Isis Very Much Unveiled

ISIS VERY MUCH UNVEILED, BEING THE STORY OF THE GREAT MAHATMA HOAX.

		TOLD FROM SOURCES MAINLY THEOSOPHICAL, BY EDMUND   GARRETT, AUTHOR OF “IN AFRIKANDER LAND,” “IBSEN’S BRAND IN ENGLISH VERSE,” &c.
London: “Westminster Gazette” Office, Tudor Street, E.C.		All Rights Reserved.

INDEX.

			PAGE.
PART I.—The Story of the Great Mahatma Hoax.
Chapter	I.—	Introduction	5
〃	II.—	No Mahatmas, no Members!	8
〃	III.—	Mystification under Madame Blavatsky	13
〃	IV.—	The Psychical Research Exposure	17
〃	V.—	Mystification under Mrs. Besant	22
〃	VI.—	Enter the Mahatma	27
〃	VII.—	Every Man his own Mahatma	32
〃	VIII.—	The Adventures of a Seal	36
〃	IX.—	The Climax of Theosophic Brotherhood	42
〃	X.—	The Mahatma Tries Threats	48
〃	XI.—	Mrs. Besant’s coup de main	55
〃	XII.—	A Meeting of the (Theosophical) Pickwick Club	60
〃	XIII.—	Questions and Challenges	67
PART II—Answers and Theosophistries.
I.—	From Officials		75
II.—	From Prominent Theosophists		80
III.—	From Private Members		93
PART III.—A General Rejoinder.
Last Shreds of the Veil of Isis			99
POSTSCRIPT.
Mr. Judge’s Mahatma at Bay			108
L’Envoi: “The Society upon the Himalay”			117
A Reply from Mr. W. Q. Judge			121
An Appreciation of Mr. Judge’s “Reply”			133
Illustrations and Facsimiles.
	Frontispiece, Portrait of Mme. Blavatsky		1
	Portrait of Mrs. Besant		80–81
	Portrait of Colonel Olcott		32–33
	The “Mahatma’s Seal”		28
	The Envelope Trick		35
	Facsimiles of Mahatma Missives, of Mr. Judge’s Handwriting, &c.		20, 33, 37, 38, 50, 52, 54, 115
	Portrait Cartoon: “When Augur meets Augur”		119

MADAME BLAVATSKY

(From a photograph by Messrs. Elliott & Fry, Baker-street, W.)

PREFACE.

Tourists at Pompeii are shown a temple of Isis. The impartial cinders have preserved for us there, not only the temple, but the secret passage which the priests used in the production of what are nowadays called “phenomena.”

The following pages are designed to show the secret passage in the temple of the Theosophic Isis, the goddess of Madame Blavatsky’s “Isis Unveiled.”

Instead of having to wait on the pleasure of Vesuvius, I am enabled to act as cicerone while the temple is still (for the present) a going concern.

The important difference between the exposure of Madame Blavatsky’s box of tricks by the Society for Psychical Research, and the present exposure of her successors is, that in this case we have the high-priesthood giving evidence against itself. My own part in the business is merely the humble one of seeing that they shall all satisfactorily “get at” one another. In redacting, out of the mass of various testimony which has fallen into my hands as clear and readable a story as I could present, my main care has been to tone down the mutual insinuations. Talk about augur meeting augur with a smile! It is the snarl which these augurs cannot disguise.

As for myself, I have tried to render a service to truth; but I cannot see, with some good people, that a sense of truth necessarily excludes a sense of humour.

Mrs. Besant is a lady whose character I have often defended in the press though I have not always been able to accept the extremer estimates of her intellectual power. She is about the only one of my dramatis personæ in whom the public at large (like myself) feel any personal interest whatever. She is, therefore, the strongest buttress of a fabric which she has now for some time known to be rotten at the base. That is why I have dealt more seriously with her than with these Olcotts and Judges. The President is too flabby to be worth fighting; the Vice-President is iialready thrown over by all the shrewder and honester members; even Mrs. Besant herself has now cabled her refusal to accept his latest revelation, and discovered that his Mahatma is indeed a fraud—when he “deposes” Mrs. Besant.

My pity is saved for those humbler dupes of the rank-and-file who have trusted these others not wisely but too well. From some of them I have seen pathetic letters; and if any gall has got upon my pen, it is the gall of the bitterness of their disillusion. They are more widely spread, and more worth saving from the quagmire of shams than most people suspect.

I need hardly remark that I was never a Theosophist myself. But my Theosophical sources of information, referred to in the course of the story, have been growing within the Society week by week ever since the exposure began.

There are no signs at present of any intention on the part of the three Theosophic chiefs to return from the various continents to which they departed last July—departed simultaneously with the issue of that “Report of an Inquiry” (so-called) which is the starting-point of these chapters. Mrs. Besant has left Australia to join Colonel Olcott in India; Mr. Judge remains just five days hence at New York. And so, taking a cue from Mahomet and the Mountain, “Isis Very much Unveiled” will now, in booklet form, go out to them.

PART I. THE STORY OF THE GREAT MAHATMA HOAX. — CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. — CHAPTER II. NO MAHATMAS, NO MEMBERS! — CHAPTER III. MYSTIFICATION UNDER MADAME BLAVATSKY. — CHAPTER IV. THE PSYCHICAL RESEARCH EXPOSURE. — CHAPTER V. MYSTIFICATION UNDER MRS. BESANT. — CHAPTER VI. ENTER THE MAHATMA. — CHAPTER VII EVERY MAN HIS OWN MAHATMA. — CHAPTER VIII. THE ADVENTURES OF A SEAL. — CHAPTER IX. THE CLIMAX OF THEOSOPHIC BROTHERHOOD. — CHAPTER X. THE MAHATMA TRIES THREATS. — CHAPTER XI. MRS. BESANT’S COUP DE MAIN. — CHAPTER XII. A MEETING OF THE (THEOSOPHICAL) PICKWICK CLUB. — CHAPTER XIII. QUESTIONS AND CHALLENGES.

“O my Theosophists.... What a pack of fools you are!”—Madame Blavatsky.

This will be one of the queerest stories ever unfolded in a newspaper. Truth, as worshipped by the Theosophists, is indeed stranger than fiction. But it is not here told merely for entertainment. It has also a degree of importance and instructiveness measured by the growing wealth and numbers of the Theosophical Society, and the personal influence of Mrs. Besant. To-day the Theosophical Society numbers some three or four thousand members in Europe, India, and America. It supports two or three publishing businesses and several score of magazines in various languages. It boasts offices and house property in London, New York, and Adyar. It attracts donations and bequests. It numbers a title or two and some money-bags. It consists almost entirely of educated or semi-educated people, many of whom are intelligent, many sincere; a few both. And it is likely, amid that debauch of sign-seeking and marvel-mongering into which a century rationalistic in its youth has plunged in its dotage, to captivate an increasing number of those who are bored with the old religions and yet agog for a new.

It is especially to these that I dedicate the singular narrative which these articles are to unfold. It may save them betimes a painful disillusionment, such as it will, I fear, inflict on many who are as yet numbered among the faithful.

What is the situation at present?

6Everybody knows that Madame Blavatsky, the original founder of the society, supported its pretensions to an occult origin by the production of phenomena which were pronounced by careful investigators to be due to systematic trickery; but which are still believed by the faithful to have been produced at Madame’s request, and in support of the Theosophic movement, by certain Eastern sages possessed of transcendental powers over mind and matter.

Everybody will remember that Mrs. Besant, on whom the mantle of Madame Blavatsky has fallen, made a sensational public assertion, some time after her teacher’s death, to the effect that those “powers” were still at work (they were indeed!), and that she was herself now the recipient of similar “communications” from the “Mahatmas.”

A few people are aware that as the result of a sort of split among prominent members of the society, there was recently a Theosophic meeting at which Mrs. Besant confessed to her friends that there had been something wrong with the “communications” which she had been in such a hurry to announce to the public; made certain Theosophically obscure charges against a brother official of the society; but persuaded those assembled to rest content with a general statement and not to inquire into the facts further—in short, generally to hush the matter up.

This the Theosophists, being a docile folk, conscientiously did; and as the accused proceeded with Mrs. Besant’s sanction to deny, still in general terms, what little assertion of fact Mrs. Besant herself had appeared to convey, after which there was an affecting reconciliation: it is not surprising that to the outside public the mystery remains exactly where it was.

