ISIS UNVEILED

H. P. Blavatsky

H. P. Blavatsky’s first major literary effort, Isis Unveiled, is a critical response to the growing materialism in the scientific and religious institutions of her day. Isis “is the fruit of a somewhat intimate acquaintance with Eastern adepts and study of their science…They showed us that by combining science with religion, the existence of God and immortality of man’s spirit may be demonstrated.” Also explored is the vast domain of the paranormal, while the motivating power behind man and the universe is shown to be spiritual, not material.

Volume I focuses on the prevailing scientific theories of the time, balanced against the “anciently universal Wisdom-Religion.”

Volume II examines the creeds of religions past and present, alongside the myths and symbols of various cultures. Throughout the author strikes at the root of dogmatism and affirms the “paramount importance of re-establishing the Hermetic philosophy in a world which blindly believes it has outgrown it.”

Topics include comparative Buddhism and Christianity, Egyptian wisdom, Masonry, Kabbala, mediumship v. adeptship, the inner and the outer man, astral light, psychic phenomena, elements and elementals, cycles in nature, cosmogonies, Savior legends, Devil myths, the Book of Job, Gnosticism, Platonic philosophy, and the ancient Mysteries.

“The drift of modern thought is palpably in the direction of liberalism in religion as well as science…But we look to the future. The contest now going on between the party of public conscience and the party of reaction, has already developed a healthier tone of thought. It will hardly fail to result ultimately in the overthrow of error and the triumph of Truth. We repeat again – we are laboring for the brighter morrow.”

(I: vii-viii)

 

“Our examination of the multitudinous religious faiths that mankind, early and late, have professed, most assuredly indicates that they have all been derived from one primitive source. It would seem as if they were all but different modes of expressing the yearning of the imprisoned human soul for intercourse with supernal spheres. As the white ray of light is decomposed by the prism into the various colors of the solar spectrum, so the beam of divine truth, in passing through the three-sided prism of man’s nature, has been broken up into varicolored fragments called RELIGIONS.”

(II: 639)

 
“…all the civilized portion of the Pagans who knew of Jesus honored him as a philosopher, an adept whom they placed on the same level with Pythagoras and Apollonius. Whence such a veneration on their part for a man, were he simply, as represented by the Synoptics, a poor, unknown Jewish carpenter from Nazareth? As an incarnated God there is no single record of him on this earth capable of withstanding the critical examination of science; as one of the greatest reformers, an inveterate enemy of every theological dogmatism, a persecutor of bigotry, a teacher of one of the most sublime codes of ethics, Jesus is one of the grandest and most clearly-defined figures on the panorama of human history.”

(II: 150)