[Moses], the
way of Issa [Jesus], and the way of Mahmoud, and there may be other
roads of which you and I know nothing. I was born in the way of
Mahmoud, and I believe it to be the best and the easiest to follow,
and you were born in the way of Issa. And of this I am very sure:
that if you will follow your guide on your road and I follow my
guide on my road, when we have climbed the hill of endeavour, we
shall salute one another again at the gates of Paradise."

If, then, in the following pages I attempt to show the errors of
Theosophy, it is not because I do not recognize that there is much that
is good and beautiful in the ancient religions from which it professes
to derive.

But what is Theosophy? The word, as we have already seen, was used in
the eighteenth century to denote the theory of the Martinists; it was
known two centuries earlier when Haselmeyer in 1612 wrote of "the
laudable Fraternity of the Theosophists of the Rosy Cross." According to
Colonel Olcott, who with Madame Blavatsky founded the modern
Theosophical Society in New York in 1875, the word was discovered by one
of the members "in turning over the leaves of a Dictionary" and
forthwith unanimously adopted.[699] Madame Blavatsky had arrived in
America two years earlier, before which date she professed to have been
initiated into certain esoteric doctrines in Thibet. Monsieur Guenon,
who writes with inside knowledge of the movement, indicates, however,
the existence of concealed superiors on the Continent of Europe by whom
she was in reality directed.

What is very significant ... is that Madame Blavatsky in 1875 wrote
this: "I have been sent from Paris to America in order to verify
phenomena and their reality and to show the deception of the
Spiritualist theory." Sent by whom? Later she will say: by the
"Mahatmas"; but then there was no question of them, and besides it
was in Paris that she received her mission, and not in India or in
Thibet.[700]

Elsewhere Monsieur Guenon observes that it is very doubtful whether
Madame Blavatsky was ever in Thibet at all. These obvious attempts at
concealment lead Monsieur Guenon therefore to the conclusion that in the
background of Theosophy there existed a mysterious centre of direction,
that Madame Blavatsky was simply "an instrument in the hands of
individuals or occult groups sheltering behind her personality," and
that "those who belie