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| H. P. Blavatsky was a great psychological mystery to the world of average men. She was a great psychological mystery even to her followers; ay, even to those who thought that they knew her best, and who met her daily and worked with her and were taught by her. To them, at least to most of them, she was an astounding paradox of what seemed to be conflicting and confusing traits of character. The intuitions of her followers and pupils told them that they were in the presence of a World-Teacher, the Messenger of other World-Teachers even greater than she was, who had sent her forth to strike the keynotes of a new age; and yet despite all this she puzzled these followers of hers most sadly, as much by those other traits of character which astonished and perplexed them because they had not the vision to expect to find such lofty and almost incomprehensible traits in a spiritual Teacher and Leader of men. The reason and cause of all this confusion of understanding, it may truthfully be said, lay not in H. P. Blavatsky herself, but in the imperfect vision of those who knew her. They had built up for themselves an idea and an ideal of what a World-Teacher should be. Doubtless they expected to see a wonderful miracle of mere physical beauty. Doubtless they thought to themselves that each day should bring forth some new and amazing demonstration of mystic power, startling, unusual, mysterious. Instead of that, they found themselves in the presence of one whose outer characteristics at least were essentially human: wit, the play of fancy, humor, kindness, indignation; they found themselves in the presence of a penetrating mind before which no shams could stand. They saw themselves laid bare to themselves through the power of a mighty intellect and a spiritual intuition which halted at no barriers and stopped at no frontiers of human personality. Some of H. P. Blavatsky's students and followers, however, were grateful for this self-revelation. But others were irritated because their minds were small and they lacked understanding; for few are the people who like to see themselves held up to their own inner understanding as they actually are. We are all so prone to excuse our own faults, and call them peccadilloes which amount to but little! None of us likes to feel that the very one whom we revere and look up to, is the one who reveals our own smallness of character to ourselves. Nor could they come to understand, at least in any but a very small degree, the strange double character which they both felt and saw when in the presence of H. P. Blavatsky: a most embarrassing and to them inexplicable union of splendid masculine and feminine characteristics. And just here we lay our finger directly on the key to the mysterious spiritual-psychological riddle that H. P. Blavatsky was for the world. |