Writings of H P Blavatsky
Cardiff
Theosophical Society in Wales
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24 -1DL
Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky (1831 – 1891)
The Founder of
Modern Theosophy
Civilization,
The Death of
Art and Beauty
By
H P Blavatsky
In an interview with the celebrated Hungarian violinist, M.
Remenyi, the
some very interesting experiences in the
European artist who ever played before the Mikado of Japan," he
said; and reverting to that which has ever been a matter of deep
regret for every lover of the artistic and the picturesque, the
violinist added:
On
memorable, unfortunately, for the change of costume commanded by
the Empress. She herself, abandoning the exquisite beauty of the
feminine Japanese costume, appeared on that day for the first time
and at my concert in European costume, and it made my heart ache
to see her. I could have greeted her had I dared with a long wail
of despair upon my travelled violin. Six ladies accompanied her,
they themselves being clad in their native costume, and walking
with infinite grace and charm.
Alas, alas, but this is not all! The Mikado – this hitherto
sacred, mysterious, invisible and unreachable personage:
The Mikado himself was in the uniform of a European general!
At that time the Court etiquette was so strict, my accompanist was
not permitted into His Majesty's drawing room, and this was told
me beforehand. I had a good remplacement, as my ambassador, Count
Zaluski, who had been a pupil of Liszt, was able himself to
accompany me. You will be astonished when I tell you that, having
chosen for the first piece in the programme my transcription for
the violin, of a C sharp minor polonaise by Chopin, a musical
piece of the most intrinsic value and poetic depths, the Emperor,
when I had finished, intimated to Count Ito, his first minister,
that I should play it again. The Japanese taste is good. I was
laden with presents of untold value, one item only being a
gold-lacquer box of the seventeenth century. I played in
and outside
There I made an interesting excursion to the Portuguese possession
of
very interesting to see outside the Chinese town of
European Portuguese town which to this very day has remained
unchanged since the sixteenth century. In the midst of the
exquisite tropical vegetation of Java, and despite the terrific
heat, I gave sixty-two concerts in sixty-seven days, travelling
all over the island, inspecting its antiquities, the chief of
which is a most wonderful Buddhist temple, the Boro Budhur, or
Many Buddhas. This building contains six miles of figures, and is
a solid pile of stone, larger than the pyramids. They have, these
Javans, an extraordinarily sweet orchestra in the national
Samelang which consists of percussion instruments played by
eighteen people; but to hear this orchestra, with its most weird
Oriental chorus and ecstatic dances, one must have had the
privilege of being invited by the Sultan of Solo, "Sole Emperor of
the World." I have seen and heard nothing more dreamy and poetic
than the Serimpis danced by nine Royal Princesses.
Where are the Æsthetes of a few years ago? Or was this little
confederation of the lovers of art but one of the soap-bubbles of
our fin de siècle, rich in promise and suggestion of many a
possibility, but dead in works and act? Or, if there are any true
lovers of art yet left among them, why do they not organize and send
out missionaries the world over, to tell picturesque
countries ready to fall victims that, to imitate the
will-o'-the-wisp of European culture and fascination, means for a
non-Christian land, the committing of suicide; that it means
sacrificing one's individuality for an empty show and shadow; at
best it is to exchange the original and the picturesque for the
vulgar and the hideous. Truly and indeed it is high time that at
last something should be done in this direction, and before the
deceitful civilization of the conceited nations of but yesterday has
irretrievably hypnotized the older races, and made them succumb to
its upas-tree wiles and supposed superiority. Otherwise, old arts
and artistic creations, everything original and unique will very
soon disappear. Already national dresses and time-honoured customs,
and everything beautiful, artistic, and worth preservation is fast
disappearing from view. At no distant day, alas, the best relics of
the past will perhaps be found only in museums in sorry, solitary,
and be-ticketed samples preserved under glass!
Such is the work and the unavoidable result of our modern
civilization. Skin-deep in reality in its visible effects, in the
"blessings" it is alleged to have given to the world, its
roots are
rotten to the core. It is to its progress that selfishness and
materialism, the greatest curses of the nations, are due; and the
latter will most surely lead to the annihilation of art and of the
appreciation of the truly harmonious and beautiful. Hitherto,
materialism has only led to a universal tendency to unification on
the material plane and a corresponding diversity on that of thought
and spirit. It is this universal tendency, which by propelling
humanity, through its ambition and selfish greed, to an incessant
chase after wealth and the obtaining at any price of the supposed
blessings of this life, causes it to aspire or rather gravitate to
one level, the lowest of all – the plane of empty appearance.
