Bertram Keightley's Testimony
in 1890, 1893, 1922 and 1931 about
Volume III (1897) of "The Secret Doctrine"
Bertram Keightley's 1890 Testimony
H.P.B. handed over to him [Keightley] the manuscript of the "Secret Doctrine," with a request that he should read it through. He read through the substance of the two volumes published, and the third still unpublished....
What would now be the 3rd volume on the history of Occultism was to have been the first volume, while the treatises on Cosmogony and the Genesis of Man were to form a later series....
He then drafted a scheme with the natural and obvious order...the Evolution of the Universe and the Evolution of man, &c. &c.
The next thing...was to rearrange ...the manuscript according to the [new] scheme....
[Quoted from a report summarising Bertram Keightley's lecture "Theosophy in the West" given at the 1890 T.S. Convention at Adyar, Madras, India (Theosophist, July 1891, pp. 586-587.]
Bertram Keightley's 1893 Testimony
A day or two after our arrival at Maycot [Upper Norwood, London], H.P.B placed the whole of the so-far completed MSS. in the hands of.Dr. Keightley and myself, instructing us to read, punctuate, correct the English, alter, and generally treat it as if it were our own - which we naturally did not do, having far too high an opinion of her knowledge to take any liberties with so important a work.
But we both read the whole mass of MSS. - a pile over three feet high - most carefully through, correcting the English and punctuation where absolutely indispensable, and then, after prolonged consultation, faced the author in her den - in my case with sore trembling, I remember - with the solemn opinion that the whole of the matter must be re-arranged on some definite plan, since as it stood the book was another Isis Unveiled, only far worse, so far as absence of plan and consecutiveness were concerned.
After some talk, H.P.B. told us to go to Tophet and do what we liked. She had had more than enough of the blessed thing, had given it over to.us, washed her hands thereof entirely, and we might get out of it as best we could.
We retired and consulted. Finally we laid before her a plan, suggested by the character of the matter itself, viz., to make the work consist of four volumes....
Further, instead of making the first volume to consist, as she had intended, of the history of some great Occultists, we advised her to follow the natural order of exposition, and begin with the Evolution of Cosmos, to pass from that to the Evolution of Man, then to deal with the historical part in a third volume treating of the lives of some great Occultists; and finally, to speak of Practical Occultism in a fourth volume should she ever be able to write it.
This plan we laid before H.P.B., and it was duly sanctioned by her.
The next step was to read the MSS. through again and make a general re-arrangement of the matter pertaining to the subjects coming under the heads of Cosmogony and Anthropology, which were to form the first two volumes of the work.
When this had been completed, and H.P.B. duly consulted, and her approval of what had been done obtained, the whole of the MSS. so arranged was typewritten out by professional hands, then re-read, corrected, compared with the original MSS., and all Greek, Hebrew, and Sanskrit quotations inserted by us.
It then appeared that the whole of the Commentary on the Stanzas did not amount to more than some twenty pages of the present work, as H.P.B. had not stuck closely to her text in writing. So we seriously interviewed her, and suggested that she should write a proper commentary, as in her opening words she had promised her readers to do.
Her reply was characteristic: "What on earth am I to say ? What do you want to know? Why it's all as plain as the nose on your face! ! !" We could not see it; she didn't - or made out she didn't - so we retired to reflect.
...I think the removal to Lansdowne Road [was] effected, before the problem of the Commentary on the Stanzas was finally solved.
The solution was this: - Each sloka of the stanzas was written (or cut out from the type-written copy) and pasted at the head of a sheet of paper, and then on a loose sheet pinned thereto were written all the questions we could find time to devise upon that sloka.....
H.P.B. struck out large numbers of them, made us write fuller explanations, or our own ideas - such as they were - of what her readers expected her to say, wrote more herself, incorporated the little she had already written on that particular sloka, and so the work was done.
But when we came to think of sending the MSS. to the printers, the result was found to be such that the most experienced compositor would tear his hair in blank dismay. Therefore Dr. Keightley and myself set to work with a type-writer, and alternately dictating and writing, made a clean copy of the first parts of volumes I. and II.
Then work was continued till parts II. and III. of each volume were in a fairly advanced condition, and we could think of sending the work to press....
Of the further history of The Secret Doctrine there is not much more to say - though there were months of hard work before us. H.P.B. read and corrected two sets of galley proofs, then a page proof, and finally a revise in sheet, correcting, adding, and altering up to the very last moment....
[Quoted from Reminiscences of H.P. Blavatsky and The Secret Doctrine by the Countess Constance Wachtmeister, London, Theosophical
Publishing Society, 1893, pp. 90-94.]
