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Parapsychology, Spiritualism, Life After Death & Reincarnation: Suggested Reading.

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MISSING: H. P. Blavatsky's Christmas Letter of 1886 --- A Video Talk by Dr. James Santucci. .
Dr. Santucci gives a talk about his research and findings on H.P. Blavatsky's December 25, 1886 letter to J. Ralston Skinner.
This letter with a detailed introduction will be published in a double issue of THEOSOPHICAL HISTORY in early 2025.

"Following the publication (in THEOSOPHICAL HISTORY Vol. XVIII/1-2) of H. P. Blavatsky's thirty-six page letter to James Ralston Skinner, dated February 17, 1887, it came to my attention that another letter, known only to a small number of researchers and apparently at one time located in the Andover-Harvard Divinity Library's collection of the J. Ralston Skinner Papers (bMS 516), predated the February letter by two months....

In reviewing the provenance of the letter, it gradually became clear...that an earlier letter composed by Blavatsky and addressed to Skinner, dated December 25, 1886 and originating from Ostend, may have been part of the collection. If it were included in the Skinner Papers, it inexplicably disappeared from the Library without any evidence that it ever existed...." Dr. James A. Santucci, editor of THEOSOPHICAL HISTORY.

"Anita Atkins (1915-2000) has made a great contribution to a better public understanding of Madame Blavatsky by writing the biography HPB: THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE AND INFLUENCE OF HELENA BLAVATSKY. This biography was first published in 1993 under Anita's pen name Sylvia Cranston.

I first corresponded with Anita around 1975. By the early 1980s I no longer wrote letters to her but had started calling her on a fairly regular basis at her New York residence. I found this was the easier way to communicate with her. In fact, on the phone we could go over in much greater detail all sorts of matters regarding our mutual HPB research. I would send her material; she would send me material.

It was in late 1982 or early 1983 that Anita told me over the phone about the discovery of the HPB letters to Skinner at Harvard. She said she would send me copies of her typescripts of these letters. Anita had personally gone to Harvard to see the originals of these letters.

I clearly remember the day I received that large manilla envelope from Anita with the typescripts. I ripped the envelope open and read all these letters. Of course, the first letter I read was HPB's Christmas letter of 1886. At the top of the first page of this typed copy of the Christmas 1886 letter, a prefatory note by Anita reads: "Original in Andover-Harvard Theological Library Cambridge Massachusetts". Many years later, I also acquired a photocopy of this original letter in H.P.B.'s own handwriting that was found among the papers of the late John Cooper in the Natonal Library of Australia.

In 2016, upon learning that the original Dec. 25, 1886 letter at Harvard had somehow gone missing, I sent both Anita's typescript and the photocopy of the original to Dr. Santucci for publication in THEOSOPHICAL HISTORY." Daniel H. Caldwell, founder and organizer of THE BLAVATSKY STUDY CENTER/BLAVATSKY ARCHIVES.

For more, see Sylvia Cranston: An Eyewitness.

"J. Ralston Skinner, author of THE SOURCE OF MEASURES, corresponded with HPB during the writing of THE SECRET DOCTRINE. One of the topics addressed in their correspondence was the 'numerical cipher of the ancients,' which Skinner had, in part, discovered. Writing to Skinner, HPB complimented his discoveries and told him that he would have never been successful in the work he had accomplished without the unseen guidance and help of the Masters. She did, however, take issue with Skinner's ideas about the preeminence of the Hebrew language and insisted that the inhabitants of India had a fully developed numerical system for sacerdotal purposes thousands of years before the development of Hebrew....[HPB's] letter to J.R. Skinner, [is] dated December 25, 1886. Original in the Andover Theological Library, Harvard University...." William Doss McDavid, "Gematria, Senzar and the Book of Dzyan," THE QUEST magazine, September, 1998, pp. 7, 12.

For more on the "numerical cipher of the ancients" and gematria as related to the Book of Dzyan, see Doss McDavid's Reading the BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE.  (First published in Supplement to BRAHMAVIDYA: The Adyar Library Bulletin, 2013)

The Mahatmas and Their Letters: Articles by Daniel H. Caldwell

K. Paul Johnson's House of Cards?: A Critical Examination of Johnson's Thesis on the Theosophical Masters Morya and Koot Hoomi