that the spirits of the dead can return and communicate with
the living through mediums. Theosophy opposed this strongly,
teaching that such activity causes serious harm to the departed,
and usually to the medium as well. What can return is not the
spirit of the departed, but only a “shell,” made up of his or her
disintegrating lower principles. This shell may retain memories
of the recently departed’s life, but it is devoid of the actual spirit
or higher principles of that person. So communication with it is
of little value to the living; but this positively harms the departed
and seriously hinders his or her passage to the next world.
This teaching, however, was not quite clear in Isis Unveiled.
An 1882 article called “Fragments of Occult Truth,” published
in The Theosophist, included the clear statement: “in short, that
no departed SPIRIT can visit us.”23 A letter to the editor asked if
this contradicted what was taught in Isis Unveiled, where it said:
“many . . . among those who control the medium subjectively . . .
are human, disembodied spirits.”24 Blavatsky replied that it did not;
that here the term “disembodied spirit” refers to the “reliquiae of
the personal EGO,” not to the spiritual Ego. She explained that:
the term “spirit” had to be often used in the sense given to it by
the Spiritualists, as well as other similar conventional terms, as,
otherwise, a still greater confusion would have been caused.25
Isis Unveiled: A Perspective 9
She concluded her article:
We may well by taxed with too loose and careless a mode of
expression, with a misuse of the foreign language in which we
write, with leaving too much unsaid and depending unwarrantably
upon the imperfectly developed intuition of the reader.
But there never was, nor can there be, any radical discrepancy
between the teachings in Isis and those of the later period,
as both proceed from one and the same source—the ADEPT
BROTHERS.26
The next month another writer in another journal quoted
this concluding sentence, and then brought up what appeared
to be, indeed, a “radical discrepancy” between the teachings
given in Isis Unveiled and those given out later.27 Reincarnation
seems to be denied in Isis Unveiled, which says:
Reincarnation, i.e., the appearance of the same individual, or
rather of his astral monad, twice on the same planet, is not a rule
in nature; it is an exception, like the teratological phenomenon
of a two-headed infant.28
Blavatsky responded in The Theosophist the following month that
“the ‘astral’ monad is not the ‘Spiritual’ monad and vice versa.”29
In other words, the same individual personality, a Mr. Smith,
does not reincarnate; only the immortal spiritual monad that
gave rise to Mr. Smith will again give rise to another personality,
perhaps a Mrs. Jones. Therefore, there is no discrepancy. She
remarks here, in the same vein she had earlier:
The most that can be said of the passage quoted from Isis is, that
it is incomplete, chaotic, vague perhaps—clumsy, as many more
passages in that work, the first literary production of a foreigner,
who even now can hardly boast of her knowledge of the English
language.30
On this reincarnation question, the Mahatma K.H. says about
“the confused and tortured explanations” in Isis Unveiled:
10 Isis Unveiled: A Perspective
. . . for its incompleteness no one but we, her inspirers are responsible.
. . .31
This same reincarnation question on this same passage in
Isis Unveiled was to arise again and again. Four years after her
first brief reply, Blavatsky gave a detailed response, providing a
description of the reincarnation process. She again showed that
“there is no ‘discrepancy,’ but only incompleteness”32 in what was
given out earlier. She adds, however, that there are important
mistakes in Isis Unveiled, resulting from being edited by others,
that should be corrected. The sentence saying that the Hindu
dreads transmigration and reincarnation “only on other and
inferior planets, never on this one,”33 should be corrected to:
“The Hindu dreads transmigration in other inferior forms, on
this planet.”34 Similarly, in the sentence saying that “this former
life believed in by the Buddhists, is not a life on this planet,”35 the
phrase “life on this planet” should be corrected to “life in the
same cycle.”36
Just over two years later, these same two sentences were
again corrected in a similar manner.37 But here she also added a
correction to the sentence cited above, “Reincarnation, i.e., the
appearance of the same individual, or rather of his astral
monad, twice on the same planet, is not a rule in nature.” She
here said that the word “planet” was a mistake and that “cycle”
was meant, i.e., the “cycle of Devachanic rest.”38 She had already
explained, more than once, that the “astral monad” is only the
personality; therefore the doctrine of the reincarnation of the