Cardiff Theosophical
Society, 206 Newport Road, Cardiff, wales
The Writings of Alfred Percy Sinnett
Alfred
Percy Sinnett
1840
-1921
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 Allahabad, gave me a complete
assurance that she was in possession of some faculties of an abnormal
character. And this assurance lent a credibility, that would not otherwise have
belonged to them, to one or two phenomena of a different kind which also
occurred at that time, the conditions of which wore not complete enough to make
them worth recording here. 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
Indiana so recklessly and cruelly by people who take up an attitude of
hostility to the views with which she is identified, that it would be
affectation to pass the question by. On the other hand, it would be too great a
concession to an ignoble attack to go minutely over the evidence of her honesty
of character with which my intimacy with Madame Blavatsky has gradually
supplied me. At various times she has been a guest of ours for periods now
amounting in all to more than three months out of nearly two years. To any
impartial intelligence it will be manifest that, under these circumstances, I
must have been able to form a better opinion concerning her real character than
can possibly be derived from the crude observations of persons who have perhaps
met her once or twice. 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 London, and which
assuredly could never have been matched in Simla.
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 Bombay, or ever saw Madame Blavatsky, is a little feature of
this hypothesis which its contented framers do not care to enquire into. Nor do
persons who think the fact that the brooch once belonged to Mrs. Hume's daughter,
and that this young lady once saw Madame Blavatsky at Bombay, sufficiently
" suspicious " to wipe out the effect of the whole incident as
described above- ever attempt, as far as I have discerned, to trace out a
coherent chain of events as illuminated by their suspicions, or to compare
these with the circumstances of the brooch's actual recovery. No care, however,
to arrange the circumstances of an occult demonstration so that the possibility
of fraud and delusion may really be excluded, is sufficient to exclude the
imputation of this afterwards by people for whom any argument, however
illogical really, is good enough to attack a strange idea with.
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 ten o'clock, I was
sitting in Madame Blavatsky's room conversing with her, and in a casual way asked
her if she would be able to send me anything by occult means when I returned to
my home. She said "'No", and explained to me some of the laws under
which she acts, one being that she must know the place and have been there- the
more recently the better- in order to establish a magnetic current: She then
recollected that she had been somewhere that morning, and after a moment's
reflection remembered whose house it was she had visited.[ This house at
which the cigarette was found was Mr. O'Meara's. He is quite willing that this
should be stated. ]. She said she could send a cigarette there, if I
would go at once to verify the fact. I of course, consented. I must here
mention that I had seen her do this kind of thing once before; and the reason
she gives for sending cigarettes is, that the paper and tobacco being
always about her person, are highly magnetised, and therefore more amenable to
her power, which she most emphatically declares is not super- natural, but
merely the manifestation of laws unknown to us. To continue my story. She took
out a cigarette paper and slowly tore oft a corner as zigzag as possible, I
never taking my eyes off her hands. She gave me the corner, which I at once put
into an envelope, and it never left my possession I can declare. She made the
cigarette with the remainder of the paper, She then said she would try an
experiment which might not succeed, but the failure would be of no consequence
with me. She then most certainly put that cigarette into the fire, and I saw it
burn, and I started at once to the gentleman's house, scarcely able to believe
that I should find in the place indicated by her the counterpart of the
cigarette paper I had with me ; but sure enough there it was, and, in the
presence of the gentleman and his wife, I opened out the cigarette and found my
corner piece fitted exactly. It would be useless to try and explain any theory
in connection with these phenomena, and it would be unreasonable to expect
anyone to believe in them, unless their own experience had proved the
possibility of such wonders. All one asks or expects is, that a few of the more
intelligent members of the community may be led to look into the vast amount of
evidence now accumulated of the phenomena taking place all over Europe and
America. It seems a pity that the majority should be in such utter ignorance of
these facts; it is within the power of anyone visiting England to convince
himself of their truth.
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 Punjab who was attracted to occult studies from his
earliest boyhood. He was sent to Europe while still a youth at the intervention
of a relative-himself an occultist- to be educated in Western knowledge, and
since then has been fully initiated in the greater knowledge of the East. From
the self complacent point of view of the ordinary European this will seem a
strange reversal of the proper order of things, but I need not stop to examine
that consideration now.