Even of the Theosophists themselves the full facts are only known at present to a few of the inner ring.

In view of what has gone before, this reticence appears misplaced; and as circumstances have put me in possession of the facts, I propose to give them the same publicity as was enjoyed by Mrs. Besant’s original statement.

I propose to show:—

That Mrs. Besant has been bamboozled for years by bogus “communications” 7of the most childish kind, and in so ludicrous a fashion as to deprive of all value any future evidence of hers on any question calling for the smallest exercise of observation and common sense.

That she would in all probability be firmly believing in the bogus documents in question to this day, but for the growing and at last irresistible protests of some less greedily gullible Theosophists.

That the bamboozling in question has been practised widely and systematically, ever since Madame Blavatsky’s death, pretty much as it used to be during her lifetime.

That official acts of the society, as well as those of individual members, have been guided by these bogus messages from Mahatmas.

That the exposure of them leaves the society absolutely destitute of any objective communication with the Mahatmas who are alleged to have founded and to watch over it, and of all other evidence of their existence.

That Mrs. Besant has taken a leading part in hushing up the facts of this exposure, and so securing the person whom she believes to have written the bogus documents in his tenure of the highest office but one in the society.

And that therefore Mrs. Besant herself and all her colleagues are in so far in the position of condoning the hoax, and are benefiting in one sense or another by the popular delusion which they have helped to propagate.

I shall show, finally, that the only alternative to this set of conclusions is another which would be even more discreditable to the personnel of the society, and even more fatal to its continued existence on its present basis.

“If there are no Mahatmas the Theosophical Society is an absurdity, and there is no use in keeping it up.”—Mrs. Besant, in Lucifer, December 15, 1890.

Before going any further I wish to emphasise one point. This society, as such, must stand or fall with its “Mahatmas.” It should be realised how consistent, in one sense, this miracle-mongering side of the Theosophical movement has been throughout the society’s history; what an important part it has played and continues to play in attracting popular interest; and how closely, along one of the versatile thaumaturgist’s many lines, Madame Blavatsky has been followed by her present-day imitator. I say this in justice to the latter, who, I think, may fairly complain of the unkind criticisms passed on his Mahatma-missives by colleagues who still cherish those produced under the auspices of Madame Blavatsky.

It is true that the society does not officially vouch for Mahatmas. It is careful not to demand belief in them as a condition of membership; and the shrewder members are put into a panic by anything which tends to compromise its boasted “neutrality” on this tender subject. But we shall soon see what this “neutrality” is worth.

9Madame Blavatsky taught that “the Masters” are certain sages, several hundred years old or so, who by steeping themselves in the immemorial lore of the East have attained powers transcending time, space, and the other puny limits of Western science. By profound solitary meditation on Things in General, these old gentlemen have arrived at a sort of Fourth Dimension, in which a Soul and a Saucer come to very much the same thing. Their residence was shrouded in a judicious mystery, which Madame declared herself under a solemn oath to preserve. She at first located them in the recesses of the Himalayas; but one of her most zealous disciples lately stated in the Daily Chronicle that “the two principal Mahatmas now reside in an oasis of the Desert of Gobi.” At any rate, these “adepts” prefer a sequestered spot, and remain occult in the strictest sense of the word.

But on some points Madame was unequivocal about them. She declared that she had sat at the feet of one of them as his chela (pupil); that the Theosophical Society was founded under his distinct inspiration; and that he and his brothers continued to intervene in its affairs. The original draft of the Society’s constitution, in fact, like a more authentic Veda straight from heaven, had been “precipitated” in New York by an exertion of the Masters’ psychic force from Tibet. Hesitating converts and dubious subscribers were determined by the same form of interposition; and somebody or other has taken steps, at all times of the society’s history, to ensure that the more faithful of the “chelas” should be comforted and encouraged as need arose, by missives from their invisible “guru.” (A good, imposing word, “guru.” Do you remember the terrible old man by the road in “David Copperfield,” who scared David almost out of his wits by running out on him, and shouting “Guroo, guroo, guroo”?) Mrs. Besant herself has admitted that Theosophy is to be regarded in the light of a “revelation” from these exalted beings, as well as in that of a science or philosophy which can be arrived at by more ordinary means.

In a word, Theosophy without Mahatmas would be “Hamlet” without the Prince of Denmark. “Isis Unveiled” and “The Secret Doctrine” are works which few would be found to wade through 10if their verbose pages were not lightened by associations of that White Magic which lends a creepy interest even to such avowed works of fiction as “Zanoni” and “Mr. Isaacs.” With belief in the Mahatmas must go any believing of “H.P.B.,” who swore to them; and with “H.P.B.” and her authorities must go those two volumes of solemn farrago, which remain the society’s only contribution to philosophical knowledge. For all that is new in them, if there is anything new except the blunders, is explicitly given on the authority of “the Masters.”

The published “Objects” of the society run thus:—

(1) To form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or colour.

(2) To promote the study of Aryan and other Eastern literatures, religions, and sciences.

(3) A third object—pursued by a portion only of the members of the Society—is to investigate unexplained laws of nature and the psychical powers of man.

It will thus be seen that the “phenomenal” side of the society’s activities has all along had a place, though guardedly, even in its published Objects. In point of fact, as I have elsewhere insisted, this third Object is the only one in pursuit of which the society has any substantial achievement to point to. As to the first Object, my narrative will presently suggest the same sort of remark on the brotherliness of the Universal Brothers as has sometimes been made by scoffers on the sociability of Socialists. As to the second Object, it is observed that there are people who study Oriental literatures, and there are people who belong to the Theosophical Society; but they are not the same people. Professor Max Müller has edited the only series of English translations of the Sacred Books of the East with which I am acquainted, and Professor Max Müller lately published some University lectures under the title of Theosophy. But his preface explained that he did so in order to rescue that respectable and ancient philosophical term from the associations of sciolism and miracle-mongering with which the Theosophical Society have linked it in the public mind. In point of fact, there is no reason to believe 11that any member of the society in Europe could pass an examination in any Oriental language whatever. The third Object, on the other hand, has led to some real achievements. The society has not, perhaps, done much in the “investigation” line itself; but members of it have certainly supplied the most astonishing “unexplained laws of nature” and “psychical powers” for investigation by other people. It is this which has given it its success, its growth, its world-wide notoriety. It is this which first attracted and convinced its best-known converts, and it is this which has created the successive “booms” (as they would be called in a more purely commercial connexion) which have produced the biggest crops of entrance subscriptions from the wonder-loving public. I lay stress on this because the Theosophists have shown a good deal of inconstancy in their treatment of the third Object. They have always worked a given marvel for all it was worth until it got somehow blown upon; then they turn round and remark that mere material phenomena are, after all, of no great importance: the thing is the study of those great spiritual ideas which, &c., &c. In fact, they want to have it both ways. Mr. Sinnett, however, whose “Occult World” remains the classic description of Madame Blavatsky as a wonder-worker, confesses candidly in a memorial sketch of her which appeared in the Review of Reviews how much stress she herself laid on such things, as long as she could get anyone to believe in them:—

One could no more write a memoir on trigonometry and say nothing about triangles, than survey the strange career just concluded and ignore the marvels coruscating through it. And at this early period of her enterprise [he means, before the Psychical Research exposure] she seems to have depended more on the startling effect of surprising powers she was enabled to exhibit than on the philosophical teaching ... which became the burden of her later utterances.

Just so. It is easy to hold your miracles cheap—after they have been found out. Madame Blavatsky fell back on Object Two—when Object Three was discredited. But the taste for such things, even when it is de rigueur to describe them as “occult applications of strictly natural laws,” is apt to grow upon any religious sect which once dabbles in them. Mrs. Besant, too, in due course fell a victim to the temptation 12to make capital out of the marvellous; and my readers will now be prepared to put their proper value on the deprecating expressions in this connexion which now, on the inevitable turn of the wheel, once more begin to be heard, and which will be redoubled, no doubt, when this narrative is fully before the public.

“Now, dear, let us change the programme.... He is willing to give 10,000 rupees ... if only he saw a little ‘phenomenon’!”—Blavatsky-Coulomb Letters.

It is no part of my present object to enter at length into the history and character of the late Madame Blavatsky. But a comparison of the earlier phase of the Theosophical Society with that of to-day is so indispensable to the right appreciation of both, that a brief résumé (borrowed mainly from previous sketches of my own elsewhere) may be welcome at this point, even to readers already familiar with the subject.

