Theos-Talk Archives (July 2006 Message tt00646)

Jake,

You write:

============================================

But let me ask you,  would you as an 
author quote from a book that had been 
"silently edited?"  At least the dots (....) 
gives it validity and one knows that 
something is missing.  With the dots in, 
one might use the quote, but without the 
dots, I wouldn't use the quote myself.  
Occult World may be an excellent source 
of material, but how much ultimate good 
does that do if other researchers won't 
quote from it.

=========================================

Good question.  Being trained as a researcher
and librarian in a university, I was taught that
one should always go to the PRIMARY source not only
to study but also especially to quote.

For example, it is NOT good practice to quote
several paragraphs from one of Einstein's book AS FOUND in some
secondary source.  I was taught instead you need to go to Einstein's 
actual book.

My book whether the first edition or the second edition is a 
SECONDARY source.  Not a primary source.

Therefore even with my first edition of THE OCCULT WORLD
OF MADAME BLAVATSKY that had all the dots (...) I don't think
it would be good practice for some author to quote some of the 
extracts from that work.

Now I suppose you could for example quote Olcott's words about 
meeting the Master Morya (I posted that excerpt recently on Theos-
Talk) as they are transcribed in my first edition but you would need 
to add something like.  

"Olcott, Henry S.  Old Diary Leaves, Vol. I, etc. AS QUOTED in THE 
OCCULT WORLD OF MADAME BLAVATSKY, etc."

This ALERTS the reader that you are NOT actually quoting DIRECTLY 
from Old Diary Leaves, Volume I.  

Authors and researchers who plan to quote material, etc. in their 
own books should not take the easy way out [one of my professors 
called that the lazy man's approach!!] and just quote from secondary 
sources.  

Changing the subject somewhat, personally if I wanted to quote 
something from HPB's SECRET DOCTRINE I would not use Boris de 
Zirkoff's edition of the SD to quote from.  Why?

For the simple reason that the editor has done some editing of HPB's 
text.   I'm not saying that Boris' edition doesn't have many good 
features.  I could list many good points of Boris' edition but since 
some of his "changes" in certain instances may "distort" HPB's 
original meaning I would instead prefer HPB's original or at least a 
photographic facsimile of the original as produced by TUP and TC.

Hope this helps.

Daniel
http://hpb.cc