"Isis Unveiled" was H.P.B.'s first public exposition of Theosophy, yet its two volumes are stupendous in their scope. It is significant to note at the outset that the work is dedicated by H.P.B. "to the Theosophical Society, which was founded in New York, A.D. 1875, to study the subjects on which they treat" i.e., to all of us present-day students who are carrying on the work for which the original T.S. was founded. On the title page, H.P.B. calls the book "A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology." Volume I is entitled "Science," and Volume II, "Theology." These two main subjects of human inquiry had become contending forces, though they were in reality two sides of the same coin, and an endeavour is made in the book to show that religion can have a basis in scientific law and fact. The two volumes go on to destroy the wrong notions then prevalent and to show that ancient Science and true Religion had sprung from a common source of Knowledge which was not the exclusive property of any one nation or any one sect, but was once universally known. The knowers of this Knowledge have always existed, and in the very opening sentence of the Preface H.P.B. gives due acknowledgment to "Eastern Adepts" with whom she had "intimate acquaintance" and who had taught her all that she knew and that she was now giving out. This public acknowledgment of Adept-Teachers who are Custodians of the one Wisdom-Religion and who are moreover living men in our day and age was among the most important purposes of H.P.B.'s mission.
In the latter half of the 19th century when science and religion were at loggerheads, a new entrant into the arena was Spiritualism. So-called "Spiritualistic" or psychic phenomena were then the rage in the Western world, though they were ridiculed and denied by both science and religion. Isis had as one of its main objects the affirmation of the existence of the unseen realms with their own laws, forces and phenomena. Psychic and spiritual powers exist in every man, though in latency, but there are those who have by training and self-mastery developed them enough to be able to practise them. Isis describes phenomena after phenomena, many of which H.P.B. had witnessed during her travels, and in those early years just before and after the Theosophical Movement was launched into the public world, she herself was performing wonderful phenomena—not as an end, but a means to demonstrate to the world the existence of the psychic in nature and in man, about which science and religion knew nothing and the Spiritualists offered a distorted explanation. The phenomena were presented only as instances of a power over perfectly natural though unrecognized forces, and incidentally over matter, possessed by certain individuals who have attained to a higher knowledge of the universe and of man than has been reached by scientists and theologians. There are no miracles, Isis affirms, and it provides a rational explanation of the seemingly "miraculous." "Everything that happens is the result of law—eternal, immutable, ever active." The Ten Items or fundamental propositions of Oriental Philosophy given towards the close of Volume II may be said to contain the essence of Isis.
The following paragraph from H.P.B.'s article "Occult or Exact Science" (originally published in The Theosophist, April 1886; reprinted in The Theosophical Movement, July 1964) is an excellent summation of the main aims of the work:
About ten years ago, when Isis Unveiled was being written, the most important point the work aimed at was the demonstration of the following: (a) the reality of the Occult in nature; (b) the thorough knowledge of, and familiarity with, all such occult domains amongst "certain men," and their mastery therein; (c) hardly an art or science known in our age, that the Vedas have not mentioned; and (d) that hundreds of things, especially mysteries of nature—in abscondito as the alchemists called it—were known to the Aryas of the pre-Mahabharatan period, which are unknown to us, the modern sages of the XIXth century.
In the course of the work it is amply demonstrated that "there was true science, profound religion, and genuine phenomena before this modern era" (II, 634-35); that there has always existed in all-inclusive body of knowledge which is destructive alike of the claims of orthodox religion and materialistic science. In the very Preface—a most important piece of writing of far-reaching worth—H.P.B. declares that her work "is a plea for the recognition of the Hermetic philosophy, the anciently universal Wisdom-Religion, as the only possible key to the Absolute in science and theology" (p. Vii).This primitive Wisdom-Religion was pre-Vedic and was the parent of all religions, all philosophies, all systems of thought, all sciences known to mankind (II, 216, 639). Its primordial articles of faith are: "the unity of God, the immortality of the spirit, belief in salvation only through our works, merit and demerit." (II, 116)
The Preface, the opening section "Before the Veil," and the Table of Contents or the two volumes are enough to give us an idea of the object of the work, which in H.P.B.'s own words is to offer "a brief summary of the religions, philosophies and universal traditions of humankind, and the exegesis of the same, in the spirit of those secret doctrines, of which none—thanks to prejudice and bigotry—have reached Christendom in so unmutilated a form, as to secure it a fair jusdgment (I, X1iV). The study of "the noblest of sciences—that of the spiritual man," had gradually fallen into "unmerited contempt" on the part of the multitude who had lost the key to it (Ibid.); and the time was ripe for a reawakening of the human soul to its own innate divinity and aspirations.