The Theosophical Society was born in America of Russo-Yankee parentage. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky founded it at New York in 1874, with the aid first of Colonel Olcott, then a kind of journalist, who became, and still is, the president, and soon afterwards of William Q. Judge, then a lawyer’s clerk in Olcott’s brother’s office, who became, and still is, the vice-president.

The previous career of the Foundress had been remarkable enough, if we accept hostile accounts of it—still more remarkable if we accept her own; but with this I am not concerned. From 1874 Madame Blavatsky’s history and that of the Theosophical Society are one.

In 1878 the society moved its headquarters to India, and in the congenial atmosphere of the mysterious East launched into marvels. Eked out by performances not unlike a drawing-room Maskelyne and 14Cook, Madame’s rehash of Neo-platonist and Kabbalistic mysticism with Buddhist terminology soon “caught on” with the impressionable natives. It had especial attraction for the educated and ardent young Babu, that typical product of British India whom Mr. Rudyard Kipling has so often drawn for us. But it also carried away, thanks to Madame’s intense personality—half repulsion, half charm—editors and officials of mark in the sceptical circles of Anglo-India. It made Mr. A. P. Sinnett (then editor of the Pioneer) turn evangelist in “The Occult World,” and Mr. A. O. Hume (then Government Secretary) follow suit with “Hints on Esoteric Philosophy.” And no wonder. Never was a new religion more industriously supplied with miracles—those coups de main célestes, as a witty Frenchman has defined them. Wherever Madame happened to be with a select circle of friends, disciples, or laymen worth impressing, but especially in and about the bungalow at Adyar, near Madras, the society’s headquarters, the invisible Mahatmas were never tired of exhibiting their astonishing psychic powers over ponderable matter. The two who were especially at Madame’s disposal went by the names (reverently breathed) of Mahatma Morya and Mahatma Koot Hoomi Lal Sing. In the region of White Magic they could do almost anything—any feat which an adroitly led-up conversation might happen to suggest. But the particular lines of business (if I may be allowed the phrase) of which they made a speciality were making objects appear and disappear: in Madame’s jargon, integrating and disintegrating them by a psychical command over astral vortices of atoms. Sitting in their studies 2,000 miles away in Tibet, they could, by a mere effort of will, project an astral epistle, or an astral body, or an astral cup and saucer, into the middle of an applauding circle at afternoon tea or picnic in Madras or Bombay. Showers of roses fluttered down from the ceiling. Invisible bells tinkled from none knew where. All kinds of tricks were played with Madame’s interminable cigarettes. Sketches and treatises were psychically “precipitated” on to blank paper, nay, sometimes the very stationery was created out of nothing to receive them. Such inferior sketches, 15too, and such twaddling, such very twaddling, treatises! One disciple—Damodar K. Mavalankar, a youth passionately ambitious of fame—even advanced to the acquirement of some of these extraordinary powers in his own person. Merely to have seen the astral body of a Mahatma became in a manner a cheap accomplishment. Damodar boasted that he had once or twice projected his own—slipping spook-like through a brick wall.

Most of these marvels, as I have hinted, required the mise en scène of the Adyar bungalow. Here Madame and the Colonel, and a few favoured chelas, had apartments. “Our domestic imbeciles” and “our familiar muffs” the latter are termed in one of the letters attributed to Madame. Here, too, in the “Occult Room” adjoining Madame’s bed-chamber, hung the famous “Shrine,” a sort of cupboard containing a fancy portrait in oils of the condescending Koot. This became associated with as many marvels as the image of a mediæval saint. Suppose you are an intending Theosophist—a hesitating convert, especially a moneyed one, like Mr. Jacob Sassoon. You call at headquarters. You are shown round by Damodar, or by M. or Madame Coulomb, librarian and secretary. With natural curiosity you ask to gaze upon the Master’s features. You are told of his indulgent concessions to deserving neophytes seeking for a sign. When the cupboard has been shut again, you are asked if there is anything you particularly desire from the Master. You indicate, not unnaturally, a message. It is about even chances whether the said message—reading generally not unlike Mr. Martin Tupper in his more oracular vein—is discovered in the cupboard immediately on reopening the door, or descends from the ceiling on to the top of your head.

The fame of these things, set out in the driest possible detail in the pages of “The Occult World,” aroused a furore of curiosity in this country, where people were just beginning to take a new interest in questions of psychical research. It was about the time when family circles played the “willing game,” and sat in the dark trying to see purple flames coming out of a magnet. Quick to seize the psychological moment, Madame Blavatsky came to England and “starred” London in the season of 1884. In her train came 16Colonel Olcott and Mohini L. Chatterji. Mohini, a Brahmin graduate of the University of Calcutta, shone like Damodar with a lustre not all reflected. He, it was whispered, was a chela of some attainments. He was not to be touched. He held his hands politely behind him when being introduced. There was a splendour as of some astral oil about his dusky countenance and thick black locks; while his big, dark eyes were as piercing as those of Madame herself. Men gazed on Mohini with awe, and ladies with enthusiasm. In the background hovered the recording Sinnett.

In spite of the disappointing fact that the London air proved unfavourable to miracles, the tale of the Indian ones was greedily drunk in, and Theosophy became the fashionable fad. Society people took to calling themselves Esoteric Buddhists: some were enrolled as chelas at short notice. The Theosophists went the round of the London drawing-rooms, penetrated to provincial towns, were not unheard of at the Universities. Madame rolled cigarettes and swore and talked black magic in the rooms of well-known Cambridge dons, till the hair of undergraduate listeners stood on end. Those were the days when a set of enthusiastic pass-men lived “the higher life” on a course of Turkish baths and a date diet; while three unlucky youths at Trinity nearly poisoned themselves with hasheesh in an attempt to project their astral bodies, and were only recovered at midnight by a relentless tutor armed with the college authority and a stomach-pump.

“Either she is a messenger from the Mahatmas or else she is a fraud. In either case the Theosophical Society would have had no existence without her.”—Mrs. Besant in Lucifer, December 15, 1890.

At the time of the Blavatsky season in London and Cambridge, the lately-founded Psychical Research Society, which had close connexion with the University town, was spoiling for something to investigate, and it decided to investigate Madame Blavatsky. Madame and her friends were delighted with this testimony to the stir which they had made, and entered into the thing with every hope of converting the Researchers. Were they not all ready to asseverate that such-and-such things had indeed happened——in India?

Whatever Theosophists may now say, the ‘S.P.R.’ was certainly not a hostile tribunal. Its very existence and objects were a challenge to the average educated prejudice which assumes that nothing can ever happen in nature which is not accounted for in current scientific textbooks. The society had itself vouched for “telepathy,” and coquetted with “phantasms of the living”; it has since bestowed a statistical respectability on the common ghost. To the miracles of Adyar some of its members had lent a more than friendly ear. One of the most prominent had actually been dubbed a chela. Dr. Hodgson (now secretary of the S.P.R. American Branch), who conducted the Indian part of the inquiry, declared that whatever prepossessions he may have 18had “were distinctly in favour of occultism and Madame Blavatsky.”

When Mr. Hodgson got to India he found people very much excited over some highly suspicious and suggestive letters which had just appeared in a Madras paper, communicated by the Madame Coulomb already spoken of, and alleged by her to have been written by Madame Blavatsky. Mr. Hodgson had to inquire on the spot: first, into the genuineness of these letters; secondly, into that of the missives alleged to have been precipitated by Mahatmas; thirdly, into the credibility of the evidence about other marvels given before the Psychical Committee by Madame herself, Colonel Olcott, Mr. Sinnett, and Mohini. He inquired and investigated for three months; and his report, with copious facsimiles and plans, is on record in Part IX. of the S.P.R. Proceedings (December, 1885).

