Definition of 'Lucifer'
1. After much discussion on names for the magazine [1887], they decided on Lucifer, or Light-Bringer. One or two members vehemently opposed the name as diabolical and unconventional, which naturally won the more avant-grade to its side. "Don't allow yourself to be frightened," H.P.B. assured Vera, "it is not the devil," but merely the name of the Morning Star or "bringer of light" sacred to the ancient world. -- Marion Meade, Madame Blavatsky, the woman behind the myth, New York, 1980, P. 396.
2. (Lat.) The planet Venus, as the bright "Morning Star." Literally, "the Light Bearer."
Before Milton, Lucifer had never been a name of the Devil. Quite the reverse, since the Christian Savior is made to say of himself in Revelations xxii.16, "I am ... the bright morning star," signifying Lucifer, or Phosphor in Greek, the planet Venus. One of the early Popes bore that name; and there was even a Christian sect in the fourth century which was called the Luciferians. -- H. P. Blavatsky, The Theosophical Glossary, London, 1892.
3. It will be perceived ... that the Satan of the Old Testament, the Diabolos or Devil of the Gospels and Apostolic Epistles, were but the antagonistic principle in matter, necessarily incident to it, and not wicked in the moral sense of the term. The Jews, coming from the Persian country, brought with them the doctrine of two principles. They could not bring the Avesta, for it was not written. But they--we mean the Asidians and Pharsi--invested Ormazd with the secret name of ..., and Ahriman with the name of the gods of the land, Satan of the Hittites, and Diabolos, or rather Diobolos, of the Greeks. The early Church, at least the Pauline part of it, the Gnostics and their successors, further refined upon their ideas; and the Catholic Church adopted and adapted them, meanwhile putting their promulgators to the sword...
The modern Devil is (the) principal heritage from the Roman Cybele, "Babylon, the Great Mother of the idolatrous and abominable religions of the earth."
But it may be argued, perhaps, that Hindu theology, both Brahmanical and Buddhistic, is as strongly impregnated with belief in objective devils as Christianity itself. There is a slight difference. This very subtlety of the Hindu mind is a sufficient warrant that the well-educated people, the learned portion, at least, of the Brahman and Buddhist divines, consider the Devil in another light. With them the Devil is a metaphysical abstraction, an allegory of necessary evil; while with Christians the myth has become a historical entity, the fundamental stone on which Christianity, with its dogma of redemption, is built. He is as necessary--as Des Mousseaux has shown--to the Church as the beast of the seventeenth chapter of the Apocalypse was to his rider. The English-speaking Protestants, not finding the Bible explicit enough, have adopted the Diabology of Milton's celebrated poem, Paradise Lost, embellishing it somewhat from Goeth's celebrated drama of Faust.
John Milton, first a Puritan and finally a Quietest and Unitarian, never put forth his great production except as a work of fiction, but it thoroughly dovetailed together the different parts of Scripture. The Ilda-Baoth of the Ophites was transformed into an angel of light, and the morning star, and made the Devil in the first act of the Diabolical Drama. Then the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse was brought in for the second act. The great red Dragon was adopted as the same illustrious personage as Lucifer, and the last scene is his fall, like that of Vulcan-Hephaistos, from Heaven into the island of Lemnos; the fugitive hosts and their leader "coming to hard bottom" in Pandemonium. The third act is the Garden of Eden. Satan holds a council in a hall erected by him for his new empire, and determines to go forth on an exploring expedition in quest of the new world. The next acts relate to the fall of man, his career on earth, the advent of the Logos, or Son of God, and his redemption of mankind, or the elect portion of them, as the case may be.
The drama of Paradise Lost comprises the unformulated belief of English-speaking "evangelical Protestant Christians." Disbelief of its main features is equivalent, in their view, to "denying Christ" and "blaspheming against the Holy Ghost." If John Milton had supposed that his poem, instead of being regarded as a companion of Dante's Divine Comedy, would have been considered as another Apocalypse to supplement the Bible, and complete its demonology, it is more than probable that he would have borne his poverty more resolutely, and withheld it from the press. A later poet, Robert Pollok, taking his cue from this work, wrote another, The Course of Time, which bade fair for a season to take the rank of a later Scripture; but the nineteenth century has fortunately received a different inspiration, and the Scotch poet is falling into oblivion.