Materialism and indifference to all save the selfish realization of
wealth and power, and the over-feeding of national and personal
vanity, have gradually led nations and men to the almost entire
oblivion of spiritual ideals, of the love of nature, to the correct
appreciation of things. Like a hideous leprosy our Western
civilization has eaten its way through all the quarters of the globe
and hardened the human heart. "Soul-saving" is its deceitful,
lying
pretext; greed for additional revenue through opium, rum, and the
inoculation of European vices – the real aim. In the far East it has
infected with the spirit of imitation the higher classes of the
"pagans" – save
respect; and in
even on the dirty, starving proletariat itself! For the last thirty
years, as if some deceitful semblance of a reversion to the
ancestral type – awarded to men by the Darwinian theory in its moral
added to its physical characteristics – were contemplated by an evil
spirit tempting mankind, almost every race and nation under the Sun
in
the frantic endeavor to destroy Nature in every direction, and also
every vestige of older civilizations – far superior to our own in
arts, godliness, and the appreciation of the grandiose and
harmonious – must result in such national calamities. Therefore, do
we find hitherto artistic and picturesque
the temptation of justifying the "ape theory" by simianizing
its
populations in order to bring the country on a level with canting,
greedy and artificial
For certainly
from its diplomats down to its custodians of religion, from its
political down to its social laws, selfish, greedy and brutal beyond
expression in its grabbing characteristics. And yet there are those
who wonder at the gradual decadence of true art, as if art could
exist without imagination, fancy, and a just appreciation of the
beautiful in Nature, or without poetry and high religious, hence,
metaphysical aspirations! The galleries of paintings and sculpture,
we hear, become every year poorer in quality, if richer in quantity.
It is lamented that while there is a plethora of ordinary
productions, the greatest scarcity of remarkable pictures and
statuary prevails. Is this not most evidently due to the facts that
(a) the artists will very soon remain with no better models than
nature morte (or "still life") to inspire themselves with; and
(b)
that the chief concern is not the creation of artistic objects, but
their speedy sale and profits? Under such conditions, the fall of
true art is only a natural consequence.
Owing to the triumphant march and the invasion of civilization,
Nature, as well as man and ethics, is sacrificed, and is fast
becoming artificial. Climates are changing, and the face of the
whole world will soon be altered. Under the murderous hand of the
pioneers of civilization, the destruction of whole primeval forests
is leading to the drying up of rivers, and the opening of the Canal
of
divert the course of the
now becoming cold and rainy, and fertile lands threaten to be soon
transformed into sandy deserts. A few years more and there will not
remain within a radius of fifty miles around our large cities one
single rural spot inviolate-from vulgar speculation. In scenery, the
picturesque and the natural is daily replaced by the grotesque and
the artificial. Scarce a landscape in
nature is desecrated by the advertisements of "Pears' Soap"
and
"Beecham's Pills." The pure air of the country is polluted
with
smoke, the smells of greasy railway-engines, and the sickening
odours of gin, whiskey, and beer. And once that every natural spot
in the surrounding scenery is gone, and the eye of the painter finds
but the artificial and hideous products of modern speculation to
rest upon, artistic taste will have to follow suit and disappear
along with them>
"No man ever did or ever will work well, but either from actual
sight or sight of faith," says Ruskin, speaking of art. Thus, the
first quarter of the coming century may witness painters of
landscapes, who have never seen an acre of land free from human
improvement; and painters of figures whose ideas of female beauty of
form will be based on the wasp-like pinched-in waists of corseted,
hollow-chested and consumptive society belles. It is not from such
models that a picture deserving of the definition of Horace – "a
poem without words" – is produced. Artificially draped Parisiennes
and
can never replace the genuine article; and both free Bedouins and
genuine Italian peasant girls are, thanks to "civilization,"
fast
becoming things of the past. Where shall artists find genuine models
in the coming century, when the hosts of the free Nomads of the
Desert, and perchance all the Negro tribes of
remain of them after their decimation by Christian cannons, and the
rum and opium of the Christian civilizer – will have donned European
coats and top hats? And that this is precisely what awaits art under
the beneficial progress of modern civilization, is self-evident to
all.