The allegation of the Coulombs was that the whole series of miracles had been a matter of vulgar trickery, some of which they had been employed to carry out for Madame. During Madame’s absence in Europe, the people at Adyar had quarrelled with them and dismissed the pair, partly for having at various times hinted to outsiders the secrets which they now proceeded to make a clean breast of. The origin of their close relationship with Madame Blavatsky is obscure. She and Madame Coulomb had been associated at Cairo in the seventies in some “page” which the foundress of Theosophy had expressed a wish to have “torn out of the book of my life.” By the foundress’s own account, this torn-out page was such as made it odd that she should pitch on the Coulombs when in want of fit guardians for the sacred Shrine. Mrs. Besant once expounded to me a theory that Madame did this, with the full foreknowledge that frauds would follow and would discredit her and her Masters, partly from a sublime benevolence towards the wicked Coulombs, partly because it was necessary that she should herself “have her Calvary.” It was the same combined motives, no doubt, which led Madame Blavatsky to act more than once exactly as if Madame Coulomb had some secret hold over her. An agitated telegram from Paris, however, failed to heal the present rupture; and the result was the giving to the press of a long series of letters in Madame’s hand, teeming with veiled instructions to the Coulombs which fitted in at every point with their accounts of jugglery at Adyar.

19The Coulomb story tallied also with equal accuracy with such outside circumstantial evidence as happened to touch it. Did Madame Coulomb allege that a “miracle” was worked by the substitution of one vase for another exactly similar, the shop she named proved to have record of the purchase of just such an exact pair just before the date of the miracle. Did she make a similar statement about a “miraculous” shower of roses, the like corroboration would be forthcoming. Did her husband describe the famous “Shrine” cupboard as a trick-cabinet with three sliding panels in the back, the panels had to be admitted, and explained by Madame as “for convenience of packing in case of removal.” It had hung against a hidden recess in the wall—there was the recess, the coincidence had to be deplored as unfortunate. On the other side of that recess, in Madame’s bedroom, the sideboard had a false back—that, too, was to be seen, and the Theosophists must content themselves with alleging that M. Coulomb had made it so after the miracles, and in the nick of time for the inquiry. As for the scribbled instructions and letters in which some of these arrangements were clearly hinted at, Madame was driven to the peculiar course of admitting some letters and even parts of letters and denying the rest. This, by the way, was exactly what she had done about a similar incriminating letter on the subject of a trick “missive,” which was planted on Mr. C. C. Massey, in 1882; the discovery of which led to the resignation of that gentleman and others from the Society.

As for the evidence of Madame and her friends about special “phenomena” it had already so melted away under the application of ordinary evidential canons as to leave the field clear for the Coulomb theory. The “tests” with which in some cases the Mahatmas had insisted on supplementing the credibility of their witnesses were as worthless and disingenuous as all the rest.

Last, what of the Mahatma missives?—precipitated from the Himalayas, speaking in the persons and signed with the superscriptions of Mahatma Morya and Koot Hoomi Lal Sing. These precious documents, which had been rained among the faithful with a copiousness almost amounting to garrulity, had been a little discredited already. The prosy and sometimes illiterate verbiage of the Tibetan sages was a severe trial to the enthusiasm of 20the more critical Theosophists even where it was apparently original. But it was too much of a good thing when a long doctrinal treatise, which Koot Hoomi had addressed to Mr. Sinnett, was found to be a gross plagiarism from a lecture by an American gentleman which had been reported in a Spiritualist paper a few months before. Nor did it mend matters when, after considerable delay, the illustrious Koot condescended to the newspaper arena, and wrote—we mean precipitated—an explanation which for its evasiveness and general “thinness” is probably unique even in the records of convicted plagiarists.

But now came worse. For the same scrutiny which had identified Madame Blavatsky as the writer of the unblushing letters to Madame Coulomb now found exactly the same characteristics of expression, turns of phrase, and solecisms in spelling in the compositions of Koot Hoomi Lal Sing. As to handwriting, it was shown that the styles of the two august correspondents had been evolved gradually by differentiation from Madame’s ordinary hand. The facsimiles in the report deal only with “K.H.” documents; but the case against those of “M.” is just as strong. I showed a mass of “M.” script, which lies before me as I write, belonging to the earliest period, to a Theosophist well acquainted with Madame’s writing, and in perfect innocence he at once took it for hers. At that time almost the only difference between the two Mahatma scripts was that one affected red pencil or ink, and the other blue.

FACSIMILE OF MAHATMA M.’S SIGNATURE. FROM AN EARLY BLAVATSKY MISSIVE.

In a word, it was declared that Koot Hoomi Lal Sing and Mahatma Morya were the same person, and that person Madame Blavatsky. When a missive from the Himalayas floated down into the neophyte’s lap, it was Madame’s own hand which had prepared it, though it was the 21no less useful if humbler function of M. Coulomb to jerk it from the ceiling at the critical moment with a string, or deftly pass it through the sliding panel into the closed Shrine.

Passing by the committee’s report on Madame Blavatsky herself, what of her leading disciples? Of Colonel Olcott it was declared proven that in a Theosophical connexion he was either unable to describe anything as he really saw it, or else to see anything as it really was. Mohini and Mr. Sinnett were disposed of in much the same way. Damodar—the astral Damodar—was charged explicitly as a confederate of Madame in missive-manufacturing. Mohini, the fascinating saint, hurried back to India with a damaged halo. Mr. Sinnett has since sprung to fame as a director—not of the regeneration of mankind, but of the Hansard Union. Damodar announced that he was off to find his guru in the Himalayas, disappeared, and has not been seen since by his friends.

William Q. Judge, having been left out in the cold when the hegira to India took place, lived to fight another day, as we shall see. Mrs. Besant had not yet loomed on the Theosophical horizon. Madame Blavatsky herself left England and travelled till the storm had blown over. To the S.P.R. Report no serious answer has ever appeared from that day to this; and it fairly killed the miraculous phenomena. One class of them has reappeared under the ægis of Mrs. Besant; but poor indeed, as we shall see, is the Late Besantine period of mythological architecture beside its gorgeous predecessor.

“I look to possible developments of her Theosophic views with the very gravest misgiving.”—Charles Bradlaugh, National Reformer, June, 1889.

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”—Hamlet.

I have said that the Psychical Research Report put a stop to most of the Theosophic miracles. But there were obvious reasons why the Mahatmas should continue to “precipitate” letters, even when the scoffs of a hard, cold world drove them to restrain their wonder-working propensities in other respects. The business was so beautifully safe and simple. It defied “tests.” The task of proving that a scribble in red chalk on a scrap of paper found in a disciple’s pocket is not the authentic handwriting of an inaccessible teacher, whose devotees have doubtless the best reason for knowing that he can never be produced as a witness—this is a task from which the boldest sceptic might well recoil.

But what of the actual process of “precipitation”? Alas, it appears to be surrounded by disappointingly obscure conditions. It is not given to see the scrap of psychically-manufactured notepaper glimmer into being and become cream-laid out of nothing before one’s eyes, nor to watch the mystic characters form themselves in lines along it like the writing on Belshazzar’s wall. It is always the finished result that is discovered ready-made, and this precisely resembles what is produced if you or I write it in the ordinary way. The “precipitation,” in fact, is a deed of darkness, and can only be done concealed from view, just as mediums are wont to declare at a séance that the spirits are prevented from manifesting themselves by the mere presence of a sceptical inquirer with a box of wax vestas. Perhaps 23it is another side of the same retiring instinct which impels the Mahatmas to live only in parts of the earth not penetrated to by vulgar explorers. Theosophists sometimes speak as if they had seen the actual precipitation; but cross-examine any credible witness, and he will reluctantly admit that he has not. This is a point to note and bear in mind.

The Mahatma missive only becomes a matter of difficulty when it has to be made to drop from the ceiling into the recipient’s hands, or spirited into a cupboard found one moment before to be as empty as Mother Hubbard’s. Those were stirring days for Theosophic neophytes when that kind of thing was a common incident. But, ichabod! that glory is departed! Its departure precisely synchronised with that of the nimble-fingered Coulombs. Their graceless avowal that both special plant and skilful confederates were required for this kind of miracle may have been a gross calumny on their employer; but the fact remains that with the removal of the panel-backed Shrine at Adyar and the dismissal of its custodians, the Masters abruptly ceased to resort to these more surprising methods of aërial post.

Occasionally they would make the assurance of the faithful doubly sure by artlessly “precipitating” the message inside a sealed envelope (a species of “test” of which more anon); but for the most part they were content to endorse letters passing through the ordinary post or discovered by the recipient in his blotting-pad under circumstances equally consistent with a commonplace human agency.

Such was the state of things till Madame Blavatsky’s death.

But then came the rub. What the Psychical Research Committee held to be proven was that Madame had written practically the whole body of these documents with her own hand. What, then, if after her decease in May, 1891, the same missives continued to be received?

