-in-waiting, and the ex-Madame Beketoff, nee Princess
Vera Gagarin and now Countess de la Salla - all of them such nice, kindly
people that I do not know how to thank them for their services and their
kindness. And even on the part of the foreigners, I was astonished, not with
their extreme amiability - to amiability I am used - but with their real
cordiality and simplicity of manner. Next morning I went with Mrs.
Cooper-Oakley to see the Nubars, taking with me the letter of Mackenzie
Wallace, and as soon as my card was sent in, Nubar Pasha in person came to meet
us nearly to the street door. He led us into the Palace, brought his wife and
his daughter, Madame Tigran Pasha, and they were all so kind to us, we might
have been old friends. Certainly I ascribe it all to the letter of my dear Olga
Alexeëvna (Madame N.). Madame Nubar Pasha is an Armenian, a well-educated and
well-read woman, speaking French like a Parisian, a real grande dame.We
lunched and dined with them twice. At their house I made the acquaintance of a
dear Russian soul, Countess de la Salla. Her husband is an adjutant to the
Khedive, but he is more like a healthy, nice-looking Russian lad than an
Italian. She knew me by hearsay and also as ‘Radha Bai’, and when she heard
that I was the niece of General Rostislav Fadeef, she positively fell on my
neck and kissed me. Uncle used to go to their house as an intimate friend, and
she was so attached to him that she had tears in her eyes when she asked me for
particulars of his death. She took me up, and began to take me from one
aristocratic house to another, proclaiming to all that I am a ‘celebrity,’ a ‘wonderful
woman,’ an authoress, a savant and what not. She took me to the Vice-Reine, as
the wife of the Khedive is called here, assuring me that it was absolutely
necessary. There in the Khedive’s Hareem I found a crowd of visitors, most of
them English women, wives of the notabilities who are now reigning over Egypt.
My old, but not kindly acquaintance from India, Lady B., who was always an
enemy to the T.S., fairly stared at me, finding me on a sofa side by side with
their Vice-Reine; and the Countess de la Salla immediately
wanted to know if she was a Theosophist! and declared that she herself had
joined the Society and was ‘awfully proud of her diploma’! Un coup de
thèatre! Then she took me to the niece of Ishmail Pasha, the late
Khedive; to his son’s wife, Princess Hussain. Both these Princesses and the
wife of the Khedive have a European education, are Parisian in speech - des
emancipées. The Vice-Reine is positively a beauty, a
most charming face, but it is a pity she is too stout. The de la Sallas have
got up a dinner-party for me, inviting about fifty of the local aristocracy,
both French and English, as well as our diplomatic corps. All the Russians are
especially delighted with my having turned an English clergyman, the Rev. C.
Leadbeater, into such an ardent Theosophist. As if he were the only one! Why
amongst our members we have even got Bishops.
“Well, and now I am starting for Madras to
fight the pseudo-Christian missionaries. God’s will be done; and if He does not
give us up the pig won’t eat us.’ [3]
Good-bye my dear, my loved ones: maybe forever, but even this would not matter.
Happiness is not to be gained on earth. Here we have the dark entrance-hall
alone, and only on opening the door into the real living place, into the
reception-room of life, shall we see light. Whether in Heaven, in Nirvana, in
Swarga is all the same: the name does not matter. But as to the divine
Principle it is One, and there is only one Light, however differently it may be
understood by various earthly darknesses. Let us wait patiently for the day of
our real, our best birth. Yours until that day, until Nirvana and forever.”
H.P.B. left India in April, 1885. She was
desperately ill at the time, and there was so much confusion over her departure
that she was not even given her clothes to take with her. She gave Colonel
Olcott her word of honor that she would not say where she was living until the
worst of the storm had blown over, and she kept her word. With Babajee and Mary
Flynn she travelled to Naples, and there lived in entire seclusion for some months.
Whilst there, she put in preliminary order her materials for the Secret
Doctrine. Madame Jelihovsky writes that she herself sometimes did not
like the idea of certain people in Tibet apparently monopolizing all the wisdom
in the universe. H. P. B. would reply that they did not monopolize such wisdom;
she spoke of the existence of these particular Great Souls because she knew of
their existence, but others no doubt existed in other parts of the world who
were equally wise and equally great.
“In every country and in every age there were
and there will be people, pure of heart, who, conquering their earthly thoughts
and the passions of the flesh, raise their spiritual faculties to such a pitch
that the mysteries of being and the laws governing Nature and hidden from the
uninitiated, are revealed to them. Let blind men persecute them; let them be
burned and hunted from ‘societies acknowledged by law;’ let them be called
Magi, Wise Men, Raj Yogis or saints - they have lived and they still live
everywhere, recognized or unrecognized. For these people who have illumined
themselves during their life-time, there are no obstacles, there are no bodily
ties. They do not know either distance or time. They are alive and active in
the body as well as out of it. They are, wherever their
thought and their will carries them. They are not tied down by anything, either
by a place, or by their temporary mortal covering.”
When the three months’ residence in Naples had
nearly expired, H.P.B. thought of going to Germany, where, as she wrote, they
at least had warm stoves and double windows in the winter, and where it was
possible to be comfortable indoors. She also vigorously defended the “Adyar
Theosophists” for having left her in such sore straits in Naples, and protested
that they had done all that was possible for her under the circumstances; and
to prove that the Society itself was loyal to her, she sent her relatives
hundreds of letters from Branches and people in India, England, and “especially
in America,” protesting against her retirement. She had resigned her office of
Corresponding Secretary at Colonel Olcott’s urgent entreaty, as he had been
greatly alarmed over the Coulomb attack.
All her letters at this time breathed peace and
rest, even gladness, caused by the many proofs of sincere friendship from such
people, she wrote,
- “as Solovioff. [4] I am travelling with him in Switzerland. I really cannot
understand what makes him so attached to me. As a matter of fact I cannot help
him in the least. I can hardly help him to realize any of his hopes. Poor man.
I am so sorry for him and all of them.”
NOTES:
[1] Copyright.
1895.
[2] A Russian
proverb.
[3] A Russian
proverb.
[4] Who
afterwards became her bitter enemy, as all his prayers to be taken as a Chela
were utterly rejected.
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On the role of the esoteric movement in the ethical
awakening of mankind during the 21st century, see the book “The Fire
and Light of Theosophical Literature”, by Carlos Cardoso Aveline.
Published in 2013 by The Aquarian
Theosophist, the volume has 255 pages and can be obtained through Amazon
Books.
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