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The
Occult World
By
Alfred
Percy Sinnett
Theosophy Wales are
pleased to present this
Tour
de Force of esoteric writing.
The
Occult World is an treatise on the Occult and Occult Phenomena, presented in
readable style,
by
an early giant of the Theosophical Movement.
Alfred
Percy Sinnett and his wife Patience were personally invited to join the
Theosophical
Society
by the founder of modern Theosophy,
Helena
Petrovna Blavatsky herself
Theosophists nowadays hesitate to use the word
“Occult” as it has been kicked around, adapted
and reworked to suit many purposes and
contexts.
A P Sinnett uses the word to describe the
study
of a deeper spiritual reality that extends
beyond
rigid rational thinking and the accepted
boundaries of the physical sciences.
The Occult
World
By
A P Sinnett
Chapter 3
First Occult
Experiences
It has been
through my connection with the Theosophical Society and my acquaintance with Madame
Blavatsky that I have obtained experiences in connection with occultism, which
have prompted me to undertake my present task. The first problem I had to solve
was whether Madame Blavatsky really did, as I heard, possess the power of
producing abnormal phenomena. And it may be imagined that, on the assumption of
the reality of her phenomena, nothing would have been simpler than to obtain
such satisfaction when once I had formed her acquaintance.
It is, however,
an illustration of the embarrassments which surround all inquiries of this
nature- embarrassments with which so many people grow impatient, to the end
that they cast inquiry altogether aside and remain wholly ignorant of the truth
for the rest of their lives- that although on the first occasion of my making.
Madame BIavatsky's acquaintance she became a guest at
my house at Allahabad and remained there for six
weeks, the harvest of satisfaction I was enabled to obtain during this time was
exceedingly small. Of course I heard a great deal from her during the time
mentioned about occultism and the Brothers, but while she was most anxious that
I should understand the situation thoroughly, and I was most anxious to get at
the truth, the difficulties to be overcome were almost insuperable.
For the Brothers,
as already described, have an unconquerable objection to showing off. That the
person who wishes them to show off is an earnest seeker of truth, and not
governed by mere idle curiosity, is nothing to the purpose. They do not want to
attract candidates for initiation by an exhibition of wonders. Wonders have a
very spirit-stirring effect on the history of every religion founded on
miracles, but occultism is not a pursuit which people can safely take up in
obedience to the impulse of enthusiasm created by witnessing a display of
extraordinary power. There is no absolute rule to forbid the exhibition of
powers in presence of the outsider ; but it is clearly disapproved of by the
higher authorities of occultism on principle, and it is practically impossible
for less exalted proficients to go against this
disapproval.
It was only the
very slightest of all imaginable phenomena that, during her first visit to my
house, Madame Blavatsky was thus permitted to exhibit freely. She was allowed
to show that" raps " like those which spiritualists attribute to
spirit agency, could be produced at will. This was something, and faute de mieux we paid great
attention to raps.
Spiritualists
are aware that when groups of people sit round a table and put their hands upon
it, they will, if a "medium " be present, generally hear little
knocks which respond to questions and spell out messages. The large outer
circle of persons who do not believe in spiritualism are fain to imagine that
all the millions who do, are duped as regards this impression. It must
sometimes be troublesome for them to account for the wide development of the
delusion, but any theory, they think, is preferable to admitting the
possibility that the spirits of deceased persons can communicate in this way;
or, if they take the scientific view of the matter, that a physical effect,
however slight, can be produced without a physical cause. Such persons ought to
welcome the explanations I am now giving, tending as these do to show that the
theory of universal self-deception as regards spirit-rapping, which must be
rather an awkward theory for anyone but a ludicrously conceited objector to
hold, is not the only one by means of which the asserted facts of spiritualism-
those with which we are now dealing at all events- can be reconciled with a
reluctance to accept the spiritual hypothesis as the explanation.
Now, I soon
found out not only that raps would always come at a table at which Madame
Blavatsky sat with the view of obtaining such results, but that all conceivable
hypotheses of fraud in the matter were rapidly disposed of by a comparison of
the various experiments we were able to make. To begin with, there was no
necessity for other people to sit at the table at all. We could work with any
table under any circumstances, or without a table at all.
A windowpane
would do equally well, or the wall, or any door, or anything whatever which
could give out a sound if hit. A half glass door put ajar was at once seen to
be a very good instrument to choose, because it was easy to stand opposite
Madame Blavatsky in this case, to see her bare hands or hand (without any
rings) resting motionless on the pane, and to hear the little ticks come
plainly, as if made with the point of a pencil or ,with the sound of electric sparks
passing from one knob of an electrical apparatus to another.
Another very
satisfactory way of obtaining the raps- one frequently employed in the evening-
was to set down a large glass clock-shade on the hearthrug, and get Madame
Blavatsky, after removing all rings from her hands, and sitting well clear of
the shade so that no part of her dress touched it, to lay her hands on it.
Putting a lamp on the ground opposite, and sitting down on the hearthrug, one
could see the under surfaces of the hands resting on the glass, and still under
these perfectly satisfactory conditions the raps would come, clear and
distinct, on the sonorous surface of the shade.
It was out of
Madame Blavatsky's power to give an exact explanation as to how these raps were
produced. Every effort of occult power is connected with some secret or other,
and slight, regarded in the light of phenomena, as the raps were, they were
physical effects produced by an effort of will, and the manner in which the
will can be trained to produce physical effects may be too uniform, as regards
great and small phenomena, to be made in accordance with the rules of occultism
the subject of exact explanations to uninitiated persons.
But the fact
that the raps were obedient to the will was readily put beyond dispute, in this
way amongst others: working with the windowpane or the clockshade,
I would ask to have a name spelled out, mentioning one at random. Then I would
call over the alphabet, and at the right letters the raps would come. Or I
would ask for a definite number of raps, and they would come. Or for series of
raps in some defined rhythmical progression, and they would come. Nor was this
all. Madame Blavatsky would sometimes put her hands, or one only, on someone
else's head, and make the raps come, audibly to an attentive listener and
perceptibly to the person touched, who would feel each little shock exactly as
if he were taking sparks off the conductor of an electrical machine.
At a later
stage of my inquiries I obtained raps under better circumstances again than
these- namely, without contact between the object on which they were produced
and Madame Blavatsky's hands at all. This was at Simla
in the summer of last year (1880), but I may as well anticipate a little as far
as the raps are concerned. At Simla Madame Blavatsky
used to produce the raps on a little table set in the midst of an attentive
group, with no one touching it at all. After starting it, or of charging it
with some influence by resting her hands on it for a few moments, she would
hold one about a foot above it and make mesmeric passes at it, at each of which
the table would yield the familiar sound. Nor was this done only at our own
house with our own tables.
The same thing
would be done at friends houses, to which Madame Blavatsky accompanied us. And
a further development of the head experiment was this: It was found to be
possible for several persons to feel the same rap simultaneously.
Four or five
persons used sometimes to put their hands in a pile, one on another on a table;
then Madame Blavatsky would put hers on the top of the pile and cause a
current, of whatever it is which produces the sound, to pass through the whole
series of hands, felt by each simultaneously, and record itself in a rap on the
table beneath. Anyone who has ever taken part in forming such a pile of hands
must feel as to some of the hypotheses concerning the raps that have been put
forward in the Indian papers by determined sceptics-
hard-headed persons not to be taken in- to the effect that the raps are
produced by Madame Blavatsky's thumbnails or by the cracking of some joint-
that such hypotheses are rather idiotic.
Summing up the
argument in language which I used in a letter written at the time, it stands as
follows; " Madame Blavatsky puts her hands on a table and raps are heard
on it. Some wiseacre suggests she does it with her thumbnails; she puts only
one hand on the table; the raps comes still. Does she conceal any artifice
under her hand? She lifts her hand from the table altogether, and merely
holding it in the air above, the raps still come. Has she done anything to the
table? She puts her hand on a windowpane, on a picture frame, on a dozen
different places about the room in succession, and from each in turn come the mysterious
raps. Is the house where she stays with her own particular friends about her
prepared all over?
She goes to
half a dozen other houses at Simla and produces raps
at them all. Do the raps really come from somewhere else than where they seem
to come from-are they perhaps ventriloquism ? She puts her hand on your head,
and from the motionless fingers you feel something which resembles a minute
series of electric shocks, and an attentive listener beside you will hear them
producing little raps on your skull. Are you telling a lie when you say you
feel the shocks ? Half a dozen people put their hands one on top of the other
in a pile on the table ; Madame Blavatsky puts hers on the top of all, and each
person feels the little throbs pass through, and hears them record themselves
in faint raps on the table on which the pile of hands is resting. When a person
has seen all these experiments many times, as I have, what impression do you
think is made on his mind by a person who says. There is nothing in raps but
conjuring- Maskelyne and Cooke can do them for £10 a
night . Maskelyne and Cooke cannot do them for £10 a
night nor for ten lakhs a night under the
circumstances I describe."
The raps even
as I heard them during the first visit that Madame Blavatsky paid us at
But it was
mortifying to approach no nearer to absolute certitude concerning the questions
in which we were really interested- namely, whether there did indeed exist men
with the wonderful powers ascribed to the adepts, and whether in this way it
was possible for human creatures to obtain positive knowledge concerning the
characteristics of their own spiritual nature. It must be remembered that
Madame Blavatsky was preaching no specific doctrine on this subject.
What she told
us about the adepts and her own initiation was elicited by questions.
Theosophy, in which she did seek to interest all her friends, did not proclaim
any specific belief on the subject. It simply recommended the theory that
humanity should be regarded as a Universal Brotherhood in which each person
should study the truth as regards spiritual things, freed from the
prepossessions of any specific religious dogma. But although her attitude, as
regards the whole subject, put her under no moral obligation to prove the
reality of occultism, her conversation and her book, " Isis
Unveiled," disclosed a view of things which one naturally desired to
explore further; and it was tantalising to feel that
she could, and yet could not give us the final proofs we so much desired to
have, that her occult training really had invested her with powers over
material things of a kind which, if one could but feel sure they were actually
in her possession, would utterly shatter the primary foundations of
materialistic philosophy.
One conviction
we felt had been fully attained. This was the conviction of her own good faith.
It is disagreeable merely to recognise that this can
be impugned; but this has been done in
I am not, of
course, attributing any scientific value to this sort of testimony as
accrediting the abnormal character of phenomena she may be concerned in
producing. With such a mighty problem at stake as the trustworthiness of the
fundamental theories of modern physical science, it is impossible to proceed by
any other but scientific modes of investigation. In any experiments I have
tried I have always been careful to exclude, not merely the probability, but
the possibility of trickery; and where it has been impossible to secure the
proper conditions, I have not allowed the results of the experiment to enter
into the sum total of my conclusions. But, in its place, it seems only right-
only a slight attempt to redress the scandalous wrong which, as far as mere
insult and slander can do a wrong, has been done to a very high-minded and
perfectly honourable woman - to record the certainty
at which in progress of time both my wife and myself arrived, that Madame
Blavatsky is a lady of absolutely upright nature, who has sacrificed, not
merely rank and fortune, but all thought of personal welfare or comfort in any
shape, from enthusiasm for occult studies in the first instance, and latterly
for the special task she has taken in hand as an initiate in, if relatively a
humble member of, the great occult fraternity- the direction of the Theosophical Society.
Besides the
production of the raps one other phenomenon had been conceded to us during
Madame Blavatsky's first visit. We had gone with her to Benares
for a few days, and were studying at a house lent to us by the Maharajah of Vizianagram - a big, bare, comfortless abode as judged by
European standards-in the central hall of which we were sitting one evening
after dinner. Suddenly three or four flowers-cut roses-fell in the midst of us-
just as such things sometimes fall in the dark at spiritual seances.
But in this
case there were several lamps and candles in the room. The ceiling of the hall
consisted simply of the solid, bare, painted rafters and boards that supported
the flat cement roof of the building. The phenomenon was so wholly
unexpected-as unexpected, I am given to understand, by Madame Blavatsky,
sitting in an armchair reading at the time, as by the rest of us- that it lost
some of the effect it would otherwise have had on our minds. If one could have
been told a moment beforehand " now some flowers are going to fall",
so that we could have looked up and seen them suddenly appear in the air above
our heads, then the impressive effect of an incident so violently out of the
common order of things would have been very great. Even as it was, the incident
has always remained for those who witnessed it one of the stages on their road
to a conviction of the reality of occult powers.
Persons to whom
it is merely related cannot be expected to rely upon it to any great extent.
They will naturally ask various questions as to the construction of the room,
who inhabited the house, etc., and even when all these questions had been
answered, as they truthfully could be in a manner which would shut out any
hypothesis by means of which the fall of the flowers could be explainable by
any conjuring trick, there would still be an uncomfortable suspicion left in
the questioner's mind as to the completeness of the explanation given.
It might hardly
have been worth while to bring the incident on to the present record at all,
but for the opportunity it affords me of pointing out that the phenomena produced
in Madame Blavatsky's presence need not necessarily be of her producing.
Corning now to
details in connection with some of the larger mysteries of occultism, I am
oppressed by the difficulty of leading up to a statement of what I know now to
be facts-as absolute facts as Charing Cross-which
shall, nevertheless, be gradual enough not to shock the understanding of people
absolutely unused to any but the ordinary grooves of thought as regards
physical phenomena. None the less is it true that any "Brother," as
the adepts in occultism are familiarly referred to, who may have been seized
with the impulse to bestow on our party at Benares
the little surprise described above, may have been in Tibet or in the South of
India, or anywhere else in the world at the time, and yet just as able to make
the roses fall as if he had been in the room with us. I have spoken already of
the adept's power of being present " in spirit " as we should say,
" in astral body " as an occultist would say, at any distant place in
the flash of a moment at will. So present, he can exercise in that distant
place some of the psychological powers which he possesses, as completely as he
can exercise them in physical body wherever he may actually be, as we
understand the expression.
I am not
pretending to give an explanation of how he produces this or that result, nor
for a moment hinting that I know. I am recording merely the certain fact that
various occult results have been accomplished in my presence, and explaining as
much about them as I have been able to find out. But at all events it has long
since become quite plain to me, that wherever Madame Blavatsky is, there the
Brothers, wherever they may be, can and constantly do produce phenomena of the
most overwhelming sort, with the production of which she herself has little or
nothing to do. In reference, indeed, to any phenomenon occurring in her
presence, it must be remembered that one can never have any exact knowledge as
to how far her own powers may have been employed, or how far she may have been
" helped," or whether she has not been quite uninfluential
in the production of the result. Precise explanations of this kind are quite
contrary to the rules of occultism- which, it must always be remembered, is not
trying to convince the world of its existence. In this volume I am trying to
convince the world of its existence, but that is another matter altogether.
Anyone who wishes to know how the truth really stands can only take up the
position of a seeker of truth.
He is not a
judge before whom occultism comes to plead for credibility. It is useless,
therefore, to quarrel with the observations we are enabled to make on the
ground that they are not of the kind one would best like to make. The question
is whether they yield data on which conclusions may safely rest.
And another
consideration claims treatment in connexion with the
character of the observations which, so far, I have been enabled to make-that
is to say, in connexion with any search for proof of occult
power as regards physical phenomena which but for such agency would be
miraculous. I can foresee that, in spite of the abject stupidity of the remark,
many people will urge that the force of the experiments with which I have had
to deal is vitiated because they relate to phenomena which have a certain
superficial resemblance to conjuring tricks. Of course this ensues from the
fact that conjuring tricks all aim at achieving a certain superficial
resemblance to occult phenomena. Let any reader, whatever his present frame of
mind on the subject may be, assume for a moment that he has seen reason to
conceive that there may be an occult fraternity in existence wielding strange
powers over natural forces as yet unknown to ordinary humanity; that this fraternity
is bound by rules which cramp the manifestation of these powers, but do not
absolutely prohibit it; and then let him propose some comparatively small but
scientifically convincing tests which he could ask to have conceded to him as a
proof of the reality of some part, at all events, of these powers: it will be
found that it is impossible to propose any such test that does not bear a
certain superficial resemblance to a conjuring trick. But this will not
necessarily impair the value of the test for people capable of dealing with
those characteristics of experiments that are not superficial.