Aye! let us boast of the blessings of civilization, by all
means. Let us brag of our sciences and the grand discoveries of the
age, its achievements in mechanical arts, its railroads, telephones
and electric batteries; but let us not forget, meanwhile, to
purchase at fabulous prices (almost as great as those given in our
day for a prize dog, or an old prima donna's song) the paintings and
statuary of uncivilized, barbarous antiquity and of the middle ages:
for such objects of art will be reproduced no more. Civilization has
tolled their eleventh hour. It has rung the death-knell of the old
arts, and the last decade of our century is summoning the world to
the funeral of all that was grand, genuine, and original in the old
civilizations. Would Raphael, O ye lovers of art, have created one
single of his many Madonnas, had he had, instead of Fornarina and
the once Juno-like women of the Trastevero of
genius, only the present-day models, or the niched Virgins of the
nooks and corners of modern
boots? Or would Andrea del Sarto have produced his famous "Venus
and
Cupid" from a modern
victims to fashion – holding under the shadow of a gigantic hat a la
mousquetaire, feathered like the scalp of an Indian chief, a dirty,
scrofulous brat from the slums? How could Titian have ever
immortalized his golden-haired patrician ladies of
been compelled to move all his life in the society of our actual
"professional beauties," with their straw-colored, dyed
capillaries
that transform human hair into the fur of a yellow Angora cat? May
not one venture to state with the utmost confidence that the world
would never have had the Athena Limnia of Phidias – that ideal of
beauty in face and form – had Aspasia, the Milesian, or the fair
daughters of
other, disfigured that "form" with stays and bustle, and
coated that
"face" with white enamel, after the fashion of the varnished
features of the mummies of the dead Egyptians.
We see the same in architecture. Not even the genius of Michael
Angelo himself could have failed to receive its death-blow at the
first sight of the
horrible still, the Albert Memorial. Nor, for the matter of that,
could it have received any suggestive idea from the Colosseum and
the palace of the Cæsars, in their present whitewashed and repaired
state! Whither, then, shall we, in our days of civilization, go to
find the natural, or even simply the picturesque? Is it still to
waters be as blue and transparent as on the day when the people of
Cumæ selected its shores for a colony, and its surrounding scenery
as gloriously beautiful as ever – thanks to that spirit of mimicry
which has infected sea and land, has now lost its most artistic and
most original features. It is bereft of its lazy, dirty, but
intensely picturesque figures of old; of its lazzaroni and
barcarolos, its fishermen and country girls. Instead of the former's
red or blue Phrygian cap, and the latter's statuesque, half-nude
figure and poetical rags, we see nowadays but the caricatured
specimens of modern civilization and fashion. The gay tarantella
resounds no longer on the cool sands of the moonlit shore; it is
replaced by that libel on Terpsychore, the modern quadrille, in the
gas-lit, gin-smelling sailor's trattorias. Filth still pervades the
land, as of yore; but it is made the more apparent on the threadbare
city coat, the mangled chimney-pot hat and the once fashionable, now
cast-away European bonnet. Picked up in the hotel gutters, they now
grace the unkempt heads of the once picturesque Neapolitans. The
type of the latter has died out, and there is nothing to distinguish
the lazzaroni from the Venetian gondoliere, the Calabrian brigand,
or the London street-sweeper and beggar. The still, sunlit waters of
Canal Grande bear no longer their gondolas, filled on festival days
with gaily dressed Venetians, with picturesque boatmen and girls.
The black gondola that glides silently under the heavy caned
balconies of the old patrician palazze, reminds one now more of a
black floating coffin, with a solemn-looking, dark-clothed
undertaker paddling it on towards the
thirty years ago.
of Austrian slavery from which it was rescued by Napoleon III. Once
on shore, its gondoliere is scarcely distinguishable from his
"fare," the British M.P. on his holiday-tour in the old city
of the
Doges. Such is the levelling hand of all-destroying civilization.
