tktt: The Abuse Of Sacred Names And Terms

“Enq:  The names certainly do occur very frequently now-a-days, and I never remember hearing of such persons as “Masters” till quite recently.

 
Theo:  It is so; and had we acted on the wise principle of silence, instead of rushing into notoriety and publishing all we knew and heard, such desecration would have never occurred.

 
Behold, only fourteen years ago, before the Theosophical Society was founded, all the talk was of “Spirits”. They were everywhere, in everyone’s mouth; and no one by any chance even dreamt of talking about living “Adepts”, “Mahatmas”, or “Masters”.

 
One hardly heard even the name of the Rosicrucians, while the existence of such a thing as “Occultism” was suspected even but by very few. Now all that is changed.

 
We Theosophists were, unfortunately, the first to talk of these things, to make the fact of the existence in the East of “Adepts” and “Masters” and Occult knowledge known; and now the name has become common property. It is on us, now, that the Karma, the consequences of the resulting desecration of holy names and things, has fallen.

 
All that you now find about such matters in current literature – and there is not a little of it – all is to be traced back to the impulse given in this direction by the Theosophical Society and its Founders. Our enemies profit to this day by our mistake. The most recent book directed against our teachings is alleged to have been written by an Adept of twenty years’ standing.

 
Now, it is a palpable lie. We know the amanuensis and his inspirers  (as he is himself too ignorant to have written anything of the sort).  These “inspirers” are living persons, revengeful and unscrupulous in proportion to their intellectual powers; and these bogus Adepts are not one, but several.

 
The cycle of “Adepts”, used as sledge-hammers to break the theosophical heads with, began twelve years ago, with Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten’s “Louis” of Art Magic and Ghost-Land, and now ends with the “Adept” and “Author” of the Light of Egypt, a work written by Spiritualists against Theosophy and its teachings.

 
But it is useless to grieve over what is done, and we can only suffer in the hope that our indiscretions may have made it a little easier for others to find the way to these Masters, whose names are now everywhere taken in vain, and under cover of which so many iniquities have already been perpetrated.”

 
H. P. Blavatsky