Masonic, Occult and Esoteric Online Library
The Hill of Discernment
By Alfred Trevor Barker
Was H. P. B. an Anomaly?
QUESTION: We are all well aware of the fact that Mme. Blavatsky was an unusually intellectual woman and most helpful to the Masters; but why did the Masters single out a personality irritable at the slightest provocation and one with so little self-control? How is it that a more Christ-like figure was not chosen than H. P. B. for the Theosophical work? Her personal life does not encourage one to accept all she says.
ANSWER: Well, I am sorry in a way that somebody has picked on the personal life of H. P. B.! I would suggest that the questioner make himself or herself familiar with records of what was the life of H. P. B. I would suggest that he read The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett. I would suggest that he read what the Masters of Wisdom have said about H. P. B.
"That her life was not Christ-like"! Are you sure? What basis do you judge from? How can you judge? You never knew her and have only got mere stories of various people, and most of them uncharitable, destructive critics. How many people agree upon the report of the simplest incident of human life, and how much can you expect of those whose whole being was challenged by that titanic force that was imbodied in H. P. B.? Don't you see that she took the Western world in a grip of the lion's paw, and simply shook their beliefs and their prejudices and their preconceptions, based upon the materialistic scientific thought of the age, their religious conceptions? She was out to smash the molds of men's minds; she was out to draw them from those ideas that enslave men's minds. From every point of view she simply created a furor, and in the middle of it she gave us a philosophy which is second to none that the world has ever known or seen, and, moreover, that has never once been successfully challenged. There is not one of you that can knock a hole in the bottom of H. P. B.'s philosophy. I ask you to try it. You cannot do it; and what does this mean? It means that her opponents are driven to do — what? To traduce her moral character. You see it is the old, old trick.
H. P. B. in the records of our own Theosophical literature was outwardly a sick, rickety old personality. She was extremely ill; but remember that she was working here sixteen or eighteen hours a day chained to a desk. Look at her writings; look what she produced. Do you know that her works will run to fourteen or fifteen volumes when they are all put together? Think of it! And then see the innumerable records of that kindly, compassionate heart. Do you think that the kind of wisdom that you find in H. P. B.'s works could come from other than a member of the Brotherhood that sent her forth? The very keynote of her is compassion, which is something that flows forth from the Christ-like nature; and I am afraid I take very little account of her nervous excitability, which came about as much as anything from her ill-health and from the psychic maelstrom of which she was the focus by reason of the iconoclastic work that she did. Do you not see the picture? If I were you I should hesitate to judge one of the titan intellects of the age. I should indeed!
I will just give you one suggestion as to a possible reason why she was imbodied in such a — shades of H. P. B.! she probably wouldn't mind my saying it — such a clumsy old female body. Do you know what they did to Jesus? Worshiped the external form, and made a personal God of it. It looks to me as if the Masters of Wisdom had no intention of permitting their Messenger in this cycle to be made into any kind of personal God. Human nature instinctively worships external beauty. She had not, perhaps, a beautiful external form; and the very nature of her mission was such that I do not think there was any danger of the later generations of human beings being permitted to make a personal God of her. The Masters were determined that her Message should be judged upon its merits and nothing else.
