The Secret Doctrine · 86 of 137

Volume III — Esotericism: Section LI. The “Doctrine of the Eye” & the “Doctrine of the Heart,” or the “Heart’s Seal.”

Some Papers On The Bearing Of Occult Philosophy On Life. Paper I. A Warning. Paper II. An Explanation. Paper III. A Word Concerning the Earlier Papers. Appendix. Notes on Papers I., II. and III. Notes On Some Oral Teachings. Footnotes

Context

Volume III of The Secret Doctrine is a posthumous compilation. Blavatsky died in May 1891, leaving behind unarranged papers that Annie Besant assembled, edited, and published in 1897. Besant’s editorial frame is unusually candid — she states explicitly that the papers had no obvious order, that she arranged them as separate Sections, that she corrected grammar and un-English idioms while otherwise leaving the text as found, and that any additions are in square brackets. Volume III thus differs from Volumes I and II in two ways worth knowing as you read: it lacks Blavatsky’s own structural design (Section I, II, III etc. are Besant’s groupings), and it carries Besant’s particular editorial sensibility. She was already moving the Society’s center of gravity toward her own concerns — Adyar Theosophy, the Christ-Maitreya teaching, and the cultivation of Krishnamurti, all of which would shape the post-1891 movement. The texts here are genuine Blavatsky; the architecture is Besant’s; both signals matter for reading well.

[Cover Art]

[Transcriber’s Note: The above cover image was produced by the submitter at Distributed Proofreaders, and is being placed into the public domain.]

As for what thou hearest others say, who persuade the many that the soul when once freed from the body neither suffers … evil nor is conscious, I know that thou art better grounded in the doctrines received by us from our ancestors and in the sacred orgies of Dionysus than to believe them; for the mystic symbols are well known to us who belong to the Brotherhood.

PLUTARCH.

The problem of life is man. Magic, or rather Wisdom, is the evolved knowledge of the potencies of man’s interior being, which forces are divine emanations, as intuition is the perception of their origin, and initiation our induction into that knowledge.... We begin with instinct; the end is omniscience.

A. WILDER.