It is the same all over
decade ago, every
clean and fresh as it was peculiar. Now the people are ashamed to
wear it. They want to be mistaken for foreign guests, to be regarded
as a civilized nation which follows suit even in fashion. Cross over
to
garlic is alone left to remind one of the poetry of the old days in
the country of the Cid. The graceful mantilla has almost
disappeared; the proud hidalgo-beggar has taken himself off from the
street-corner; the nightly serenades of love-sick Romeos are gone
out of fashion; and the duenna contemplates going in for woman's
rights. The members of the "Social Purity" Associations may
say
"thank God" to this and lay the change at the door of
Christian and
moral reforms of civilization. But has morality gained anything in
have every right to say, no. A Don Juan outside a house is less
dangerous than one inside. Social immorality is as rife as ever – if
not more so, in
"Harper's Guide Book" quotes in its last edition as follows:
"Morals
in all classes, especially in the higher, are in the most degraded
state. Veils, indeed, are thrown aside, and serenades are rare, but
gallantry and intrigue are as active as ever. The men think little
of their married obligations; the women . . . are willing victims of
unprincipled gallantry." (
is but on a par with all other countries civilized or now
civilizing, and is assuredly not worse than many another country
that could be named; but that which may be said of it with truth is,
that what it has lost in poetry through civilization, it has gained
in hypocrisy and loose morals. The Cortejo has turned into the petit
creve'; the castanets have become silent, because, perhaps, the
noise of the uncorked champagne bottles affords more excitement to
the rapidly civilizing nation; and the Andalouse au teint bruni
having taken to cosmetics and face-enamel, "la Marquesa d'
Almedi"
may be said to have been buried with Alfred de Musset.
The gods have indeed been propitious to the
permitted it to be burnt before its chaste Moresque beauty had been
finally desecrated, as are the rock-cut temples of
Pyramids and other relics, by drunken orgies. This superb relic of
the Moors had already suffered, once before, by Christian
improvement. It is a tradition still told in
too, that the monks of Ferdinand and Isabella had made of
that "palace of petrified flowers dyed with the hues of the wings
of
angels" – a filthy prison for thieves and murderers. Modern
speculators might have done worse; they might have polluted its
walls and pearl-inlaid ceilings, the lovely gilding and stucco, the
fairy-like arabesques, and the marble and gossamer-like carvings,
with commercial advertisements, after the Inquisitors had already
once before covered the building with whitewash and permitted the
prison-keepers to use Alhambra Halls for their donkeys and cattle.
Doubting but little that the fury of the Madrilenos for imitating
the French and English must have already, at this stage of modern
civilization, infected every
lovely country as dead. A friend speaks, as an eye-witness, of
"cocktails" spilled near the marble fountain of the
the blood-marks left by the hapless Abancerages slain by Boabdil,
and of a Parisian cancan pur sang performed by working girls and
soldiers of
But these are only trifling signs of the time and the spread of
culture among the middle and the lower classes. Wherever the spirit
of aping possesses the heart of the nation – the poor working
classes – there the elements of nationality disappear and the
country is on the eve of losing its individuality and all things
change for the worse. What is the use of talking so loudly of "the
benefits of Christian civilization," of its having softened public
morals, refined national customs and manners, etc., etc., when our
modern civilization has achieved quite the reverse! Civilization has
depended, for ages, says Burke, "upon two principles . . . the
spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion." And how many
true
gentlemen have we left, when compared even with the days of
half-barbarous knighthood? Religion has become canting hypocrisy and
the genuine religious spirit is regarded now-a-days as insanity.
