[The following is translated from a Russian manuscript in HPB’s handwriting, found in the Adyar Archives. Vera Petrovna de Zhelihovsky said that HPB was working on the piece shortly before her final illness and completed only part of its introduction. The first complete English rendering of the surviving fragment was Zoltán de Álgya-Pap’s, published in The Theosophist in September, 1961; the Russian text was published in Alba in 1962. Boris de Zirkoff gives his translation in CW 13:209. His translation largely followed de Álgya-Pap, with alterations from the Russian.]
Material toward a Future History of Psychism in the Age of Darwinism
(Dedicated to the Skeptics of My Native Land)
So much nonsense is being written and talked—especially in Russia—about the Theosophical Society, conceived and founded by me personally in New York on the 17th of November, 1875, that I have at last made up my mind to enlighten my dear compatriots. Whether they believe me or do not believe me—that is their affair.
Rumour has it that whenever Prince Bismarck wishes to conceal from the public some new political trick of his devising, the proper course of which might be hindered by premature gossip about it, he proclaims his new combination aloud to the public. In other words, the Iron Chancellor tells the truth—and nobody believes him. So I sit down to write the truth and to state facts, and facts alone—knowing beforehand that it is not according to the laws of criticism in a civilized country to believe them.
On the contrary: while reading my truthful narrative, founded upon facts almost incredible, yet nevertheless true; while making acquaintance with the history of a Society which, almost instantaneously and without any preparation whatever, grew in the course of a few years from seven members, unknown to the world, into a many-thousand-strong “Brotherhood,” covering the terrestrial globe with “Lodges” like mushrooms after rain—the wise critics are bound to doubt.
Even from my well-wishers I expect no better than what a certain Major’s wife in the Caucasus wrote me in a letter. Having favoured me with her impressions of my story, The Mysterious Tribes of the Blue Mountains, she ended them with the exclamation:
“Oh, what an incorrigible romancer you are!”
Since 1881 I have written much about the Theosophical Society and its work in India—first in my “Letters to the Motherland” in the Moskovskiya Vedomosti, and afterwards in the Russkiy Vestnik. And whatever I described was invariably put down by the public to my “story-making”—especially everything I related concerning the psychic constitution of the Hindus; a constitution which, naturally enough, does not enter into the statistical observations and books concerning the Colonies of Great Britain.
The narratives in From the Caves and Jungles of Hindustan, left unfinished owing to the death of M. N. Katkov, were taken by the readers for a novel and sheer fiction. Yet, really, it would not be amiss to remember the wise saying of the English poet—“truth is often stranger than fiction.”
Why believe? Perhaps, after all, it is more prudent not to. The unbeliever sleeps more peacefully and lives more easily; for it is ever so much more convenient to deny than to accept on faith that which has not yet acquired the rights of citizenship in society, and for which one must swim against the current of prevailing social opinion and thought.
They will not believe me now either, then. Well—good luck to them!
As Epictetus said to his master, who was beating him with a stick for giving advice, so I say to criticism:
“Strike—but listen.”
And what comes afterwards is a matter of indifference to me; besides, as grandmother says, the future may still turn out either way. And for this reason.
Public opinion in Russia, as everywhere else, is a kaleidoscope in which the combinations of figures change incessantly according to the will of the hand that holds it; or, to put it differently, our notions of what is possible and impossible, wise and foolish, fitting and unfitting, depend upon a few ringleaders of science and fashion, who turn public opinion about like a weathercock.
What we believed yesterday falls out of belief today—in the one case as in the other simply because the wind happens to blow from one quarter rather than another.
Modern science itself—or, more properly, its high priests—taught in the Middle Ages all that they now deny, and believes today in that at which they then laughed.
Astrology, Alchemy, Magic have been thrown into the attics of the Academies; while the circulation of the blood, steam-power, and electricity—which only the other day they called the mad inventions of lunatics—have been installed in honourable chairs at their meetings.
On the other hand, Messrs. the Academicians have now been obliged to believe in something at which, only ten years ago, they turned up their most learned noses with supreme contempt; namely, that which fifty years ago was placed under the great ban, and expelled from the sacred precincts of the Academies—Mesmerism and Animal Magnetism. Both now flourish under the masks of “suggestion” and “hypnotism.”
And all because our earth turns round, and human brains turn round along with it.
Once upon a time, before Galileo, learned men beheld in the terrestrial globe a flat pancake in the centre of the universe; although Pythagoras, two thousand years before Copernicus, had already taught the heliocentric doctrine.