The gulf of
difference which is really to be observed lying between any of the occult
phenomena I shall have to describe presently and a conjuring trick which might
imitate it, is due to the fact that the conditions would be utterly unlike. The
conjuror would work in his own stage, or in a prepared room. The most
remarkable of the phenomena I have had in the presence of Madame Blavatsky have
taken place away out of doors in fortuitously chosen places in the woods and on
the hills. The conjuror is assisted by any required number of confederates
behind his scenes. Madame Blavatsky comes a stranger to Simla,
and is a guest in my own house, under my own observation, during the whole of
her visit.
The conjuror is
paid to incur the expenses of accomplishing this or that deception of the
senses. Madame Blavatsky is, what I have already explained, a lady of honourable character, instrumental in helping her friends -
at their earnest desire wherever phenomena are produced at all-to see some
manifestation of the powers in the acquisition of which (instead of earning
money by them as the conjuror does with his) she has sacrificed everything the
world generally holds dear- station, and so forth, immeasurably above that to
which any conjuror or any impostor could aspire. Pursuing Madame Blavatsky with
injurious suspicions, persons who resent the occult hypothesis will constantly
forget the dictates of common sense in overlooking these considerations.
About the
beginning of September, 1880, Madame Blavatsky came to Simla
as our guest, and in the course of the following six weeks various phenomena
occurred, which became the talk of all Anglo-India for a time, and gave rise to
some excited feeling on the part of persons who warmly espoused the theory that
they must be the result of imposture. It soon became apparent to us that
whatever might have been the nature of the restrictions which operated the
previous winter at Allahabad to prevent our guest
from displaying more than the very least of her powers, these restrictions were
now less operative than before. We were soon introduced to a phenomenon we had
not been treated to previously. By some modification of the force employed to produce
the sound of raps on any object, Madame Blavatsky can produce in the air,
without the intermediation of any solid object whatever, the sound of a silvery
bell-sometimes a chime or little run of three or four bells on different notes.
We had often heard about these bells, but had never heard them produced before.
They were
produced for us for the first time one evening after dinner while we were still
sitting round the table, several times in , succession in the air over our
heads, and in one instance instead of the single bell-sound there came one of
the chimes of which I speak. Later on I heard them on scores of occasions and
in all sorts of different places-in the open air and at different houses where
Madame Blavatsky went from time to time. As before with the raps, there is no
hypothesis in the case of the bells which can be framed by an adherent of the
imposture theory which does not break down on a comparison of the different
occasions and conditions under which I have heard them produced. Indeed, the
theory of imposture is one which in the matter of the bells has only one narrow
conjecture to rest on. Unlike the sound of a rap, which in the ordinary way
could be produced by many different methods --so that, to be sure any given
example of such a sound is not produced by ordinary means, one has to procure
its repetition under a great variety of conditions-the sound of a bell can only
be made, physically, in a few ways. You must have a bell, or some sonorous
object in the nature of a bell, to make it with. Now, when sitting in a well
lighted room, and attentively watching, you get the sound of a bell up above
your heads where there is no physical bell to yield it- what are the hypotheses
which can attribute the result to trickery. Is the sound really produced
outside the room altogether by some agent or apparatus in another. First of all
no rational person who had heard this sound would advance that theory, because
the sound itself is incompatible with the idea. It is never loud- at least I
have never heard it very loud- but it is always clear and distinct to a
remarkable extent. If you lightly strike the edge of a thin claret glass with a
knife you may get a sound which it would be difficult to persuade anyone had
come from another room; but the occult bell-sound is like that, only purer and
clearer, with no sub-sound of jarring in it whatever.
Independently
of this, I have, as I say, heard the sound in the open air produced up in the
sky in the stillness of evening. In rooms it has not always been overhead, but
sometimes down on the ground amongst the feet of a group of persons listening
for it. Again, on one occasion, when it had been produced two or three times in
the drawing-room of a friend's house where we had all been dining, one
gentlemen of the party went back to the dining-room two rooms off, to get a
finger glass with which to make a sound for the occult bells to repeat- a
familiar form of the experiment. While by himself in the dining-room he heard
one of the bell-sounds produced near him, though Madame Blavatsky had remained
in the drawing-room.
This example of
the phenomenon satisfactorily disposed of the theory, absurd in itself for
persons who frequently heard the bells in all manner of places, that Madame
Blavatsky carried some apparatus about her with which to produce the sound. As
for the notion of confederacy, that is disposed of by the fact that I have
repeatedly heard the sounds when out walking beside Madame Blavatsky's jampan with no other person near us but the jampanees carrying it.
The bell-sounds
are not mere sportive illustrations of the properties of the currents which-
are set in action to produce them. They serve the direct, practical purpose
among occultists of a telegraphic call-bell. It appears that when trained occultists
are concerned, so that the mysterious magnetic connection, whatever it may be,
which enables them to communicate ideas is once established, they can produce
the bell-sounds at any distance in the neighbourhood
of the fellow-initiate whose attention they wish to attract. I have repeatedly
heard Madame Blavatsky called in this way, when our own little party being
alone some evening, we have all been quietly reading. A little " ting
" would suddenly sound, and Madame Blavatsky would get up and go to her
room to attend to whatever occult business may have been the motive of her
summons.
A very pretty
illustration of the sound, as thus produced by some brother-initiate at a
distance, was afforded one evening under these circumstances. A lady, a guest
at another house in Simla, had been dining with us,
when about eleven o'clock I received a note from her host, enclosing a letter
which he asked me to get Madame Blavatsky to send on by occult means to a
certain member of the great fraternity to whom both he and I had been writing.
I shall explain
the circumstances of this correspondence more fully later on. We were all
anxious to know at once- before the lady with us that evening returned up the
hill, so that she could take back word to her host- whether the letter could be
sent; but Madame Blavatsky declared that her own powers would not enable her to
perform the feat. The question was whether a certain person, a half-developed
brother then in the neighbourhood of Simla, would give the necessary help. Madame Blavatsky said
she would see if she could " find him," and taking the letter in her
hands, she went out into the veranda, where we all followed her. Leaning on the
balustrade, and looking over the wide sweep of the Simla
valley, she remained for a few minutes perfectly motionless and silent, as we
all were; and the night was far enough advanced for all commonplace sounds to
have settled down, so that the stillness was perfect.
Suddenly, in
the air before us, there sounded the clear note of an occult-bell. " All
right," cried Madame, " he will take it." And duly taken the
letter was shortly afterwards. But the phenomenon involved in its transmission
will be better introduced to the reader in connection with other examples.
I come now to a
series of incidents which exhibit occult power in a more striking light than
any of those yet described. To a scientific mind, indeed, the production of
sounds by means of a force unknown to ordinary science should be as clear a
proof that the power in question is a power, as the more sensational phenomena
which have to do with the transmission of solid objects by occult agency.
The sound can
only reach our ears by the vibration of air, and to set up the smallest
undulation of air as the effect of a thought will appear to the ordinary
understanding as no less outrageous an impossibility than the uprooting of a
tree in a similar way. Still there are degrees in wonderfulness which the
feelings recognise even if such distinctions are
irrational.
The first incident of the kind which I now take up is not one which would in
itself be a complete proof of anything for an outsider. I describe it rather
for the benefit of readers who may be, either through spiritualistic
experiences or in any other way, already alive to the possibility of phenomena
as such, and interested rather in experiments which may throw light on their
genesis than in mere texts. Managed a little better, the occurrence now to be
dealt with would have been a beautiful test ; but Madame Blavatsky, left to herself
in such matters, is always the worst devisor of tests imaginable. Utterly out
of sympathy with the positive and incredulous temperament; engaged all her life
in the development amongst Asiatic mystics of the creative rather than the
critical faculties, she never can follow the intricate suspicions with which
the European observer approaches the consideration of the marvellous in its
simplest forms.
The marvellous,
in forms so stupendously marvellous that they almost elude the grasp of
ordinary conceptions, has been the daily food of her life for a great number of
years, and it is easy to realise that, for her, the
jealous distrust with which ordinary people hunt round the slightest
manifestation of occult force to find any loophole through which a suspicion of
fraud may creep, as no less tiresome and stupid, then the ordinary person
conceives the too credulous spirit to be.
About the end
of September my wife went one afternoon with Madame Blavatsky to the top of a neighbouring hill. They were only accompanied by one other
friend. I was not present myself on this occasion. While there Madame Blavatsky
asked my wife, in a joking way, what was her heart's desire. She said at random
and on the spur or the moment, " to get a note from one of the Brothers."
Madame Blavatsky took from her pocket a piece of blank pink paper that had been
torn off a note received that day. Folding this up into a small compass she
took it to the edge of the hill, held it up for a moment or two between her
hands and returned saying that it was gone. She presently, after communicating
mentally by her own occult methods with the distant Brother, said he asked
where my wife would have the letter. At first she said she should like it to
come fluttering down into her lap, but some conversation ensued as to whether
this would be the best way to get it, and ultimately it was decided that she
should find it in a certain tree. Here, of course, a mistake was made which
opens the door to the suspicions of resolutely disbelieving persons. It will be
supposed that Madame Blavatsky had some reasons of her own for wishing the tree
chosen. For readers who favour that conjecture after all that has gone before,
it is only necessary to repeat that the present story is being told not as a
proof, but as an incident.
At first Madame
Blavatsky seems to have made a mistake as to the description of the tree ,which
the distant Brother was indicating as that in which he was going to put the
note, and with some trouble my wife scrambled on to the lower branch of a bare
and leafless trunk on which nothing could be found. Madame then again got into
communication with the Brother and ascertained her mistake. Into another tree
at a little distance, which neither Madame nor the one other person present had
approached, my wife now climbed a few feet and looked all round among the
branches. At first she saw nothing, but then, turning back her head without
moving from the position she had taken up, she saw on a twig immediately before
her face- where a moment previously there had been nothing but leaves-a little
pink note. This was stuck on to the stalk of a leaf that had been quite freshly
torn off, for the stalk was still green and moist- not withered as it would
have been if the leaf had been torn off for any length of time. The note was
found to contain these few words: " I have been asked to leave a note here
for you. What can I do for you?", It was signed by some Tibetan
characters. The pink paper on which it was written appeared to be the same which
Madame Blavatsky had taken blank from her pocket shortly before.
How was it
transmitted first to the Brother who wrote upon it and then back again to the
top of our hill ? not to speak of the mystery of its attachment to the tree in
the way described. So far as I can frame conjectures on this subject, it would
be premature to set them forth in detail till I have gone more fully into the
facts observed. It is no use to discuss the way the wings of flying-fish are
made for people who will not believe in the reality of flying fish at all, and
refuse to accept phenomena less guaranteed by orthodoxy than Pharaoh's chariot
wheels.
I come now to
the incidents of a very remarkable day. The day before, I should explain, we
started on a little expedition which turned out a coup manqué, though,
but for some tiresome mishaps, it might have led, we afterwards had reason to
think, to some very interesting results. We mistook our way to a place of which
Madame Blavatsky had received an imperfect description- or a description she
imperfectly understood- in an occult conversation with one of the Brothers then
actually passing through Simla. Had we gone the right
way that day we might have had the good fortune of meeting him, for he stayed
one night at a certain old Tibetan temple, or rest-house, such as is often
found about the Himalayas, and which the blind apathy of commonplace English
people leads them to regard as of no particular interest or importance. Madame
Blavatsky was wholly unacquainted with Simla, and the
account she gave us of the place she wanted to go to led us to think she meant
a different place. We started, and for a long time Madame declared that we must
be going in the right direction because she felt certain currents. Afterwards
it appeared that the road to the place we were making for, and to that for
which we ought to have made, were coincident for a considerable distance ; but
a slight divergence at one point carried us into a wholly wrong system of
hill-paths. Eventually Madame utterly lost her scent: we tried back; we who
knew Simla discussed its topography and wondered
where it could be she wanted to get to, but all to no purpose. We launched
ourselves down a hillside where Madame declared she once more felt the missing
current; but occult currents may flow where travellers
cannot pass, and when we attempted this descent. I knew the case was desperate.
After a while the expedition had to be abandoned, and we went home much
disappointed.
Why, some one
may ask, could not the omniscient Brother feel that Madame was going wrong, and
direct us properly in time ? I say this question will be asked, because I know
from experience that people unused to the subject will not bear in mind the
relations of the Brothers to such inquirers as ourselves. In this case, for
example, the situation was not one in which the Brother in question was
anxiously waiting to prove his existence to a jury of intelligent Englishmen.
We can learn so little about the daily life of an adept in occultism, that we
who are uninitiated can tell very little about the interests that really engage
his attention; but we can find out this much - that his attention is constantly
engaged on interests connected with his own work, and the gratification of the
curiosity concerning occult matters of persons who are not regular students of
occultism forms no part of that work at all. On the contrary, unless under very
exceptional conditions, he is even forbidden to make any concessions whatever
to such curiosity. In the case in point the course of events may probably have
been something of this kind :-Madame Blavatsky perceived by her own occult
tentacle that one of her illustrious friends was in the neighbourhood.
She immediately - having a sincere desire to oblige us- may have asked him
whether she might bring us to see him.
Probably he
would regard any such request very much as the astronomer royal might regard
the request of a friend to bring a party of ladies to look through his
telescopes; but none the less he might say, to please his half-fledged "
brother " in occultism, Madame Blavatsky, " Very well, bring them, if
you like: I am in such and such a place." And then he would go on with his
work, remembering afterwards that the intended visit had never been paid, and perhaps
turning an occult perception in the direction of the circumstances to ascertain
what had happened.
However this
may have been, the expedition as first planned broke down. It was not with the
hope of seeing the Brother, but on the general principle of hoping for something
to turn up, that we arranged to go for a picnic the following day in another
direction, which, as the first road had failed, we concluded to be probably the
one we ought to have taken previously.
We set out at
the appointed time next morning. We were originally to have been a party of
six, but a seventh person joined us just before we started. After going down
the hill for some hours a place was chosen in the wood near the upper waterfall
for our breakfast: the baskets that had been brought with us were unpacked,
and, as usual at an Indian picnic, the servants at a little distance lighted a
fire and set to work to make tea and coffee. Concerning this some joking arose
over the fact that we had one cup and saucer too few, on account of the seventh
person who joined us at starting, and some one laughingly asked Madame
Blavatsky to create another cup and saucer. There was no set purpose in the
proposal at first, but when Madame Blavatsky said it would be very difficult,
but that if we liked she would try, attention was of course at once arrested.
Madame Blavatsky, as usual, held mental conversation with one of the Brothers,
and then wandered a little about in the immediate neighbourhood
of where we were sitting- that is to say, within a radius of half-a-dozen to a
dozen yards from our picnic cloth- I closely following, waiting to see what
would happen. Then she marked a spot on the ground, and called to one of the
gentlemen of the party to bring a knife to dig with. The place chosen was the
edge of a little slope covered with thick weeds and grass and shrubby
undergrowth. The gentleman with the knife-let us call him X-------------- as I
shall have to refer to him afterwards- tore up these in the first place with
some difficulty, as the roots were tough and closely interlaced. Cutting then
into the matted roots and earth with the knife, and pulling away the débris with his hands, he came at last, on the edge
of something white, which turned out, as it was completely excavated, to be the
required cup. A corresponding saucer was also found after a little more
digging.