We ought, perhaps, to make a brief notice of the European Devil. He is the genius who deals in sorcery, witchcraft, and other mischief. The Fathers taking the idea from the Jewish Pharisees, made devils of the Pagan gods, Mithras, Serapis, and the others. The Roman Catholic Church followed by denouncing the former worship as commerce with the powers of darkness [(and) prosecuted and put to death on charges of witchcraft]. The malefecii and witches of the middle ages were thus but the voteries of the proscribed worship. Magic in all ancient times had been considered as divine science, wisdom, and the knowledge of God. The healing art in the temples of AEsculapius, and at the shrines of Egypt and the East, had always been magical...
-- H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master-key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, New York, 1877, Vol. II: Theology, pp 500-502.
4. In antiquity and reality, Lucifer, or Luciferus, is the name of the angelic Entity presiding over the light of truth as over the light of day. In the great Valentinian gospel Pistis-Sophia, it is taught that of the three Powers emanating from the Holy names of the three Triple powers, that of Sophia (the Holy Ghost, according to these Gnostics--the most cultured of all), resides in the planet Venus or Lucifer...
And now it stands proven that Satan, or the Red Fiery Dragon, the "Lord of Phosphorus" (brimstone was a theological improvement), and Lucifer, or "Light-Bearer," is in us: it is our Mind--our Tempter and Redeemer, our intelligent liberator and Savior from pure animalism. Without this principle ... we would be surely no better than animals. The first man Adam was made only a living soul (nepesh), the last Adam was made a quickening Spirit--says Paul, his words referring to the building or Creation of man. Without this quickening spirit, or human mind or soul, there would be no difference between man and beast...
-- H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, London, 1888, Vol. II: Anthropogenesis, p. 512-513.
...It was useless to give advanced lessons in the great Science of the Spirit, until a certain number of people at least were ready to receive those lessons. And the earlier teachings that were given, that spread abroad among the educated part of the [Theosophical] Society, those laid down some great truths, sometimes in simple language and sometimes in obscure, until H.P.B.'s own work blossomed into those wonderful volumes called The Secret Doctrine--hard to understand, difficult to learn, unless the pupils, as was generally the case, had had some knowledge in a previous life and recognized the knowledge when it came out in the form that H.P. Blavatsky gave it.
Take, if you will, my own experiences of that, for it must have been the experience of many. The particular way in which The Secret Doctrine came into my hands may not have been so general, perhaps, because I was told by Mr. William Stead, then editor of an important London paper, that I was quite mad enough to be able to review it. He gave me those two ponderous volumes, and told me to write a review of them. I did not feel very hopeful from the way they were given to me, for Mr. Stead remarked: "None of my young men can make anything out of them!"
However, I went home and tried. I began to read the Stanzas of Dzyan and they seemed to me to strike some strange note that I had heard before but could not recognize; and then I went on to the comments on the Stanzas, and then on and on through those two large volumes; then I wrote the review and when I read that review many years afterwards I found that it really had picked out the vital parts of the book and gave a fairly clear idea of those two big volumes; for it was to those two volumes that I owed my recognition of the truth of H.P.B.'s teaching, and the immediate request to Mr. Stead, who knew her, to give me an introduction to the author of the book that I had reviewed for the Pall Mall Gazette.
I went and saw her, became her pupil, and let me say that after thirty-seven years of the knowledge of Theosophy, from the day when I first wrote that review for the Pall Mall Gazette, that every year has made the teaching more valuable to me, every year has made me stronger in my love and my defense of it. As the years went by nothing has ever shaken my certainty of the truths that then I learned--or, remembered--and today, after those many, many years, I can say to you that I believe more utterly, more thoroughly, more completely in the truth of the Ancient Wisdom than I did in 1889. Every year has added to the certainty, if the word 'certainty' can be used of the recognition which came with the first vision of the truth in those two volumes. -- Annie Besant, Some American Lectures, "The Work of the Theosophical Society in its First Half-Century," Chicago (1927), Pp. 5-7.
By the time she was forty, Annie Besant was known over half the world as one of the most remarkable women of her day. She was an agitator in radical political circles, a strike leader and union organizer, a champion of science and materialism working in partnership with the radical free thinker Charles Bradlaugh, an atheist, a feminist, a social and educational reformer, an early convert to Fabian Socialism by her friend Bernard Shaw, a prolific author as well as editor and publisher, the first prominent woman to wage open battle on behalf of birth control, and, not least, an orator of such power that her contemporaries unanimously acclaimed her as the greatest woman speaker of the nineteenth century.
