Editorial policy
Katinka Hesselink 2000
On this website I have used a rather unusual editorial policy, for the theosophical movement. I have NOT shown where previous editions of the same material show deletions. This is especially relevant to the way I publish those parts of the ES-instructions that I thought relevant, and to the letter from Mahatma K.H. to Annie Besant. In the first I take the text as published by Boris de Zirkoff in H.P. Blavatsky's Collected Writings. But with one change: There are parts of these instructions that when H.P. Blavatsky lay on her sickbed, the people in charge of printing thought fit to delete, as being of to personal a nature. H.P. Blavatsky later was adamant that this material should have been included. Therefore, I too have included it, but I do not show what matter was previously deleted. Boris does show this by having this material within square brackets. I feel that the student interested in the history of the TS will look these differences up in the collected writings (or on the cd-rom containing this material), but that it is hardly relevant for the general student.
The same goes for the letter by Mahatma K.H. to Annie Besant. This letter was published for the first time in full in The Eclectic Theosophist, September/October 1987. In that publication, it was logical to highlight the previously deleted phrases. They did so by printing them in bold. As far as I am concerned, for this internet-edition of this highly important letter, the historical history of its publication is less relevant than its content. Therefore, I have published it the way the Mahatma wrote it, that is, I give all in the same typeface.