What's in a Book?

Blavatsky was a great admirer of fiction and considered it an important tool to promote Theosophical, occult and mystical ideas. She deemed literature as the heart and pulse of people replete with leading lights and signposts throughout the realm of the occult: "Literature-once wrote a critic-is the confession of social life, reflecting all its sins and all its acts of baseness as of heroism. Books do not represent one man, but they are the mirror of a host of men." Fictional works, in her worldview, were not mere fancies of imagination, but "true presentiments of what lies in the bosom of the future, and much of which is already born."