Born Annie Wood on October 1, 1847, in London, she was three-quarters Irish, a fact which she frequently mentioned with pride...Annie and her two brothers grew up in the middle-class neighborhood of St. John's Wood, and her recollections were of an uneventful but happy childhood. When she was five, her father died unexpectedly and left the family almost destitute...When Annie was eight, she caught the notice of a...wealthy, unmarried Ellen Marryat who satisfied her maternal needs by taking on bright but genteelly impoverished children whom she reared and educated. Annie spent most of her adolescence at Miss Marryat's estate on the Devon border.
A rather precocious bluestocking, Annie was also a pious girl whose adolescent daydreams centered, not on romance, but on the apostles and martyrs of the early Christian Church. She read St. Augustine, went to weekly communion, fasted herself into ecstatic meditations, and dreamed of the days when girls could become martyrs. In this mood of religious preoccupation, she met and married in 1867 the Rev. Frank Besant, a cold, domineering martinet of an Anglican minister. As her friend W. T. Stead put it in later years, "She could not be the bride of Heaven, and therefore became the bride of Mr. Frank Besant. He was hardly an adequate substitute." The marriage was troubled from the beginning because Annie could not be so submissive as Frank thought proper and they quarreled fiercely, sometimes physically. Once, she asserted, he threw her bodily over a fence and later, threatened to shoot her with the loaded gun in his study. After a miserable six years in the provinces, and having had two children, Mabel and Digby, Annie could no longer endure her husband and fled to London. Since divorce was out of the question, a separation agreement was drawn up by which four-year-old Digby would stay with his father and three-year-old Mabel would live with Annie, with summer visitation privilege.
Faced with respectable starvation on the hundred ten pounds a year Besant gave her from his modest salary, Annie began to look for work and finally found a position as a governess. Soon afterward she met forty-year-old Charles Bradlaugh and began her career as a militant atheist, exhorting, organizing, writing, speaking and leading thousands for whom she would come to symbolize the triumph of science over the decaying old faiths...
During the early 1880s, Annie threw herself into work with a ferocity that astonished her contemporaries. Recalled Bernard Shaw:
"Her displays of personal courage and resolution, as when she would march into a police-court, make her way to the witness stand, and compel the magistrate to listen to her by sheer force of style and character, were trifles compared to the way in which she worked day and night to pull through the strike of the over-exploited matchgirls who had walked into her office one day and asked her to help them somehow, anyhow. An attempt to keep pace with her on the part of a mere man generally wrecked the man."
By 1889, however, despite her enviable reputation and excellent income from writing and speaking, Annie was forced to admit that she still had not found happiness...In spite of her intimate association with Bradlaugh, a stormy romance with Shaw, and close friendships with a number of men, some of whom she had been in love with, she seems to have successfully repressed her need for physical love. Hypatia Bradlaugh cone commented that had her father and Annie Besant both been single, they would have wed; still she believed their love unconsummated because Annie "was the one person who was capable of the deepest affection without any thought of sex." In the opinion of one of her biographers, Arthur Nethercot [The First Five Lives of Annie Besant, Chicago (1960)], "it is very unlikely that she ever took a lover, " a supposition that is probably correct because if she had, it would have come to the attention of the detectives Frank Besant hired to shadow her movements for evidence of immorality.
Generally disillusioned with life, Annie slowly came to feel that "my philosophy was not sufficient; that life and mind were other than, more than, I had dreamed." A professional atheist, she suddenly began to interest herself in psychology, hypnotism and Spiritualism. "Fact after fact came hurtling in upon me, demanding explanation I was incompetent to give." In February, 1889, she undertook a private course in psychic training, probably in telepathy, from a Rev. J. Williams Ashman, an Anglican clergyman who was interested in the occult and, coincidentally, acquainted with H. P. Blavatsky though not a member of the Theosophical Society. On February 14, she wrote Ashman, "I have studied nothing on 'occult' science, only read anything that came in my way--two books of Sinnett's, some stray pamphlets. I have not been able to get anything. But I am quite ready to study carefully any works throwing light on the matter. Thank you very much for giving me the possible chance of knowing more."
