Theos-Talk Archives (July 2002 Message tt00289)

Bart, you wrote:

". . . What about the following: Is it true that The Secret Doctrine 
(the book) was, as written by Blavatsky, a huge pile of handwritten 
pages, left for others to organize and edit as they saw fit? If so, 
then whose idea was it to put it into separate volumes in the first 
place?"

I would say that it was HPB herself who decided what was in the 
various manuscript volumes of the SD. She was organizing the 
manuscript herself in this time period 1885-1886-early 1887.

I will cite just two examples. More could be given.

In a letter dated September 23, 1886, HPB at Ostende,Belgium wrote to 
Colonel Henry S. Olcott in India:

"I send you the MSS. of Secret Doctrine.....Now I send only 1st 
volume of Introduct. Section.... There are in the 1st Introductory 
Vol. Seven Sections or Chapt. § and 27 Appendices, several App. 
attached to every Section from l to 6, etc. Now all this will make 
either more or at any rate one volume and it is not the S.D. but a 
Preface to it.... Now, it is so arranged that the Appendices can 
either go as attached to the Sections or be taken out and placed in a 
separate Vol. or at the end of each.... If you take out the App. then 
there will not [be] 300 pages printed in Int. Sections, but they will 
lose in interest." [quoted in de Zirkoff , SD Intro., 30-1]

Elsewhere she writes to Mr. Sinnett just two days before the above 
letter to Olcott:

"I have sent Vol. I of the S.D. to Adyar and am now on Vol. II -- the 
Archaic."  

[Quoted from:
http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/hpb-aps/bl-100.htm ]

Numerous quotes from her 1885-1886-1887 letters (published and 
unpublished) could be given illustrating HPB's own arrangement of the 
material into specific volumes or books.

Daniel H. Caldwell
BLAVATSKY ARCHIVES
http://blavatskyarchives.com/introduction.htm