Both objects
were in among the roots which spread everywhere through the ground, so that it
seemed as if the roots were growing round them. The cup and saucer both
corresponded exactly, as regards their pattern, with those that had been
brought to the picnic, and constituted a seventh cup and saucer when brought
back to where we were to have breakfast. I may as well add at once that
afterwards, when we got home, my wife questioned our principal khitmutgar as to how many cups and saucers of that
particular kind we possessed. In the progress of years, as the set was an old
set, some had been broken, but the man at once said that nine teacups were
left. When collected and counted that number was found to be right, without
reckoning the excavated cup. That made ten, and as regards the pattern- it was
one of a somewhat peculiar kind, bought a good many years previously in
Now, the notion
that human beings can create material objects by the exercise of mere
psychological power, will of course be revolting to the understandings of
people to whom this whole subject is altogether strange. It is not making the
idea much more acceptable to say that the cup and saucer appear in this case to
have been " doubled " rather than created. The doubling of objects
seems merely another kind of creation- creation according to a pattern.
However, the facts, the occurrences of the morning I have described, were at
all events exactly as I have related them. I have been careful as to the strict
and minute truthfulness of every detail.
If the
phenomenon was not what it appeared to be- a most wonderful display of a power
of which the modern scientific world has no comprehension whatever it was, of
course, an elaborate fraud. That supposition, however, setting aside the moral
impossibility from any point of view of assuming Madame Blavatsky capable of
participation in such an imposture, will only bear to be talked of vaguely. As
a way out of the dilemma it will not serve any person of ordinary intelligence
who is aware of the facts, or who trusts my statement of them. The cup and
saucer were assuredly dug up in the way I describe. If they were not deposited
there by occult agency, they must have been buried there beforehand. Now, I
have described the character of the ground from which they were dug up;
assuredly that had been undisturbed for years by the character of the
vegetation upon it. But it may be urged that from some other part of the
sloping ground a sort of tunnel may have been excavated in the first instance
through which the cup and saucer could have been thrust into the place where
they were found. Now this theory is barely tenable as regards its physical
possibility. If the tunnel had been big enough for the purpose it would have
left traces which were not perceptible on the ground - which were not even
discoverable when the ground was searched shortly afterwards with a view to
that hypothesis. But the truth is that the theory of previous burial is morally
untenable in view of the fact that the demand for the cup and saucer-of all the
myriad things that might have been asked for-could never have been foreseen. It
arose out of circumstances themselves the sport of the moment. If no extra
person had joined us at the last moment the number of cups and saucers packed
up by the servants would have been sufficient for our needs, and no attention
would have been drawn to them. It was by the servants, without the knowledge of
any guest, that the cups taken were chosen from others that might just as
easily have been taken. Had the burial fraud been really perpetrated it would
have been necessary to constrain us to choose the exact spot we did
actually choose for the picnic with a view to the previous preparations, but
the exact spot on which the ladies' jarnpans were
deposited was chosen by myself in concert with the gentleman referred to above
as X-, and it was within a few yards of this spot that the cup was found. Thus,
leaving the other absurdities of the fraud hypothesis out of sight, who could
be the agents employed to deposit the cup and saucer in the ground, and when
did they perform the operation? Madame Blavatsky was under our roof the whole
time from the previous evening when the picnic was determined on to the moment
of starting. The one personal servant she had with her, a Bombay boy and a
perfect stranger to Simla, was constantly about the
house the previous evening, and from the first awakening of the household in
the morning- and as it happened he spoke to my own bearer in the middle of the
night, for I had been annoyed by a loft door which had been left unfastened,
and was slamming in the wind, and called up servants to shut it. Madame
Blavatsky it appears, thus awakened, had sent her servant, who always slept
within call, to inquire what was the matter. Colonel Olcott, the President of
the Theosophical Society, also a guest of ours at the time of which I am
speaking, was certainly with us all the evening from the period of our return
from the abortive expedition of the afternoon, and was also present at the
start. To imagine that he spent the night in going four or five miles down a
difficult khud through forest paths difficult
to find, to bury a cup and saucer of a kind that we were not likely to take in
a place we were not likely to go to, in order that in the exceedingly remote
contingency of its being required for the perpetration of a hoax it might be
there, would certainly be a somewhat extravagant conjecture. Another
consideration- the destination for which we were making can be approached by
two roads from opposite ends of the upper horseshoe of hills on which Simla stands. It was open to us to select either path, and
certainly neither Madame Blavatsky nor Colonel Olcott had any share in the
selection of that actually taken. Had we taken the other, we should never have
come to the spot where we actually picnicked.
The hypothesis
of fraud in this affair is, as I have said, a defiance of common sense when
worked out in any imaginable way. The extravagance of this explanation will,
moreover, be seen to heighten as my narrative proceeds, and as the incident
just related is compared with others which took place later. But I have not yet
done with the incidents of the cup-morning.
The gentleman
called X ---------------------------had been a good deal with us during the
week or two that had already elapsed since Madame Blavatsky's arrival. Like
many of our friends, he had been greatly impressed with much he had seen in her
presence. He had especially come to the conclusion that the Theosophical
Society, in which she was interested, was exerting a good influence with the
natives, a view which he had expressed more than once in warm language in my
presence. He had declared his intention of joining this Society as I had done
myself. Now, when the cup and saucer were found most of us who were present, X
among the number, were greatly impressed, and in the conversation that ensued
the idea arose that X-- might formally become a member of the Society then and
there. I should not have taken part in this suggestion-I believe I originated
it-if X ----------had not in cool blood decided, as I understood, to join the
Society; in itself, moreover, a step which involved no responsibilities
whatever, and simply indicated sympathy with the pursuit of occult knowledge
and a general adhesion to broadly philanthropic doctrines of brotherly
sentiments towards all humanity, irrespective of race and creed. This has to be
explained in view of some little annoyances which followed.
The proposal
that X ------------should then and there formally join the Society was one with
which he was quite ready to fall in. But some documents were required-a formal
diploma, the gift of which to a new member should follow his initiation into
certain little Masonic forms of recognition adopted in the Society. How could
we get a diploma? Of course for the group then present a difficulty of this
sort was merely another opportunity for the exercise of Madame's powers. Could
she get a diploma brought to us by " magic?" After an occult
conversation with the Brother who had then interested himself in our proceedings,Madame told us that the diploma would be
forthcoming. She described the appearance it would present- a roll of paper
wound round with an immense quantity of string, and then bound up in the leaves
of a creeping plant. We should find it about in the woods where we were, and we
could all look for it, but it would be X-, for whom it was intended, who would
find it. Thus it fell out. We all searched about in the undergrowth or in the
trees, wherever fancy prompted us to look, and it was X- who found the roll,
done up as described.
We had had our
breakfast by this time. X- was formally" initiated " a member of the
society by Colonel Olcott, and after a time we shifted our quarters to a lower
place in the wood where there was the little Tibetan temple, or rest-house,
which the Brother who had been passing through Simla-
according to what Madame Blavatsky told us- had passed the previous night. We
amused ourselves by examining- the little building inside and out, "
bathing in the "good magnetism," as Madame Blavatsky expressed it,
and then, lying on the grass outside, it occurred to someone that we wanted
more coffee. The servants were told to prepare some, but it appeared that they
had used up all our water. The water to be found in the streams near Simla is not of a kind to be used for purposes of this
sort, and for a picnic, clean filtered water is always taken out in bottles, It
appears that all the bottles in our baskets had been exhausted. This report was
promptly verified by the servants by the exhibition of the empty bottles. The
only thing to be done was to send to a brewery, the nearest building, about a
mile oft, and ask for water.
I wrote a
pencil note and a coolie went off with the empty bottles. Time passed, and the
coolie returned, to our great disgust, without the water. There had been no
European left at the brewery that day (It was Sunday) to receive the note, and
the coolie had stupidly plodded back with the empty bottles under his arm,
instead of asking about and finding someone able to supply the required water.
At this time
our party was a little dispersed. X- and one of the other gentlemen had
wandered off. No one of the remainder of the party was expecting fresh
phenomena, when Madame suddenly got up, went over to the baskets, a dozen or
twenty yards off, picked out a bottle- one of those, I believe, which had been
brought back by the coolie empty-and came back to us holding it under the fold
of her dress. Laughingly producing it it was found to
be full of water. Just like a conjuring trick, will some one say ? Just like,
except for the conditions. For such a conjuring trick, the conjurer defines the
thing to be done. In our ease the want of water was as unforeseeable in the
first instance as the want of the cup and saucer. The accident that left the
brewery deserted by its Europeans, and the further accident that the coolie
sent up for water should have been so abnormally stupid even for a coolie as to
come back without, because there happened to be no European to take my note,
were accidents but for which the opportunity for obtaining the water by occult
agency could not have arisen. And those accidents supervened on the fundamental
accident, improbable in itself, that our servants should have sent us out
insufficiently supplied. That any bottle of water could have been left
unnoticed at the bottom of the baskets is a suggestion that I can hardly
imagine anyone present putting forward, for the servants had been found fault
with for not bringing enough; they had just before had the baskets completely
emptied out, and we had not submitted to the situation till we had been fully
satisfied that there really was no more water left.
Furthermore, I
tasted the water in the bottle Madame Blavatsky produced, and it was not water
of the same kind as that which came from our own filters. It was an earthy
tasting water, unlike that of the modern Simla
supply, but equally unlike, I may add, though in a different way, the offensive
and discoloured water of the only stream flowing
through those woods.
How was it
brought ? The how, of course, in all these cases is the great mystery which I
am unable to explain except in general terms; but the impossibility of
understanding the way adepts manipulate matter is one thing; the impossibility
of denying that they do manipulate it in a manner which Western ignorance would
describe as miraculous is another. The fact is there whether we can explain it
or not. The rough, popular saying that :you cannot argue the hind leg off a
cow, embodies a sound reflection ,which our prudent sceptics
in matters of the kind with which I am now dealing are too apt to overlook. You
cannot argue away a fact by contending that by the lights in your mind it ought
to be something different from what it is. Still less can you argue away a mass
of facts like those I am now recording by a series of extravagant and
contradictory hypotheses about each in turn. What the determined disbeliever so
often overlooks is that the scepticism which may show
an acuteness of mind up to a certain point, reveals a deficient intelligence
when adhered to in face of certain kinds of evidence.
I remember when
the phonograph was first invented, a scientific officer in the service of the
Indian Government sent me an article he had written on the earliest accounts
received of the instrument- to prove that the story must be a hoax, because the
instrument described was scientifically impossible. He had worked out the times
of vibrations required to reproduce the sounds and so on, and very
intelligently argued that the alleged result was unattainable. But when
phonographs in due time were imported into India, he did not continue to say
they were impossible, and that there must be a man shut up in each machine,
even though there did not seem to be room. That last is the attitude of the
self-complacent people who get over the difficulty about the causation of occult
and spiritual phenomena by denying, in face of the palpable experience of
thousands- in face of the testimony in shelves- full of books that they do not
read- that any such phenomena take place at all.
X-, I should
add here, afterwards changed his mind about the satisfactory character of the
cup phenomena, and said he thought it vitiated as a scientific proof by the
interposition of the theory that the cup and saucer might have been thrust up
into their places by means of a tunnel cut from a lower part of the bank. I
have discussed that hypothesis already, and mention the fact of X-'s change of
opinion, which does not affect any of the circumstances I have narrated, merely
to avoid the chance that readers, who may have heard or read about the Simla phenomenon in other pages, might think I was treating
the change of opinion in question as something which it was worth while to
disguise. And, indeed, the convictions which I ultimately attained were
themselves the result of accumulated experiences I have yet to relate, so that
I cannot tell how far my own certainty concerning the reality of occult power
rests on anyone example that I have seen.
It was on the
evening of the day of the cup phenomenon that there occurred an incident
destined to become the subject of very wide discussion in all the Anglo-Indian
papers. This was the celebrated " brooch incident." The facts were
related at the time in a little statement drawn up for publication, and signed
by the nine persons who witnessed it. ! This statement will be laid before the
reader directly, but as the comments to which it gave rise showed that it was
too meagre to convey a full and accurate idea of what
occurred, I will describe the course of events a little more fully. In doing
this, I may use names with a certain freedom, as these were all appended to the
published document.
We, that is, my
wife and myself with our guest, had gone up the hill to dine, in accordance
with previous engagements, with Mr. and Mrs. Hume. We dined, a party of eleven,
at a round table, and Madame Blavatsky, sitting next our host, tired and out of
spirits as it happened, was unusually silent. During the beginning of dinner
she scarcely said a word, Mr. Hume conversing chiefly with the lady on his
other hand. It is a common trick at Indian dinner-tables to have little metal
plate warmers with hot water before each guest, on which each plate served
remains while in use. Such plate warmers were used on the evening I am
describing, and over hers -in an interval during which plates had been removed-
Madame Blavatsky was absently warming her hands. Now, the production of Madame
Blavatsky's raps and bell-sounds we had noticed some- times seemed easier and
the effects better when her hands had been warmed in this way ; so some one,
seeing her engaged in warming them, asked her some question, hinting in an
indirect way at phenomena. I was very far from expecting anything of the kind
that evening, and Madame Blavatsky was equally far from intending to do
anything herself or from expecting any display at the hands of one of the
Brothers. So, merely in mockery, when asked why she was warming her hands, she
enjoined us all to warm our hands too and see what would happen. Some of the
people present actually did so, a few joking words passing among them. Then
Mrs. Hume raised a little laugh by holding up her hands and saying, " But
I have warmed my hands, what next". Now Madame Blavatsky, as I have said,
was not in a mood for any occult performances at all, but it appears from what
I learned afterwards that just at this moment, or immediately before, she
suddenly perceived by those occult faculties of which mankind at large have no
knowledge, that one of the Brothers was present " in astral body"
invisible to the rest of us in the room. It was following his indications,
therefore, that she acted in what followed; of course no one knew at the time
that she had received any impulse in the matter external to herself. What took
place as regards the surface of things was simply this: When Mrs. Hume said
what I have set down above, and when the little laugh ensued, Madame Blavatsky
put out her hand across the one person sitting between herself and Mrs. Hume
and took one of that lady's hands, saying, " Well then, do you wish for
anything in particular ? or as the lawyers say, " words to that
effect." I cannot repeat the precise sentences spoken, nor can I say now
exactly what Mrs. Hume first replied before she quite understood the situation;
but this was made clear in a very few minutes. Some of the other people present
catching this first, explained, " Think of something you would like to
have brought to you; anything you like not wanted for any mere worldly motive ;
is there anything you can think of that will be very difficult to get ?"
Remarks of this sort were the only kind that were made in the short interval
that elapsed between the remark by Mrs. Hume about having warmed her hands and
the indication by her of the thing she had thought of. She said then that she
had thought of something that would do. What was it ? An old brooch that her
mother had given her long ago and that she had lost.
Now, when this
brooch, which was ultimately recovered by occult agency, as the rest of my
story will show, came to be talked about, people said :- " Of course
Madame Blavatsky led up the conversation to the particular thing she had
arranged before- hand to produce." I have described all the
conversation which took place on this subject, before the brooch was named.
There was no conversation about the brooch or any other thing of the kind
whatever. Five minutes before the brooch was named, there had been no idea in
the mind of any person present that any phenomenon in the nature of finding any
lost article, or of any other kind, indeed, was going to be performed. Nor
while Mrs. Hume was going over in her mind the things she might ask for, did
she speak any word indicating the direction her thoughts were taking.
From the point
of the story now reached the narrative published at the time tells it almost as
fully as it need be told, and, at all events, with a simplicity that will
assist the reader in grasping all the facts-so I reprint it here in full-
" On
Sunday, the 3rd of October, at Mr. Hume's house at Simla,
there were present at dinner Mr. and Mrs. Hume, Mr. and Mrs. Sinnett, Mrs.