She was ripe for change of some sort, but no one, including Annie herself, would have predicted that the answers she sought could be found in Theosophy.
In early March, a copy of The Secret Doctrine reached the editorial offices of the Pall Mall Gazette. As W. T. Stead had met Madame Blavatsky, he felt an obligation to take review notice of her, although the two thick volumes made him "shrink in dismay" from mastering their contents himself. Aware that Annie Besant had been quietly pursuing a study of other-worldly subjects and had even attended a few seances, he took the books to her.
"Can you review these?" he asked. "My young men all fight shy of them, but you are quite mad enough on these subjects to make something of them."
There is, however, an alternate version of how The Secret Doctrine found its way to Mrs. Besant. According to Shaw, it was he who had been given the assignment, no doubt because he had previously reviewed the S.P.R. Report and also Sinnett's biography of H.P.B.; he had passed on the job to Annie who had recently asked him to get her reviewing work from the Gazette. Why she would have needed Shaw as an intermediary is puzzling, since she and Stead were close friends, but in any case, she took home "my burden" and sat down to read. From the outset she was totally absorbed, in fact, she later admitted, "I was dazzled, blinded by the light in which disjointed facts were seen as parts of a mighty whole, and all my puzzles, riddles, problems, seemed to disappear."
Acknowledging that the book did not offer easy reading, she penned a facetious little note to Stead: "I am immersed in Madame B! If I perish in the attempt to review her, you must write on my tomb, 'She has gone to investigate the Secret Doctrine at first hand.'" If reading H.P.B. seemed an arduous proposition, reviewing her was worse, and Annie started out by declaring that to ninety-nine out of every hundred readers, "the study of the book will begin in bewilderment and end in despair." The average person might just as well skip it; all who did decide to attempt it "must have an intense desire to know."
After handing in the review, she asked Stead for a letter of introduction to Madame Blavatsky, which she proceeded to forward along with a note asking permission to call. On March 15, Helena wrote back,
Dear Mrs. Besant,
I too have been long wishing to make your acquaintance, and there is nothing in the world I admire more than pluck and the rare courage to come out and state one's own opinion of the face of all the world...I am at home every evening from tea time at seven till eleven o'clock; and I shall be delighted to see you whenever you come. On Thursdays I have a meeting here, so on that night you would not find me alone; but all the rest of the week you would find me quite free. Hoping that I shall soon have the pleasure of seeing you, believe me. Yours very sincerely, H. P. Blavatsky
P.S. This invitation includes of course Mr. Burrows or anyone whom you may choose to bring with you.
It was a soft spring evening in late March when Annie Besant and Herbert Burrows, a Socialist friend who was interested in Theosophy, walked from Notting Hill Station to the door of 17 Lansdowne Road. When they were ushered in, Helena saw a petite, slightly stooped woman with a gently rounded bade and close-cropped hair that showed streaks of silver. A few years earlier Annie had been slimmer, prettier; she had worn tightly buttoned gowns that showed off her slender figure and cameo brooches at her throat, and she had curled her hair into short bangs over the forehead with the rest wound in plaits at the back of her head. Now, no longer so slim, she had taken to wearing a sort of working-class uniform--short skirt that skimmed the top of her thick, laced boots (usually muddy) and a red neckerchief or Tam O'Shanter. But the sweet face remained.
Helena reached out for her hand and gave it a firm shake. "My dear Mrs. Besant," she said, "I have so long wished to see you."
Annie was conscious of a sudden leaping of her heart--"was it recognition?" she asked herself later--followed by "a fierce rebellion, a fierce withdrawal, as of some wild animal when it feels a mastering hand."
The rest of the visit proved anticlimactic. When Annie explained that she was interested in Madame's work and would like to know more about it, Helena, "her eyes veiled, her exquisitely moulded fingers rolling cigarettes incessantly," talked about Egypt and India and then turned the conversation to more general topics. Nothing was said about occultism, no mysteries were subtly conveyed. Slightly disappointed, Annie and Burrows rose to leave but at the last moment, Annie would recall, "the veil lifted, and two brilliant, piercing eyes met mine, and with a yearning throb in the voice: 'Oh, my dear Mrs. Besant, if you would only come among us!'" The younger woman...turned away "with some inanely courteous and evasive remark."