Civilization, it is averred, "has destroyed brigandage, established
public security, elevated morality and built railways which now
honeycomb the face of the globe." Indeed? Let us analyze seriously
and impartially all these "benefits" and we shall soon find
that
civilization has done nothing of the kind. At best it has put a
false nose on every evil of the Past, adding hypocrisy and false
pretence to the natural ugliness of each. If it is true to say that
it has put down in some civilized centers of
the
highway-men, it is also as true that it has, thereby, destroyed
robbery only as a specialty, the latter having now become a common
occupation in every city great or small. The robber and cut-throat
has only exchanged his dress and appearance by donning the livery of
civilization – the ugly modern attire. Instead of being robbed under
the vault of thick woods and the protection of darkness, people are
robbed now-a-days under the electric light of saloons and the
protection of trade-laws and police-regulations. As to open
day-light brigandage, the Mafia of
Sicily, with high officialdom, population, police, and jury forced
to play into the hands of regularly organized bands of murderers,
thieves, and tyrants1 in the full glare of European "culture,"
show
how far our civilization has succeeded in establishing public
security, or Christian religion in softening the hearts of men and
the ways and customs of a barbarous past. Modern Cyclopædias are
very fond of expatiating upon the decadence of
horrors. But if the latest editions of the Dictionary of Greek and
Roman Biography were honest enough to make a parallel between those
"monsters of depravity" of ancient civilization, Messalina and
Faustina, Nero and Commodus, and modern European aristocracy, it
might be found that the latter could give odds to the former – in
social hypocrisy, at any rate. Between "the shameless and beastly
debauchery" of an Emperor Commodus, and as beastly a depravity of
more than one "Honourable," high official representative of
the
people, the only difference to be found is that while Commodus was a
member of all the sacerdotal colleges of Paganism, the modern
debauchee may be a high member of the Evangelical Christian
Churches, a distinguished and pious pupil of Moody and Sankey and
what not. It is not the Calchas of Homer, who was the type of the
Calchas in the Operette "La Belle Helene," but the modern
sacerdotal
Pecksniff and his followers.
As to the blessings of railways and "the annihilation of space
and time," it is still an undecided question – without speaking of
the misery and starvation the introduction of steam engines and
machinery in general has brought for years on those who depend on
their manual labour – whether railways do not kill more people in
one month than the brigands of all
year. The victims of railroads, moreover, are killed under
circumstances which surpass in horror anything the cut-throats may
have devised. One reads almost daily of railway disasters in which
people are "burned to death in the blazing wreckage,"
"mangled and
crushed out of recognition" and killed by dozens and scores.2 This
is a trifle worse than the highwaymen of old Newgate.
Nor has crime been abated at all by the spread of civilization;
though owing to the progress of science in chemistry and physics, it
has become more secure from detection and more ghastly in its
realization than it ever has been. Speak of Christian civilization
having improved public morals; of Christianity being the only
religion which has established and recognized Universal Brotherhood!
Look at the brotherly feeling shown by American Christians to the
Red Indian and the Negro, whose citizenship is the farce of the age.
Witness the love of the Anglo-Indians for the "mild Hindu,"
the
Mussulman, and the Buddhist. See "how these Christians love each
other" in their incessant law litigations, their libels against
each
other, the mutual hatred of the Churches and of the sects. Modern
civilization and Christianity are oil and water – they will never
mix. Nations among which the most horrible crimes are daily
perpetrated; nations which rejoice in Tropmanns and Jack the
Rippers, in fiends like Mrs. Reeves the trader in baby slaughter –
to the number of 300 victims as is believed – for the sake of filthy
lucre; nations which not only permit but encourage a
hosts of suicides, that patronize prize-fights, bull-fights, useless
and cruel sport and even indiscriminate vivisection – such nations
have no right to boast of their civilization. Nations furthermore
which from political considerations, dare not put down slave-trade
once for all, and out of revenue-greed, hesitate to abolish opium
and whiskey trades, fattening on the untold misery and degradation
of millions of human beings, have no right to call themselves either
Christian or civilized. A civilization finally that leads only to
the destruction of every noble, artistic feeling in man, can only
deserve the epithet of barbarous. We, the modern-day Europeans, are
Vandals as great, if not greater than Atilla with his savage hordes.