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 London newspaper would close the
mouths of the sceptics," it was inadmissible. " See it in what light
you will, the world is yet in its first stage of disenthralment...... hence
unprepared. Very true we work by natural, not supernatural, means and laws. But
as on the one hand science would find itself unable, in its present state, to
account for the wonders given in its name, and on the other the ignorant masses
would still be left to view the phenomenon in the light of a miracle, everyone
who would thus be made a witness to the occurrence would be thrown off his
balance, and the result would be deplorable. Believe me it would be so
especially for yourself, who originated the idea, and for the devoted woman who
so foolishly rushes into the wide, open door leading to notoriety. This door,
though opened by so friendly a hand as yours, would prove very soon a trap- and
a fatal one, indeed, for her. And such is not surely your object. ...Were we to
accede to your desires know you really what consequences would follow in the
trail of success ? The inexorable shadow which follows all human innovations
moves on, yet few are they who are ever conscious of its approach and dangers.
What are, then, they to expect who would offer the world an innovation which,
owing to human ignorance, if believed in, will surely be attribute to those
dark agencies the two-thirds of humanity believe in and dread as yet ?.... The
success of an attempt of such a kind as the one you propose must be calculated
and based upon a thorough knowledge of the people around you. It depends
entirely upon the social and moral conditions of the people in their bearing on
these deepest and most mysterious questions which can stir the human mind- the
deific powers in man and the possibilities contained in Nature. How many even
of your best friends, of those who surround you, are more than superficially
interested in these abstruse problems? You could count them upon the fingers of
your right hand. Your race boasts of having liberated in their century the
genius so long imprisoned in the narrow vase of dogmatism and intolerance- the
genius of knowledge, wisdom, and free thought. It says that, in their turn,
ignorant prejudice and religious bigotry, bottled up like the wicked djin
of old, and sealed by the Solomons of science, rest at the bottom of the sea,
and can never, escaping to the surface again, reign over the world as in the
days of old: that the public mind is quite free, in short, and ready to accept
any demonstrated truth. Ay, but is it verily so, my respected friend?
Experimental knowledge does not quite date from 1662, when Bacon, Robert Boyle,
and the. Bishop of Chester transformed under the royal charter their' invisible
college' into a society for the promotion of experimental science. Ages before
the Royal Society found itself becoming a reality upon the plan of the'
Prophetic Scheme,' an innate longing for the hidden, a passionate love for, and
the study of, Nature, had led men in every generation to try and fathom her
secrets deeper than their neighbours did. Roma ante Romulum fuit is an
axiom taught us in your English schools. The Vril of the Coming Race
was the common property of races now extinct. And as the very existence of
those gigantic ancestors of ours is now questioned- though in the Himavats, on
the very territory belonging to you, we have a cave full of the skeletons of
these giants-and their huge frames, when found, are invariably regarded as isolated
freaks of Nature-so the Vril, or akas as we call it, is looked
upon as an impossibility-a myth. And without a thorough knowledge of akas-its
combinations and properties, how can science hope to account for such
phenomena? We doubt not but the men of your science are open to conviction ;
yet facts must be first demonstrated to them; they must first have become their
own property, have proved amenable to their modes of investigation, before you
find them ready to admit them as facts. If you but look into the preface to the
Micrographia, you will find, in Hookes' suggestions, that the intimate
relations of object were of less account in his eyes than their external
operation on the senses, and Newton's fine discoveries found in him their
greatest opponent. The modern Hookeses are many. Like this learned but ignorant
man of old, your modern men of science are less anxious to suggest a physical
connection of facts which might unlock for them many an occult force in Nature,
as to provide a convenient classification of scientific experiments, so that
the most essential quality of a hypothesis is, not that it should be true,
but only plausible, in their opinion.
" 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 'kingdom of Heaven is
obtained by force', say the Christian mystics. It is but with armed hand, and
ready to either conquer or perish, that the modern mystic can hope to achieve
his object.