During the next weeks Annie Besant struggled against the temptation to go back and drown herself in "that yearning voice, those compelling eyes," but she could see what throwing herself at Madame's feet entailed. She had finally overcome many years of public ostracism and now saw a smooth road stretching before her. Was she to begin a fresh fight for an unpopular cause and make herself an object of ridicule again? Must she turn against materialism and face the humiliation of publicly confessing that she had been wrong? "What would be the look in Charles Bradlaugh's eyes when I told him that I had become a Theosophist?" she wondered. Aside from these agonizing questions, she also felt perplexed as well as repulsed by H.P.B. Madame Blavatsky was obviously wasting away and Annie repeatedly asked herself how this was consistent with her occult training: if the Mahatmas existed, why did they permit their representative to suffer? "And does it not seem rather cruel," she wrote Reverend Ashman, "if they have used her, worn her out, & thrown her away? They remain vigorous and strong. If they trained her, why does she not share their higher vitality, instead of being exhausted. I am puzzled altogether."
When Annie's review appeared on April 25, she sent Helena a copy and was invited to call again. By this time it must have been obvious to H.P.B. that while Annie wanted to join the Society, pride was holding her back. She was, H.P.B. decided and later told her, "as proud as Lucifer himself." When Annie returned yet a third time and continued to ask questions about Theosophy and made it clear she was close to a decision...On the tenth of May she visited the office of the Theosophical Publishing Company in Duke Street and asked Countess Wachtmeister for an application. Filling it out then and there, she left and hurried straight to Lansdowne Road where she found H.P.B. alone. Without a word, she went up to her and bent to kiss her.
Deeply moved, Helena nevertheless set her face in a stern expression and asked: "You have joined the Society?"
"Yes."
Kneeling beside her, Annie clasped both of her hands and looked deep into her eyes, "Will you accept me as your pupil, and give me the honour of proclaiming you as my teacher in the face of the world?"
With tears gleaming in her eyes, Helena rested her hand on Annie's head. When she could trust herself to speak, she murmured, "You are a noble woman. May Master bless you."
No one knew better than H.P.B. what this decision would cost Annie Besant and what it would mean to the Theosophical Society. For her, it was literally a dream come true and it provoked joyous tears; it was one of the rare instances in her life when anybody saw her cry.
Due to the fact that Annie's Pall Mall Gazette review had been unsigned, news of her conversion took several weeks to become public. There was a personal item in the Sun on June 16 announcing briefly that she had turned Theosophist and had been admitted to "the Esoteric Section of the famous Blavatsky Lodge," and a few days later Annie wrote a piece for the Star, "Sic Itur ad Astra": or, Why I Became a Theosophist. Bernard Shaw, while paying a call on the editor, happened to glance at a set of proofs littering the table and saw Annie's by-line. Staggered, he galloped over to her office in Fleet Street and "asked her whether she was quite mad." ...If Annie sincerely felt in need of a mahatma, he teased, he would be her mahatma. After playing all his usual tricks to stir her indignation or her wit, he could see that "it was no use." She listened patiently with a half smile and then remarked only that she had become a vegetarian, as he was; perhaps the new diet had enfeebled her mind. "In short," Shaw concluded, "she was for the first time able to play with me; she was no longer in the grip of her pride; she had after many explorations found her path and come to see the universe and herself in their real perspective."
Annie's about-face may have seemed sudden to most people but, as we have seen, it followed a long period of incubation extending back to the religious ecstasy of her girlhood when she had yearned to be a martyr; it continued through her adult career, in which she devoted herself to good world that might be expected to bring grievous by pleasurable suffering. Shaw believed her shift to H.P.B.'s ranks reflected the fact that "she was a born actress. She was successively a Pusyite Evangelical, an Atheist Bible-smasher, a Darwinian secularist, a Fabian Socialist, a Strike Leader, and finally a Theosophist...She 'saw herself' as a priestess above all. That was how Theosophy held her to the end."
For the remainder of that year and all through the next, Annie would break most of her ties with her own past life, resigning her membership in the Fabian and other Socialist societies, participating less actively in strikes and labor demonstrations and making fewer speeches to factory workers. In some respects, this was both predictable and natural but in others, H.P.B. can be seen aiding an historical process by gradually handing over authority to her personal heir. In September she made Annie co-editor of Lucifer, and four months later, after the president of the Blavatsky Lodge, William Kingsland, had "resigned," Annie was elected to the position...