Gordon, Mr. F. Hogg, Captain P.J. Maitland, Mr. Beatson,
Mr. Davidson, Colonel Olcott, and Madame Blavatsky. Most of the persons present
having recently seen many remarkable occurrences In Madame Blavatsky's
presence, conversation turned on occult phenomena, and in the course of this
Madame Blavatsky asked Mrs. Hume if there was anything she particularly wished
for. Mrs. Hume at first hesitated, but in a short time said there was something
she would particularly like to have brought her, namely, a small article of jewellery that she formerly possessed, but had given away
to a person who had allowed it to pass out of her possession. Madame Blavatsky
then said if she would fix the image of the article in question very definitely
on her mind, she, Madame Blavatsky, would endeavour
to procure It. Mrs. Hume then said that she vividly remembered the article, and
described it as an old-fashioned breast brooch set round with pearls, With
glass at the front, and the back made to contain hair. She then, on being
asked, drew a rough sketch of the brooch.
Madame
Blavatsky then wrapped up a coin attached to her watch-chain In two cigarette
papers, and put it in her dress, and said that she hoped the brooch might be
obtained in the course of the evening. At the close of dinner she said to Mr.
Hume that the paper in which the corn had been wrapped was gone. A little
later, in the drawing room , she said that the brooch would not be brought into
the house, but that it must be looked for in the garden, and then as the party
went out accompanying her, she said she had clairvoyantly seen the brooch fall
into a star-shaped bed of flowers. Mr. Hume led the way to such a bed in a
distant part of the garden.
A prolonged and
careful search was made with lanterns, and eventually a small paper packet,
consisting of two cigarette papers, was found amongst the leaves by Mrs.
Sinnett. This being opened on the spot was found to contain a brooch exactly
corresponding to the previous description, and which Mrs. Hume Identified as that
which she had originally lost. None of the party, except Mr. and Mrs. Hume, had
ever seen or heard of the brooch. Mr. Hume had not thought of it for years.
Mrs. Hume had never spoken of it to anyone since she parted with it, nor had
she, for long, even thought of it. She herself stated, after it was found, that
it was only when Madame asked her whether there was anything she would like to
have, that the remembrance of this brooch, the gift of her mother, flashed
across her mind.
" Mrs.
Hume is not a spiritualist, and up to the time of the occurrence described was
no believer either in occult phenomena or in Madame Blavatsky's powers. The
conviction of all present was, that the occurrence was of an absolutely
unimpeachable character, as an evidence of the truth of the possibility of
occult phenomena. The brooch is unquestionably the one which Mrs, Hume lost.
Even supposing, which is practically impossible, that the article, lost months
before Mrs. Hume ever heard of Madame Blavatsky, and bearing no letters or
other indication of original ownership, could have passed in a natural way into
Madame Blavatsky's possession, even then she could not possibly have foreseen
that it would be asked for, and Mrs. Hume herself had not given it a thought
for months
" This
narrative, read over to the party, is signed by-
A. 0. HUME,
ALICE GORDON,
M. A. HUME,
P. J. :MAITLAND,
FRED. R. HOGG,
WM. DAVIDSON,
A. P. SINNETT,
STUART BEATSON.
PATIENCE SINNETT.
It is needless to state that when this narrative was published the nine persons
above mentioned were assailed with torrents of ridicule, the effect of which,
however; has not been in any single case to modify, in the smallest degree, the
conviction which their signatures attested at the time, that the incident
related was a perfectly conclusive proof of the reality of occult power. Floods
of more or less imbecile criticism have been directed to show that the whole
performance must have been a trick; and for many persons in India it is now, no
doubt, an established explanation that Mrs. Hume was adroitly led up to ask for
the particular article produced, by a quantity of preliminary talk about a feat
which Madame Blavatsky specially went to the house to perform. A further
established opinion with a certain section of the Indian public is, that the
brooch which it appears Mrs. Hume gave to her daughter, and which her daughter
lost, must have been got from that young lady about a year previously, when she
passed through Bombay, where Madame Blavatsky was living, on her way to England.
The young lady's testimony to the effect that she lost the brooch before she
went to
As regards the
witnesses of the brooch phenomenon the conditions were so perfect that when
they were speculating as to the objections which might be raised by the public
when the story should come to be told, they did not foresee either of the
objections actually raised afterwards- the leading up in conversation theory,
and the theory about Miss Hume having- put Madame Blavatsky in possession of
the brooch. They knew that there had been no previous conversation at all about
the brooch or any other proposed feat, that the idea about getting something
Mrs. Hume should ask for, arose all in a moment, and that almost immediately
afterwards, the brooch was named. As for Miss Hume having unconsciously
contributed to the production of the phenomenon, it did not occur to the
witnesses that this would be suggested, because they did not foresee that
anyone could be so foolish as to shut their eyes to the important
circumstances, to concentrate their attention entirely on one of quite minor
importance. As the statement itself says, even supposing, which is practically
impossible, that the brooch could have passed into Madame Blavatsky's
possession in a natural way, she could not possibly have foreseen that it would
have been asked for.
The only
conjectures the witnesses could frame to explain beforehand the tolerably certain
result that the public at large would refuse to be convinced by the brooch
incident, were that they might be regarded as misstating the facts and omitting
some which the superior intelligence of their critics- as their critics would
regard the matter- would see to upset the significance of the rest, or that
Mrs. Hume must be a confederate. Now, this last conjecture, which will no doubt
occur to readers in England, had only to be stated, to be, for the other
persons concerned in the incident, one of the most amusing results to which it
could give rise. We all knew Mrs. Hume to be as little predisposed towards any
such a conspiracy as she was morally incapable of the wrongdoing it would
involve.
At one stage of
the proceedings, moreover, we had considered the question as to the extent to
which the conditions of the phenomenon were satisfactory. It had often happened
that faults had eventually been found with Madame Blavatsky's phenomena by
reason of some oversight in the conditions that had not been thought of at
first. One of our friends, therefore, on the occasion I am describing, had
suggested, after we rose from the dinner-table, that before going any further
the company generally should be asked whether, if the brooch could be produced,
that would under the circumstances be a satisfactory proof of occult agency in
the matter. We carefully reviewed the matter in which the situation had been
developed and we all came to the conclusion that the test , would be absolutely
complete, and that on this occasion there was no weak place in the chain of the
argument. Then it was that Madame Blavatsky said the brooch would be brought to
the garden, and that we could go out and search for it.
An interesting
circumstance for those who had already watched some of the other phenomena I
have described was this: The brooch, as stated above, was found wrapped up in
two cigarette papers, and these, when examined in a full light in the house,
were found still to bear the mark of the coin attached to Madame Blavatsky's watch
chain, which had been wrapped up in them before they departed on their
mysterious errand. They were thus identified for people who had got over the
first stupendous difficulty of believing in the possibility of transporting
material objects by occult agency as the same papers that had been seen by us
at the dinner-table.
The occult
transmission of objects to a distance not being, "magic', 'as Western
readers understand the word, is susceptible of some partial explanation even
for ordinary readers, for whom the means by which the forces employed are
manipulated must remain entirely mysterious. It is not contended that the
currents which are made use of, convey the bodies transmitted in a solid mass
just as they exist for the senses. The body, to be transmitted, is supposed
first to be disintegrated, conveyed on the currents in infinitely minute
particles, and then reintegrated at its destination. In the case of the brooch,
the first thing to be done must have been to find it. This, however, would
simply be a feat of clairvoyance- the scent of the object, so to speak, being
taken up from the person who spoke of it and had once possessed it- and there
is no clairvoyance of which the western world has any knowledge, comparable in
its vivid intensity to the clairvoyance of an adept in occultism. Its resting-
place thus discovered, the disintegration process would come into play, and the
object desired would be conveyed to the place where the adept engaged with it
would choose to have it deposited. The part played in the phenomenon by the
cigarette papers would be this: In order that we might be able to find the
brooch, it was necessary to connect it by an occult scent with Madame
Blavatsky. The cigarette papers, which she always carried about with her, were
thus impregnated with her magnetism, and taken from her by the Brother, left an
occult trail behind them. Wrapped round the brooch, they conducted this trail
to the required spot.
The magnetisation of the cigarette papers always with her,
enabled Madame Blavatsky to perform a little feat with them which was found by
everyone for whom it was done an exceedingly complete bit of evidence ; though
here again the superficial resemblance of the experiment to a conjuring trick
misled the intelligence of ordinary persons who read about the incidents
referred to in the newspapers. The feat itself may be most conveniently
discussed by the quotation of three letters ,which appeared in the Pioneer
of the 23rd of October, and were as follows ;-
"Sir,
-The account of
the discovery of Mrs. Hume's brooch has called forth several letters, and many
questions have been asked, some of which I may answer on a future occasion, but
I think it only right to first contribute further testimony to the occult
powers possessed by Madame Blavatsky. In thus coming before the public, one
must be prepared for ridicule, but it is a weapon which we who know something
of these matters can well afford to despise. On Thursday last, at about
half-past
ALICE GORDON
"Sir,
-I have been asked
to give an account of a circumstance which took place in my presence on the
13th instant. On the evening of that day I was sitting alone with Madame
Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott in the drawing-room of Mr. Sinnett's
house in Simla. After some conversation on various
matters, Madame Blavatsky said she would like to try an experiment in a manner
which had been suggested to her by Mr. Sinnett. She, therefore, took two
cigarette papers from her pocket and marked on each of them a number of
parallel lines in pencil. She then tore a piece off the end of each paper
across the lines, and gave them to me. At that time Madame Blavatsky was
sitting close to me, and I intently watched her proceedings, my eyes being not
more than two feet from her hands. She declined to let me mark or tear the
papers alleging that if handled by others they would become imbued with their
personal magnetism, which would counterset her own.
However, the torn pieces were handed directly to me, and I could not observe
any opportunity for the substitution of other papers by sleight of hand. The
genuineness or otherwise of the phenomena afterwards presented appears to rest
on this point. The torn off pieces of the paper remained in my closed left hand
until the conclusion of the experiment. Of the larger pieces Madame Blavatsky
made two cigarettes, giving the first to me to hold while the other was being
made up. I scrutinised this cigarette very
attentively, in order to be able to recognise it
afterwards. The cigarettes being finished, Madame Blavatsky stood up, and took
them between her hands, which she rubbed together. After about twenty or thirty
seconds, the grating noise of the paper, at first distinctly audible, ceased.
She then said the current [The
theory is that a current of what can only be called magnetism, can be made to
convey objects, previously dissipated by the same force, to any distance, and
in spite of the Intervention of any amount of matter.] Is passing round this end of the room, and I can only send them
somewhere near here. A moment afterwards she said one had fallen on the piano,
the other near that bracket. As I sat on a sofa with my back to the wall, the
piano was opposite, and the bracket, supporting a few pieces of china, was to
the right, between it and the door. Both were in full view across the rather
narrow room. The top of the piano was covered with piles of music books, and it
was among these Madame Blavatsky thought a cigarette would be found; The books
were removed, one by one, by myself, but without seeing anything. I then opened
the piano, and found a cigarette on a narrow shelf inside it. This cigarette I
took out and recognised as the one I had held in my
hand. The other was found in a covered cup on the bracket. Both cigarettes were
still damp where -they had been moistened at the edges in the process of
manufacture. I took the cigarettes to a table, without permitting them to be
touched or even seen by Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott. On being unrolled
and smoothed out, the torn, jagged edges were found to fit exactly to the
pieces that I had all this time retained in my hand. The pencil marks also
corresponded. It would therefore appear that the papers were actually the same
as those I had seen torn. Both the papers are still in my possession. It may be
added that Colonel Olcott sat near me with his back to Madame Blavatsky during
the experiment, and did not move till it was concluded.
"P. J. MAITLAND, Captain."
" Sir,
- With reference
to the correspondence now filling your columns, on the subject of Madame
Blavatsky's recent manifestations, it may interest your readers if I record a
striking incident which took place last week in my presence. I had occasion to
call on Madame, and in the course of our interview she tore off a corner from a
cigarette paper, asking me to hold the same, which I did. With the remainder of
the paper she prepared a cigarette in the ordinary manner, and in a few moments
caused this cigarette to disappear from her hands. We were sitting at the time
in the drawing-room. I inquired if it were like]y to find this cigarette again,
and after a short pause Madame requested me to accompany her into the
dining-room, where the cigarette would be found on the top of a curtain hanging
over the window. By means of a tab]e and a chair placed thereon, I was enabled
with some difficulty to reach and take down a cigarette from the place
indicated. This cigarette I opened, and found the paper to correspond exactly
with that I had seen a few minutes before in the drawing-room. That is to say,
the corner-piece, which I had retained in my possession, fitted exactly into
the jagged edges of the torn paper in which the tobacco had been rolled. To the
best of my belief, the test was as complete and satisfactory as any test can
be. I refrain from giving my opinion as to the causes which produced the
effect, feeling sure that your readers who take an interest in these phenomena
will prefer exercising their own judgement in the
matter. I merely give you an unvarnished statement of what I saw. I may be
permitted to add I am not a member of the Theosophist Society, nor, so far as I
know, am I biassed in favour of occult science,
although a warm sympathiser with the proclaimed
objects of the Society over which Colonel Olcott presides.
" CHARLES FRANCIS MASSY."
Of course, anyone familiar with conjuring will be aware that an imitation of
this" trick " can be arranged by a person gifted with a little
sleight of hand. You take two pieces of paper, and tear off a corner of both
together, so that the jags of both are the same. You make a cigarette with one
piece, and put it in the place where you mean to have it ultimately found. You
then hold the other piece underneath the one you tear in presence of the
spectator, slip in one of the already torn corners into his hand instead of
that he sees you tear, make your cigarette with the other part of the original
piece, dispose of that anyhow you please, and allow the prepared cigarette to
be found. Other variations of the system may be readily imagined, and for
persons who have not actually seen Madame Blavatsky do one of her cigarette
feats it may be useless to point out that she does not do them as a conjuror
would, and that the spectator, if he is gifted with ordinary common sense, can
never have the faintest shadow of a doubt about the corner given to him being
the corner torn off- a certainty which the pencil-marks upon it, drawn before
his eyes, would enhance, if that were necessary. However, as I say, though
experience shows me that the outsider is prone to regard the little cigarette
phenomenon as ''suspicious," it has never failed to be regarded as
convincing by the most acute people among those who have witnessed it. With all
phenomena, however, stupidity on the part of the observer will defeat any
attempt to reach his understanding, no matter how perfect the tests supplied.
I realise this more fully now than at the time of which I am
writing. Then I was chiefly anxious to get experiments arranged ,which should
be really complete in their details and leave no opening for the suggestion
even of imposture. It was "an uphill struggle first, because Madame
Blavatsky was intractable and excitable as an experimentalist, and herself no
more than the recipient of favours from the Brothers
in reference to the greater phenomena. And it seemed to me conceivable that the
Brothers might themselves not always realise
precisely the frame of mind in which persons of European training approached
the consideration of such miracles as these with which we were dealing, so that
they did not always make sufficient allowance for the necessity of rendering
their test phenomena quite perfect and unassailable in all minor details. I
knew, of course, that they were not primarily anxious to convince the
commonplace world of anything whatever; but still they frequently did assist
Madame Blavatsky to produce phenomena that had no other motive except the
production of an effect on the minds of people belonging to the outer world;
and it seemed to me that under these circumstances they might just as well do
something that would leave no room for the imputation even of any trickery.