Consummatum est. Such is the work of our modem Christian
civilization and its direct effects. The destroyer of art, the
Shylock, who, for every mite of gold it gives, demands and receives
in return a pound of human flesh, in the heart-blood, in the
physical and mental suffering of the masses, in the loss of
everything true and lovable – can hardly pretend to deserve grateful
or respectful recognition. The unconsciously prophetic fin de
siècle, in short, is the long ago foreseen fin de cycle; when
according to Manjunâtha Sutra, "Justice will have died, leaving as
its successor blind Law, and as its Guru and guide – Selfishness;
when wicked things and deeds will have to be regarded as
meritorious, and holy actions as madness." Beliefs are dying out,
divine life is mocked at; art and genius, truth and justice are
daily sacrificed to the insatiable mammon of the age – money
grubbing. The artificial replaces everywhere the real, the false
substitutes the true. Not a sunny valley, not a shadowy grove left
immaculate on the bosom of mother nature. And yet what marble
fountain in fashionable square or city park, what bronze lions or
tumble-down dolphins with upturned tails can compare with an old
worm-eaten, moss-covered, weather-stained country well, or a rural
windmill in a green meadow! What Arc de Triomphe can ever compare
with the low arch of Grotto Azzurra, at
Champs Elysées, rival
birth-place of Tasso? Ancient civilizations have never sacrificed
Nature to speculation, but holding it as divine, have honoured her
natural beauties by the erection of works of art, such as our modern
electric civilization could never produce even in dream. The sublime
grandeur, the mournful gloom and majesty of the ruined temples of
Pæstum, that stand for ages like so many sentries over the sepulchre
of the Past and the forlorn hope of the Future amid the mountain
wilderness of
new civilization will ever produce. Give us the banditti who once
infested these ruins, rather than the railroads that cut through the
old Etruscan tombs; the first may take the purse and life of the
few; the second are undermining the lives of the millions by
poisoning with foul gases the sweet breath of the pure air. In ten
years, by century xxth,
and even
fogs, thanks to the increase of population and changes of climate.
We hear that Speculation is preparing a new iniquity against Nature:
smoky, greasy, stench-breathing funiculaires (baby-railways) are
being contemplated for some world-renowned mountains. They are
preparing to creep like so many loathsome, fire-vomiting reptiles
over the immaculate body of the
pierce the heart of the snow-capped Virgin mountain, the glory of
priceless remains of the grand
over its colossal corpse and sculptured pillars the present Custom
House?
Are we so wrong then, in maintaining that modern civilization
with its Spirit of Speculation is the very Genius of Destruction;
and as such, what better words can be addressed to it than this
definition of Burke:
"A Spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish
temper and confined views. People will not look forward to
posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors."
Lucifer, May, 1891
H. P. Blavatsky
1 Read the "Cut Throat's
April, 1877, and the digest of it in the
15th, 1891, "Murder as a Profession,"
2 To take one instance. A Reuter's telegram from
accidents are almost of daily occurrence, gives the following
details of a wrecked train: "One of the cars which was attached to
a
gravel train and which contained five Italian workmen, was thrown
forward into the center of the wreck, and the whole mass caught
fire. Two of the men were killed outright and the remaining three
were injured, pinioned in the wreckage. As the flames reached them
their cries and groans were heartrending. Owing to the position of
the car and the intense heat the rescuers were unable to reach them,
and were compelled to watch them slowly burn to death. It is
understood that all the victims leave families."
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Preface
Theosophy and the Masters General Principles
The Earth Chain Body and Astral Body Kama – Desire
Manas Of Reincarnation Reincarnation Continued
Karma Kama Loka
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Colonel Henry Steel Olcott William Quan Judge
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Theosophical Works
H P Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine
Isis Unveiled by H P Blavatsky
H P Blavatsky’s Esoteric Glossary
Mahatma Letters to A P Sinnett 1 - 25
A Modern Revival of Ancient Wisdom
(Selection of Articles by H P Blavatsky)
The Secret Doctrine – Volume 3
A compilation of H P Blavatsky’s
writings published after her death
Esoteric Christianity or the Lesser Mysteries
The Early Teachings of The Masters
A Collection of Fugitive Fragments
Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy
Mystical,
Philosophical, Theosophical, Historical
and Scientific
Essays Selected from "The Theosophist"
Edited by George Robert Stow Mead
From Talks on the Path of Occultism - Vol. II
In the Twilight”
Series of Articles
The In the
Twilight” series appeared during
1898 in The
Theosophical Review and
from 1909-1913 in The Theosophist.
compiled from
information supplied by
her relatives and friends and edited by A P Sinnett
Letters and
Talks on Theosophy and the Theosophical Life
Obras Teosoficas En Espanol
Theosophische Schriften Auf Deutsch
An Outstanding
Introduction to Theosophy
By a student of
Katherine Tingley
Elementary Theosophy Who is the Man? Body and Soul
Body, Soul and Spirit Reincarnation Karma
Guide to the
Theosophy Wales King Arthur Pages
Arthur draws the Sword from the Stone
The Knights of The Round Table
The Roman Amphitheatre at Caerleon,
Eamont Bridge, Nr Penrith, Cumbria, England.
