Theos-Talk Archives (May 2008 Message tt00465)

To all readers

My views are:

It might be a surprise to some, that H. P. Blavatsky also took the occultist and author A. E. Waite to the cleaners so to speak while reviewing his latest book on the Rosicrucians...

"THE REAL HISTORY OF THE ROSICRUCIANS
Founded on their own Manifestoes, and on Facts and Documents
collected from the Writings of Initiated Brethren.
With Illustrations.
London: George Redway, 1887. viii, pp. 446


by Arthur Edward Waite

Reviewed by H.P.Blavatsky "

.......
" Different people interpret in different ways the two manifestoes - the "Fama" and "Confessio". Mr. Waite appears to place great importance on the adherence to Christian dogmas observable in the wording of these papers. But in taking the documents literally, he seems to overlook the necessity that all writers were under, in those troubled times, of pandering to the narrow and prejudiced minds of the leaders of the so-called Christian Church, by apparently adhering to the Ritual. Naturally, the author of the "Fama" worded it in such a manner as to avoid persecution or suspicion of heresy. Those to whom it  [Page 234] was really addressed would not be misled by its tone of orthodoxy, and the general public and the church would pass it by as harmless. Moreover, as Mr. Waite remarks further on [pp. 200-01], "the philosophical and scientific opinions and pretensions of the Rosicrucian Society have more claim on our notice" than their theology. Speaking again of the school of thought current at the time this organisation was floated, and which he tells us the Rosicrucians followed, he says [p. 201]: "Mystics in an age of scientific and religious materialism, they were connected by an unbroken chain with the theurgists of the first Christian centuries; they were alchemists in the spiritual sense and the professors of a divine magic Their disciples, the Rosicrucians, followed closely in their footsteps, and the claims of the "Fama" and "Confessio" must be reviewed in the light of the great elder claims of alchemy and magic". In spite of this, Mr. Waite judges the Society, it would appear, by what he admits to be the minor and less important side of its object, for he speaks of it eventually, as a body of "pre-eminently learned men and a Christian Sect" [p. 216]. We will not stop to consider the probability or possibility of a body of "pre-eminently learned men", being at the same time a "Christian Sect".

Having thus deprived the Rosicrucians of the dignity, reverence and romance, that cling round great antiquity; having saddled them with the tenets and dogmas of conventional mediaeval Christianity, Mr. Waite next proceeds to demolish their emblems, or at all events, to deny that they attached any esoteric interpretation to them."
http://www.theosophical.ca/LuciferMagazineVol01-03November1887.html#230






M. Sufilight

H. P. Blavatsky said:
"The Society founded to remedy the glaring evils of Christianity, to shun bigotry and intolerance, cant and superstition and to cultivate real universal love extending even to the dumb brute".
(The Collected Writings of H. P. Blavatsky, vol. 7, p.246)








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