One day,
therefore, I asked Madame Blavatsky whether if I wrote a letter to one of the
Brothers explaining my views, she could get it delivered for me. I hardly
thought this was probable, as I knew how very unapproachable the Brothers
generally are; but as she said that at any rate she would try, I wrote a
letter, addressing it " to the Unknown Brother," and gave it to her
to see if any result would ensue. It was a happy inspiration that induced me to
do this, for out of that small beginning has arisen the most interesting
correspondence in which I have ever been privileged to engage- a correspondence
which, I am happy to say, still promises to continue, and the existence of
which, more than any experiences of phenomena which I have had, though the most
wonderful of these are yet to be described, is the raison d'être of this
little book.
The idea I had
specially in my mind when I wrote the letter above referred to, was that of all
test phenomena one could wish for, the best would be the production in our
presence in India of a copy of the London Times of that day's date. With
such a piece of evidence in my hand, I argued, I would undertake to convert
everybody in Simla who was capable of linking two
ideas together, to a belief in the possibility of obtaining by occult agency
physical results which were beyond the control of ordinary science. I am sorry
that I have not kept copies of the letter itself nor of my own subsequent
letters, as they would have helped to elucidate the replies in a convenient
way; but I did not at the time foresee the developments to which they would
give rise and, after all, the interest of the correspondence turns almost
entirely on the letters I received: only in a very small degree on those I
sent.
A day or two
elapsed before I heard anything of the fate of my letter, but Madame Blavatsky
then informed me that I was to have an answer. I afterwards learned that she
had not been able at first to find a Brother willing to receive the
communication. Those whom she first applied to declined to be troubled with the
matter. At last her psychological telegraph brought her a favourable
answer from one of the Brothers with whom she had not for some time been in
communication. He would take the letter and reply to it.
Hearing this, I
at once regretted that I had not written at greater length, arguing my view of
the required concession more fully. I wrote again, therefore, without waiting
for the actual receipt of the expected letter.
A day or two after I found one evening on my writing-table the first letter
sent me by my new correspondent. I may here explain, what I learned afterwards,
that he was a native of the
My correspondent
is known to me as the Mahatma Koot Hoomi.[See
Appendix "C"] .This is
his " Tibetan Mystic name " -occultists, it would seem, taking new
names on initiation- a practice which has no doubt given rise to similar
customs which we find perpetuated here and there in ceremonies of the Roman
Catholic church.
The letter I
received began, in medias res, about the
phenomenon I had professed. " Precisely," the Mahatma wrote, "
because the test of the
" So far
for science- as much as we know of it. As for human nature in general it is the
same now as it was a million of years ago. Prejudice, based upon selfishness, a
general unwillingness to give up an established order of things for new modes
of life and thought - and occult study requires all that and much more- pride
and stubborn resistance to truth, if it but upsets their previous notions of
things- such are the characteristics of your age.........
What, then,
would be the results of the most astounding phenomena supposing we consented to
have them produced ? However successful, danger would be growing
proportionately with success. No choice would soon remain but to go on, ever crescendo,
or to fall in this endless struggle with prejudice and ignorance, killed by
your own weapons. Test after test would be required, and would have to be
furnished; every subsequent phenomenon expected to be more marvellous than the
preceding one. Your daily remark is, that one cannot be expected to believe
unless he becomes an eyewitness. Would the lifetime of a man suffice to satisfy
the whole world of sceptics ? It may an an easy matter to increase the original number of believers
at Simla to hundreds and thousands. But what of the
hundreds of millions of those who could not be made eyewitnesses ? The
ignorant, unable to grapple with the invisible operators, might some day vent
their rage on the visible agents at work; the higher and educated classes would
go on disbelieving, as ever, tearing you to shreds as before. In common with
many, you blame us for our great secrecy. Yet we know something of human
nature, for the experience of long centuries- ay, ages, has taught us. And we
know that so long as science has anything to learn, and a shadow of religious
dogmatism lingers in the hearts of the multitude, the world's prejudices have
to be conquered step by step, not at a rush. As hoary antiquity had more than
one Socrates, so the dim future will give birth to more than one martyr.
Enfranchised Science contemptuously turned away her face from the Copernican
opinion renewing the theories of Aristarchus Samius, who 'affirmeth that the
earth moveth circularly about her own centre', years
before the Church sought to sacrifice Galileo as a holocaust to the
Bible. The ablest mathematician at the Court of Edward VI., Robert Recorde, was left to starve in jail by his colleagues, who
laughed at his Castle of Knowledge, declaring his discoveries vain
fantasies All this is old history, you will think. Verily so, but the
chronicles of our modern days do not differ very essentially from their
predecessors. And we have but to bear in mind the recent persecutions of
mediums in England, the burning of supposed witches and sorcerers in South
America, Russia, and the frontiers of Spain, to assure ourselves that the only
salvation of the genuine proficient in occult sciences lies in the scepticism of the public: the charlatans and the jugglers
are the natural shields of the adepts. The public safety is only ensured by our
keeping secret the terrible weapons which might otherwise be used against it,
and which, as you have been told, become deadly in the hands of the wicked and
selfish."
The remainder
of the letter is concerned chiefly with personal matters, and need not be here
reproduced. I shall, of course, throughout my quotations from letters, leave
out passages which, specially addressed to myself, have no immediate bearing on
the public argument. The reader must be fearful to remember, however, as I now
most unequivocally affirm, that I shall in no case alter one syllable of
the passages actually quoted. It is important to make this declaration very
emphatically, because the more my readers may be acquainted with India, the
less they will be willing to believe, except on the most positive testimony,
that the letters from the Mahatma, as I now publish them, have been written by
a native of India. That such is the fact, however, is beyond dispute.
I replied to
the letter above quoted at some length, arguing, if I remember rightly, that
the European mind was less hopelessly intractable than Koot
Hoomi represented it. His second letter was as
follows :-
" We will
be at cross purposes in our correspondence until it has been made entirely
plain that occult science has its own methods of research, as fixed and
arbitrary as the methods of its antithesis, physical science, are in their way.
If the latter has its dicta, so also have the former; and he who would cross
the boundary of the unseen world can no more prescribe how he will proceed,
than the traveller who tries to penetrate to the
inner subterranean recesses of L'Hassa the Blessed
could show the way to his guide. The mysteries never were, never can be, put
within the reach of the general public, not, at least, until that longed-for
day when our religious philosophy becomes universal. At no time have more than
a scarcely appreciable minority of men possessed Nature's secret, though
multitudes have witnessed the practical evidences of the possibility of their
possession. The adept is the rare efflorescence of a generation of inquirers ;
and to become one, he must obey the inward impulse of his soul, irrespective of
the prudential considerations of worldly science or sagacity. Your desire is to
be brought to communicate with one of us directly, without the agency of either
Madame Blavatsky or any medium. Your idea would be, as I understand it, to
obtain such communications, either by letter, as the present one, or by audible
words, so as to be guided by one of us in the management, and principally in
the instruction of the Society. You seek all this, and yet, as you say
yourself, hitherto you have not found sufficient reasons to even give up your
modes of life, directly hostile to such modes of communication. This is hardly
reasonable. He who would lift up high the banner of mysticism and proclaim its
reign near at hand must give the example to others. He must be the first to
change his modes of life, and, regarding the study of the occult mysteries as
the upper step in the ladder of knowledge, must loudly proclaim it such,
despite exact science and the opposition of society. The '
" My first
answer covered, I believe, most of the questions contained in your second and
even third letter. Having, then, expressed therein my opinion that the world in
general was unripe for any too staggering proof of occult power, there but
remains to deal with the isolated individuals who seek, like yourself, to
penetrate behind the veil of matter into the "world of primal causes ---- i.e.,
we need only consider now the cases of yourself and Mr. -----."
I should here
explain that one of my friends at Simla, deeply
interested with me in the progress of this investigation, had, on reading Koot Hoomi's first letter to me,
addressed my correspondent himself. More favourably
circumstanced than I, for such an enterprise, he had even proposed to make a
complete sacrifice of his other pursuits, to pass away into any distant
seclusion ,which might he appointed for the purpose, where he might, if
accepted as a pupil in occultism, learn enough to return to the world armed
with powers which would enable him to demonstrate the realities of spiritual
development and the errors of modern materialism, and then devote his life to
the task of combating modern incredulity and leading men to a practical
comprehension of a better life. I resume the letter:-
" This
gentleman also has done me the great honour to address me by name, offering to
me a few questions, and stating the conditions upon which he would be willing
to work for us seriously. But your motives and aspirations being of
diametrically opposite character, and hence leading to different results, I
must reply to each of you separately. "
'The first and
chief consideration in determining us to accept or reject your offer lies in
the inner motive which propels you to seek our instruction and, in a certain
sense, our guidance; the latter in all cases under reserve, as I understand it,
and therefore remaining a question independent of aught else. Now, what are
your motives ? I may try to define them in their general aspects, leaving
details for further consideration. They are-(l ) The desire to see positive and
unimpeachable proofs that there really are forces in Nature of which science
knows nothing; (2) The hope to appropriate them some day- the sooner the
better, for you do not like to wait- so as to enable yourself ; (a) to
demonstrate their existence to a few chosen Western minds; (b) to contemplate
future life as an objective reality built upon the rock of knowledge, not of
faith; and (c) to finally learn -most important this, among all your motives, perhaps,
though the most occult and the best guarded- the whole truth about our lodges
and ourselves; to get, in short, the positive assurance that the' Brothers,' of
whom everyone hears so much and sees so little, are rare entities, not fictions
of a disordered, hallucinated brain. Such, viewed in their best light, appear
to us your motives for addressing me. And in the same spirit do I answer them,
hoping that my sincerity will not be interpreted in a wrong way, or attributed
to anything like an unfriendly spirit.
" To our
minds, then, these motives, sincere and worthy of every serious consideration
from the worldly standpoint, appear selfish. (You have to pardon me what
you might view as crudeness of language, if your desire is that which you
really profess- to learn truth and get instruction from us who belong to quite
a different world from the one you move in.) They are selfish, because you must
be aware that the chief object of the Theosophical Society is not so much to
gratify individual aspirations as to serve our fellowmen, and the real value of
this term' selfish,' which may jar upon your ear, has a peculiar significance
with us which it cannot have with you; therefore, to begin with, you must not
accept it otherwise than in the former sense. Perhaps you will better
appreciate our meaning when told that in our view the highest aspirations for
the welfare of humanity become tainted with selfishness, if, in the mind of the
philanthropist, there lurks the shadow of a desire for self-benefit, or a tendency
to do injustice, even where these exist unconsciously to himself. Yet you have
ever discussed but to put down, the idea of a Universal Brotherhood, questioned
its usefulness, and advised to remodel the Theosophical Society on the
principle of a college for the special study of occultism...
" Having
disposed of personal motives, let us analyse your
terms for helping us to do public good. Broadly stated, these terms are-first,
that an independent Anglo -Indian Theosophical Society shall be founded through
your kind services, in the management of which neither of our present
representatives shall have any voice ; [
In the absence of my own letter, to which this Is a reply, the reader
might think from this sentence that I had been animated by some unfriendly
feeling for the representatives referred to- Madame Blavatsky and Colonel
Olcott. This is far from having been the case; but, keenly alive to mistakes
which had been made up to the time of, which I am writing, In the management of
the Theosophical Society, Mr. ------and myself were under the impression that
better public results might be obtained by commencing operations de novo,
and taking, ourselves, the direction of the measures which might be employed to
recommend the study of occultism to the modern world. This belief on our part
was coexistent In both cases with a warm friendship based on the purest esteem
for both the persons mentioned. ]
And second, that one of us shall take the new body' under his patronage,' be'
in free and direct communication with its leaders,' and afford them' direct
proof that he really possessed that superior knowledge of the forces of Nature
and the attributes of the human soul which would inspire them with proper
confidence in his leadership.' I have copied your own words so as to avoid
inaccuracy in defining the position.
"From your
point of view, therefore, those terms may seem so very reasonable as to provoke
no dissent, and, indeed, a majority of your countrymen -if not of
Europeans-might share that opinion. What, will you say, can be more reasonable
than to ask that that teacher anxious to disseminate his knowledge, and pupil
offering him to do so, should be brought face to face, and the one give the
experimental proof to the other that his instructions were correct? Man of the
world, living in, and in full sympathy with it, you are undoubtedly right. But
the men of this other world of ours, untutored in your modes of thought, and
,who find it very hard at times to follow and appreciate the latter, can hardly
be blamed for not responding as heartily to your suggestions as in your opinion
they deserve. The first and most important of our objections is to be found in
our rules. True, we have our schools and teachers, our neophytes and' shaberons' (superior adepts) and the door is always opened
to the right man who knocks. And we invariably welcome the new comer; only,
instead of going over to him, he has to come to us. More than that, unless he
has reached that point in the path of occultism from which return is impossible
by his having irrevocably pledged himself to our Association, we never - except
in cases of utmost moment visit him or even cross the threshold of his door in
visible appearance.
" Is any
of you so eager for knowledge and the beneficent powers it confers, as to be
ready to leave your world and come into ours? Then let him come, but he must
not think to return until the seal of the mysteries has locked his lips even
against the chances of his own weakness or indiscretion. Let him come by all
means as the pupil to the master, and without conditions, or let him wait, as
so many others have, and be satisfied with such crumbs of knowledge as may fall
in his way.
" And
supposing you were thus to come, as two of your own countrymen have already-as
Madame B. did and Mr. 0. will - supposing you were to abandon all for the
truth; to toil wearily for years up the hard, steep road, not daunted by
obstacles, firm under every temptation ; were to faithfully keep within your
heart the secrets entrusted to you as a trial ; had worked with all your
energies and unselfishly to spread the truth and provoke men to correct
thinking and a correct life -would you consider it just, if, after all your
efforts, we were to grant to Madame B., or Mr. 0. as ' outsiders ' the terms
you now ask for yourselves. Of these two persons, one has already given
three-fourths of a life, the other six years of manhood's prime to us, and both
will so labour to the close of their days; though ever working for their merited
reward, yet never demanding it, nor murmuring when disappointed. Even though
they respectively could accomplish far less then they do, would it not be a
palpable injustice to ignore them in an important field of Theosophical effort?
Ingratitude is not among our vices, nor do we imagine you would wish to advise
it.
" Neither
of them has the least inclination to interfere with the management of the
contemplated Anglo-Indian Branch, nor dictate its officers. But the new
Society, if formed at all, must, though bearing a distinctive title of its own,
be, in fact, a branch of the parent body, as is the British Theosophical
Society at London, and contribute to its vitality and usefulness by promoting
its leading idea of a Universal Brotherhood, and in other practicable ways.
" Badly as
the phenomena may have been shown, there have still been, as yourself admit,
certain ones that are unimpeachable. The' raps on the table when no one touches
it, , and the' bell sounds in the air,' have, you say, always been regarded as
satisfactory, etc. etc. From this, you reason that good test phenomena' may
easily be multiplied ad infinitum.' So they can- in any place where our
magnetic and other conditions are constantly offered, and where we do not have
to act with and through an enfeebled female body, in which, as we might say, a
vital cyclone is raging much of the time. But imperfect as may be our visible
agent, yet she is the best available at present, and her phenomena have for
about half a century astonished and baffled some of the cleverest minds of the
age...."
"Two or
three little notes which I next received from the Mahatma had reference to an
incident I must now describe, the perfection of which as a test phenomenon
appears to me more complete than that of any other I have yet described. It is
worth notice, by-the-bye, that although the circumstances of this incident were
related in the Indian papers at the time, the happy company of scoffers who
flooded the Press with their simple comments on the brooch phenomenon, never
cared to discuss " the pillow incident."
Accompanied by
our guests, we went to have lunch one day on the top of a neighbouring
hill, The night before, I had had reason to think that my correspondent, Koot Hoomi, had been in what, for
the purpose of the present explanation, I may call subjective communication
with me. I do not go into any details, because it is unnecessary to trouble the
general reader with impressions of that sort, After discussing the subject in
the morning, I found on the hall-table a note from Koot
Hoomi , in which he promised to give me something on
the hill which should be a token of his (astral) presence near me the previous
night.
