Theos-Talk Archives (July 2006 Message tt00581)

For comparison purposes, interested students
might want to look at the following works.
All of them are products of "silent editing".

[1]  Michael Gomes' abridged edition of ISIS UNVEILED

[2]  Christmas Humphreys & Elizabeth Preston's
abridged edition of THE SECRET DOCTRINE

[3]  Katharine Hillard's Abridgment of THE SECRET DOCTRINE.

As stated above, all of these books are
products of "silent editing".  The famous
dots are NOT used to indicate any deletions.
The only exception to this is in the Humphreys-
Preston abridgement where HUGE gaps of deleted
material is indicated by ...   Other than that
there are no dots (...) used in the volume to indicate 
where "normal" amounts of text have been deleted.

Now I have heard some Blavatsky students describe
these documents as almost products of the "devil"!
But for the purpose of giving overviews, I believe the
3 volumes are excellent.

By reading the Gomes and Humphreys-Preston volumes,
one sorta has the gist of both Isis and the SD in
about 500 pages.  Not bad for many students who
look at the originals of ISIS and the SD and consider
them too daunting to read and end up never reading them...

One more example:

Theosophy Magazine has done over the years many collations
from HPB's works.  For example:

Studies in Isis Unveiled:
A Compilation from H.P. Blavatsky's First Book

http://blavatskyarchives.com/isisunveiledselections.htm

Again no dots... to tell the reader that maybe something has
been deleted!! or where deletions might occur !! ...but these types 
of collations are still very helpful material.

Daniel
http://hpb.cc