" 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 Europe, spoken of thus
familiarly.
A miracle for all the science of Europe,
and as hard a fact for us, nevertheless, as the room in which we sat. We knew
that the phenomenon we had seen was a wonderful reality; that the thought-power
of a man in Kashmir had picked up a material object from a table in Simla, and,
disintegrating it by some process of which Western science does not yet dream,
had passed it through other matter, and had there restored it to its original
solidarity, the dispersed particles resuming their precise places as before,
and reconstituting the object down to every line or scratch upon its surface.
(By-the-by, it bore some scratches when it emerged from the pillow which it
never bore before -the initials of our friend. ) And we knew that written notes
on tangible paper had been flashing backwards and forwards that day between our
friend and ourselves, though hundreds of miles of Himalayan mountains
intervened between us, and had been flashing backwards and forwards with the
speed of electricity, And yet we knew that an impenetrable wall, built up of
its own prejudice and obstinacy, of its learned ignorance and polished dulness,
was established round the minds of scientific men in the West, as a body,
across which we should never be able to carry our facts and our experience. And
it is with a greater sense of oppression than people who have never been in a
similar position will realise, that I now tell the story I have to tell, and
know all the while that the solemn accuracy of its minutest detail, the utter
truthfulness of every syllable in this record, is little better than incense to
my own conscience - that the scientific minds of the West with which of all
cultivated minds my own has hitherto been most in sympathy, will be closed to
my testimony most hopelessly. " Though one should rise from the dead,"
etc.. It is the old story. It is the old story, at all events as regards the
crashing results on opinion which such evidence as that I have been giving,
ought to have. The smile of incredulity which thinks itself so wise and is so
foolish, the suspicions which flatter themselves they are so cunning, and are
really the fruit of so much dulness, will gleam over these pages, and wither
all their meaning-for the readers who smile. But I suppose that Koot Hoomi is
not only right in declaring the world unripe as yet for too staggering a proof
of occult power, but also in taking a friendly interest, as it will be seen
presently that he does, in the little book I am writing, as one of the
influences which bit by bit may sap the foundations of dogmatism and stupidity,
on which science, which thinks itself so liberal, has latterly become so firmly
rooted.
The next letter- the third long one-that I
received from the Mahatma, reached me shortly after my return for the cold
weather to Allahabad. But I received one communication from him- a telegram
-before its arrival, on the day of my own return to Allahabad. This telegram,
of no great importance as regards its contents, which were little more than an
expression of thanks for some letters I had written in the papers, was,
nevertheless, of great interest indirectly, affording me, as it ultimately did,
evidence of a kind which could appeal to other minds besides my own, that Koot
Hoomi's letters were not, as some ingenious persons may have been inclined to
imagine - in spite of various mechanical difficulties in the way of the theory-
the work of Madame Blavatsky. 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
"Isis Unveiled " has certainly a command of language which renders it
difficult to say what she could not write, the answer is simple. In the
production of this book she was so largely helped by the Brothers, that great
portions of it are not really her work at all. She never makes any disguise of
this fact, though it is one of a kind which it is useless for her to proclaim
to the world at large, as it would be perfectly unintelligible, except to
persons who knew something of the external facts, at all events, of occultism.
Koot Hoomi's letters, as I say, are perfectly unlike her own style. 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 Allahabad by direction of Koot Hoomi, not in the least
knowing why he wished it sent to me. I did not at first see what on earth was
the use of the old envelope to me, but I put it away and afterwards obtained
the clue to the idea in Koot Hoomi's mind when Madame Blavatsky wrote me word
that he wanted me to obtain the original of the Jhelum telegram. Through the
agency of a friend connected with the administration of the telegraph
department, I was enabled eventually to obtain a sight of the original of the
telegram- a message of about twenty words; and then I saw the meaning of the
envelope. The message was in Koot Hoomi's own handwriting, and it was an answer
from Jhelum to a letter which the delivery postmark on the envelope showed to
have been delivered at Amritsur on the same day the message was sent. Madame
Blavatsky assuredly was herself at Amritsur on that date, seeing large numbers
of people there in connection with the work of the Theosophical Society, and
the handwriting of Koot Hoomi's letters, nevertheless, appears on a telegram
undeniably handed in at the Jhelum office on that date. So although some of
Koot Hoomi's letters passed through her hands to me, she is proved not to be
their writer, as she is certainly not the producer of their handwriting.