We went to our
destination, camped down on the top of the hill, and were engaged on our lunch,
when Madame Blavatsky said Koot Hoomi
was asking where we would like to find the object he was going to send me. Let
it be understood that up to this moment there had been no conversation in
regard to the phenomenon I was expecting. The usual suggestion will, perhaps,
be made that Madame Blavatsky " led up " to the choice I actually
made. The fact of the matter was simply that in the midst of altogether other
talk Madame Blavatsky pricked up her ears on hearing her occult voice- at once
told me what was the question asked, and did not contribute to the selection
made by one single remark on the subject, In fact, there was no general
discussion, and it was by an absolutely spontaneous choice of my own that I
said, after a little reflection, " inside that cushion," pointing to
one against which one of the ladies present was leaning.
I had no sooner
uttered the words than my wife cried out, " Oh no, let it be inside
mine," or words to that effect. I said, " very well, inside my wife's
cushion; " Madame Blavatsky asked the Mahatma by her own methods if that
would do, and received an affirmative reply. My liberty of choice as regards
the place where the object should be found was thus absolute and unfettered by
conditions. The most natural choice for me to have made under the
circumstances, and having regard to our previous experiences, would have been
up some particular tree, or buried in a particular spot of the ground; but the
inside of a sewn-up cushion, fortuitously chosen on the spur of a moment,
struck me, as my eye happened to fall upon the cushion I mentioned first, as a
particularly good place; and when I had started the idea of a cushion, my
wife's amendment to the original proposal was really an improvement, for the
particular cushion then selected had never been for a moment out of her own
possession all the morning.
It was her
usual jampan cushion; she had been leaning against it
all the way from home, and was leaning against it still, as her jampan had been carried right up to the top of the hill,
and she had continued to occupy it. The cushion itself was very firmly made of
worsted work and velvet, and had been in our possession for years. It always
remained, when we were at home, in the drawing-room, in a conspicuous corner of
a certain sofa whence, when my wife went out, it would be taken to her jampan and again brought in on her return.
When the
cushion was agreed to, my wife was told to put it under her rug, and she did
this with her own hands, inside her jampan. It may
have been there about a minute, when Madame Blavatsky said we could set to work
to cut it open. I did this with a penknife, and it was a work of some time, as
the cushion was very securely sewn all round, and very strongly, so that it had
to be cut open almost stitch by stitch, and no tearing was possible. When one
side of the cover was completely ripped up, we found that the feathers of the
cushion were enclosed in a separate inner case, also sewn round all the edges.
There was nothing to be found between the inner cushion and the outer case ; so
we proceeded to rip up the inner cushion; and this done, my wife searched among
the feathers.
The first thing
she found was a little three-cornered note, addressed to me in the now familiar
handwriting of my occult correspondent. It ran as follows :
" My dear
Brother,
-This brooch, No. 2, is placed in this very strange place, simply to show you
how very easily a real phenomenon is produced, and how still easier it is to
suspect its genuineness. Make of it what you like, even to classing me with
confederates.
" The difficulty you spoke of last night with respect to the interchange
of our letters, I will try to remove. One of our pupils will shortly visit
Lahore and the N. W. P. ; and an address will be sent to you which you can
always use; unless, indeed, you really would prefer corresponding through
-----pillows! Please to remark that the present is not dated from a Lodge, ,
but from a Kashmere valley ."
While I was
reading this note, my wife discovered, by further search among the feathers, the
brooch referred to, one of her own, it very old and very familiar brooch which
she generally left on her dressing-table when it was not in use. It would have
been impossible to invent or imagine a proof of occult power, in the nature of
mechanical proofs, more irresistible and convincing than this incident was for
us who had personal knowledge of the various circumstances described. The whole
force and significance to us of the brooch thus returned, hinged on to my
subjective impressions of the previous night. The reason for selecting the
brooch as a thing to give us, dated no earlier than then. On the hypothesis,
therefore, idiotic hypothesis as it would be on all grounds, that the cushion
must have been got at by Madame Blavatsky, it must have been got at since I
spoke of my impressions that morning, shortly after breakfast; but from the
time of getting up that morning, Madame Blavatsky had hardly been out of our
sight, and had been sitting with my wife in the drawing-room. She had been
doing this, by-the- bye, against the grain, for she had writing which she
wanted to do in her own room, but she had been told by her voices to go and sit
in the drawing-room with my wife that morning, and had done so, grumbling at
the interruption of her work, and wholly unable to discern any motive for the
order.
The motive was
afterwards clear enough, and had reference to the intended phenomenon. It was
desirable that we should have no arrière pensée in our minds as to what Madame Blavatsky might
possibly have been doing during the morning, in the event of the incident
taking such a turn as to make that a factor in determining its genuineness. Of
course, if the selection of the pillow could have been foreseen, it would have
been unnecessary to victimise our " old Lady, "
as we generally called her. The presence of the famous pillow itself, with my
wife all the morning in the drawing-room, would have been enough. But perfect
liberty of choice was to be left to me in selecting a cache for the brooch; and
the pillow can have been in nobody's mind, any more than in my own, beforehand.
The language of
the note given above embodied many little points which had a meaning for us.
All through, it bore indirect reference to the conversation that had taken
place at our dinner-table the previous evening. I had been talking of the
little traces here and there which the long letters from Koot
Hoomi bore, showing in spite of their splendid
mastery over the language and the vigour of their
style, a turn or two of expression that an Englishman would not have made use
of; for example, in the form of address, which in the two letters already
quoted had been tinged with Orientalism.
" But what
should he have written?' somebody asked, and I had said, " under similar
circumstances an Englishman would probably have written simply: " My dear
Brother." Then the allusion to the Kashmir Valley as the place from which
the letter was written, instead of from a Lodge, was au allusion to the same
conversation ; and the underlining of the " k " was another, as
Madame Blavatsky had been saying that Koot Hoomi's spelling of " Scepticism"
with a " k " was not an Americanism in his case, but due to a
philological whim of his.
The incidents
of the day were not quite over, even when the brooch was found; for that
evening, after we had gone home, there fell from my napkin, after I had
unfolded it at dinner, a little note, too private and personal to be reprinted
fully, but part of which I am impelled to quote, for the sake of the allusion
it contains, to occult modus operandi. I must explain that, before
starting for the hill, I had penned a few lines of thanks for the promise
contained in the note then received as described. This note I gave to Madame
Blavatsky, to despatch by occult methods if she had an opportunity. And she
carried it in her hand as she and my wife went on in advance, in jampans, along the Simla Mall,
not finding an opportunity until about halfway to our destination. Then she got
rid of the note, occultism only knows how. This circumstance had been spoken of
at the picnic; and as I was opening the note found in the pillow, someone
suggested that it would, perhaps, be found to contain an answer to my note just
sent. It did not contain any allusion to this, as the reader will be already
aware.
The note I received at dinnertime said :-" A few words more. Why should
you have felt disappointed at not receiving a direct reply to your last note.
It was received in my room about half a minute after the currents for the
production of the pillow dak, had been set
ready, and in full play. And there was no necessity for an answer. ..."
It seemed to bring one in imagination one step nearer a realisation
of the state of the facts to hear " the currents " employed to
accomplish what would have been a miracle for all the science of
A miracle for
all the science of
The next
letter- the third long one-that I received from the Mahatma, reached me shortly
after my return for the cold weather to
But I received
one communication from him- a telegram -before its arrival, on the day of my
own return to
For me, knowing
her as intimately as I did, the inherent evidence of the style was enough to
make the suggestion that she might have written them, a mere absurdity. And, if
it is urged that the authoress of "
But, in
reference to some of them, receiving them as I did while she was in the house
with me, it was not mechanically possible that she might have been the writer.
Now, the
telegram I received at Allahabad, which was wired to
me from Jhelum, was in reply specially to a letter I
addressed to Koot Hoomi
just before leaving Simla, and enclosed to Madame
Blavatsky, who had started some days previously, and was then at Amritsur. She received the letter, with its enclosure, at Amritsur on the 27th of October, as I came to know, not
merely from knowing when I sent it, but positively by means of the envelope
which she returned to me at
Koot Hoomi was probably
himself actually at or near Jhelum at the time, as he
came down into the midst of the world for a few days, under peculiar
circumstances, to see Madame Blavatsky: the letter I received at
Madame Blavatsky had been deeply hurt by the behaviour
of some incredulous persons at Simla whom she had met
at our house and elsewhere, who, being unable to assimilate the experience they
had had of her phenomena, got by degrees into that hostile frame of mind which
is one of the phases of feeling I am now used to seeing developed. Perfectly
unable to show how the phenomena can be the result of fraud, but thinking that,
because they do not understand them, they must be fraudulent, people of a
certain temperament become possessed with the spirit which animated persecution
by religious authorities in the infancy of physical science. And, by a piece of
bad luck, a gentleman who was thus affected was annoyed at a trifling
indiscretion on the part of Colonel Olcott, who, in a letter to one of the
Bombay papers, quoted some expressions he had made use of in praise of the
Theosophical Society and its good influence on the natives. All the irritation
thus set up, worked on Madame Blavatsky's excitable temperament to an extent
which only those who know her will be able to imagine. The allusions in Koot Hoomi 's letter will now be
understood. After some reference to important business with which he had been
concerned since writing to me last, Koot Hoomi went on :-
" You see, then, that we have weightier matters than small societies to
think about; yet the Theosophical Society must not be neglected. The affair has
taken an impulse which, if not well guided, might beget very evil issues.
Recall to mind the avalanches of your admired
" What could I do but come. Argument through space with one who was in
cold despair and in a state of moral chaos, was useless. So I determined to
emerge from a seclusion of many years, and spend some time with her to comfort
her as well as I could. But our friend is not one to cause her mind to reflect
the philosophical resignation of Marcus Aurelius. The Fates never wrote, that
she could say :- 'It is a royal thing when one is doing good to hear evil
spoken of himself.' I had come for a few days, but now find that I myself
cannot endure for any length of time the stifling magnetism even of my own
countrymen. I have seen some of our proud old Sikhs drunk and staggering over
the marble pavement of their sacred temple. I have heard an English-speaking Vakil declaim against Yog
Vidya and Theosophy as a delusion and a lie,
declaring that English science had emancipated them from such degrading
superstitions, and saying that it was an insult to India to maintain that the
dirty Yogees and Sunuyasis
knew anything about the mysteries of Nature, or that any living man can, or
ever could, perform any phenomena. I turn my face homeward tomorrow.
"
........I have telegraphed you my thanks for your obliging compliance with my
wishes in the matter you allude to in your letter of the 24th..... Received at Amritsur, on the 27th, at
" I could not ask a more judicial frame of mind in an ally than that in
which you are beginning to find yourself. My brother, you have already changed
your attitude toward us in a distinct degree. What is to prevent a perfect
mutual understanding one day?...... It is not possible that there should be
much more at best than a. benevolent neutrality shown by your people towards
ours. There is so very minute a point of contact between the two civilisations they respectively represent, that one might
almost say they could not touch at all. Nor would they, but for the few- shall
I say eccentrics ?-who, like you, dream better and bolder dreams than the rest,
and, provoking thought, bring the two together by their own admirable
audacity."
The letter before me at present is occupied so much with matters personal to
myself, that I can only make quotations here and there; but these are specially
interesting, as investing with an air of reality subjects which are generally
treated in "vague and pompous language. Koot Hoomi was anxious to guard me from idealising
the Brothers too much on the strength of my admiration for their marvellous
powers.
" Are you certain," he writes, " that the pleasant impression
you now may have from our correspondence would not instantly be destroyed upon
seeing me. And which of our holy shaberons has
had the benefit of even the little university education and inkling of European
manners that has fallen to my share. An instance: I desired Madame Blavatsky to
select, among the two or three Aryian Punjabees who study Yog Vidya and are natural mystics, one whom, without disclosing
myself to him too much, I could designate as an agent between yourself and us,
and whom I was anxious to despatch to you with a letter of introduction, and
have him to speak to you of Yoga and its practical effects. This young
gentleman, who is as pure as purity itself, whose aspirations and thoughts are
of the most spiritual, ennobling kind, and who, merely through self-exertion,
is able to penetrate into the regions of the formless world - this young man is
not fit for a drawing-room. Having explained to him that the greatest good
might result for his country if he helped you to organise
a branch of English mystics, by proving to them practically to what wonderful
results led the study of Yog, Madame Blavatsky asked
him, in guarded and very delicate terms, to change his dress and turban before
starting for Allahabad ; for-though she did not give
him this reason- they were very dirty and slovenly. You are to tell Mr.
Sinnett, she said, that you bring him a letter from the Brother, with whom he
corresponds ; but if he asks you anything either of him or the other Brothers,
answer him simply and truthfully that you are not allowed to expatiate upon the
subject. Speak of Yog, and prove to him what powers
you have attained. 'This young man who had consented, wrote later on the
following curious letter :- Madame,' he said, you who preach the highest
standard of morality, of truthfulness, etc., you would have me play the part of
an impostor. You ask me to change, my clothes at the risk of giving a false
idea of my personality and mystifying the gentleman you send me to. Here is an
illustration of the difficulties under which we have to labour. Powerless to
send you a neophyte before you have pledged yourself to us, we have to either
keep back or despatch to you one who, at best, would shock, if not inspire, you
at once with disgust."
The present
letter yields only little more that it seems desirable to quote. In a guarded way,
Koot Hoomi said that as
often as it was practicable to communicate with me, " whether ..........by
letters (in or out of pillows) or personal visits in astral form, it will be
done. But remember," he added, " that Simla
is 7,000 feet higher than
I am here enabled to insert the greater part of a letter addressed by Koot Hoomi to the friend referred
to in a former passage, as having opened up a correspondence with him in
reference to the idea which he contemplated under certain conditions, of
devoting himself entirely to the pursuit of occultism. This letter throws a
great deal of light upon some of the metaphysical conceptions of the
occultists, and their metaphysics, be it remembered, are a great deal more than
abstract speculation.
" Dear
Sir-
Availing of the first moments of leisure to formally answer your letter of the
17th ultimo, I will now report the result of my conference with our chiefs upon
the proposition therein contained, trying at the same time to answer all your
questions.
" I am first to thank you on behalf of the whole section of our fraternity
that is especially interested in the welfare of India for an offer of help
whose importance and sincerity no one can doubt. Tracing our lineage through
the vicissitudes of Indian civilization from a remote past, we have a love for
our motherland no deep and passionate that it has survived even the broadening
and cosmopolitanizing (pardon me if that is not an
English word) effect of our studies in the laws of Nature. And so I, and every
other Indian patriot, feel the strongest gratitude for every kind word or deed
that is given in her behalf.
" Imagine, then, that since we are all convinced that the degradation of
India is largely due to the suffocation of her ancient spirituality, and that
whatever helps to restore that higher standard of thought and morals, must be
regenerating in national force, everyone of us would naturally and without
urging, be disposed to push forward a society whose proposed formation is under
debate, especially if it really is meant to become a society untainted by
selfish motive, and whose object is the revival of ancient science, and
tendency, to rehabilitate our country in the world's estimation. Take this for
granted without further asseverations. But you know, as any man who has read
history, that patriots may burst their hearts in vain if circumstances are
against them. Sometimes it has happened that no human power, not even the fury
and force of the loftiest patriotism, has been able to bend an iron destiny
aside from its fixed course, and nations have gone out like torches dropped
into the water in the engulfing blackness of ruin. Thus, we who have the sense
of our country's fall, though not the power to lift her up at once, cannot do
as we would either as to general affairs or this particular one. And with the
readiness, but not the right to meet your advances more than half way, we are
forced to say that the idea entertained by Mr. Sinnett and yourself is
impracticable in part. It is, in a word, impossible for myself or any Brother,
or even an advanced neophyte, to be specially assigned and set apart as the
guiding spirit or chief of the Anglo-lndian branch.
