Introduction: Front Matter and Preface
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Key Thoughts:
THE KEY TO THEOSOPHY was one of the last books from the remarkably prolific pen of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. After she had been released from her public work for the Society in India (1885), HPB labored mightily for three years to produce The Secret Doctrine. Almost simultaneously with its publication (1888), she founded the Esoteric School and produced its Instructions over the next several years. The following year she published both The Voice of the Silence and The Key to Theosophy (1889). She gave answers to questions about The Secret Doctrine, which were published as Transactions of the Blavatsky Lodge (1890, 1891). After her departure from India and before her death in 1891, she also produced other works that fill eight volumes (7–14) of the Collected Writings series and began the Theosophical Glossary (published posthumously in 1892).
During those last seven years of her life, Blavatsky wrote at a feverish pace. Each of her works from that period addresses a different aspect of Theosophical study and activity. It is as though she was trying, during the little time remaining to her, to leave behind something for every purpose and every kind of Theosophist.
The Secret Doctrine is, of course, her masterwork, an amazing overview of the cosmic and human process, whose scope is so vast that it dwarfs the concerns of our ordinary life. The Voice is her guidebook for those who aspire to walk the path of selfless devotion, the bodhisattva way. The Esoteric Instructions were intended for students who want to understand and apply the laws of inner reality to their own lives.
The Key to Theosophy, however, is the most accessible and popular of her books. Unlike The Voice, which was dedicated to “the few,” The Key was dedicated by HPB “to all her Pupils, that They may Learn and Teach in their turn.” It is an introduction to Theosophy and the Theosophical Society for both the inquirer and the serious student. It is HPB’s presentation of the elements of Theosophy, with a strong emphasis on practical matters: ethics, self-improvement, prayer, karma, the afterlife, reincarnation, the nature of our minds, political and social causes, charity, asceticism and marriage, education, and the mahatmas or inner founders and teachers of the Society.
The Key is the simplest, most comprehensive, most basic, best organized, and clearest presentation of Theosophy HPB ever wrote. Even after more than a century, it remains a readable introduction to Theosophical ideas and practice. HPB acknowledges that it is not “a complete or exhaustive text-book of Theosophy,” but only a key to the door to deeper study. It presents, she says, “the broad outlines” of Theosophy and “explains its fundamental principles.”
The book is organized into a preface, fourteen chapters or “sections” (which fall into four groups), and a conclusion:
Although The Key is an introductory work, it still cannot be absorbed without effort on the part of the reader. Bodybuilders have a motto: “No pain, no gain.” Much the same is true of mind-building. As HPB puts it:
To the mentally lazy or obtuse, Theosophy must remain a riddle; for in the world mental as in the world spiritual each man must progress by his own efforts. The writer cannot do the reader’s thinking for him, nor would the latter be any the better off if such vicarious thought were possible.
All any teacher can do is make available an opportunity for students to learn: present material, explain difficulties, and answer questions. Studying the material, working out the difficulties, and fitting the answers to questions—all those are the work of the students. The Key to Theosophy fills the role of teacher. Its readers must, in their turn, fill the role of students.
That the book is worth the mental effort any study demands is clear from the influence it has had on some seminal figures of the twentieth century. Two instances will illustrate.
Gandhi described his early acquaintance with two Theosophists who he thought were brothers, but who were probably the uncle and nephew Archibald and Bertram Keightley, who figured prominently in the publication of The Secret Doctrine and HPBs final years in London. They introduced Gandhi to the Bhagavad Gita, which he had not read before:
They also took me on one occasion to the Blavatsky Lodge and introduced me to Madame Blavatsky and Mrs. Besant. The latter had just then joined the Theosophical Society, and I was following with great interest the controversy about her conversion. The friends advised me to join the Society, but I politely declined, saying, “With my meager knowledge of my own religion I do not want to belong to any religious body.” I recall having read, at the brothers’ insistence, Madame Blavatsky’s Key to Theosophy. The book stimulated in me the desire to read books on Hinduism, and disabused me of the notion fostered by the missionaries that Hinduism was rife with superstition. [M. K. Gandhi, Gandhi’s Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1948), p. 91]
Wassily Kandinsky, who has been called the father of modern art, wrote about his theory of art in a book that is a charter for twentieth-century nonobjective painting: Über das Geistige in der Kunst or Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911). In this book, he writes of a turning away from materialistic science and of the discovery of a new respect for “primitives,” as Europeans regarded the people of India, and then he adds:
Mme. Blavatsky was the first person, after a life of many years in India, to see a connection between these “savages” and our “civilization.” From that moment there began a tremendous spiritual movement which today includes a large number of people and has even assumed a material form in the Theosophical Society. This society consists of groups who seek to approach the problem of the spirit by the way of the inner knowledge. The theory of Theosophy which serves as basis to this movement was set out by Blavatsky in the form of a catechism [The Key to Theosophy] in which the pupil receives definite answers to his questions from the theosophical point of view. Theosophy, according to Blavatsky, is synonymous with eternal truth. “The new torchbearer of truth will find the minds of men prepared for his message, a language ready for him in which to clothe the new truths he brings, an organization awaiting his arrival, which will remove the merely mechanical, material obstacles and difficulties from his path.” And then Blavatsky continues: “The earth will be a heaven in the twenty-first century in comparison with what it is now,” and with these words ends her book. [Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: Dover, 1977, translation first published 1914), pp. 13–4]
Kandinsky ended his own book with a paragraph echoing Blavatsky’s sentiments:
Finally, I would remark that, in my opinion, we are fast approaching the time of reasoned and conscious composition, when the painter will be proud to declare his work constructive. This will be in contrast to the claim of the Impressionists that they could explain nothing, that their art came upon them by inspiration. We have before us the age of conscious creation, and this new spirit in painting is going hand in hand with the spirit of thought towards an epoch of great spiritual leaders. [p. 571]
The Key to Theosophy is indeed a kind of catechism, a dialog between an “Enquirer” who asks questions and a “Theosophist” who answers them. Its title page announces it to be “a clear exposition, in the form of question and answer, of the ethics, science, and philosophy for the study of which the Theosophical Society has been founded.” The specification of its three subjects as “ethics, science, and philosophy” is noteworthy. The second Object of the Society speaks of encouraging the comparative study of religion, philosophy, and science. But “religion” is missing from the title page of The Key, and its place is taken by “ethics.” The focus of the book is indeed on human ethics rather than religion in any narrow sense. Yet in a wide sense of the term, religion is not neglected in The Key. A catechism is a work that summarizes (especially, religious) teachings in the form of questions and answers. The relationship of Theosophy to religion and the question of whether it is a religion are the very first topics to be taken up in chapter 1. And it is with them that the next study on this basic textbook of Theosophy will begin.