Before the controversy which sprang up again over her ashes had well died down, the public was asked to believe that this was indeed the case, on the word of a woman whom it believed incapable of making a statement of the kind without having first proved it to the uttermost and found it true.

24Speaking in the Hall of Science on August 30, 1891, three months after Madame Blavatsky’s death, Mrs. Besant said:—

“You have known me in this hall for sixteen and a half years. You have never known me tell a lie. (‘No, never,’ and loud cheers.) I tell you that since Madame Blavatsky left I have had letters in the same handwriting as the letters which she received. (Sensation.) Unless you think dead persons can write, surely that is a remarkable fact. You are surprised; I do not ask you to believe me; but I tell you it is so. All the evidence I had of the existence of Madame Blavatsky’s teachers of the so-called abnormal powers came through her. It is not so now. Unless even sense can at the same time deceive me, unless a person can at the same time be sane and insane, I have exactly the same certainty for the truth of the statements I have made as I know that you are here. I refuse to be false to the knowledge of my intellect and the perceptions of my reasoning faculties.”

It is no wonder that the reporter had to interpolate the word “Sensation.” The audience was one rather of Freethinkers than of Theosophists; the hall itself was identified with previous rhetorical successes of Mrs. Besant as the prophetess of Materialism. The thing was dramatically done, and was well calculated to impress on the outside public the fact that the personal reputation of Mrs. Besant for intelligence and honesty was now pledged to the genuineness of Theosophical wonder-working. In an interview in the Pall Mall Gazette of September 1, 1891, Mrs. Besant carried her statement still further, and pledged herself definitely to “precipitation”:—

“‘These letters are from a Mahatma whose pupil you are?’

“Mrs. Besant nodded assent.

“‘Did they just come through the post?’ our representative asked.

“But here he had hit the mystery.

“‘No, I did not receive the letters through the post,’ the lady replied. ‘They did come in what some would call a miraculous fashion, though to us Theosophists it is perfectly natural. The letters 25I receive from the Mahatmas are “precipitated.”’

“‘How “precipitated”?’ ...

“Mrs. Besant was quite ready to explain.

“‘Well,’ she said, ‘you can hear voices by means of the telephone, and receive a telegram which is actually written by the needle, not merely indicated by its ticks. The Mahatmas go a step further. With their great knowledge of natural laws they are able to communicate with us without using any apparatus at all.’

“‘But can you give me any details of the precipitation?’

“‘No; the Mahatmas only communicate with pupils who will not unwisely divulge anything. You can easily imagine the reason why this knowledge should be kept so secret. Were it possessed by a criminal it might be put to dreadful purposes.’ ...

“Mrs. Besant repeated that she had made her startling statement in the lecture deliberately, adding that there were many persons who knew her and would accept her statements as true, but who might not believe in Madame Blavatsky, because, Mrs. Besant was careful to add, they had not enjoyed the advantage of knowing that lady.”

Mrs. Besant did not overrate the extent of her public credit. She was implicitly believed by many who would not have troubled their heads at all over an assertion of Madame Blavatsky’s. A “boom” was the immediate result—the second big boom in the society’s history. Mrs. Besant had the satisfaction of seeing her statement honoured with a salvo of leading articles. “Can it be,” the Daily Chronicle exclaimed, “that there are things in heaven and earth which philosophy and science have not yet dreamed of?”—(Daily Chronicle, August 31.) And it opened its columns to a flood of correspondence on Theosophy and things occult. Day after day a crop of letters attested the public appetite for the marvellous.

The Theosophical Society has a sort of Press department, the business of which is to get up sham fights in newspapers in order to advertise the society; and whenever the excitement 26seemed to flag some member or other contributed a screed which revived it. The time was well chosen. It was the “silly season,” and under cover of Mrs. Besant more cautious papers than the Chronicle were glad to let the Mahatma divide attention with the sea-serpent and the giant gooseberry. The Theosophical Society reaped a fine harvest; though some complaints were heard that the new inquirers after truth addressed themselves more to the marvels which had attracted them than to the philosophisings to which Mrs. Besant had designed the marvels as a bait. However, if their interest was tepid on this side of Theosophy, their curiosity on the other side achieved small gratification. In Mrs. Besant’s words, “The Mahatmas only communicate with pupils who will not unduly divulge anything.”

But, as we have seen, what Mrs. Besant did divulge was enough to convey to the public certain definite impressions: to wit, that she had received letters in a certain handwriting, which did not come through the post, but “in what some would call a miraculous fashion,” and that these letters were, in fact, “precipitated” by the Mahatmas out of thin air. Also that she had satisfied herself of the above propositions by evidential processes as certain as the assurance of her own “sense” and “reasoning faculty” that her audience were before her as she spoke.

And now let us see what were the facts on the strength of which Mrs. Besant made these astonishing statements. So far, I have been occupied necessarily with putting on record matters of history open to any careful student of the subject. From this point I shall be dealing with a side of Isis which up to this moment has been kept closely veiled indeed.

“Answer the question I’ve put you so oft.... Give us a colloquy, something to quote. Make the world prick up its ear!”—Master Hugues, of Saxegotha.

“Thus has a Master spoken, and ... the word of a guardian of the Esoteric Philosophy is authoritative.”—“Introduction to Theosophy,” by Annie Besant.

Madame Blavatsky died May 8, 1891. Who was to succeed her as hierophant of the mysteries of Tibet? There was none among her disciples who could aspire to fill that rôle with anything resembling the hierophantine proportions of Madame herself. But Mrs. Besant, whose conversion had been much advertised to the public, was undoubtedly more fitted to pass muster as a prophetess than any of the others.

The brief and late character of her acquaintance with Madame was rather in her favour than otherwise, since it had left undisturbed in her ardent mind a loftier conception of Madame’s ethical character than had been affected for some time past by some who had known her longer. Mrs. Besant was even understood to be in some sense designate for the succession.

Officially, however, she was subordinate to Colonel Olcott, the president, then in India, and to Mr. William Q. Judge, vice-president, and head of the faithful in America.

It soon appeared that the latter gentleman, at any rate, did not mean his claims to Theosophical prominence to be ignored.

In reply to the announcement of “H.P.B.’s” death (Theosophists are wont to refer to their foundress, as the ancient Hebrews to the Deity, under the guise of initials) Mr. Judge promptly cabled to

Avenue-road was at first inclined to resent this ukase.

But Mr. Judge soon put a new face on matters when he arrived. That was a time of sore searchings of heart. With “H.P.B.’s” death the society’s one link with its unseen guides was broken, and “Masters” had let a fortnight elapse without giving any sign that they survived the decease of their high-priestess. William Q. Judge was to change all that.

On the evening of May 23 (he lost no time after his arrival), Mr. Judge suggested to Mrs. Besant that as they were in sore need of some assurance from Masters, they should repeat an old recipe of Madame Blavatsky’s for bringing those august beings to a point. He proposed that they should write a certain question on paper, put it in an envelope, shut that into a certain cabinet in “H.P.B.’s” room at Avenue-road, and invite the Masters to “precipitate” replies.

Mrs. Besant agreed. Mr. Judge himself wrote the question and closed the envelope, and put it into the cabinet.

Mrs. Besant did not stay in the room through the process of incubation. For “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear,” the Theosophic scripture reads, “He that hath eyes to see, let him put his Head in a Bag.”

After due delay, Mr. Judge took the letter out again. On his showing it to Mrs. Besant, judge of that lady’s emotion at the discovery that at the end of the question stood the word

traced apparently in red chalk; also, a little lower down, the words

with the impression, in black carbon, of a peculiar seal, representing a cryptograph M. (A simple way to produce this appearance is to hold a seal in candle-smoke and impress with that.)

THE “MAHATMA’S SEAL.”	IMPRESSION SHOWING CRYPTOGRAPH.

29What need of further witness that the thing was the result of psychic “precipitation” from Madame Blavatsky’s “Mahatma M,” away in Tibet? If that gentleman had not, in his communications to Madame, been observed to use a seal, still he certainly used to scribble them in the same sort of red chalk, and he certainly used to sign himself similarly M.

Note one point here. It was not Mahatma M, but Mahatma K.H., who used to be the more prolix correspondent in Madame Blavatsky’s time, and whose handwriting appeared accordingly in copious specimens and comparisons with her own, in the published Report of the Psychical Research Committee.

No specimens were there given of the writing which Madame called Mahatma M’s: there were but a few scraps of it available.