During Helena's six-week absence, the Theosophical Society, commanded by its newest convert, continued to be the center of lively controversy; not a week went by that some newspaper or journal did not throw fresh branches on the fire. Since many of the statements made about the situation were absurd and some decidedly malicious, Annie scheduled two lectures on August 4 and 11 in the Hall of Science to explain "Why I Became a Theosophist." To packed houses, she bravely charged into such subjects as reincarnation, hypnotism, ...and of course the mentorship of Madame Blavatsky. In a stouthearted defense of H.P.B., Annie lashed out at those who declared that if Madame had truly been the victim of slander, she should have prosecuted... To this Annie replied that "I have been accused of the vilest life a woman could lead. Have I prosecuted? No. A strong woman and a good woman knows that her life is enough to live down slander." When news of these remarks reached Helena's ears, she must have known for a surety that in Annie Besant she had found a jewel beyond value.
While (Yeats) was trying to raise the ghosts of flowers, another young man found himself attracted to the Theosophical Society through his admiration for Annie Besant. Mohandas K. Gandhi was a twenty-one-year-old Indian law student, nondescript, and frail, with a tiny mustache and bow tie. During his year's stay in London, he had made a number of acquaintances at vegetarian restaurants, among them Bert and Arch Keightley who were reading the Bhagavad-Gita in Sir Edwin Arnold's popular translation called The Song Celestial, and they invited him to join them. Ashamed that he had never read the Gita either in Sanskrit or Gujarati, Gandhi went through it and Arnold's Light of Asia with their help. The Keightleys invited him to a meeting of the Blavatsky Lodge and introduced him to Annie Besant, whose recent conversion he had followed in the papers with great interest. The shy Gandhi felt out of place, and when the Keightleys asked him if he would care to join the Society, he declined politely by saying, "With my meagre knowledge of my own religion I do not want to belong to any religious body." He did, however, follow their suggestion that he read Madame's recently published Key to Theoeophy, which "stimulated in me the desire to read books on Hinduism and disabused me of the notion fostered by the missionaries that Hinduism was rife with superstition." Gandhi would later...credit the Society as the means by which he began to discover his own heritage. With Annie Besant, who some twenty-five years later would become a brilliant advocate of Indian freedom and President of the Indian National Congress, Gandhi may have had political differences, but his veneration would never diminish.
On Gandhi's sole visit to Lansdowne Road, Helena took no more notice of him than she did of hundreds of others who entered her rooms and were led up to her chair for a brief introduction, nor did she intuit or infer...the fact that she had encountered, for a few minutes, a genuine mahatma, or at least one who would be regarded so not only by his own countrymen but the world. Such were the ironies of Madame Blavatsky's life...
On the morning of Friday, May 8, 1891, Madame Helena Petrovna von Hahn Blavastky passed on...(her) ashes were placed in an urn and brought back to her bedroom. Later they were divided into three portions: that destined for India was carried to Adyar by Henry Olcott and buried under a statue that he erected to memory...A second portion was taken to New York by William Judge and today is in the keeping of the Theosophical Society at Pasadena, California. The third, kept in London for a time, was eventually removed to India by Annie Besant and dropped into the Ganges...
In her eighties, Annie Besant was visibly weary...but to the world she remained one of the most remarkable women of the age. The New York Times placed her in the company of Madame Curie, Jane Adams and Anna Pavlova; a London paper called her one of the most unique women of all time, to be ranked with the Duchess of Marlborough and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She died at Adyar on September 20, 1933, age eighty-six, after five days of semi-consciousness in which she refused to eat or drink water. Her body, clad in white silk, was cremated on a pyre of sandalwood...
The Theosophical Society today continues to thrive in sixty countries. There are approximately forty thousand members worldwide, with some fifty-five hundred in the United States. The international headquarters, still at Adyar, India, is now a beautiful estate of two hundred sixty-six acres along the banks of the Adyar River, and the Adyar Library is world famous for its unique collection of Oriental literature.
-- Marion Meade, Madame Blavatsky, the woman behind the myth, New York (1980), Pp. 422-461.