Our European scholars of the Middle Ages beheld a sacred truth in the Hindu allegory which represents our earth as resting upon four elephants, themselves standing upon a turtle wagging its little tail in the empty space of the universe; while now they have become convinced of its spherical form, and that our planet is but an insignificant little ball among milliards of planets considerably superior to it.
Then men imagined themselves earthly gods, for whose sake the Cosmos itself had been created; now science has convinced us that we are no more than relatives of the tailless little monkey, and that, together with these our miserable cousins, we descend from one and the same—though still undiscovered—progenitor:
Adam with a tail. . . .
Was it so long ago? Why, it was only yesterday that, according to the authoritative teaching of Haeckel and his friend Huxley, there sat at the very root of humanity’s genealogical tree the Moneron, hermit of the Ocean—a jelly-like lump in which the Darwinists beheld the Alpha of the flesh of everything living upon earth, whose Omega is man.
This morsel of jelly, fished up by Huxley from the depths of the sea, was named by him, in honour of his German colleague, Bathybius Haeckelii, and mightily did the Darwinists boast of their great discovery.
“Eureka! The genuine seed of the human race has been discovered!” Romanes was telling me only the other day.
And what came of it?
Today this candidate for the dignity of human progenitor has, under rigorous chemical examination, turned into a pinch—not even of organic matter, but simply—of precipitate.
[Page 5 of the manuscript is missing.—Ed.]
The fact that the foundress of this supposedly wonder-working Society is herself a child of the native flock cannot fail to interest the Russian reader.
And the fact that this “child of our own” has gained both for herself and for the Society a world-wide, though decidedly mixed reputation, having driven into her pasture some of the best, soundest, and often even the most learned heads (as shall presently be proved) out of many foreign flocks, hitherto hostile to the Russian spirit—this is a significant fact, and one which, one would think, ought to tickle the patriotic pride of the mother-country….
But until the whole history of our “Brotherhood” has been handed down to posterity, readers and critics, knowing absolutely nothing about the Theosophical Society save the gossip concerning it, have of course the most legitimate and logical right to judge it and hold forth about it after their own fashion.
Such is the spirit of the age.
I therefore invite them all to laugh at the “Mahatmas” of Tibet and India.
Let all prudent skeptics behold in them—judging from the stories of the enemies of the Society—nothing but scarecrows made of muslin and bladders mounted upon long poles; Magicians flying beneath the blue skies of India and even hovering, according to eye-witnesses, amid the fogs of England.
Let us laugh together at those hundreds of intelligent people whom, according to the opinion of the Society for Psychical Research, I so cleverly fooled with these muslin Mahatmas; and let us remember that Indian Magic, like all antediluvian Magic, its Adepts and its phenomena—all of it is but mystification and conjuring.
So be it.
Only—it is not Magic that is in question at all. . . .
I assure everyone that the denial of “supernatural phenomena”—in the supernaturalness of which neither I nor any Theosophist has ever believed—does not touch the Theosophical Society in the least.
Still less can its existence be explained by these foolish and invariably exaggerated manifestations.
[Here again one page is missing.—Ed.]
. . . from the steppes and the banks of the Dnieper—a person without house or home, without connections as without money—suddenly conceived and actually accomplished that which not one of you could accomplish?
She sounded the call in New York on the 7th of October, 1875; and by the 17th of November of that same year—that is, within five weeks—the Theosophical Society was already being founded with several hundred members in America, while its first Branch, consisting of seventy-three persons, was formed in London.
And from that day, at the mere touch of my hand, the avalanche began to roll. . . .
Since then it has rolled over the whole terrestrial globe, and it is rolling still, increasing not by the day but by the hour.
And no calumnies of any Psychical Societies, no mockeries, no persecutions can shatter this avalanche.
Why?
Because, without any phenomena whatever, this avalanche is—a power!
And behind it stands the power of Truth.
That riddle cannot be hewn away with the axe of the fiercest criticism, any more than its traces can be swept away with the broom of indifferent neglect.
Wherein precisely this power consists will be seen further on.
And then everyone will see how little the phenomena could have contributed to the growth and success of the Theosophical Society, and how, on the contrary, they might have injured it—if anything in the world could injure that whose appointed hour has struck.
But all this is merely by way of a prefatory word which, in view of all the fables afloat, I was bound to say.
And now, having said it. . . .
[At the bottom of the manuscript is a note in another hand, in black ink, apparently made by H.P.B.’s sister, V. P. de Zhelihovsky: “Not finished owing to the death of H. P. Blavatsky, 26 April 1891” (8 May, New Style).—Ed.]