Time & Perspective Quote by H. P. Blavatsky

Blavatsky is staging the past as a kind of occult projector: what we call religions and philosophies are not the thing itself, but the dancing silhouettes thrown onto a wall. It’s a clever reversal of authority. Instead of treating traditions as self-contained revelations, she demotes them to effects, symptoms, distortions - useful precisely because they’re distorted. The “hoary Past” is both venerable and suspect: ancientness becomes evidence of depth, yet also a warning that what survives is often a theatrical residue.

Her intent is methodological, almost forensic. “Checking them as we go along, and comparing them” reads like a pitch for comparative religion before it was fully professionalized, but with an esoteric twist: comparison is not just to map differences, it’s to reconstruct an original “body” behind the shadows - a hidden source-tradition, a primal metaphysical anatomy. The subtext is polemical. If every creed is merely an “external screen,” then churches, dogmas, and even academic philosophy lose their monopoly on truth. Authority shifts to the interpreter who claims to see through patterns across cultures.

Context matters: late 19th-century spiritual hunger, post-Darwinian anxiety, imperial encounters with Asian texts, and the Victorian craze for séances and “ancient wisdom.” Blavatsky’s Theosophical project offers modernity a compromise: keep reason’s comparative tools, but let them lead somewhere anti-materialist. The rhetorical trick is that it flatters skepticism (don’t trust appearances) while smuggling in a grand, untestable conclusion (there is a single “body” to be found). The shadow-play isn’t just imagery; it’s her permission slip to reinterpret everything.