(History of the Kings of Britain)
The reliabilty of this work has long been a subject of
debate but it is the first definitive account of Arthur’s
Reign
and one which puts Arthur in a historcal context.
and his version’s political agenda
According to Geoffrey of Monmouth
The first written mention of Arthur as a heroic figure
The British leader who fought twelve battles
King Arthur’s ninth victory at
The Battle of the City of the Legion
King Arthur ambushes an advancing Saxon
army then defeats them at Liddington Castle,
Badbury, Near Swindon, Wiltshire, England.
King Arthur’s twelfth and last victory against the Saxons
Traditionally Arthur’s last battle in which he was
mortally wounded although his side went on to win
No contemporary writings or accounts of his life
but he is placed 50 to 100 years after the accepted
King Arthur period. He refers to Arthur in his inspiring
poems but the earliest written record of these dates
from over three hundred years after Taliesin’s death.
Mallerstang Valley, Nr Kirkby Stephen,
A 12th Century Norman ruin on the site of what is
reputed to have been a stronghold of Uther Pendragon
From
wise child with no earthly father to
Megastar
of Arthurian Legend
History of the Kings of Britain
Drawn from the Stone or received from the Lady of the Lake.
Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur has both versions
with both swords called Excalibur. Other versions
5th & 6th Century Timeline of Britain
From the departure of the Romans from
Britain to the establishment of sizeable
Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms
Glossary of
Arthur’s uncle:- The puppet ruler of the Britons
controlled and eventually killed by Vortigern
Amesbury, Wiltshire, England. Circa 450CE
An alleged massacre of Celtic Nobility by the Saxons
History of the Kings of Britain
Athrwys / Arthrwys
King of Ergyng
Circa 618 - 655 CE
Latin: Artorius; English: Arthur
A warrior King born in Gwent and associated with
Caerleon, a possible Camelot. Although over 100 years
later that the accepted Arthur period, the exploits of
Athrwys may have contributed to the King Arthur Legend.
He became King of Ergyng, a kingdom between
Gwent and Brycheiniog (Brecon)
Angles under Ida seized the Celtic Kingdom of
Bernaccia in North East England in 547 CE forcing
Although much later than the accepted King Arthur
period, the events of Morgan Bulc’s 50 year campaign
to regain his kingdom may have contributed to
Old Welsh: Guorthigirn;
Anglo-Saxon: Wyrtgeorn;
Breton: Gurthiern; Modern Welsh; Gwrtheyrn;
*********************************
An earlier ruler than King Arthur and not a heroic figure.
He is credited with policies that weakened Celtic Britain
to a point from which it never recovered.
Although there are no contemporary accounts of
his rule, there is more written evidence for his
existence than of King Arthur.
How Sir Lancelot slew two giants,
From Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur
How Sir Lancelot rode disguised
in Sir Kay's harness, and how he
From Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur
How Sir Lancelot jousted against
four knights of the Round Table,
From Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur
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UK Listing of Theosophical Groups
Cardiff
Theosophical Society in Wales
Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24 – 1DL
_____________________________
Cardiff Picture Gallery
Cardiff
Millennium Stadium
The Hayes Cafe
Outside Cardiff Castle Circa 1890
Church Street
Cardiff View
Royal
The Original
Norman Castle which stands inside
the Grounds of
the later
Inside the
Grounds at
Cardiff Street
Entertainment
Cardiff Indoor
Market
All
Wales Guide to Theosophy Instant Guide to
Theosophy
Theosophy
Wales Hornet Theosophy Wales Now
Cardiff
Theosophical Archive Elementary Theosophy
Basic
Theosophy Theosophy in Cardiff
Theosophy in Wales Hey Look! Theosophy in
Cardiff
Streetwise Theosophy Grand
Tour
Theosophy
Aardvark Theosophy
Starts Here
Theosophy 206 Biography of William Q Judge
Theosophy Cardiff’s Face Book of Great Theosophists
Theosophy Evolution Theosophy Generally Stated
Biography of Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky
Cardiff
Theosophical Society in Wales