Bart's question about "separate volumes"
Jul 31, 2002 09:02 AM
by danielhcaldwell
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unpublished) could be given illustrating HPB's own arrangement of the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
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