When, therefore, Mr. William Q. Judge conjured a letter from him (I use “conjure” in its old-fashioned sense, of course), it was not possible for Mrs. Besant to compare it with any published specimens of the same script (with private specimens I fancy she had never been favoured), even if the extremely scanty and hurried nature of the message, and the temper of Mrs. Besant’s mind had not in themselves forbidden any such partial measure of verification.

It is true that a few months later Mrs. Besant felt able to affirm with the utmost confidence (as we have seen) that the handwriting was “the same as that which Madame Blavatsky was accused of producing,” and this at first sight appears to refer to the “K.H.” script, which afforded the gravamen of Mr. Hodgson’s Report. In that case what Mrs. Besant asserted was that the writing was the same as that which was not even supposed to be by the same person.

Next morning, there was a meeting of the “Inner Group,” at which Mr. William Q. Judge at once took up that position of Senior Chela to which his services as postman of the Mahatmas so well entitled him. There is some oath or other of equality with fellow-members 30and of obedience to its head which members of this Esoteric Section have to take: Mr. Judge pointed out that it was quite unnecessary for him to take this oath.

To which end he produced not only a letter from Madame Blavatsky, but one from Mahatma M, which he had personally received in America, he said. Its contents he did not feel able to communicate to others who could not yet aspire to be on corresponding terms with the Great Unseen: what he did show was the signature and seal impression (which exactly resembled that “precipitated” in the cabinet overnight). He specially begged those present to take note of the seal; “for,” said Mr. Judge, “they might have need to recognise it on some future occasion.”

With eager eyes they all obeyed; each aspiring young chela fluttered with the hope (for Mrs. Besant had noised the cabinet business about, and it seemed to rain missives) that he too might soon be blest with one.

Mr. Judge is a man of some foresight. But that was not precisely what he had in his mind when he bade them note the seal.

Three days after this (May 27) there was a meeting of the Esoteric Section Council, to decide how the section should in future be governed, its head being gone.

It had been expected that Mrs. Besant, having assumed the rôle of Teacher and Expounder in succession to her friend, would succeed her also as official head of the Esoteric Section Council. But William Q. Judge had drafted a plan under which the Council was to dissolve, and its powers be delegated to Mrs. Besant and himself as joint “Outer Heads”—the Inner Heads being, of course, Mr. Judge’s august correspondents in the Himalayas.

Mrs. Besant, it seems, was more than content, in view of Mr. Judge’s newly-developed occult powers, with a position of “high collateral glory.” But it was hardly to be expected that the scheme should not be exposed to some discussion and criticism from other 31members of the Council. At any rate, the Mahatma evidently deemed the occasion to be a dignus vindice nodus. For what happened?

As Mrs. Besant, who took the chair and expounded the new scheme, was turning over her papers on the table, there fluttered out a little slip of paper, at which she just glanced, and was about to put it by, when William Q. Judge pointedly asked her what it was?

The slip of paper bore the words in red pencil—

Signature and seal as before.

Tableau!

Round it went from hand to hand. None questioned that paper and script alike had just been “precipitated” into their midst by “the Master.” Thanks to Mr. Judge’s foresight, as we have just seen, all were in a position to recognise the seal.

Under these circumstances discussion was obviously out of place. William Q. Judge at once went and took his seat at Mrs. Besant’s side, and “Judge’s plan” was unanimously adopted!

It will hardly be believed, but it is, nevertheless, a fact, which I challenge Mrs. Besant to contradict, that when that lady, on a public platform, pledged the evidence of her senses, her sanity, and her reasoning faculties, &c., &c., to having received messages from the Mahatmas—messages which, as she assured the subsequent interviewer, came “not through the post” but by “precipitation” “in a way which some people would call miraculous”—these two documents, produced as has been described, and only these, were all the pièces justificatives that she had to go upon.

But the vice-president’s Mahatma had only made a beginning. There was more, much more, to come. It will be my privilege to present the reader, in succeeding Chapters, with facsimiles of several of his more interesting compositions.

“The T.S. is the agency chosen by the Masters ... but They do not directly guide, save where guidance is strenuously sought and eagerly obeyed.”—“Introduction to Theosophy,” by Annie Besant.

It was not surprising that the Vice-President, finding the Mahatma so complaisant, should hasten to exploit him to the utmost. The resumption of the broken communication could not fail to restore the confidence of doubting disciples both in the society itself and in the favoured chela, who could not only, Glendower-like, “call spirits from the vasty deep,” but also, to the satisfaction of Theosophic Hotspurs, “make them come.” Forthwith letters began to be showered about among such persons as it was considered desirable to keep up to the mark, in which the sentiments of William Q. Judge were endorsed by the Mahatma. Of those two it might truly be said that “their unanimity was wonderful.”

One of the first recipients was Mr. Bertram Keightley, a gentleman whose services to Theosophy have been of a material kind, and whose zeal has been rewarded more than once by gratifying marks of approbation from Tibet. In fact, his experience, like that of Countess Wachtmeister and some other liberal friends of the society, suggests the formula: “Put a donation in the slot and you will receive a revelation.” For the Mahatma obligingly honours the bills of the society.

COLONEL H. S. OLCOTT.

(From a photograph by Messrs. Elliott & Fry, Baker-street, W.)

33Under date May 29, 1891, the Vice-President wrote to Mr. Keightley from Avenue-road a Pauline epistle, in which he says:—

Fear not, Bert! Masters watch us, and since May 8 have sent word here in writing.

Close beside the signature of “William Q. Judge” appeared in solemn confirmation the M signature and seal impression—“precipitated,” doubtless, during transit among Her Majesty’s mails. As the recipient was at Adyar, Madras, and therefore, some thousands of miles nearer the home of the Mahatmas than Mr. Judge, it will be seen to what roundabout methods the Master was compelled in order to maintain his determination to have his messages ushered into the world in some connexion or other with the one favoured disciple.

Another recipient was important for other reasons than Mr. Keightley. Babula, a low-caste Hindu, formerly Madame Blavatsky’s personal servant, was at this time in a position of trust at the Theosophic quarters at Adyar. Since then he has got into trouble with his employers, like others of Madame’s former confidants. But in July, 1891, Babula was still in authority at Adyar, and the vice-president thought it worth while to convince him that he, Judge, was his friend. A letter, dated some weeks later than Mr. Keightley’s, from Avenue-road, terminated with the signature,

Under the words “Your friend,” the ever-officious Mahatma has drawn a line, at the end of which he has solemnly inscribed “YES,” and his signature and seal. The seal is, as usual, impressed in black carbon; the writing is in red pencil; and Judge’s signature is in ordinary ink.

Pity that the famous Mr. Codlin had not a Mahatma to back him thus conveniently in his asseverations that “Codlin’s the friend, not Short.”

34Parallel to this corroborative use of the Mahatma’s seal, though belonging to a different period of the story, was the case of another letter of Mr. Judge’s to a brother official, in which, after expressing certain views, Mr. Judge used these words:—

I believe the Master agrees with me, in which case I will ask him to put his seal here.

Plump on the written word came the seal. Inimitable Mahatma!

Mrs. Besant’s previous “communications,” as we have seen, did not come through the post. But during that July Mr. Judge seems to have left Mrs. Besant’s side for the express purpose of enabling his Mahatma to give her an exhibition of his powers in this special line of “precipitation” during postal transit.

July 21, 1891, was the date of one such performance; which included signature and seal complete. I pass over this and some equally commonplace missives, which Mrs. Besant received at various dates, all equally under Mr. Judge’s auspices, in order to deal more fully with one particular one in which she was favoured with a “test condition.”

For lo! on cutting the envelope open in the usual way, along the top edge, Mrs. Besant observed a line or so of pencilling inside written partly on the upper flap, partly on the under flaps, of the adhesive part of the envelope.

Here was proof indeed of powers occult! For this must obviously have been written or “precipitated” after the envelope was stuck up: and there it was inside! For a Mahatma, of course, it was as easy to produce it so as in any other way. He might do it in mere artless absence of mind.

Ingenuous Mrs. Besant! Unfortunately for the test, the feat is equally easy for any commonplace mortal—though in his case it would hardly be done quite artlessly. The trick was first shown me by a student of “occultism”—a Theosophist, in fact. But it is a very old affair, and can be found in any book of parlour magic. It might be called “Every Man his own Mahatma.”