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 Allahabad
shortly after my return explained this.
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 Alps, and remember that at first
their mass is small, and their momentum little. A trite comparison, you may
say, but I cannot think of a better illustration when viewing the gradual
aggregation of trifling events growing into a menacing destiny for the
Theosophical Society. It came quite forcibly upon me the other day as I was
coming down the defiles of Konenlun -- Karakorum you call them- and saw an
avalanche tumble. I had gone personally to our chief. ... and was crossing over
to Lhadak on my way home. What other speculations might have followed I cannot
say. But just as I was taking advantage of the awful stillness which usually
follows such cataclysms, to get a clearer view of the present situation, and
the disposition of the' mystics ' at Simla, I was rudely recalled to my senses.
A familiar voice, as shrill as the one attributed to Saraswati's peacock-
which, if we may credit tradition, frightened off the King of the Nagas-
shouted along the currents-" Koot Hoomi,....... come quicker and help me!
" and, in her excitement, forgot she was speaking English. I must say that
the "old Lady's" telegrams do strike one like stones from a catapult.
" 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 2 P.M. I
got your letter about thirty miles beyond Rawul Pinder, five minutes later, and
had an acknowledgement wired to you from Jhelum at 4 P. M. on the same
afternoon. Our modes of accelerated delivery and quick communications [
Many old Indians, and some books about the Indian Mutiny, take note of the
perfectly incomprehensible way news of events transpiring at a distance would
sometimes be found to have penetrated the native bazaars before It had reached
the Europeans at such places by the quickest means of communication at their
disposal. The explanation I have been informed, Is that the Brothers, who were
anxious to save the British power at that time, regarding it as a better
government for India than any system of native rule that could take its place,
were quick to distribute information by their own methods when this could
operate to quiet popular excitement and discourage new risings. The sentiment
that animated them then, animates them still, and the influence of the
Theosophical Society In India is one which the Government would do wisely to
countenance and support. The suspicions directed against its founders in the
first instance, misdirected as they were, were excusable enough , but now that
the character of the whole movement is better understood, it would be well for
the officers of the British Government in India who have any opportunity of the
kind, to do whatever they can towards showing their sympathy with the promoters
of the Society, who must, necessarily, have an uphill task to perform without
such manifestations of sympathy. ] Are not, then, as you will see, to be
despised by the Western world, or even the Aryan English-speaking and sceptical
Vakils.
" 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
Allahabad, and the difficulties to be surmounted at the latter are
tremendous." To the ordinary mind, feats of " magic " are hardly
distinguishable by degrees of difficulty, and the little hint contained in the
last sentence may thus help to show that, magical as the phenomena of the
Brothers appear (as soon as the dull-witted hypothesis of fraud is abandoned),
they are magic of a kind which is amenable to its own laws. Most of the bodies
in Nature were elements, in the infancy of chemistry; but in turn the number is
reduced by deeper and deeper researches into the law of combinations - and so
with magic. To ride the clouds in a basket, or send messages under the sea,
would have been magic in one age of the world, but becomes the commonplace of
the next. The Simla phenomena are magic for the majority of this generation,
but psychological telegraphy itself may become, if not the property of mankind
a few generations hence, a fact of science as undeniable as the differential
calculus, and known to be attainable by its own appropriate students. That it
is easier to accomplish it and cognate achievements, in certain strata of the
atmosphere rather than in others, is already a practical suggestion which tends
to drag it down from the realms of magic; or, as the same idea might be
differently expressed, to lift it towards the region of exact science.
