The Secret Doctrine, Würzburg Manuscript, Volume 1

Editor’s Note—On the History and Context of Volume 1

The manuscript generally known as the “Würzburg Manuscript” preserves a substantial portion of an early version of H. P. Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, written principally during 1885-1886 while she was living first at Würzburg, Germany, and later at Ostend, Belgium. It is important to note that the surviving manuscript is not Blavatsky’s autograph original, but a copy made for transmission to India, where T. Subba Row had agreed to review and correct the work. Research carried out by Daniel Caldwell and others in connection with the preparation of the Würzburg Manuscript for publication identified its principal copyists as Countess Constance Wachtmeister and Mary Gebhard, with occasional assistance from others. Their research also indicated that only a portion—perhaps a third or a fourth—of the copy sent to India has survived.

The present volume represents the surviving portion of what was then conceived as the first, introductory volume of The Secret Doctrine. At this stage the work had not yet assumed the familiar arrangement of Cosmogenesis and Anthropogenesis published in 1888. Blavatsky described this preliminary volume in 1886 as an extensive historical introduction intended to establish the antiquity and continuity of the Wisdom-Religion: the existence of adepts and initiates in ancient history, the esoteric meaning underlying religious scriptures, the Mysteries, and the relationship of later religious systems to older traditions. In a letter to Henry S. Olcott of September 23, 1886, she stated that this introductory volume comprised seven sections and twenty-seven appendices and characterized it as a necessary “Preface” to the more metaphysical portions of The Secret Doctrine.

The surviving Volume I is therefore plainly incomplete. It contains “To the Readers,” followed by five sections comprising thirteen separate essays, and a single surviving appendix, “The Star-Angel Worship in the Roman Church.” Caldwell has pointed out that the discrepancy between these extant portions and Blavatsky’s own description of seven sections and twenty-seven appendices shows that a considerable portion of the original introductory volume has been lost. Nevertheless, what survives is extensive enough to reveal both the character of Blavatsky’s original plan and the later destination of much of its material.

The manuscript itself was rediscovered in 1921 by C. Jinarajadasa among papers at Benares and was subsequently returned to Adyar. Jinarajadasa published “To the Readers” in the August 1931 Theosophist and began a serial publication of Volume I in October 1932 under the title “The Secret Doctrine, Vol. I. Original Manuscript of 1885.” The series continued through November 1933 but was then discontinued; Jinarajadasa had encountered considerable difficulty in reconstructing a text containing numerous errors introduced by the copyists. Portions of the manuscript were subsequently reproduced in Boris de Zirkoff’s H. P. Blavatsky: Collected Writings, especially Volume XIV. The complete surviving Würzburg Manuscript was finally published in 2014 by Eastern School Press, with an introduction by David Reigle and appendices containing Daniel H. Caldwell’s research into the composition and reorganization of The Secret Doctrine.

The historical importance of Volume I becomes especially clear when it is compared with the third volume of The Secret Doctrine published in 1897. When Bertram and Archibald Keightley examined Blavatsky’s large body of manuscripts after her arrival in London in May 1887, the work was still arranged substantially according to its earlier plan: a first volume devoted to the historical and occult material, followed by volumes on the evolution of the cosmos and of humanity. The Keightleys recommended a fundamental reorganization. Cosmogenesis should come first, Anthropogenesis second, the historical material dealing with occultism and the great initiates should become a third volume, and a possible fourth volume should treat practical occultism. According to Bertram Keightley, Blavatsky accepted this plan, and the manuscript was rearranged accordingly.

Thus the early Volume I became, in conception, the later Volume III. Caldwell’s detailed comparison of the Würzburg manuscript with the 1897 volume demonstrates that most of the historical material preserved here reappeared, often after revision or rearrangement, among the sections published posthumously in The Secret Doctrine, Volume III. This provides important manuscript evidence that a substantial portion of the 1897 volume was not a collection of unrelated papers arbitrarily attached to The Secret Doctrine after Blavatsky’s death, but derived from material she had actually written as part of the work during its earlier stages.

The relationship is not, however, one of simple identity. Blavatsky continued to revise and redistribute the material after the Würzburg copy was made. Parts of “To the Readers” and “Explanation of the First Page of Isis Unveiled” were incorporated into the Introductory of Volume I as published in 1888, while the appendix on “Star-Angel Worship in the Roman Church” was removed from the projected volume and published separately in Lucifer. Other surviving essays were revised, divided, rearranged, or placed in a different sequence before appearing in the 1897 Volume III. The Würzburg manuscript therefore establishes an important textual ancestry for that volume, but it should not be assumed that the arrangement or wording of the 1897 edition reproduces Blavatsky’s earlier Volume I unchanged.

Volume I of the Würzburg Manuscript is consequently valuable in two distinct ways. It preserves a significant body of Blavatsky’s work in an earlier and comparatively unrevised state, allowing the development of individual passages to be traced into the published Secret Doctrine; and it preserves a snapshot of the book at a stage when its entire architecture was still different from what was ultimately adopted in 1888. Read alongside the published Volumes I and II and the posthumous Volume III, it provides one of the most important surviving witnesses to the gradual composition, revision, and reorganization of Blavatsky’s magnum opus.

For the present online edition, only the contents of Volume I of the Würzburg Manuscript are reproduced. The surviving material of Volumes II and III represents earlier drafts of teachings and passages that were subsequently revised, expanded, and incorporated into Volumes I and II of The Secret Doctrine as published by Blavatsky in 1888—their principal value is therefore textual and developmental. Volume I stands in a different position. Although portions of it were later revised, redistributed, or published elsewhere, much of its content was never brought by Blavatsky into a final published form and does not survive in its entirety in any work issued during her lifetime. It therefore constitutes a distinct body of posthumously published writings and thus we have treated it as part of the surviving corpus of Blavatsky’s unique works.

The Wurzburg Manuscript, Volume 1, Contents

To the Readers
[Portions later incorporated into the 1888 Secret Doctrine Introduction.]

Chapter I — On Eastern and Western Occult Literature

Introducing the Reader and leading him to Chapter II. The evidence of Profane and Sacred History, to an Antediluvian Wisdom-Religion; Divine and Human,* or White and Black Magic and Adepts of the same. Old Fragments and manuscripts known and unknown.

* “Human” means in esoteric parlance “evil” magic; being materiality.

Section I

1. Explanation of the First Page of Isis Unveiled
[Portions later incorporated into the 1888 Secret Doctrine Introduction.]
[See also: The Secresy of Initiates & Some Reasons for Secresy (Probable Reworked Drafts)]

2. Hermetic and Other Books of Antiquity
[See also: Modern Criticism and the Ancients & The Origin of Magic (Reworked Drafts)]

Section II

1. White and Black Magic—in Theory and Practice
[See also: The Dangers of Practical Magic (Revised and Expanded Draft)]

2. Hermes and the 32 Ways of Wisdom
[See also: Hermetic and Kabalistic Doctrines (Revised Draft of Principal Portions)]

Section III

1. Mathematics and Geometry—the Keys to the Universal Problems
[See also: Various Occult Systems of Interpretations of Alphabets and Numerals (Revised Draft)]

2. The Key of the Absolute in Magic—the Hexagon with the Central Point—or the Seventh key
[See also: The Hexagon with the Central Point, or the Seventh Key (Revised Draft)]

Section IV

1. Who was the Adept of Tyana?