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Blavatsky, the Secret Doctrine Commentaries Book Reviews / ARIES . () – H[elena] P[etrovna] Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine Commentaries: The Unpub- lished Instructions, transcribed and annotated by Michael Gomes, The Hague: I[nternational] S[tudy-centre for] I[ndependent] S[earch for Truth] Foundation . xvi + pp. ISBN - One of the great enigmas surrounding Madame Blavatsky’s writings concerns the striking differences between her renowned books Isis Unveiled () and The Secret Doctrine (), the one appearing to be a special synthesis of eso- teric traditions and the other basically a commentary on the stanzas (“slokas”) of an archaic (“Akashic”) document (or “Book of Dzyan”), purportedly asso- ciated with Tibet yet mediated through Masters who are still available to Blavatsky (and the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society) to elucidate its secret message. The Secret Doctrine is a much more systematic work than Isis, and expounding both “Cosmogenesis” and “Anthropogenesis” it fills out details of both cosmic cycles and of “Four Prehistoric Continents” (especially the lost civilizations of Lemuria and Atlantis). Various scholars have rightly deduced that the differences between the two works have to do with the appearance of the so-called “Mahatma Letters” delivered by the etheric Masters Morya and Koot Hoomi in – to Alfred Percy Sinnett, who had met Blavatsky in India () and had quickly gained influence in the Theosophical Soci- ety. Through Sinnett, a newspaper editor and a man well able to organize his thoughts, the Letters presented the first clear and systematic account of man- vantaras, “world rings”, “rounds” and yugas in the eternal-looking cosmic pro- cesses that became fixtures in Theosophical teaching, and presented the theory of the seven “root races” that manifest in the seven “rounds” or stages of our globe. Because the original Letters had some disparaging things to say about Blavatsky, as “the Old Lady” who was “guilty of deceit” and “over-zealous”, her authority as co-founder of the Society was seriously threatened, especially when Sinnett followed the Letters up with the publication of his Esoteric Buddhism (). It is my own view that The Secret Doctrine, written in relative seclusion in Germany and Belgium, was above all a move to re-secure her primacy as the foremost accessory to “the Masters”, who now took on centrality in the politics of the Theosophical movement. The abstruse manner in which Blavatsky presented her “revelatory” materi- als, and the very complexity of her cosmo-history and root-race theory, made it virtually inevitable that there would be endless debates about details, and jostling over control of “Truth” and the Masters’ intentions (and Sinnett’s orderly presentation of matters was always going to be needed to clarify con- troversial points). Once The Secret Doctrine was published (and it contains © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, DOI: 10.1163/156798911X581289 Book Reviews / ARIES . () – challenges to Esoteric Buddhism right from the start), she was bound to face in-house questioning about the meanings of her new text, and to uphold her authority under intellectual pressures and threats of calumniation, particularly in Great Britain, where the Mahatma Letters had most influence (even if they remained unpublished until ). How interesting it is, then, that in recorded London meetings from January to June , recently made available through the welcome labours of Michael Gomes on a long unpublished manuscript (apparently kept for many years in Amsterdam), Blavatsky is shown facing a barrage of questions about her newly disclosed systematic occultism. This is why this newly published volume is so important: it belongs to a context in which tensions ran high about “new religious leadership” and “occult authori- tativeness”, and it shows a Blavatsky under serious scrutiny. If readers are likely to find themselves confused over all the technical points, the twenty-two documented discussions in this large volume will make sense if one appreciates that subtle differences between Sinnett’s and Blavatsky’s “cosmo-histories” are under investigation. In the cosmogonic teaching of The Secret Doctrine, for example, Blavatsky had taken a more positive approach than found in the Letters to the pre-human entities or “planetary spirits” called Dhyani-Chohans, and she showed more flexibility over proto-human life vis- à-vis rounds connected to “the elemental kingdom” (of mineral, vegetal and animal states); and so these matters had to be sorted out (esp., pp. – , –, –). Apropos Blavatsky’s macroscopic vision of history, questions of difference and continuity between Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine naturally popped up; Blavatsky settled on ‘, or , years’ for the periodic careening of the earth’s axis (pp. –), and, clearly under pressure, contended that Atlantis was ‘twice as populated as China is now’ (p. ) and that Sri Lanka was once part of Atlantis with legends placing this ‘most mysterious race’ to ‘something like thousand years’ ago (pp. –), two among a number of spontaneous points not made by her elsewhere. She confirmed the importance of ‘the Fourth Round’ as the phase when ‘regular men, as we know them, begin’ (in adjustments that bring ‘matter and spirit into equilibrium’), but was more outright in conversation in saying that many members of ‘the fourth race are not fully human’, and that present ‘savages are not […] the same as we are’, and ‘the direct ones’, as she put it, ‘such as the flat-headed Australians’, were ‘all dying out’, even if future ‘savages will be more intelligent in the Sixth Race’ (pp. –). The general absence of detailed discussions about Hyperborean, Lemurian and Atlantean ways of life was determined by the chief concerns of the participants: they wanted to unravel the mysteries of cosmogenesis and the basic framework of cosmic processes..
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