Theos-Talk Archives (May 2006 Message tt00777)

An Intuitive Hunch about a Solitary Page of the SD

If you look in Boris de Zirkoff's Introduction to the SD, p. [36]
you will see a:

"Facsimile of a solitary page of one version of THE SECRET DOCTRINE
in H.P.B.'s handwriting preserved in the Adyar Archives."

Now I had always asked myself:  WHAT version?  Certainly not the 
final 1888 version!

Yesterday, after having had an exchange on Theos-Talk with Ken Small
on the different versions of the SD, I was pondering on what had been
discussed when I had what many would call an "intuitive insight".

It suddently dawned on me that this above mentioned solitary page 
was actually from HPB's handwritten manuscript of 1886!!

This would have been one of the many pages that Bertram Keightley
read in May 1887. Remember he wrote that Madame Blavatsky:

"placed the whole of the so far completed MSS. [of The Secret 
Doctrine] in the hands of Dr. [Archibald] Keightley and myself....We 
both read the whole mass of MSS.--a pile over three feet high--most 
carefully through."

Here I give two links:

The first link is to an online facsimile of the page in question:

http://blavatskyarchives.com/sdsolitarypage1886.htm

The second link is to a larger version in red.  This version may 
help readers especially in deciphering the latter part of the page.

http://blavatskyarchives.com/sdsolitarypage1886bb.htm

Now as soon as I got over the excitement of the intuitive hunch, I 
thought:

Hmm.  Now I need to somehow verify or falsify this.  Can I do it?

A preliminary mental analysis confirms to me that this is indeed
one page of HPB's original 1886 manuscript.  And it was found in 
Volume II which at that time was the volume on Cosmogenesis.

When the volumes were rearranged/reordered, this Volume II page and 
the rest of Volume II became Volume I.

Now notice that this solitary page shows the 3 famous fundamental 
propositions of the SD.

In the solitary page, the 3 propositions were part of the commentary 
on Stanza I but HPB must have decided to take this material and 
transfer it from the commentary on Stanzas I to the "Proem" section 
of the same volume.

In the published 1888 Vol. I, she  starts listing these propositions 
on page 14, but she apparently greatly EXPANDED her comments and you 
can see some of the comments from the solitary page on page 18 for 
example.

Students will also see that she REWORDS the 3 fundamental 
propositions in the final 1888 version!! 

Interesting to read and study the 2 different versions (1886 & 1888) 
of the 3 propositions…..

Daniel
http://hpb.cc