…There are other cycles within this archetype for service. The one we would consider here is the “Hundred Year Cycle” of the Theosophical Movement. It is linked to a decision made in the 14th century, when, under the auspices of TsongKha Pa, whom H.P.B. stated was a “reincarnation” of Gautama the Buddha, the great Lodge of Adepts vowed to take advantage of this hundred year cycle to bring additional facts before the “Western Races” of mankind; races, which earlier, had severed themselves from the truths of ancient wisdom. This service was begun and a duty initiated to bring to their brothers in the “West” an increased perception of the Higher Self, of the Divinity that is enshrined in each man-mind. … The Adept, known to us as H.P. Blavatsky, spearheaded the fifth mission of this nature in the West…
This quotation is from the November 1997 THEOSOPHY magazine.
HPB’s mission was not the “fifth mission of this nature” to the West. Before Je Tsongkhapa’s time, circa 1400, the West had been receiving Messengers from the Occult Brotherhood for well over one thousand years.
In HPB’s article “The Cycle Moveth” (Collected Writings 12, 120) she wrote: “…messengers [are] sent out westward periodically in the last quarter of every century — ever since the mysteries, which alone had the key to the secrets of nature, had been crushed out of existence in Europe by heathen and Christian conquerors…”
The European Mysteries were “crushed out of existence” — long before Je Tsongkhapa’s time in the 1400s.
In CW 14, 294-95, “The Last of the Mysteries in Europe” HPB said:
“The first strokes if its [the Mysteries’] last hour sounded in the year 47 B.C. … It was during the first century before our era, that the last and supreme hour of the Mysteries had struck.” First Alesia and then Bibractis in Gaul were “plundered and razed.” Bibractis “was the last city in Gaul wherein died for Europe the secrets of the Initiations of the Great Mysteries…” She also mentioned that the beginning of the end of the European Mysteries began with the conquests of Alexander the Great around 320 B.C.
So Messengers to the West have been sent from the Eastern Lodge since at least the beginning of the Christian era, perhaps longer. Jehoshua ben Pandira, Apollonius of Tyana and AmmoniusSaccas may have been among the earliest Messengers.
Perhaps our Western egotism has once again blinded us to the reason for this recurrent grace from the Masters. It was not because the Adepts saw us as so spiritually advanced as to have earned this assistance, nor because They were taking advantage of a cycle, but because we had blindly destroyed our own original sources of truth and inspiration. We in the West were, and are, being helped primarily because of the vast Compassion of the Eastern Brothers, not because we deserve it.
– Nicholas Weeks