Bertram Keightley's 1922 Testimony
...As regards the matter intended by H.P.B. for future volumes----besides the two first published under her own supervision----all this material has been published in the third volume which contains absolutely all that H.P.B. has left in manuscript.
Mrs. Besant even believed it her duty to publish a certain number of manuscripts which to my mind were not left by H.P.B. in a suffiently advanced state to really justify the publication of them....
[Quoted from Bertram Keightley's letter (written from Lucknow, India on December 6, 1922 and addressed to Charles Blech, a French Theosophist) and published in The O. E. Library Critic, July 4, 1923, p. 5.]
Bertram Keightley's 1931 Testimony
As soon as she was settled [at "Maycot," Crown Hill, Upper Norwood, London],...H.P. B. said that her job for the moment was The Secret Doctrine and asked if we were prepared to work with her on that and help in its publication.
...[We] promised to help....And she handed over to Arch. K. and myself the whole of her MS., every scrap she had written up to date, and bade us go through it and tell her what we thought of it, and advise her.
So Arch and I set to work and each of us separately read carefully through every line....When Arch and I came to compare notes after the reading, we found we had independently come to exactly the same conclusions, which we then laid before H. P. B....:
1. The matter itself of the MS. is extraordinarily interesting, most suggestive and valuable....
2. [But] as a book it is just a confused muddle and jumble, without plan, structure or arrangement. It is far worse in those respects than Isis Unveiled. Topics are started, dropped suddenly for no reason, taken up again, and again dropped and so on.
3. The MS....must be thoroughly re-arranged and recast on some definite plan.
4. Such a plan indeed seems indicated, or at least intended, by the introduction, and by bits and fragments from the Stanzas of Dayan and by the Commentaries, etc., thereon, which are quoted here and there in the MS.
5. But though in this a sort of plan may be found, a detailed and thorough study of the MS. must first be made and only then can a workable plan be outlined.
H. P. B. listened to all this...[and] swore not a little....
Thereupon H. P. B. just handed over the whole stack of MS., --- every single scrap of it to A. K. and myself and told us to "go to Hell and get on with it".
Our next step...was to get the whole of the MS., every line of it, typed out on ordinary.typing paper----professionally----for we fully realized that the actual work of re-arrangement and fitting must not be done upon H. P. B.'s own MS. which ought to be preserved intact for reference, but upon a copy. Hence we had it all typed out....
...When we had got all the MS. typed out, we tied up the original MS. complete as it was and made a strong sealed parcel of it all, which was given back to H. P. B., and was subsequently removed to No. 19, Avenue Road, St. John's Wood, N. W., (Mrs. Besant's house) when H. P. B. moved there. I clearly remember seeing the parcel there intact shortly before I left for India a few months before H. P. B.'s death.
...Arch and I again went very carefully through the now type-written MS. and devised the plan finally approved and adopted by H. P. B.
This was to divide the whole work into two volumes:
Vol. I. Cosmogenesis and Vol. II. Anthropogenesis.
Each volume was to be based upon a set of the Stanzas of Dzyan....
Our first task then was to sort out and bring together all the fragments of Stanzas, Commentaries and such matter as seemed to bear more or less directly upon these; then the matter dealing with or bearing specially upon Symbolism; while the remainder was relegated to the third section of each volume as Addenda or Appendices.
As soon as the first section for Vol. I was roughly put together, we handed it over to H. P. B. with detailed notes of gaps, omissions, queries and points for her to consider.
She went to work on the type-script with pen, scissors and paste, till she said she had done all she could.
The final result was a regular mosaic pattern of type-script, pasted bits, and matter added and written in by H. P. B. or sometimes transferred from other places in the second and third sections.
In the end it got such a complicated mosaic, that Arch and I ourselves typed out afresh the whole of the matter in the first section of the two volumes and much also of the second and third sections....
After this was done, there still remained a certain amount of matter over; mostly unfinished fragments or "Appendices" or bits about Symbolism, which could find no suitable place in the selected matter, or more frequently were not in a condition or state for publication.
Of course we asked H. P. B. about this matter, as it was she herself not Arch nor myself ----who had set it aside for the time being.
She put this left-over matter in one of the drawers of her desk and said that "some day" she would make a third Volume out of it.
But this she never did, and after H. P. B.'s death, Mrs. Besant and Mr. Mead published all that could possibly be printed------without complete and extensive revision and re-writing----as part of Volume III in the revised edition...
[Quoted from The Theosophist (Adyar, Madras, India), September, 1931, pp.707-709, 711-712.]
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