452 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



come as an open book, doubt and despair be replaced by the serenity of 

 perfect wisdom. As our ordinary senses and faculties are obviously in- 

 sufficient to accomplish such ends, supernatural powers must be appealed 

 to, a transcendental sphere of spiritual activity must be cultivated capa- 

 ble of perceiving through the hidden symbolism of apparent phenomena, 

 the underlying relations of cosmic structure and final purposes. Long 

 periods of training and devotion, seclusion from the world, contempla- 

 tion of inner mysteries, lead the initiate through the various stages of 

 adeptship up to the final plane of communion with the infinite and the 

 comprehension of truth in all things. This form of occultism reaches 

 its fullest and purest expression in Oriental wisdom-religions. These 

 vie in interest to the historian with the mythology and philosophy of 

 Greece and Eome; and we of the Occident feel free to profit by their 

 ethical and philosophical content, and to cherish the impulses which 

 gave them life. But when such views are forcibly transplanted to our 

 age and clime, when they are decked in garments so unlike their orig- 

 inal vestments, particularly when they are associated with dubious prac- 

 tices and come into violent conflict with the truth that has accumulated 

 since they first had birth, their aspect is profoundly altered and they 

 come within the circle of the modern occult. 



Of this character is Theosophy, an occult movement brought into 

 recent prominence by the works and personality of Mme. Blavatsky. 

 The story of the checkered career of that remarkable woman is fairly 

 accessible. Born in Russia in 1831 as Helen Petrovna, daughter of 

 Colonel Hahn, of the Eussian army, she was married at the age of 

 seventeen to an elderly gentleman, M. Blavatsky. She is described in 

 girlhood as a person of passionate temper and wilful and erratic dispo- 

 sition. She separated or escaped from her husband after a few months 

 of married life and entered upon an extended period of travel and ad- 

 venture, in which 'psychic' experiences and the search for unusual per- 

 sons and beliefs were prominent. She absorbed Hindu wisdom from 

 the adepts of India; she sat at the feet of a thaumaturgist at Cairo; she 

 journeyed to Canada to meet the medicine man of the Eed Indians, and 

 to New Orleans to observe the practices of Voodoo among the negroes. 

 It is difficult to know what to believe in the accounts prepared by 

 her enthusiastic followers. Violations of physical laws were constantly 

 occurring in her presence, and "sporadic outbreaks of rappings and 

 feats of impulsive pots, pans, beds and chairs insisted on making them- 

 selves notorious." In 1873 she came to New York and sat in 'spiritual- 

 istic' circles, assuming an assent to their theories, but claiming to see 

 through and beyond the manifestations the operations of her theosophic 

 guides in astral projection. At one of these seances she met Colonel 

 Olcott and assisted him in the foundation of the Theosophical Society 