35An envelope has four flaps. Three of these are stuck together in manufacture, but with a much less adhesive sort of gum than that which is put on the remaining flap to be stuck up by the user.

ENVELOPE, INSIDE VIEW.	OUTSIDE VIEW, SHOWING INSERTION.

It is generally quite easy to insert a penknife behind the bottom flap, as in the accompanying cut, and so make entrance and exit for a slip of paper. On this slip you write the words backwards, as they would appear in a looking-glass, using a black pencil of the “copying” kind. You then pass the slip in, push and shake it into the right position, press till you feel sure the inside flaps have taken the impression, and then out with your slip by the door it came in at. Moisten and fix the flap again, and the “precipitation” is complete. A child can do it.

A Mahatma, of course, produces the result by mere psychic effort. But it is a curious coincidence that M on this occasion abandoned his usual red pencil for the black one which you or I would use if we were playing just the trick described.

No doubt he felt that a more satisfactory test would have been wasted on Mrs. Besant.

Others, however, were a little more exacting. The story enters here on a less smooth course.

“O that Heaven had set a seal upon men, that we might know them, honest from dishonest!”—Euripides.

From the previous record of Colonel Olcott—described by Madame Blavatsky herself, in an epigrammatically candid moment, as “a psychologised baby”—he is almost the last person whom one would have expected to lead the way in any sceptical examination of “miracles.”

And no doubt he might have been content, like Mrs. Besant, to open his mouth and shut his eyes and take whatever Mr. Judge should send him, so long as that gentleman’s thaumaturgy was confined to benefiting the common cause. But it was another matter when the vice-president’s Mahatma showed a tendency to favour the vice-president, and that at the expense of the president himself. Had the oracle said “Olcott’s plan is right,” and declared that Olcott was the “friend,” “not Lancelot nor another”; had it made Olcott, and not Judge, Outer Head with Mrs. Besant—the president’s ears might have been an inch longer, and the course of Theosophic history have been changed.

But there was, from the first, about Mr. Judge’s Mahatma a certain crudity, a lack of tact in dissembling favouritism, which was bound, human nature being what it is, to make enemies.

On the decease of “H.P.B.,” President Olcott, like Vice-President Judge, had hurried to the headquarters at Avenue-road. He had to come from India, however, and the American disciple naturally out-ran him. When the former arrived, the latter’s Mahatma was already in full swing. On hearing of his performances with the seal, a look of more than usual intelligence may have crossed the president’s mild and venerable features; but, like Brer Rabbit, he wasn’t “sayin’ nuffin,” “he just lay low.”

37That busy July, ’91, the period of Mahatma M’s greatest activity, was also marked by the assembling at Avenue-road of one of the periodical conventions of Theosophic Europe. Some conversation occurred between the president and vice-president about the expenses of this convention, and the former, being “H.P.B.’s” legatee, mentioned a happy thought of his, of selling some of the jewels that lady had left behind her, and giving the proceeds as her posthumous contribution to the expenses.

But here, too, Mr. Judge was prepared to “go one better,” as his countrymen say, than the president-legatee. He responded airily that Colonel Olcott need not trouble himself about it, as “Master” had promised him (Judge) that the cash should be forthcoming, and also that he would convey a “message” on the subject to Olcott himself.

The Colonel waited for his message. None came.

The Colonel jogged Mr. Judge’s memory. Mr. Judge said he had no more to tell.

But that very day, on sitting down at his writing-table, and lifting up a piece of blotting-paper, the Colonel found under it a piece of peculiar paper, reading as in the following facsimile (reds and blacks as per former samples):—

38Now, Colonel Olcott thought he recognised that particular quality of paper, and also, so far as it was legible, that seal-impression. The facsimile here necessarily makes it much clearer. In the original the impression was curiously faint and vague, as if the Master did not wish, in the Colonel’s case, to burst that seal upon him all at once; but preferred the manner of Tennyson’s Freedom, who “part by part to men revealed The fulness of her face.”

So Brer Rabbit continued to say nuffin’, and to lie low.

Presently Mr. William Q. Judge left on the same writing-table the following note (being scribbled on a torn-off scrap of paper, it also has rather a Mahatmic look. But that is accidental):—

“Dear Olcott” “looked” accordingly; and sure enough, in the ordinary envelope of a letter, previously opened and put by on the table, there was a piece of paper bearing a message with all the proper Mahatma-marks about it. And this time the Mahatma had taken heart and “precipitated” a decently clear impression of the seal.

And then the Colonel “smiled a sorter sickly smile.” For now he did recognise that seal. And this is its story.

Back in the palmy days of 1883, or ever the marvels of “H.P.B.” were besmirched by slanderous tongues, the Colonel was in a certain city of the Panjab. Passing an Urdu seal-engraver’s shop in the bazaar, he turned in and ordered the man to make a seal bearing the cryptograph signature which “H.P.B.” identified as that of the “Master of Wisdom,” Mahatma Morya.

39What did the Colonel want the seal for? Let him explain himself:—

An idea occurred to me (he writes) of sending through “H.P.B.,” as a playful present to my Master M, a seal bearing a facsimile of his cryptograph.

An odd idea, this “playful present” of the Colonel’s. Had the seal been intended for use by an ordinary person—by “H.P.B.” herself, for instance—there would have been some sense in it. But the Mahatma, of course, who “precipitated” his letters and his signature psychically, might just as well “precipitate” the latter in the shape of a seal impression as otherwise, if he wanted to; and where, then, should the use of a brass seal come in? However, as the Colonel says, the present was merely “playful.”

Back went the Colonel to Madras, where Madame was, and presented the seal to her, with a “jocular remark” (I am again quoting his own account). Madame’s keen eye dwelt on it a moment, and then she pointed out that the Colonel, in his jocularly playful mood, had made a slight mistake. “The Master’s cryptograph was not correctly drawn,” according to the pattern already familiar to recipients of his precious missives. There was a twiddle too much, or a twiddle too little, in it. The Colonel himself saw the blunder when it was pointed out, and he now declares that he would know it anywhere.

For this sufficient reason the “playful present” was not sent on to the Himalayas (Heaven knows, by the way, by what astral form of parcels-post service the Colonel had expected it to be sent); neither did it appear in any of the communications vouched for by Madame.

It went into Madame’s despatch-box, along with a lot of other mystical odds and ends, properties of the occult stage; and among these it was remarked, as late as 1888, by the Mr. Keightley already mentioned, who was then living with her in Lansdowne-road.

This gentleman asked the prophetess what the little brass seal might be? Madame Blavatsky’s answer—a characteristically racy “fragment of her prophet voice”—was:—

In the same year, at a time when William Q. Judge was staying with Madame, Mr. Judge’s Mahatma evidently determined to overlook the inaccuracy in the seal, and to make use of it for the first time to save himself the trouble of a psychic signature.

He did this, of course, in a letter of Mr. William Q. Judge’s own, and in a sense endorsing Mr. William Q. Judge’s wishes—in fact, the letter was the one recorded in the last chapter, in which the Master’s seal came so plump upon the disciple’s prayer for a sign.

I have not mentioned before, however, that the recipient of this ’88 letter was Colonel Olcott. He presumably recognised, then as now, his own “playful present,” his own “flap-doodle”; but he appears to have let it pass in silence.

From this date the seal seems to have disappeared from among Madame Blavatsky’s belongings. It was, of course, intrinsically valueless.

But in 1890 it turned up again—in New York, and in close contiguity with Mr. Judge. Madame sent a message through Mr. Judge to a disciple, then in America, who happened to be the Mr. Keightley who had remarked the “flap-doodle of Olcott’s” at Lansdowne-road. The context, which is before me as I write, shows that Madame was persuading this disciple to take some course distasteful to him. Judge added his persuasions to hers. But what was bound to determine the disciple was the discovery on receiving the missive from Mr. Judge’s hands, that the Mahatma had added his vote in transitu by endorsing the word “RIGHT,” in red pencil, with cryptograph and impression of the Panjab seal.

Mr. Keightley, too, must have recognised the “flap-doodle”; but he, too, like Olcott, said never a word. He did, indeed, go so far as to ask Judge if he had affixed the seal? But on receiving a blandly surprised assurance that Mr. Judge did not so much as know there was a seal affixed, he let the matter drop.