We know it would be a good thing to have you and a few of your colleagues
regularly instructed and shown the phenomena and their rationale. For though
none but you few would be convinced, still it would be a decided gain to have
even a few Englishmen, of first-class ability, enlisted as students of Asiatic
Psychology. We are aware of all this, and much more; hence we do not refuse to
correspond with, and otherwise help you in various ways. But what we do refuse
is, to take any other responsibility upon ourselves than this periodical
correspondence and assistance with our advice, and, as occasion favours, such tangible, possibly visible, proofs, as would
satisfy you of our presence and interest. To " guide " you we will
not consent. However much we may be able to do, yet we can promise only to give
you the full measure of your deserts. Deserve much, and we will prove honest
debtors; little, and you need only expect a compensating return. This is not a
mere text taken from a schoolboy's copybook, though it sounds so, but only the
clumsy statement of the law of our order, and we cannot transcend it. Utterly
unacquainted with Western, especially English, modes of thought and action,
were we to meddle in an organization of such a kind, you would find all your
fixed habits and traditions incessantly clashing, if not with the new
aspirations themselves, at least with their modes of realisation
as suggested by us. You could not get unanimous consent to go even the length
you might yourself. I have asked Mr. Sinnett to draft a plan embodying your
joint ides for submission to our chiefs, this seeming the shortest way to a
mutual agreement. Under our' guidance' your branch could not live, you not
being men to be guided at all in that sense. - Hence the society would be a
premature birth and a failure, looking as incongruous as a
" You say there are few branches of science with which you do not possess
more or less acquaintance, and that you believe you are doing a certain amount
of good having acquired the position to do this by long years of study.
Doubtless you do ; but will you permit me to sketch for you still more clearly
the difference between the modes of physical (called exact out of mere
compliment) and metaphysical sciences. The latter, as you know, being incapable
of verification before mixed audiences, is classed by Mr. Tyndall with the
fictions of poetry. The realistic science of fact on the other hand is utterly
prosaic. Now, for us, poor unknown philanthropists, no fact of either of these
sciences is interesting except in the degree of its potentiality of moral
results, and in the ratio of its usefulness to mankind. And what, in its proud
isolation, can be more utterly indifferent to everyone and everything, or more
bound to nothing but the selfish requisites for its advancement, then, this
materialistic science of fact ? May I ask then, what have the laws of Faraday,
Tyndall, or others to do with philanthropy in their abstract relations with
humanity, viewed as an intelligent whole? What care they for Man as an
isolated atom of this great and harmonious whole, even though they may be
sometimes of practical use to him ? Cosmic energy is something eternal and
incessant; matter is indestructible and there stand the scientific facts. Doubt
them, and you are an ignoramus; deny them, a dangerous lunatic, a bigot;
pretend to improve upon the theories - an impertinent charlatan. And yet even
these scientific facts never suggested any proof to the word of experimenters
that Nature consciously prefers that matter should be indestructible under
organic rather than inorganic forms, and that she works slowly but incessantly
towards the realisation of this object - the
evolution of conscious life out of inert material. Hence, their ignorance about
the scattering and concretion of cosmic energy in its metaphysical aspects,
their division about Darwin's theories, their uncertainty about the degree of
conscious life in separate elements, and, as a necessity, the scornful
rejection of every phenomenon outside their own stated conditions, and the very
idea of worlds of semi-intelligent if not intellectual forces at work in hidden
corners of Nature. To give you another practical illustration- we see a vast
difference between the two qualities of two equal amounts of energy expended by
two men, of whom one, let us suppose, is on his way to his daily quiet work,
and another on his way to denounce a fellow creature at the police-station,
while the men of science see none ; and we- not they- see a specific difference
between the energy in the motion of the wind and that of a revolving wheel. And
why? Because every thought of man upon being evolved passes into the inner
world, and becomes an active entity by associating itself, coalescing we might
term it, with an elemental- that is to say, with one of the semi-intelligent
forces of the kingdoms. It survives as an active intelligence-a creature of the
mind's begetting-for a longer or shorter period proportionate with the original
intensity of the cerebral action which generated it. Thus, a good thought is
perpetuated as an active, beneficent power, an evil one as a maleficent demon.
And so man is continually peopling his current in space with a world of his
own, crowded with the offsprings of his fancies,
desires, impulses, and passions; a current which reacts upon any sensitive or
nervous organization which comes in contact with it, in proportion to its
dynamic intensity. The Buddhist calls this his 'Skandha
' ; the Hindu gives it the name of 'Karma.' The adept evolves these shapes
consciously; other men throw them off unconsciously. The adept, to be
successful and preserve his power, must dwell in solitude, and more or less
within his own soul. Still less does exact science perceive that while the
building ant, the busy bee, the nidifacient bird,
accumulates each in its own humble way as much cosmic energy in its potential
form as a Haydn, a Plato, or a ploughman turning his furrow, in theirs; the
hunter who kills game for his pleasure or profit, or the positivist who applies
his intellect to proving that + x + =---, are wasting and scattering energy no
less than the tiger which springs upon its prey. They all rob Nature instead of
enriching her, and will all, in the degree of their intelligence, find
themselves accountable.
" Exact
experimental science has nothing to do with morality, virtue, philanthropy-
therefore, can make no claim upon our help until it blends itself with
metaphysics. Being but a cold classification of facts outside man, and existing
before and after him, her domain of usefulness ceases for us at the outer
boundary of these facts; and whatever the inferences and results for humanity
from the materials acquired by her method, she little cares. Therefore, as our
sphere lies entirely outside hers- as far as the path of Uranus is outside the
Earth's - we distinctly refuse to be broken on any wheel of her construction.
Heat is but a mode of motion to her, and motion develops heat, but why the
mechanical motion of the revolving wheel should be metaphysically of a higher
value than the heat into which it is gradually transformed she has yet to
discover. The philosophical and transcendental: (hence absurd) notion of the
mediaeval Theosophist that the final progress of human labour, aided by the
incessant discoveries of man, must one day culminate in a process which, in
imitation of the sun energy - in its capacity as a direct motor-shall result in
the evolution of nutritious food out inorganic matter, is unthinkable for men
of science. Were the sun, the great nourishing father of or planetary system,
to hatch granite chickens out of a boulder 'under test conditions' tomorrow,
the (the men of science) would accept it as a scientific fact without wasting a
regret that the fowls were not alive so as to feed the hungry and the starving.
But let a shaberon cross the Himalayas in a
time of famine and multiply sacks of rice for the perishing multitudes-as he
could- and your magistrates and collectors would probably lodge him in jail
make him confess what granary he had robbed. This is exact science and your
realistic world. An though, as you say, you are impressed by the vast extent of
the world's ignorance on every subject which you pertinently designate as a'
few palpable facts collected and roughly generalised,
and a technical jargon invented to hide man's ignorance of all that lies behind
these facts,' and though you speak of your faith in the infinite possibilities
of Nature, yet you are content to spend your life in a work which aids only
that same exact science.....
" Of your
several questions we will first discuss, if you please, the one relating to the
presumed failure of the' Fraternity' to ' leave any mark upon the history of
the world.' They ought, you think, to have been able, with their extraordinary
advantages, to have' gathered into their schools a considerable portion of the
more enlightened minds of every race.' How do you know they have made no such
mark ~ Are you acquainted with their efforts, successes, and failures? Have you
any dock upon which to arraign them ? How could your world collect proofs of
the doings of men who have sedulously kept closed every possible door of
approach by which the inquisitive would spy upon them? The prime condition of
their success was that they should never be supervised or obstructed. What they
have done they know; all that those outside their circle could perceive was
results, the causes of which were masked from view. To account for these
results, men have, in different ages, invented theories of the interposition of
gods, special providences, fates, the benign or hostile influence of the stars.
There never was a time within or before the so- called historical period when
our predecessors were not moulding events and' making
history,' the facts of which were subsequently and invariably distorted by
historians to suit contemporary prejudices. Are you quite sure that the visible
heroic figures in the successive dramas were not often but their puppets? We
never pretended to be able to draw nations in the mass to this or that crisis
in spite of the general drift of the world's cosmic relations. The cycles must
run their rounds. Periods of mental and moral light and darkness succeed each
other as day does night. The major and minor yugas
must be accomplished according to the established order of things. And we,
borne along on the mighty tide, can only modify and direct some of its minor
currents. If we had the powers of the imaginary Personal God, and the universal
and immutable laws were but toys to play with, then, indeed, might we have
created conditions that would have turned this earth into an arcadia for lofty
souls. But having to deal with an immutable law, being ourselves its creatures,
we have had to do what we could, and rest thankful. There have been times when
a considerable portion of 'enlightened minds' were taught in our schools. Such
times there were in
" What good,' you say, ' is to be attained for my fellows and myself (the
two are inseparable) by these occult sciences ? ' When the natives see that an
interest is taken by the English, and even by some high officials in
" If we
look at Ceylon we shall see the most scholarly priests combining, under the
lead of the Theosophical Society, in a new exegesis of Buddhistic
philosophy; and at Galle, on the 15th of September, a
secular Theosophical School for the teaching of Singhalese youth, opened with
an attendance of over three hundred scholars; an example about to be imitated
at three other points in that island. If the Theosophical Society, as at
present constituted,' has indeed no' real vitality,' and yet in its modest way
has done so much practical good, how much greater results might not be
anticipated from a body organised upon the better
plan you could suggest ?
" The same
causes that are materialising the Hindu mind are
equally affecting all Western thought. Education enthrones scepticism,
but imprisons spirituality. You can do immense good by helping to give the
Western nations a secure basis upon which to reconstruct their crumbling faith.
And what they need is the evidence that Asiatic psychology alone supplies. Give
this, and you will confer happiness of mind on thousands. The era of blind
faith is gone; that of inquiry is here. Inquiry that only unmasks error,
without discovering anything upon which the soul can build, will but make
iconoclasts. Iconoclasm, from its very destructiveness, can give nothing; it
can only raze. But man cannot rest satisfied with bare negation. Agnosticism is
but a temporary halt. This is the moment to guide the recurrent impulse which
must soon come, and which will push the age towards extreme atheism, or drag it
back to extreme sacerdotalism, if it is not led to
the primitive soul-satisfying philosophy of the Aryans. He who observes what is
going on today, on the one hand among the Catholics, who are breeding miracles
as fast as the white ants do their young, on the other among the freethinkers,
who are converting, by masses, into Agnostics- will see the drift of things.
The age is revelling at a debauch of phenomena. The
same marvels that the spiritualists quote in opposition to the dogmas of
eternal perdition and atonement, the Catholics swarm to witness as proof of
their faith in miracles. The sceptics make game of
both. All are blind and there is no one to lead them. You and your colleagues
may help to furnish the materials for a needed universal religious philosophy;
one impregnable to scientific assault, because itself the finality of absolute
science, and a religion that is indeed worthy of the name since it includes the
relations of man physical to man psychical, and of the two to all that is above
and below them. Is not this worth a slight sacrifice? And if, after reflection,
you should decide to enter this new career, let it be known that your society
is no miracle-mongering or banqueting club, nor specially given to the study of
phenomenalism. Its chief aim is to extirpate current
superstitions and scepticism, and from long-sealed
ancient fountains to draw the proof that man may shape his own future destiny,
and know for a certainty that he can live hereafter, if he only wills, and that
all ' phenomena' , are but manifestations of natural law, to try to comprehend
which is the duty of every intelligent being."
I have hitherto
said nothing of the circumstances under which these various letters reached my
hands ; nor, in comparison with the intrinsic interest of the ideas they
embody, can the phenomenal conditions under which some of them were delivered,
be regarded as otherwise than of secondary interest for readers who appreciate
their philosophy. But every bit of evidence which helps to exhibit the nature
of the powers which the adepts exercise, is worth attention, while the
rationale of such powers is still hidden from the world. The fact of their
existence can only be established by the accumulation of such evidence, as long
as we are unable to prove their possibility by a priori analysis of the
latent capacities in man.
My friend to whom the last letter was addressed wrote a long reply, and
subsequently an additional letter for Koot Hoomi , which he forwarded to me, asking me to read and
then seal it up and send or give it to Madame Blavatsky for transmission, she
being expected at about that time at my house at Allahabad
on her way down country from Amritsur and Lahore,
where, as I have already indicated, she had stayed for some little time after
our household broke up for the season at Simla. I did
as desired, and gave the letter to Madame Blavatsky, after gumming and sealing
the stout envelope in which it was forwarded. That evening, a few hours
afterwards, on returning home to dinner, I found that the letter had gone, and
had come back again. Madame Blavatsky told me that she had been talking to a
visitor in her own room, and had been fingering a blue pencil on her
writing-table without noticing what she was doing, when she suddenly noticed
that the paper on which she was scribbling was my letter that the addressee had
duly taken possession of, by his own methods, an hour or two before. She found
that she had, while talking about something else, unconsciously written on the
envelope the words which it then bore, " Read and returned with thanks,
and a few commentaries. Please open. " I examined the envelope carefully,
and it was absolutely intact, its very complete fastenings having remained just
as I arranged them. Slitting it open, I found the letter which it had contained
when I sent it, and another from Koot Hoomi to me, criticising the
former with the help of a succession of pencil figures that referred to
particular passages in the original letter- another illustration of the passage
of matter through matter, which, for thousands of people who have had personal
experience of it in Spiritualism, is as certain a fact of nature as the rising
of the sun, and which I have now not only encountered at spiritual séances,
but, as this record will have shown, on many occasions when there is no motive
for suspecting any other agency than that of living beings with faculties of
which we may all possess the undeveloped germs, though it is only in their case
that knowledge has brought these to phenomenal fruition.
Sceptical critics, putting aside the collateral bearing of
all the previous phenomena I have described, and dealing with this letter
incident by itself alone, will perhaps say- of course Madame Blavatsky had
ample time to open the envelope by such means as the mediums who profess to get
answers to sealed letters from the spirit world are in the habit of employing.
But, firstly, the Jhelum telegram proof, and the
inherent evidence of the whole correspondence show that, the letters which come
to me in that which I recognise as Koot Hoomi 's handwriting, are
not the work of Madame Blavatsky, at all events; secondly, let the incident I
have just described be compared with another illustration of an exactly similar
incident which occurred shortly afterwards under different circumstances Koot Hoomi had sent me a letter
addressed to my friend to read and forward on. On the subject of this letter
before sending it I had occasion to make a communication to Koot
Hoomi . I wrote a note to him, fastened it up in an
ordinary adhesive envelope, and gave it to Madame Blavatsky. She put it in her
pocket, went into her own room, which opened out of the drawing room , and came
out again almost instantly. Certainly she had not been away thirty seconds. She
said " he " had taken it at once. Then she followed me back through
the house to my office room, spoke for a few minutes in the adjoining room to
my wife, and, returning into my office, lay down on a couch. I went on with my
work, and perhaps ten minutes elapsed, perhaps less. Suddenly she got up.
" There's your letter," she said, pointing to the pillow from which
she had lifted her head; and there lay the letter I had just written, intact as
regards its appearance, but with Koot Hoomi's name on the outside scored out and mine written
over it. After a thorough examination I slit the envelope, and found inside, on
the flyleaf of my note, the answer I required in Koot
Hoomi's handwriting. Now, except for the thirty
seconds during which she retired to her own room, Madame Blavatsky had not been
out of my sight, except for a minute or two in my wife's room, during the short
interval which elapsed between the delivery of the letter by me to her and its
return to me as described. And during this interval no one else had come into
my room. The incident was as absolute and complete a mechanical proof of
abnormal power exercised to produce the result as any conceivable test could
have yielded. Except by declaring that I cannot be describing it correctly, the
most resolute partisan of the commonplace will be unable seriously to dispute
the force of this incident. He may take refuge in idiotic ridicule, or he may
declare that I am misrepresenting the facts. As regards the latter hypothesis I
can only pledge my word, as I do hereby, to the exact accuracy of the
statement.
