When the “sphinx of the 19th Century” arrived in New York City in 1874 at the behest of her master, she was fully trained and prepared for the great task he had announced to her as early as 1851, and not an (unreliable) “medium,” as the anthroposophist Axel Burkart repeatedly claimed (but did not substantiate).
Instead of making assumptions and speculations, it is helpful to first familiarize oneself with how she herself read in the astral light, as illustrated below by the example (more can be found) in a letter from probably 1876 to her niece Vera (Vera Vladimirovna de Zhelihovsky, married Mrs. Charles Johnston, 1864–1923), daughter of her younger sister Vera Petrovna de Zhelihovsky (1835–1896).
writing on The Secret Doctrine; public domain; enhanced with AI.
The astral light (she further distinguishes between the lower and the higher) is identical to Akasha, a term she also used privately in 1876 and then explained in Isis Unveiled (1877), p. I:xxvii: “The astral light is identical with the Hindu akâsa.”
The term Akashic Records (world memory) was coined and popularized by Dr. Rudolf Steiner in the 20-part article series Aus der Akascha Chronik (“From the Akashic Records”) in his journal Lucifer-Gnosis, beginning in July 1904.
In the undated letter to her younger sister Vera, probably written around 1876, Helena P. Blavatsky described how the goddess Isis herself inspired her to write her first book, Isis Unveiled (1877). […]
“Well, Vera, whether you believe me or not, something miraculous is happening to me. You cannot imagine in what a charmed world of pictures and visions I live. I am writing Isis; not writing, rather copying out and drawing that which She personally shows to me. Upon my word, sometimes it seems to me that the ancient Goddess of Beauty in person leads me through all the countries of past centuries which I have to describe.
I sit with my eyes open and to all appearances see and hear everything real and actual around me, and yet at the same time I see and hear that which I write. I feel short of breath; I am afraid to make the slightest movement for fear the spell might be broken. Slowly century after century, image after image, float out of the distance and pass before me as if in a magic panorama; and meanwhile I put them together in my mind, fitting in epochs and dates, and know for sure that there can be no mistake.
Races and nations, countries and cities, which have for long disappeared in the darkness of the prehistoric past, emerge and then vanish, giving place to others; and then I am told the consecutive dates.
Hoary antiquity makes way for historical periods; myths are explained to me with events and people who have really existed, and every event which is at all remarkable, every newly-turned page of this many-colored book of life, impresses itself on my brain with photographic exactitude.
My own reckonings and calculations appear to me later on as separate colored pieces of different shapes in the game which is called casse-tete (puzzles). I gather them together and try to match them one after the other, and at the end there always comes out a geometrical whole. . . . Most assuredly it is not I who do it all, but my Ego, the highest principle which lives in me. And even this with the help of my Guru and teacher who helps me in everything.
If I happen to forget something I have just to address him, or another of the same kind, in my thought, and what I have forgotten rises once more before my eyes — sometimes whole tables of numbers passing before me, long inventories of events. They remember everything. They know everything. Without them, from whence could I gather my knowledge?”
- Anonymously published as “Letters of H.P. Blavatsky, II,” by William Quan Judge in The Path 9, no. 10 (January 1895):300. The Russian original appeared in Russkoye Obozreniye 6 (November 1891): 274. The translator was Blavatsky’s niece, Vera V. Johnston. According to Wouter J. Hanegraaff (2017, The Theosophical Imagination), there were two other English translations, but Vera’s was the most accurate.
German version: Blavatskys hellseherische Praxis