6 Isis Unveiled: A Perspective
latter, they said, can never be demonstrated but by the former.
Man-spirit proves God-spirit, as the one drop of water proves a
source from which it must have come. . . . prove the soul of man
by its wondrous powers—you have proved God!”16
When writing Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky was unaware of the
connotations of the word “God,” and therefore used it when she
actually meant the impersonal and universal principle known in
Hinduism among Adwaiti Vedantins as Parabrahman.
A sceptic in my early life, I had sought and obtained through the
Masters the full assurance of the existence of a principle (not
Personal God)—“a boundless and fathomless ocean” of which
my “soul” was a drop. Like the Adwaitis, I made no difference
between my Seventh Principle and the Universal Spirit, or
Parabrahm; . . . My mistake was that throughout the whole work
[Isis Unveiled] I indifferently employed the words Parabrahm
and God to express the same idea . . . .17
A few years later the problem with the use of the term
“God” emerged. Two Englishmen living in India, A. P. Sinnett
and A. O. Hume, had in 1880 begun a correspondence with
Blavatsky’s two teachers, the Mahatmas M. and K.H. The two
Englishmen then wrote about the heretofore hidden or occult
teachings of the Mahatmas based on these letters. Hume had in
1882 written a “Preliminary Chapter” headed “God” intended
to preface an exposition of Occult Philosophy. The Mahatma
K.H. responded clearly and unmistakably:
Neither our philosophy nor ourselves believe in a God, least of
all in one whose pronoun necessitates a capital H. . . . Our
doctrine knows no compromises. It either affirms or it denies,
for it never teaches but that which it knows to be the truth.
Therefore, we deny God both as philosophers and as Buddhists.
We know there are planetary and other spiritual lives, and
we know there is in our system no such thing as God, either
personal or impersonal. Parabrahm is not a God, but absolute
immutable law. . . .18
Isis Unveiled: A Perspective 7
Hume’s chapter had added “God” to their philosophy, which
the Mahatma regarded as a very serious problem, saying:
. . . if he publishes what I read, I will have H.P.B. or Djual Khool
deny the whole thing; as I cannot permit our sacred philosophy
to be so disfigured.19
A different kind of problem arose due to the fact, noted
above, that Blavatsky could not give out Theosophical doctrines
in their completeness in 1877 when Isis Unveiled was published.
In this book she taught the threefold constitution of a human
being: body, soul, and spirit. When the Theosophical teaching
on the sevenfold constitution of a human being was brought
out four years later, she was accused of contradiction. But as the
Mahatma K.H. explained in a letter to Sinnett:
In reality, there is no contradiction between that passage in Isis
and our later teaching; to anyone who never heard of the seven
principles—constantly referred to in Isis as a trinity, without any
more explanation—there certainly appeared to be as good a
contradiction as could be. “You will write so and so, give so far,
and no more”—she was constantly told by us, when writing her
book. It was at the very beginning of a new cycle, in days when
neither Christians nor Spiritualists ever thought of, let alone
mentioned, more than two principles in man—body and Soul,
which they called Spirit. If you had time to refer to the spiritualistic
literature of that day, you would find that with the phenomenalists
as with the Christians, Soul and Spirit were synonymous.
It was H.P.B., who, acting under the orders of Atrya (one whom
you do not know) was the first to explain in the Spiritualist the
difference there was between psyche and nous, nefesh and ruach—
Soul and Spirit. She had to bring the whole arsenal of proofs
with her, quotations from Paul and Plato, from Plutarch and
James, etc., before the Spiritualists admitted that the theosophists
were right. It was then that she was ordered to write Isis—just
a year after the Society had been founded. And, as there
happened such a war over it, endless polemics and objections to
the effect that there could not be in man two souls—we thought it
8 Isis Unveiled: A Perspective
was premature to give the public more than they could possibly
assimilate, and before they had digested the “two souls”;—and
thus, the further sub-division of the trinity into 7 principles was
left unmentioned in Isis.20
For reasons such as this the Mahatma M. told Sinnett to beware
trusting Isis Unveiled too implicitly,21 and the Mahatma K.H. told
him the same thing:
By-the-bye you must not trust Isis literally. The book is but a
tentative effort to divert the attention of the Spiritualists from
their preconceptions to the true state of things.22
The Mahatma K.H. is here not referring to the two versus three
human principles question, but to the teaching of Spiritualism