Uncanny fiction as a vehicle for occult teaching
What the Work Is
“Racconti da incubo” is the Italian title of Nightmare Tales, a collection of short stories by Helena Blavatsky first published in English in 1892, the year after her death, by the Theosophical Publishing Society. The Italian edition used here appeared in 2020 from Edizioni Studio Tesi, translated and edited by Angelo Airò Farulla. Unlike Blavatsky’s major doctrinal works — Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine — this is a work of fiction: a set of short, self-contained tales rather than a philosophical or historical treatise.
What the Book Is About
The collection gathers stories built around uncanny and supernatural events — hauntings, mesmeric domination, doubles, and other strange occurrences — that Blavatsky uses to dramatize ideas she elsewhere presented in expository form. Rather than arguing for the reality of occult forces through scholarly or comparative-religious argument, as she does in her longer works, here she stages them as narrative incidents, letting the reader encounter hypnotic influence, psychic phenomena, or the consequences of forbidden knowledge through plot rather than exposition. The book is best understood as fiction in service of her theosophical worldview: entertainment with a didactic undertow, meant to make esoteric ideas vivid and memorable to a general readership rather than to specialists in occult doctrine.
Key Ideas and Themes
Running through the tales is a recurring interest in the darker, more dangerous side of occult power — what happens when hidden forces are misused, or when a human will becomes subject to another’s mesmeric or psychic control. Several stories turn on the idea of duality: a person doubled, haunted, or possessed by another influence, echoing Blavatsky’s broader teaching about the astral body and the layered, non-physical dimensions of the human being. One of the best-known pieces in the volume, built around a violin possessed of an unnatural, soul-stealing power, exemplifies this pattern — an object or art form becomes the conduit for an occult transaction with tragic consequences. Across the collection, the uncanny is not presented as inexplicable supernatural horror in the Gothic sense alone, but as evidence of real, if little-understood, forces governing consciousness and fate — the same forces Blavatsky elsewhere systematized as reincarnation, karma, and the subtle planes of existence. Moral warning is a persistent undercurrent: those who tamper carelessly with hidden powers, or submit their will to another’s, tend to meet with disaster.
Structure and Approach
The book is composed of several independent short stories rather than a continuous narrative, most of which had originally circulated in periodicals connected to the Theosophical movement, such as The Theosophist, during Blavatsky’s lifetime; they were assembled into a single volume only after her death. The tone blends the conventions of nineteenth-century Gothic and weird fiction — ghosts, doubles, cursed objects, fatal encounters — with the interpretive framework of Theosophy, so that each tale functions simultaneously as a piece of supernatural storytelling and as an illustration of occult principle.
Significance and Influence
Within Blavatsky’s body of work, Nightmare Tales occupies a minor but distinctive place: it is one of the rare instances of her writing in narrative rather than doctrinal or historical form, showing how her ideas about the astral body, psychic influence, and hidden cosmic law could be translated into popular storytelling. It has never carried the weight or reach of Isis Unveiled or The Secret Doctrine, but it remains of interest to readers tracing the intersection of nineteenth-century occultism with the wider Gothic and weird-fiction tradition of the period.
