Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), née Hahn Von Rottenstern, often known as Madame Blavatsky, was a Russian mystic and author who co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. She gained an international following as the primary founder of Theosophy as a belief system.
Blavatsky was a controversial figure during her lifetime, championed by supporters as an enlightened sage and derided as a charlatan by critics. Her Theosophical doctrines influenced the spread of Hindu and Buddhist ideas in the West as well as the development of Western esoteric currents like Ariosophy, Anthroposophy, and the New Age Movement.
She wrote fundamental essays, includingIsis Unveiled,The Secret Doctrine,The Key to Theosophy andThe Voice of the Silence.
The Blavatsky’s articlePsychic and Noetic Action, which we propose to our readers today, was published in October-November 1880 in the Lucifer Magazine.
According to Blavatsky, holding to our motto, “There is no religion higher than truth”, we refuse most decidedly to pander to physical science. Yet, we may say this: If the so-called exact sciences limited their activity only to the physical realm of nature: if they concerned themselves strictly with surgery, chemistry—up to its legitimate boundaries, and with physiology—so far as the latter relates to the structure of our corporeal frame, then the Occultists would be the first to seek help in modern sciences, however many their blunders and mistakes. But once that over-stepping material Nature the physiologists of “animalistic” school pretend to meddle with, and deliver ex cathedra dicta on, the higher functions and phenomena of the mind, saying that a careful analysis brings them to a firm conviction that no more than the animal is man a free-agent, far less a responsible one—then the Occultist has a far greater right than the average modern “Idealist” to protest.