In one or two
cases I have got back answers from Koot Hoomi to my letters in my own envelopes, these remaining
intact as addressed to him, but with the address changed, and my letter gone
from the inside, his reply having taken its place. In two or three cases I have
found short messages from Koot Hoomi
written across the blank parts of letters from other persons, coming to me
through the post, the writers in these cases being assuredly unaware of the
additions so made to their epistles.
Of course I
have asked Koot Hoomi for
an explanation of these little phenomena, but it is easier for me to ask than
for him to answer, partly because the forces which the adepts bring to bear
upon matter to achieve abnormal results, are of a kind which ordinary science
knows so little about that we of the outer world are not prepared for such explanations;
and partly because the manipulation of the forces employed has to do,
sometimes, with secrets of initiation which an occultist must not reveal.
However, in reference to the subject before us, I received on one occasion this
hint as an explanation.
"
..........Besides, bear in mind that these my letters are not written, but impressed,
or precipitated, and then all mistakes corrected."
Of course I wanted to know more about such precipitation; was it a process
which followed thought more rapidly than any with which we were familiar? And
as regards letters received, did the meaning of these penetrate the
understanding of an occult recipient at once, or were they read in the ordinary
way?
" Of
course I have to read every word you write," Koot
Hoomi replied, " otherwise I would make a fine
mess of it. And whether it be through my physical or spiritual eyes, the time
required for it is practically the same. As much may be said of my replies; for
whether I precipitate or dictate them or write my answers myself, the
difference in time saved is very minute. I have to think it over, to photograph
every word and sentence carefully in my brain, before it can be repeated by
precipitation. As the fixing on chemically prepared surfaces of the images
formed by the camera requires a previous arrangement within the focus of the
object to be represented, for otherwise- as often found in bad photographs- the
legs of the sitter might appear out of all proportion with the head, and so on-
so we have to first arrange our sentences and impress every letter to appear on
paper in our minds before it becomes fit to be read. For the present it is
all I can tell you. When science will have learned more about the mystery
of the lithophyl (or litho-biblion
), and how the impress of leaves comes originally to take place on stones, then
I will be able to make you better understand the process. But you must know and
remember one thing -we but follow and servilely copy
Nature in her works."
In another
letter Koot Hoomi
expatiates more fully on the difficulty of making occult explanations
intelligible to minds trained only in modern science.
" Only the
progress one makes in the study of arcane knowledge from its rudimental
elements brings him gradually to understand our meaning. Only thus, and not
otherwise, does it, strengthening and refining those mysterious links of
sympathy between intelligent men- the temporarily isolated fragments of the
universal soul, and the cosmic soul itself- bring them into full rapport. Once
this established, then only will those awakened sympathies serve, indeed, to
connect Man with- what, for the want of a European scientific word more
competent to express the idea, I am again compelled to describe as that
energetic chain which binds together the material and immaterial kosmos - Past, Present, and Future, and quicken his
perceptions so as to clearly grasp not merely all things of matter, but of
spirit also. I feel even irritated at having to use the three clumsy words -
Past, Present, and Future. Miserable concepts of the objective phases of the
subjective whole, they are about as ill adapted for the purpose, as an axe for
fine carving. Oh, my poor disappointed friend, that you were already so far
advanced on THE PATH that this simple transmission of ideas should not be
encumbered by the conditions of matter, the union of your mind with ours
prevented by its induced incapabilities. Such is
unfortunately the inherited and self-acquired grossness of the Western mind,
and so greatly have the very phrases expressive of modern thoughts been
developed in the line of practical materialism, that it is now next to
impossible, either for them to comprehend or for us to express in their own
languages anything of that delicate, seemingly ideal, machinery of the occult kosmos. To some little extent that faculty can be acquired
by the Europeans through study and meditation, but- that's all. And here is the
bar which has hitherto prevented a conviction of the theosophical truths from
gaining currency among Western nations - caused theosophical study to be cast
aside as useless and fantastic by Western philosophers. How shall I teach you
to read and write, or even comprehend a language off which no alphabet palpable
or words audible to you have yet been invented. How could the phenomena of our
modern electrical science be explained to --- say a " Greek philosopher of
the days of Ptolemy, were he suddenly recalled to life - with such an unbridged hiatus in discovery as would exist between his
and our age? Would not the very technical terms be to him an unintelligible
jargon, an abracadabra of meaningless sounds, and the very instruments and
apparatuses used but miraculous monstrosities? And suppose for one instant I
were to describe to you the lines of those colour rays that lie beyond the
so-called visible spectrum - rays invisible to all but a very few even among
us; to explain how we can find in space anyone of the so called subjective or accidental
colours - the complement (to speak mathematically) moreover' of any
other given colour of a dichromatic body (which alone sounds like an
absurdity) could you comprehend, do you think, their optical effect, or even my
meaning? And since you see them not - such rays - nor can know them, nor have
you any names for them as yet in science, if I were to tell you. .......'
without moving from your writing-desk, try search for, and produce before your
eyes the whole solar spectrum decomposed into fourteen prismatic colour -(seven
being complementary) as it is but with the help of that occult light that you
can see me from a distance as I see you '-what think you would be your answer?
What would you have to reply? Would you not be likely enough to retort by
telling me that as there never ,were but seven (now three) primary colours
which, moreover, have never yet by any known physical process been seen
decomposed further than the seven prismatic hues, my invitation was as
unscientific as it was absurd? Adding that my offer to search for an imaginary
solar complement, being no compliment to your knowledge of physical science- l
had better, perhaps, go and search for my mythical dichromatic and solar
'pairs' in 'Tibet, for modern science has hitherto been unable to bring under
any theory even so simple a phenomenon as the colours of all such dichromatic
bodies. And yet truth knows these colours are objective enough.
" So you see the insurmountable difficulties in the way of obtaining not
only absolute, but even primary knowledge in Occult Science, for one
situated as you are. How could you make yourself understood, command in
fact, those semi-intelligent forces, whose means of communicating with us are
not through spoken words, but through sounds and colours in correlations
between the vibrations of the two ? For sound, light, and colour are the main
factors in forming those grades of intelligences, these beings of whose very
existence you have no conception, nor are you allowed to believe in them -
Atheists and Christians, Materialists and Spiritualists, all bringing forward
their respective arguments against such a belief-Science objecting stronger
than either of these to such a degrading superstition.
" Thus, because they cannot with one leap over the boundary walls attain
to the pinnacles of Eternity- because we cannot take a savage from the centre
of Africa and make him comprehend at once the' Principia' of Newton, or the'
Sociology' of Herbert Spencer, or make an unlettered child write a new "
Iliad in old Achaian Greek, or an ordinary painter
depict scenes in Saturn, or sketch the inhabitants of Arcturus-
because if all this our very existence is denied. Yes, for this reason are
believers in us pronounced impostors and fools, and the very science which
leads to the highest goal of the highest knowledge, to the real tasting of the
Tree of Life and Wisdom - is scouted as a wild flight of imagination."
The following
passage occurs in another letter, but it adheres naturally enough to the
extract just concluded.
" The
truths and mysteries of occultism constitute, indeed, a body of the highest
spiritual importance, at once profound and practical for the world at large.
Yet it is not as an addition to the tangled mass of theory or speculation that
they are being given to you, but for their practical bearing on the interests
of mankind. The terms Unscientific, Impossible, Hallucination, Imposture, have
hitherto been used in a very loose, careless way, as implying in the occult
phenomena something either mysterious and abnormal, or a premeditated
imposture. And this is why our chiefs have determined to shed upon a few
recipient minds more light upon the subject, and to prove to them that such
manifestations are as reducible to law as the simplest phenomena in the
physical universe. The wiseacres say,' the age of miracles is past', but we
answer, ' it never existed.' While not unparalleled or without their
counterpart in universal history, these phenomena must and will come
with an overpowering influence upon the world of sceptics
and bigots. They have to prove both destructive and constructive -
destructive in the pernicious errors of the past, in the old creeds and
superstitions which suffocate in their poisonous embrace, like the Mexican
weed, nigh all mankind ; but constructive of new institutions of a genuine,
practical Brotherhood of Humanity, where all will become co-workers of Nature,
will work for the good of mankind, with and through the higher planetary
spirits, the only spirits we believe in. Phenomenal elements previously unthought of, undreamed of, will soon begin manifesting
themselves day by day with constantly augmented force, and disclose at last the
secrets of their mysterious workings. Plato was right. [See Appendix D.] Ideas
rule the world ; and as men's minds will receive new ideas, leaving aside the
old and effete, the world will advance, mighty revolutions will spring from
them, creeds and even powers will crumble before their onward march, crushed by
their Irresistible force. It will be just as impossible to resist their
influence when the time comes as to stay the progress of the tide. But all this
will come gradually on, and before it comes we have a duty set before us: that
of sweeping away as much as possible the dross left to us by our pious
forefathers. New ideas have to be planted on clean places, for these ideas
touch upon the most momentous subjects. It is not physical phenomena, but these
universal ideas, that we study; as to comprehend the former, we have first to
understand the latter.
They touch
man's true position in the universe in relation to his previous and future
births, his origin and ultimate destiny; the relation of the mortal to the
immortal, of the temporary to the eternal, of the finite to the infinite; ideas
larger, grander, more comprehensive, recognising the
eternal reign of immutable law, unchanging and unchangeable, in regard to which
there is only an ETERNAL Now : while to uninitiated mortals, time is past or
future, as related to their finite existence on this material speck of dirt.
This is what we study and what many have solved........ Meanwhile, being human,
I have to rest. I took no sleep for over sixty hours."
Here are It few
lines from Koot Hoomi's
hand, in a letter not addressed to me, It fall conveniently into the present
series of extracts.
" Be it as
it may, we are content to live as we do, unknown and undisturbed by a
civilization which rests so exclusively upon intellect. Nor do we feel in any
way concerned about the revival of our ancient art and high civilization, for
these are as sure to come back in their time, and in a higher form, as the Plesiosaurus
and the Megatherium in theirs.
We have the
weakness to believe in ever-recurrent cycles, and hope to quicken the
resurrection of what is past and gone. We could not impede it, even if we would.
The new civilization will be but the child of the old one, and we have but to
leave the eternal law to take its own course, to have our dead ones come out of
their graves; yet we are certainly anxious to hasten the welcome event. Fear
not, although we do 'cling superstitiously to the relics of the past', our
knowledge will not pass away from the sight of man. It is , the gift of the
gods,' and the most precious relic of all. The keepers of the sacred light did
not safely cross so many ages but to find themselves wrecked on the rocks of
modern scepticism. Our pilots are too experienced
sailors to allow us to fear any such disaster. We will always find volunteers
to replace the tired sentries, and the world, bad as it is in its present state
of transitory period, can yet furnish us with a few men now and then."
Turning back to
my own correspondence, and to the latest letter I received from Koot Hoomi before leaving India
on the trip home during which I am writing these pages, I read :-
" I hope
that at least you will understand that we ( or most of us) are far from
being the heartless morally dried-up mummies some would fancy us to be. Mejnour is very well where he is-as an ideal character of a
thrilling, in many respects truthful story. Yet, believe me, few of us would
care to play the part in life of a desiccated pansy between the leaves of a
volume of solemn poetry. We may not be quite' the boys' to quote -----'s
irreverent expression when speaking of us, yet none of our degree are
like the stern hero of Bulwer's romance. While the
facilities of observation secured to some of us by our condition certainly give
a greater breadth of view, a more pronounced and impartial, a more widely
spread humaneness- for answering Addison, we might justly maintain that it
is the business of "magic " to humanize our natures with
compassion' -for the whole mankind as all living beings, instead of
concentrating and limiting our affections to one predilected
race- yet few of us (except such as have attained the final negation of Moksha) can so far enfranchise ourselves from the influence
of our earthly connection as to be unsusceptible in various degrees to the
higher pleasures, emotions, and interests of the common run of humanity.
Of course the
greater the progress towards deliverance, the less this will be the case,
until, to crown all, human and purely individual personal feelings, blood-ties
and friendship, patriotism and race predilection, will all give way to become
blended into one universal feeling, the only true and holy, the only unselfish
and eternal one - Love, an Immense Love for humanity as a whole. For it is
humanity which is the great orphan, the only disinherited one upon this earth,
my friend. And it is the duty of every man who is capable of an unselfish
impulse to do something, however little, for its welfare. It reminds me of the
old fable of the war between the body and its members ; here, too, each limb of
this huge' orphan,' fatherless and motherless, selfishly cares but for itself,
The body, uncared for, suffers eternally whether the limbs are at war or at
rest. Its suffering and agony never cease; and who can blame it-as your
materialistic philosophers do- if, in this everlasting isolation and neglect,
it has evolved gods into whom 'it ever cries for help, but is not heard.' Thus-
'Since
there is hope for man only in man,
I would not let one cry whom I could save. '
Yet I confess
that I individually am not yet exempt from some of the terrestrial attachments.
I am still attracted toward some men more than towards others, and philanthropy
as preached by our great Patron
"...................The Saviour of the world,
The teacher of Nirvana and the Law
'.,; has never
killed in me either individual preferences of friendship, love for my next of
kin, or the ardent feeling of patriotism for the country in which I was last
materially individualised."
I had asked Koot Hoomi how far I was at
liberty to use his letters in the preparation of this volume, and, a few lines
after the passage just quoted, he says :-
" I lay no
restrictions upon your making use of anything I may have written to you or Mr.
----- having full confidence in your tact and judgment as to what should be
printed, and how it should be presented. I must only ask you. ..." and
then he goes on to indicate one letter which he wishes me to
withhold......" As to the rest, I relinquish it to the mangling tooth of
criticism."
______________________
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Elementary Theosophy Who is the Man? Body and Soul
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What Theosophy Is From the Absolute to Man
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Theosophy - What it is How is it Known? The Method of Observation
General Principles The Three Great Truths The Deity
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Confusion as the Theoversity moves out of
Tekels Park to
Southampton, Glastonbury &
Chorley in
Lancashire while the leadership claim
that the Theosophical
Society will carry on using
Tekels Park despite its sale to a developer
Anyone planning a
“Spiritual” stay at the
Tekels Park Guest
House should be aware of the sale.
Future
of Tekels Park Badgers in Doubt
Party On!
Tekels Park Theosophy NOT
Tekels Park & the Loch Ness Monster
A Satirical view of
the sale of Tekels Park
in Camberley,
Surrey to a developer
The Toff’s Guide to the Sale of
Tekels Park
What the men in top
hats have to
say about the sale
of Tekels Park
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General pages
about Wales, Welsh History
and The History
of Theosophy in Wales
Wales is a
Principality within the United Kingdom and has an eastern
border with
England. The land area is just over 8,000 square miles.
Snowdon in North Wales is the highest mountain at 3,650 feet.
The coastline is
almost 750 miles long. The population of Wales
as at the 2001 census is 2,946,200.
________________
Bangor Conwy & Swansea Lodges are members
of the Welsh
Regional Association (Formed 1993).
Theosophy Cardiff
separated from the Welsh Regional
Association in
March 2008 and became an independent
body within the Theosophical Movement in March 2010
High
Drama & Worldwide Confusion
as Theosophy Cardiff Separates from the
Welsh Regional Association (formed 1993)
Theosophy Cardiff Cancels its Affiliation
to the Adyar Based Theosophical Society