immortal spiritual monad is not being denied. In this article she
explained further:
The paragraph quoted meant to upset the theory of the French
Reincarnationists who maintain that the same personality is reincarnated,
often a few days after death, so that a grandfather can
be reborn as his own grand-daughter.39
Errors such as “planet” for “cycle” were permitted to remain in
Isis Unveiled, she repeats, because its stereotyped plates were
owned by the publisher and not by her. She then says:
Isis Unveiled: A Perspective 11
The work was written under exceptional circumstances, and no
doubt more than one great error may be discovered in Isis
Unveiled.40
The “great error” discovered in Isis Unveiled pertaining to
reincarnation was due, then, to two causes. First, as with the
problem of wrong usage of the term “God,” Blavatsky had to
write in a language that was foreign to her. Second, as with the
problem of three human principles versus seven given later, the
teachings found in Isis Unveiled are incomplete. The teaching
that the personality does not reincarnate, without stating that
the immortal spiritual monad does, led to the misconception
that reincarnation is denied in the Wisdom-Religion. Blavatsky
could maintain that there is no radical discrepancy between the
earlier and later teachings because they come from the same
source, her teachers. Thus, this would be true irrespective of
whether or not she herself knew the whole teaching from the
beginning. Colonel Olcott, who worked with her throughout
on correcting the English in Isis Unveiled, writes in his Old Diary
Leaves about the reincarnation teaching:
When we worked on Isis it was neither taught us by the
Mahatmas or supported by her in literary controversies or
private discussions of those earlier days. She held to, and
defended, the theory that human souls, after death, passed
on by a course of purificatory evolution to other and more
spiritualised planets.41
Besides errors due to faulty expression and those arising
from incompleteness, others were added by proofreaders when
Isis Unveiled went to press. As Blavatsky describes:
. . . the proofs and pages of Isis passed through a number of
willing but not very careful hands, and were finally left to the
tender mercies of the publisher’s proof-reader.42
This resulted in other serious mistakes, such as on its opening
page. About this the Mahatma K.H. writes:
12 Isis Unveiled: A Perspective
Proof reader helping, a few real mistakes have crept in as on
page 1, chapter 1, volume 1, where divine Essence is made
emanating from Adam instead of the reverse.43
There is yet another kind of error in Isis Unveiled, that for
obvious reasons was not noted during Blavatsky’s lifetime. This
kind arises from the fact that Blavatsky used the then current
knowledge and books to support the teachings given to her by
her teachers. For example, while writing about the Jainas, she
adds that Gautama Buddha was the pupil of the Tirthamkara,
the great Jaina teacher, who is called Mahavira:
It is clear that Gautama Buddha, the son of the King of
Kapilavastu, and the descendant of the first Sakya, . . . did not
invent his philosophy. Philanthropist by nature, his ideas were
developed and matured while under the tuition of Tirthamkara,
the famous guru of the Jaina sect.44
Professor C. P. Tiele wrote in his book, Outlines of the History of
Religion, at that same time:
According to the Jainas, Gautama (Buddha) was a disciple of
their great saint, Mahavira.45
This was the current view in 1877, when almost nothing was
known about the Jainas, and very little about Buddhism. It is
based on the fact that Mahavira’s closest disciple was named
Gautama. But it has long since been known that this Gautama
was not Gautama Buddha, and that the latter was not a disciple
of the Jaina Tirthamkara Mahavira.
Errors of this kind in regard to Buddhism are frequent in
Isis Unveiled, attributing to Buddhism both the teaching of God
and of an immortal soul, or atma. These teachings, of course,
are not found in Buddhism. Some of these errors, such as the
ones regarding God, may have been due to Blavatsky’s lack of
fluency with English, while others were apparently due to the
fact that she drew from then available sources to back up the
material given to her by her teachers.
Isis Unveiled: A Perspective 13
Despite Blavatsky’s repeated statements that Isis Unveiled
was far from perfect, some of her followers regarded the whole
book as infallible truth. Because some of it was dictated to her
by her Mahatma teachers, they thought every word of it was.
These “friends, as unwise as they were kind,” writes Blavatsky,
spread this idea, “and this was seized upon by the enemy and
exaggerated out of all limits of truth.” She continues:
It was said that the whole of Isis had been dictated to me from
cover to cover and verbatim by these invisible Adepts. And, as the