Deeply sensible of the Titanic struggle that is now in progress between materialism and the spiritual aspirations of mankind, our constant endeavour has been to gather into our several chapters, like weapons into armories, every fact and argument that can be used to aid the latter in defeating the former. Sickly and deformed child as it now is, the materialism of To-Day is born of the brutal Yesterday. Unless its growth is arrested, it may become our master. It is the bastard progeny of the French Revolution and its reaction against ages of religious bigotry and repression. To prevent the crushying of these spiritual aspirations, the blighting of these hopes, and the deadening of that intuition which teaches us of a God and a hereafter, we must show our false theologies in their naked deformity, and distinguish between divine religion and human dogmas. Our voice is raised for spiritual freedom, and our plea made for enfranchisement from all tyranny, whether of Science or Theology. (I, XiV)
Some of the other main ideas covered in Isis and "submitted to public judgment" include: the kinship of man's spirit with the Universal Spirit or God; the wondrous powers of man's immortal self; the truth about the inner and outer man; mediumship and adeptship; review of the ancient philosophical systems and traditions; Platonic philosophy as the link between eastern and western thought; the priceless value of ancient sacred and other works; the achievements of the ancients in many spheres; the lost arts; psychological and physical marvels; magic as a divine science; the mysteries of nature; the role of the astral light; the doctrine of cycles; interpretation of certain ancient myths and allegories; Egyptian and Indian wisdom; the corruption of Western religions and the absurdities perpetrated by religious orthodoxy and by theological Christianity in particular; the mission and teachings of great Adepts through history; the antiquity of the human race, through millions of years of rises and falls in civilization, the vicissitudes of which are governed by the Law of Cycles, or Karma; the correlation between ethical ideas and superphysical laws of nature; the researches of students of symbology and mysticism.
In the years following its publication, many controversies had centred round this book, mainly because of unfamiliarity of ordinary thinkers with Occult ideas—i.e., the distinction between the personality and the individuality in man. Moreover, when Isis was written it was felt by the Adept-Teachers from whom the impulse which directed its preparation came, that the time was not ripe for the explicit declaration of a great many truths which were later imparted in plain language. So this first work of H.P.B.'s supplies its readers "rather with hints, sketches and adumbrations of the philosophy to which it relates, than with methodical expositions." These hints, however, were addressed to the intuition of the reader. H.P.B. wrote in The Theosophist for November 1882, five years after the publication of the book: "In Isis the explanations of a hundred mysteries lie but half buried...only waiting for the application of intelligence guided by a little Occult knowledge to come out into the light of day." And in her very last article, "My Books," published in Lucifer for May 1891, she stated that, all its literary defects notwithstanding, "Isis Unveiled contains a mass of original and never hitherto divulged information on occult subjects." (She Being Dead Yet Speaketh, p. 201)
The prime mission of H.P.B. was to spread broadcast true basic concepts of Deity, of Law, and of Man. Isis was written with this very object in view, as were all her other writings. From this first work of hers up to the last, the emphasis was on Knowledge in place of belief, Adept-Teachers in place of priestly authority. Isis paved the way for the later teachings of the immemorial philosophy of Theosophy.
Mankind is obviously divided into god-informed men and lower human creatures. The intellectual difference between the Aryan and other civilized nations and such savages as the South Sea Islanders, is inexplicable on any other grounds. No amount of culture, nor generations of training amid civilization, could raise such human specimens as the Bushmen, the Veddhas of Ceylon, and some African tribes, to the same intellectual level as the Aryans, the Semites, and the Turanians so called. The "sacred spark" is missing in them and it is they who are the only inferior races on the globe, now happily—owing to the wise adjustment of nature which ever works in that direction—fast dying out. Verily mankind is "of one blood," but not of the same essence. We are the hot-house, artificially quickened plants in nature, having in us a spark, which in them is latent.—The Secret Doctrine, II, 421 fn.