Isis Unveiled, Volume I
H. P. Blavatsky, 1877
Blavatsky’s first major work: a thousand-page argument that an ancient wisdom tradition underlies both the religions and the sciences of the modern West, and that both have forgotten it.
- Composed
- Published 1877
- Original language
- English
- In the SOL library
- 1109 searchable passages
- Rights
- Public domain
What this text is
Isis Unveiled, published in New York in 1877, is the founding document of the Theosophical movement. Its first volume takes aim at the scientific materialism of its day, assembling ancient and contemporary testimony for phenomena and principles Blavatsky argued the sciences excluded by decree rather than by evidence, and claiming that a single archaic wisdom tradition stands behind Egyptian, Indian, Greek, and Hebrew teachings alike.
The book is contentious and was so from the day it appeared: critics documented extensive unattributed borrowing from earlier esoteric compilations, and its claims range from the documented to the untestable. It remains historically indispensable, because the modern Western revival of interest in comparative esoteric traditions largely begins with it.
Why researchers read it
SOL reads Blavatsky the way it reads Frazer: as a primary source for how the nineteenth century framed questions SOL now studies with better tools. The "single hidden tradition" thesis is itself a hypothesis SOL’s comparative investigations test rather than assume, and this is the book that gave that thesis its modern form.
In order to demonstrate that the notions which the ancients entertained about dividing human history into cycles were not utterly devoid of a philosophical basis, we will close this chapter by introducing to the reader one of the oldest traditions of antiquity as to the evolution of our planet. At the close of each “great year,” called by Aristotle—according to Censorinus—the _greatest_, and which consists of six _sars_ our planet is subjected to a thorough physical revolution. The polar and equatorial climates gradually exchange places; the former moving slowly toward the Line, and the tropical zone, with its exuberant vegetation and swarming animal life, replacing the forbidding wastes of the icy {31} poles. This change of climate is necessarily attended by cataclysms, earthquakes, and other cosmical throes.
Isis Unveiled, Volume I, H. P. Blavatsky, 1877 · Public domain
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