Theos-Talk Archives (May 2007 Message tt00095)

An Intuitive Hunch about 
a Solitary Page of the SD

If you look in Boris de Zirkoff's Introduction to THE SECRET DOCTRINE 
(New Adyar Edition], 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!

Sometime ago I was pondering on this page and 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!!  I give more 
details about this 1886 manuscript in my article on SD III at:
http://blavatskyarchives.com/sdiiipt1.htm

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."

BELOW 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 [1886, early 1887] was the volume on 
Cosmogenesis.

When the volumes were rearranged/reordered, this Volume II page and
the rest of Volume II became Volume I (as published in 1888).

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 decided to greatly EXPAND 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