The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett (book)

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First published in 1923 by A. Trevor Barker, this volume gathers most of the letters sent by Mahatmas Morya and Koot Hoomi to A. P. Sinnett and A. O. Hume between the years 1880 and 1884. This publication, where the letters were arranged under subjects, underwent three editions.

On March 25, 1972, Vicente Hao Chin, Jr. published a fourth edition with the letters arranged in chronological order based on the Readers Guide to The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett written by George Linton and Virginia Hanson. This edition also includes brief notes by Hanson regarding the context and circumstances of each letter.

Why A. P. Sinnett?

According to Annie Besant in her book A Study in Karma Mahatma K. H. and Mr. Sinnett had created a karmic link in a previous life:

Many of such helpful karmic links have we seen within the Theosophical Society. Long, long ago, He who is the Master K.H. was taken prisoner in a battle with an Egyptian army, and was generously befriended and sheltered by an Egyptian of high rank. Thousands of years later, help is needed for the nascent Theosophical Society, and the Master, looking over India for one to aid in this great work, sees His old friend of the Egyptian and other lives, now Mr. A.P. Sinnett, editing the leading Anglo-Indian newspaper, The Pioneer. Mr. Sinnett goes, as usual, to Simla; Mme Blavatsky goes up thither, to form the link; Mr. Sinnett is drawn within the immediate influence of the Master, receives instruction from Him, and becomes the author of The Occult World and of Esoteric Buddhism, carrying to thousands the message of Theosophy.[1]

Editions

What is included in this book

Mr. Barker chose to include some letters in this volume that another editor might have placed the companion volume, The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett. Boris de Zirkoff clarified this situation in a letter to Fritz Kunz. Mr. Kunz asked:

I know that you have a set of the microfilmed copy of the material in the British Museum catalogued under the heading of the "Mahatma Letters."
I wonder whether you would be so good as to advise me whether the pages entitled "Cosmological Notes" which are published near the very end of H.P.B.'s letter to A.P.Sinnett, are included therein, and if so, in whose handwriting, and whether you could kindly supply me with a sufficiently enlarged print of this so that I might have it at hand for my personal use? [2]

Boris de Zirkoff responded:

Re the "Mahatma Papers", Additional MS.45284, in the British Museum. Now the actual Letters, both those from the Masters and those from H.P.B. to Sinnett, have been bound up in separate volumes, seven in all. The originals of some of the Letters from the Masters, as transcribed in the published volume of Mahatma Letters, were not among the material bequeathed by Sinnett to Miss Maud Hoffman. They exist only as copies made by Sinnett in a separate leather-bound notebook. This notebook has been filmed also, when microfilm was prepared of the entire material. It is in this notebook that the "Cosomological Notes" are to be found; they are therefore in Sinnett's handwriting. THere are 24 pages of this material.[3]

Editorial changes to the Letters

See also

Online resources

Video

Notes

  1. Annie Besant, A Study in Karma, (Wheaton, IL: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1987), 48.
  2. letter of Fritz Kunz to Boris de Zirkoff. December 14, 1956. Boris de Zirkoff Papers. Records Series 22. Theosophical Society in America Archives.
  3. Letter of Boris de Zirkoff to Fritz Kunz. December 23, 1956. Boris de Zirkoff Papers. Records Series 22. Theosophical Society in America Archives.