Since this blog is devoted to historical, non-fictional adepts, I feel a responsibility to alert readers to a misleading “newly discovered non-fiction book by H.P. Blavatsky” that is neither newly discovered, non-fiction, nor authored by Blavatsky, yet is a huge 2022 best seller for her fans. My own The Masters Revealed ends with a lengthy discussion of an autobiographical 1890 novel, The Talking Image of Urur, illuminating Franz Hartmann’s relationship with Theosophical leaders in India.
Three years earlier in 1887 Hartmann [1838-1912] had published another novel discussing adept brotherhoods, this time set in the Alps and featuring Rosicrucians. It was first titled An Adventure Among the Rosicrucians and finally reprinted in 1910 as With the Adepts. The name of this blog and subsequent book series was chosen after years of utter confusion caused by disinformation about “the Masters” which erases crucial historical distinctions between “Adepts” and “Mahatmas” illustrated by the two books. One was a novel about Germany, the other a novel set in South Africa but transparently based on events in India, but in 2022 the former reappears as a non-fiction account by a Russian going to Shambhala.
[Adding credit where due to Marc Demarest whose Amazon review of Land of the Gods dissects the whole mess and asks Amazon to delete the book; and blame where due to the Theosophical leaders who decreed thirty years ago re my historical inquiries that “the Masters” were inherently inaccessible and unapproachable by means of ordinary, “material” historical research– the very same people from three different Theosophical groups and publishers who feigned interest in publishing me, encouraged me for ten years that I needed more evidence and better analysis only to say in the end, “NO EVIDENCE, NO REASONING ALLOWED re our sacred Mahatmas who are voices in our heads not figures in history and how dare you distract us from voices in our heads.”]
Free online versions of the Hartmann novels are available at Archive.org.