New Year Message from H. P. Blavatsky

Blavatsky Portrait by James Montgomery Flagg

New Year thoughts from HPB:  In 2019, the perihelion or the Theosophical New Year will occur on January 2nd.  The average date of perihelion, over the centuries, is January 4th. Special thanks to fc (friendly chap) for this post:

Instead of wishing our readers a happy or prosperous New Year, we feel more in the vein to pray them to make it one worthy of its brilliant herald. This can be effected by those who are courageous and resolute. Thoreau pointed out that there are artists in life, persons who can change the colour of a day and make it beautiful to those with whom they come in contact. We claim that there are adepts, masters in life who make it divine, as in all other arts. Is it not the greatest art of all, this which affects the very atmosphere in which we live? 

That it is the most important is seen at once, when we remember that every person who draws the breath of life affects the mental and moral atmosphere of the world, and helps to color the day for those about him. Those who do not help to elevate the thoughts and lives of others must of necessity either paralyze them by indifference, or actively drag them down... Everyone lives, and thinks, and speaks. 

If all our readers who have any sympathy with Lucifer endeavoured to learn the art of making life not only beautiful but divine, and vowed no longer to be hampered by disbelief in the possibility of this miracle, but to commence the Herculean task at once, then however unlucky a year, it would have been fitly ushered in by the gleaming star...The Theosophist who is at all in earnest, sees his responsibilities and endeavors to find knowledge, living, in the meantime, up to the highest standard of which he is aware.  

Man's life is in his own hands, his fate is ordered by himself. Why then should not be a year of greater spiritual development than any we have lived through? It depends on ourselves to make it so. This is an actual fact, not a religious sentiment...  Let no one imagine that it is a mere fancy, the attaching of importance to the birth of the year. The earth passes through its definite phases and man with it; and as a day can be colored, so can a year. The astral life of the earth is young and strong between Christmas and Easter. Those who form their wishes now will have added strength to fulfill them consistently. (CW IX:3-5).

The Gods are many; and every December, according to the Japanese, is the month of the arrival, or descent of the Gods; therefore there must be a considerable number of deities lurking around us mortals in astral space. The 3rd of January, a day which was consecrated to the worship of Isis, was also set apart as the day on which the deities of Olympus visited their worshippers. January the 4th is the day of Mercury (Hermes, Budha), who is credited with adding brains to the heads of those who are civil to him... Shine more on us, O, Helios, Son of Hyperion! Those on whom thou beamest thy greatest radiance must be, as in the legend of Apollo, good and kind men. (CW X:278, 280)

Every man or woman is endowed, more or less, with a magnetic personality, which when helped by a sincere, and especially by an intense and indomitable will - is the most effective of magic levers placed by Nature in human hands - for woe or weal. Let us then, Theosophists, use that will to send a sincere greeting and wish of good luck for the New Year to every living creature under the sun - enemies and relentless traducers included. Let us try and feel especially kindly and forgiving to our foes and persecutors, honest or dishonest, lest some of us should send unconsciously an 'evil eye' greeting instead of a blessing." (CW XII:67).

"To be brief, it is January the 4th which ought to be selected by the Theosophists - the Esotericists especially - as their New Year. January is under the sign of Capricornus, the mysterious Makara of the Hindu mystics - the 'Kumaras,' it being stated, having incarnated in mankind under the 10th sign of the Zodiac. For ages the 4th of January has been sacred to Mercury-Budha, or Thoth-Hermes. Thus everything combines to make of it a festival to be held by those who study ancient Wisdom. (CW XII:76)