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 Paris
Daumont drawn by a team of Indian yaks or camels. You ask us to teach you true
science- the occult aspect of the known side of Nature ; and this you think can
be as easily done as asked. You do not seem to realise the tremendous
difficulties in the way of imparting even the rudiments of our science
to those who have been trained in the familiar methods of yours. You do not see
that the more you have of the one the less capable you are of instinctively
comprehending the other, for a man can only think in his worn grooves, and
unless he has the courage to fill up these, and make new ones for himself, he
must perforce travel on the old lines. Allow me a few instances. In conformity
with exact science you would define but one cosmic energy, and see no
difference between the energy expended by the traveller who pushes aside the bush
that obstructs his path, and the scientific experimenter who expends an equal
amount of energy in setting a pendulum in motion. We do; for we know there is a
world of difference between the two. The one uselessly dissipates and scatters
force, the other concentrates and stores it. And here please understand that I
do not refer to the relative utility of the two, as one might imagine, but only
to the fact that in the one case there is but brute force flung out without any
transmutation of that brute energy into the higher potential form of spiritual
dynamics, and in the other there is just that. Please do not consider me
vaguely metaphysical. The idea I wish to convey is that the result of the
highest intellection in the scientifically occupied brain is the evolution of a
sublimated form of spiritual energy, which, in the cosmic action, is productive
of illimitable results; while the automatically acting brain holds, or stores
up in itself, only a certain quantum of brute force that is unfruitful of benefit
for the individual or humanity. The human brain is an exhaustless generator of
the most refined quality of cosmic force out of the low, brute energy of Nature
; and the complete adept has made himself a centre from which irradiate
potentialities that beget correlations upon correlations through Aeons of time
to come. This is the key to the mystery of his being able to project into and
materialise in the visible world the forms that his imagination has constructed
out of inert cosmic matter in the invisible world. The adept does not create
anything new, but only utilizes and manipulates materials which Nature has in
store around him, and material which, throughout eternities, has passed through
all the forms. He has but to choose the one he wants, and recall it into
objective existence. Would not this sound to one of your ' learned ' biologists
like a madman's dream?
" 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 India,
Persia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. But, as I remarked in a letter to Mr. Sinnett,
the adept is the efflorescence of his age, and comparatively few ever appear in
a single century. Earth is the battleground of moral no less than of physical
forces, and the boisterousness of animal passion, under the stimulus of the
rude energies of the lower group of etheric agents, always tends to quench
spirituality. What else could one expect of men so nearly related to the lower
kingdom from which they evolved ? True also, our numbers are just now
diminishing, but this is because, as I have said, we are of the human race,
subject to its cyclic impulse, and powerless to turn that back upon itself. Can
you turn the Gunga or the Bramaputra back to its sources; can you even dam it
so that its piled-up waters will not overflow the banks ? No; but you may draw
the stream partly into canals, and utilise its hydraulic power for the good of
mankind. So we, who cannot stop the world from going in its destined direction,
are yet able to divert some part of its energy into useful channels. Think of
us as demigods, and my explanation will not satisfy you; view us as simple men-
perhaps a little wiser as the result of special study- and it ought to answer
your objection.
" 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 India, in
their ancestral science and philosophies, they will themselves take openly to
their study. .And when they come to realise that the old' divine' phenomena
were not miracles, but scientific effects, superstition will abate. Thus, the
greatest evil that now oppresses and retards the revival of Indian civilization
will in time disappear. The present tendency of education is to make them
materialistic and root out spirituality. With a proper understanding of what
their ancestors meant by their writings and teachings, education would become a
blessing, whereas now it is often a curse. .At present the non-educated, as
much as the learned natives, regard the English as too prejudiced, because of
their Christian religion and modern science, to care to understand them or
their traditions. They mutually hate and mistrust each other. This changed
attitude towards the older philosophy, would influence the native princes and
wealthy men to endow normal schools for the education of pundits ; and old
MSS., hitherto buried out of the reach of the Europeans, would again come to
light, and with them the key to much of that which was hidden for ages from the
popular understanding, for which your sceptical Sanscritists do not care, which
your religious missionaries do not dare, to understand. Science would
gain much, humanity everything. Under the stimulus of the AngIo-Indian
Theosophical Society, we might in time see another golden age of Sanskrit
literature.
" 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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