Helena Blavatsky

The teaching

Taught from her own books, above all The Secret Doctrine (1888), The Key to Theosophy and The Voice of the Silence (1889).

Three fundamental propositions

The Secret Doctrine rests on three propositions. The first is an omnipresent, eternal, boundless and immutable principle, beyond the reach of thought, of which nothing can truly be said; every name given to it lessens it. All that exists is its expression, and it is the one root of spirit and of matter.

The second is the eternity of the universe as a boundless plane, on which numberless universes appear and disappear in turn, and with it the absolute universality of the law of periodicity, of flux and reflux, ebb and flow, which science finds in every part of nature. Nothing is made once and for ever: worlds and beings come forth, grow, pass away and come forth again.

The third is the fundamental identity of every soul with the universal oversoul, itself an aspect of the unknown root, and the obligatory pilgrimage of every soul through the cycle of incarnation under cyclic and karmic law. No soul is exempt and none is lost. Each goes the whole road, and rises at last by its own effort and merit.

The night and the day of the universe

The Stanzas of Dzyan, round which the book is built, open in the night between universes, which she calls pralaya. The eternal parent, space, sleeps wrapped in her ever invisible robes; time is not, for it lies asleep in the infinite bosom of duration; universal mind is not, for there are no beings to contain it. Then the night ends. A vibration stirs in the darkness, a ray goes out into the germ, the one becomes two and three, and the day of manifestation, the manvantara, begins, to run its course and close in another night.

The force that carries the divine thought into matter she calls Fohat: the bridge between spirit and substance, the energy that impresses the ideas of the divine mind on matter as the laws of nature. Through Fohat and the hosts of intelligences she calls the Dhyan Chohans the universe is shaped by mind from within, and nothing in it is dead or blind.

The pilgrimage of the soul

Spirit descends into matter and rises out of it again. The divine spark passes down through the elemental kingdoms, the mineral, the plant and the animal, gaining form and experience, until in the human being it awakens to itself; from there it climbs by its own effort, life after life, back toward the spirit it came from, now conscious and individual. The arc of descent and the arc of ascent together make the circle of evolution, and the human kingdom stands at its turning.

Karma, as The Key to Theosophy states it, is the ultimate law of the universe and the source of all its other laws: the unerring law that adjusts effect to cause on every plane and restores every broken balance. It is not a punishment laid on from outside. What a person does, thinks and wishes comes back to them, in this life or another, and so each makes their own future. Between lives the lower self is shed in kama-loka, the place of desire, and the higher rests in devachan until it is drawn back to birth.

Personality and individuality

A human being has seven principles, from the dense body to the spirit, whose names are given in The planes and the cord. They fall into two groups: a lower four, the body, its life, its double and its desires, which die; and a higher three, mind, the spiritual soul and spirit, which do not. Mind stands between, drawn down by desire and up by the spiritual soul.

From this comes her distinction between the personality and the individuality. The personality is the mask of one life, the name, face and character that last from birth to death. The individuality is the reincarnating ego, the higher mind joined to the spiritual soul, which wears one personality after another as an actor plays many parts. It is the individuality that learns, and the work of each life is to give it something worth keeping.

Brotherhood and the three objects

The Key to Theosophy gives the Society three objects: to form the nucleus of a universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, colour or creed; to promote the study of the scriptures, religions and sciences of the world, and above all of the old literature of Asia; and to investigate the hidden mysteries of nature and the psychic and spiritual powers latent in human beings. Only the first binds a member. The Society's motto is that there is no religion higher than truth.

Theosophy, in her teaching, is not a new religion but the wisdom at the root of them all, which she calls the Wisdom-Religion, kept whole by a few and veiled in the symbols of every faith. Isis Unveiled had made the case against two opponents at once: against the churches, for taking the veil for the truth, and against the science of her day, for denying whatever cannot be weighed.

The Masters

Behind the Society, she teaches, stand the Masters, or Mahatmas: men who have gone ahead of humanity on the same road, perfected themselves through many lives and gained knowledge and powers that others have yet to reach. They live apart, in the East, and they work for humanity through pupils and by persuasion, never by compulsion, leaving each person free.

The Voice of the Silence

The Voice of the Silence teaches the path of the disciple in short verses. Its first lesson is that the mind is the great slayer of the real, and that the disciple must slay the slayer: the restless, grasping mind must be stilled before the voice of the silence, the voice of the spirit within, can be heard. The way passes through three halls, of ignorance, of learning and of wisdom, and through seven portals, each opened by its own key: charity, harmony in word and act, patience, indifference to pleasure and pain, dauntless energy, contemplation and wisdom.

She sets the doctrine of the eye, the learning of the head, below the doctrine of the heart, the wisdom of the soul. At the end of the road stand two paths: the open path, which leads to liberation for oneself, and the secret path of renunciation, on which the one who has won freedom refuses it in order to stay and help a suffering world. The second she calls the higher, and its rule is that the disciple's soul should lend its ear to every cry of pain.

The root races

The second volume of The Secret Doctrine sets out seven root races of humanity, each on its own continent, and that teaching is given, with what it alleges and the facts that refute it, in Lemuria and Mu. It is a ranking of peoples, and it is false: all living people are one species, which arose in Africa, and no lost continent of Lemuria or Atlantis ever held a people.