Helena Blavatsky: The Secret Doctrine

Glossary

• Book of Dzyan: a mysterious, ancient text that archeologists believe never existed
• cosmogony: the study of the origin, evolution, and structure of the universe
• fons et origo: Latin for “source and origin”
• Hermes: Hermes Trismegistus, a Greco-Egyptian god and putative author of a Gnostic text
• Kabalists: followers of Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism
• Karmic law: the Hindu law of moral causation
• Manas: “mind”
• Mandukya: the name of one of the Hindu Upanishads
• Manvantara: an astronomical measure of a time period, an “age of a Manu,” or progenitor of humankind
• mutatis mutandis: Latin for “by changing those things that need to be changed” or, more simply, “the necessary changes having been made”
• “Notes on the Bhagavadgita”: a book published by the Theosophical Society; the “able lecturer” was the author T. Subba Row
• Paracelsus: a fifteenth-century alchemist and occultist
• Pralaya: “dissolution”
• Puranas: the scriptural texts that contain the mythologies of Hinduism
• Sciolists: amateurs, dabblers
• Senzar Commentaries and Glosses: mythical commentaries written in Atlantis in the Senzar language
• Vedantins: those who follow the Vedanta, one of the systems of Indian philosophy; essentially, Hindus
• Von Hartmann: Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann, a nineteenth-century German philosopher
• Young: British poet Edward Young; the quotation is from his 1742 poem “The Complaint; or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality”