The Secret Doctrine

The Secret Doctrine (1888) is Blavatsky's magnum opus, presented as a commentary on the "Stanzas of Dzyan," a supposedly ancient text in a hidden language (Senzar) that no independent scholar has ever seen and which is generally regarded as her own composition rather than a genuine document. Around it she expounds a grand scheme of cosmic and human evolution: a single divine principle, the periodic emanation and reabsorption of the cosmos, and the development of humanity through a sequence of "root races" over vast cycles. This last element requires an honest note.

Blavatsky's root-race scheme is an esoteric evolutionary mythology, not anthropology, and although she herself affirmed the essential unity and common origin of humankind, the vocabulary of higher and lower "races" was later selectively borrowed and distorted by others, including some in the orbit of Ariosophy and early twentieth-century racial nationalism, to ends Theosophy did not endorse. The book's lasting influence is real and largely separate from that misuse: its vision of an ancient cosmic wisdom shaped the whole subsequent New Age, and historians such as Wouter Hanegraaff treat it as a central document in the modern reinvention of esotericism.

The Secret Doctrine is built on a device. Blavatsky presents a series of Stanzas, said to be translated from an archaic work called the Book of Dzyan, and then comments on them at very great length. The stanzas themselves are short and oracular; the commentary is where the content is, and it runs to well over a thousand pages across two volumes.

The first volume, Cosmogenesis, treats the emanation of the universe: the periodic manifestation and reabsorption of worlds, the sevenfold division of everything, and a cosmology explicitly offered as an alternative to both Genesis and contemporary physics. The second, Anthropogenesis, treats the emergence of humanity through a sequence of root races, and it is the part of the work with the worst subsequent history, because its racial schema was taken up in the twentieth century by people Blavatsky would not have recognised and put to uses the atlas records rather than passes over.

The commentary form matters for how the book is read. Because the stanzas are unverifiable and the commentary is vast, the argument can always retreat from the text to the exposition, and there is no external check available on either.

No manuscript of the Book of Dzyan has ever been produced, and Blavatsky said it was inaccessible. The atlas records the stanzas as her composition unless and until a source is found, which is the position the academic study of the subject takes.