Women Adepts
In June, 1889, C.S. Stockholm sent a few questions to the editors of the Theosophical Journal Lucifer. One of them was about the existence of Women Adepts:
Has any woman ever attained to Adeptship proper? Will her intellectual and spiritual nature and gifts permit it, even while supposing that her physical nature might endure the hardships therefrom indispensable?
To this, H. P. Blavatsky answered:
Woman has as good a chance as any man has to reach high Adeptship. Why she does not succeed in this direction in Europe is simply due to her early education and the social prejudice which causes her to be regarded as inferior to man. This prejudice, amounting to a curse in Christian lands, was mainly derived from the Jewish Bible, and man has profited by it.[1]
T. Subba Row, considered by H.P. Blavatsky to be her equal in occultism, wrote:
There are instances of females becoming the greatest Adepts. Whether an individual is male of female depends upon temperament as much as anything else. . . . There is one woman who still stands in the list of the Mahachohans of one of the greatest Rays--that to which H ... belongs. She is not merely a great Adept of that Ray, but had made many original discoveries. . . There is a Ray specially adapted to women; it is sometimes called "the body of love". Its Logos is rather a female than a male; it belongs to the magnetic pole of the universe. I do not think there will ever be a female Adept of the First Ray, because it belongs to entirely to the positive pole.[2]
Notes
Further reading
- Chelas by H. P. Blavatsky