Ukrainian-born Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831–91) was a powerful member of the spiritualist world and for a time famous for her powers as a medium. She was a co-founder of the theosophy movement in the United States, which she later extended to Europe and India, drawing from her extensive global travels and her familiarity with a broad range of belief systems, from Asian religions to New Orleans voodoo, as well as secret societies such as the Freemasons. Drawing from Hinduism and Buddhism, theosophy aimed to understand the mystic powers of the universe and promote the study of other religions. Though many denounced her as a fraud, her writings provide an insight into the driving forces behind nineteenth-century spiritualist movements. In The Secret Doctrine, published in 1888, Blavatsky aims to explain the spiritual origins of the world. In 1897 a third volume was edited by Annie Besant from Blavatsky's notes.

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Product details
- Date Published: September 2011
- format: Multiple copy pack
- isbn: 9781108073257
- length: 2201 pages
- dimensions: 228 x 152 x 127 mm
- weight: 3.4kg
- availability: Temporarily unavailable - available from TBC
Table of Contents
Volume 1: Preface
Introduction
Book I
Section 1. Cosmic Evolution: Seven Stanzas from the Book of Dzyan:
1. The night of the universe
2. The idea of differentiation
3. The awakening of kosmos
4. The septenary hierarchies
5. Fohat: the child of the septenary hierarchies
6. Our world, its growth and development, theosophical misconceptions, explanations concerning the globes and the monads
6. Continued
7. The parents of man on Earth
Summing up
Section 2. The Evolution of Symbolism in its Approximate Order:
1. Symbolism and ideographs
2. The mystery language and its keys
3. Primordial substance and divine thought
4. Chaos - theos - kosmos
5. The hidden deity, its symbols and glyphs
6. The mundane egg
7. The days and nights of Brahma
8. The lotus as a universal symbol
9. Deus lunus
10. Tree and serpent and crocodile worship
11. Demon est deus inversus
12. The theogony of the creative gods
13. The seven creations
14. The four elements
15. On Kwan-Shi-Yin and Kwan-Yin
Section 3. Science and the Secret Doctrine Contrasted:
1. Reasons for these addenda
2. Modern physicists are playing at blind man's buff
3. An lumen sit corpus nec non?
4. Is gravitation a law?
5. The theories of rotation in science
6. The masks of science
7. An attack on the scientific theory of force by a man of science
8. Life, force, or gravity
9. The solar theory
10. The coming force
11. On the elements and atoms
12. Ancient thought in modern dress
13. The modern nebular theory
14. Forces - modes of motion or intelligences?
15. Gods, monads, and atoms
16. Cyclic evolution and karma
17. The zodiac and its antiquity
18. Summary of the mutual position. Volume 2: Preliminary notes
Book II
Section 1. Anthropogenesis. Stanzas from the Book of Dzyan:
1. Beginnings of sentient life
2. Two antediluvian astronomers
3. Nature unaided fails
4. The chronology of the Brahmins
5. Attempts to create man
6. Creation of the first races
7. The evolution of the second race
8. The evolution of the weat-born
9. From the semi-divine down to the first human races
10. Evolution of the animal mammalians - the first fall. What may be the objections to the foregoing
11. The final evolution of man. Edens, serpents and dragons. The sons of God and the sacred island
12. The history of the fourth race. Archaic teachings in the Puranas and Genesis. A panoramic view of the early races
12. Continued
13. Are giants a fiction? The races with the 'third eye'. The primeval manus of humanity
14. The civilization and destruction of the fourth and fifth races. Gyclopean ruins and colossal stones as witnesses to giants
15. The fifth race and its divine instructors
Additional fragments from a commentary on the verses of stanza 12
Conclusion
Section 2. The Archaic Symbolism of the World-Religions: Esoteric Tenets Corroborated in Every Scripture:
1. Adam-Adami
2. The 'Holy of Holies', its degradation
3. On the myth of the 'Fallen angel', in its various aspects
4. Is Pleroma Satan's lair?
5. Prometheus the Titan
6. Enoichion-Henoch
7. The symbolism of the mystery names, Iao, and Jehovah
8. The Upanishads in Gnostic literature
9. The cross and the Pythagorean decade
10. The mysteries of the Hebdomad
Section 3. Addenda. Science and the Secret Doctrine Contrasted:
1. Archaic, or modern anthropology?
2. The ancestors mankind is offered by science
3. The fossil relics of man and the anthropoid ape
4. Duration of the geological periods, race cycles, and the antiquity of man
5. Organic evolution and creative centres
6. Giants, civilizations, and submerged continents traced in history
7. Scientific and geological proofs of the existence of several submerged continents
Index. Volume 3: Preface Annie Besant
Introductory
1. Preliminary survey
2. Modern criticism and the ancients
3. The origin of magic
4. The secresy of the initi
Author
H. P. Blavatsky
Contributors
Annie Besant