Free The List Of Seven by Mark Frost Page B

presented the preferred alternative; feed the body, quiet the mind. Then a visit to an individual uniquely qualified to lead him out of this metaphysical mire was in order: HPB.
    chapter seven HPB
    One full stomach and two hours later, Doyle was srr-ting amid a modest gathering of Transcendentalists at the local Grange Hall listening to H. P. Blavatsky hold forth from center stage. No lectern, no notes, she spoke extemporaneously, and even if the essential content and continuity of the lecture proved elusive in retrospect, the effect was undeniably mesmerizing.
    "—there has never been a religious leader of any stature or importance who invented a new religion. New forms, new interpretations, yes, these they have given us, but the truths upon which these revelations were based are older than mankind. These prophets, by their own admission, were never originators. The word they preferred was transmitters. They never, any of them, from Confucius to Zoroaster, Jesus to Mohammed, they never said, These things I have created. What they said was, invariably, These things I receive and pass on. And so it is today."
    As her passion mounted, her eyes flashed liked sapphires. Blavatsky's round, diminutive figure assumed protean dimensions, while her heavily accented English, broken and tentative to start with, flowed in a grammatically impeccable silver stream.
    "There exists in the world today sacred wisdom which dwarfs our puny notions of history; I am speaking of books of ancient origin, vast depositories of them, hidden for centuries from the Western eye; the Northern Buddhists of Tibet alone possess three hundred and twenty-five volumes, fifty to sixty times the amount of information contained in the so-called Bible, recounting two hundred thousand years of human history. Let me repeat that: two hundred thousand years
    of recorded human history. 'But that's pre-Christian! What an assertion! She must be insane! She must be silenced!' I can hear the venerable Archbishop crying out all the way from Canterbury."
    She cocked a hand to her ear, the comic effect of which did not elude her audience. Doyle glanced around the room and noticed that the Indian woman who had ridden up with him on the train was sitting one row over, smiling at HPB and nodding approvingly.
    "What was the most devastating act the Christians took against their precedents? How did they begin their fanatical and systematic eradication of the Ancient Knowledge? Answer? The Gregorian calendar. So simple: Year One. Time begins with the birth of the Nazarene prophet—oh there were some mildly significant events before this, but the years run backward, you see, away from this Supreme Moment, into the void of insignificance. We men of the True Church, we'll decide when time begins. And so with one stroke prove definitively that the writing implement is mightier than the saber.
    "Do you see how damaging, how trivializing this decision is to all the history that preceded it? How this one act, born not of the traditional Christian pieties, but from the fear of unwelcome truths—that is, truths contradictory to the best interests of those currently in power—cuts human progress off from the most powerful spiritual resources it has or will ever have available to it."
    Bold talk in a Christian country. Doyle had to admire the woman's verve and evident common sense. This was no fuzzy-headed mystic with her head in cloud-cuckoo-land.
    "You have to grant them this. These early Christians. They were tenacious. Did their work well. They scoured the world for these Ancient Doctrines, and they obliterated them, almost entirely, in the Western world. The library at Alexandria, the last great archive whose contents straddled the pre- and post-Christian worlds, burned to the ground. Do you suppose this act of willful spiritual vandalism was an accident?
    "This is why our travels, our work as Theosophists, must always take us to the East. That is where the knowledge is. From where it