These are, so far as I know, the only two instances in evidence of the use of this peculiar seal in Mahatma missives during the lifetime of 41Madame Blavatsky, and, as was to be expected from her objection to the seal, neither missive was among those vouched for by her, for the message from herself to New York was telegraphed, and it was the telegraph-form at the New York end that the Mahatma endorsed. Nevertheless, it is clear that no intimate of Madame’s would get hold of the seal and make use of it for bogus Mahatma missives under her very nose, unless he were under the impression either that she had it for that purpose herself, or that she might be relied on at least not to “peach” on a chela who used it.

But why did neither Colonel Olcott nor Mr. Keightley speak? The only answer I can suggest is that while Madame Blavatsky was in the flesh the faithful thought twice before they expressed a doubt about anything or anybody. They were accustomed to take their marvels as they found them, and be thankful.

Otherwise, they might at least have pointed out to Mr. Judge, in order that he might in turn apprise his Mahatma, whose supernal knowledge seems here to have been somewhat at fault, what a fatal blunder he was making in palming off upon the faithful a bogus edition of his own cryptograph, known as such by three of the faithful themselves.

However, there are the facts; and but for the Mahatma’s trop de zéle in pushing his favourite chela’s occult claims immediately on Madame Blavatsky’s decease, I fear we should never have been vouchsafed this instructive side-light on an earlier period of the Theosophical Society.

These Adventures of a Seal supply the clue to the great game of bluff between the two highest Theosophical officials which must be depicted in the next chapter.

“To form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity.”—Theosophical Society, Object I.

“Pestling a poisoned poison behind his crimson lights!”—“Maud.”

We left the president of the Theosophical Society staring at the impression of his own “flap-doodle” seal on that which purported to be a missive from the Mahatma.

The purport of the missive was precisely what the prescient Judge had foretold. Colonel Olcott was not to sell the Blavatsky jewels, as the money would be provided.

Having shown it to a brother member, the Colonel replaced it in the envelope, and went off to have a few words with Mr. William Q. Judge.

He remarked to Judge that he had missed a certain brass seal from among Madame Blavatsky’s relics, and described the Panjab seal and the story of its making; not mentioning, however, the name of the exact city where it was made. Had Judge seen the seal?

Judge answered in the negative. Upon which the Colonel remarked meaningly (I quote his own account) that he “hoped no scoundrel would get possession of it, and use it to give colour to bogus Mahatma messages,” adding that he would at once recognise an impression from the seal.

He did not mention that he had looked for and found the missive in the envelope.

43After two days he looked into the envelope for that missive again. It was gone!

Some judicious hand had removed it. “Judicious,” says the Dictionary, “literally: of or pertaining to a Judge.” Colonel Olcott concluded with some assurance that the hand which had removed that missive, the hand which had put it there, and the hand which had written it, were one and the same hand, and that hand William Q. Judge’s. That is a conclusion which we must leave the two gentlemen to settle between them.

But note the sequel. The writer of the missive, whoever he was, was as good as his word.

When the Convention in due course was held, it was announced that a donation had been contributed towards the expenses in a peculiar way.

There had appeared to one of the brethren one afternoon a dark and mysterious Oriental figure, who gave no name, but deposited two Bank of England £10 notes (from Tibet?), which were backed with the familiar red cryptograph, after which he, like Mr. Lewis Carroll’s Snark, “softly and silently vanished away.”

It will not surprise the astute reader to learn that the brother favoured with this substantial spectre was William Q. Judge.

Well, there was the £20, and the vice-president’s reputation as an occultist stood higher than ever. There was a time, years before, when the society had made much of a similar vision of its president’s, one which, the Colonel used to explain, had first assured him of the truth of Madame Blavatsky’s doctrines. On his asking for a sign, the Colonel’s figure, which was, of course, like Mr. Judge’s, the “astral body” of a Mahatma, had materialised its turban, and disappeared into several yards of substantial textile fabric. “And here,” the Colonel was wont to conclude the story, “here, you see, is the turban!”—whipping it from his coat-tail pocket. Ah! that was in the palmy eighties. But now where was he? What was a chela who conjured up a turban beside one who could conjure up £20 hard cash—“on the table,” as Hilda Wangel would say?

In a word, Colonel Olcott was altogether thrown into the shade by 44this bold stroke, and had not even the face to suggest that perhaps Mr. Judge’s story was only a donor’s graceful way of conveying assistance from his own pocket. The Colonel pulled rather a sour face, however, over the heavy sum with which the society’s chest was debited when Mr. Judge’s expenses at the Convention came to be paid. For, Judge having attended in his official capacity, it was the Colonel’s treasury at Adyar which had to foot the bill. Personally, I consider the miracles cheap at the price.

This reminds me of the matter of Madame Blavatsky’s Rosicrucian jewel, in which also the Mahatma stole an amusing march on the Colonel. This was a pendant set with gems, which had the property of changing colour with every change in Madame’s health—so she and the faithful Olcott used to swear. The Colonel had his own ideas about the future of this mystic gewgaw; but what was his disgust on getting to Avenue-road to learn that the Master had sent a message for it to be given to Judge, and that Mrs. Besant had accordingly handed it over! Nor was the Colonel’s chagrin lightened by the fact that the forgetful Mahatma attempted (through Judge, of course) to put him off the track of the jewel by a message to quite another effect—an exceedingly misleading message.

For all I know, the gift was as valueless intrinsically as the brass seal; but Theosophically it was a distinct score for Mr. Judge and his Mahatma thus to amalgamate the two mystic apparatuses in one firm’s hands, so to speak.

After the passages described above, Mr. Judge’s Mahatma was chary of subjecting any more epistolary efforts to the eye of Colonel Olcott. And he seems to have become more cautious altogether. In the following September, however, he succumbed to the temptation of intervening again in the administration of the society. A letter with the usual trimmings was enclosed to the Inner Group, bearing upon its constitution and future changes, in one of Mr. Judge’s on the same subject and in the same sense (September 14).

45Just at this time Colonel Olcott was visiting America, en route for Japan, where he was to teach the Buddhists their own religion in a flying visit. He took the opportunity of making some more pointed representations to Mr. Judge on the vagaries of his Master.

The result was prompt and significant.

During the very next month Mrs. Besant, then preparing for her trip to India, received a cablegram from the vice-president in America to this effect:—

You are desired not to go to India remain where you are grave danger Olcott await further particulars by an early mail.

At Avenue-road this mysterious telegram was at first read in the sense, “Grave danger to Olcott.” The president was just then due at Tokyo, and there was a report of an earthquake thereabouts. For a while there was a great flutter over this convincing case of Mahatmic prescience. When, however, the “early mail” arrived with Mr. Judge’s explanatory letter, quite a different complexion was put on the telegram. After reading this letter, and one from the inevitable Mahatma which Mr. Judge enclosed, the conclusion of the Inner Group was that the “grave danger” against which the Master warned Mrs. Besant was “from Olcott.” The Tibetan founder of the society, in short, warned Mrs. Besant against imperilling her safety in the neighbourhood of its president!

The Mahatma had declared war on Colonel Olcott.

This was the first shot in the campaign.

But what could this danger from Colonel Olcott be? Mr. Judge and his Mahatma left that darkly vague. Some of their friends in England dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s for them. It is hardly credible, but the suggestion was nothing less preposterous than that Colonel Olcott intended to poison Mrs. Besant!

I have no great veneration for Colonel Olcott’s character, and none at all for his intelligence; but I frankly apologise to him for having to mention this astounding nonsense in connexion with his name. I 46mention it simply in order to explain one of the documents which follow, and to throw a light on the minds of the colleagues who made or believed the charge; and I suppose I need scarcely add that I attach to it no other value whatever. Colonel Olcott is about as remote as it is possible to conceive from the sort of stuff of which murderers are made. I am sure he never had and never will have any more intention to poison Mrs. Besant, or anybody else, than the Man in the Moon. Having said so much to make any misunderstanding impossible, I return to the suspicions or pretended suspicions of the Colonel’s professed “Brothers.”

Positively, the only material which these ladies and gentlemen had to work on was an innocent conversation of the Colonel’s with a friend on the subject of poisons, Indian and other, which took place at a date when Mrs. Besant was not yet even a member of the society! The “evidence”—save the mark!—was such as ordinary non-Theosophical folk would not give even a dog a bad name on. But Mahatmas and their friends are different, and Mr. Judge’s Mahatma was well served. For this trivial episode, buzzed about from mouth to mouth in connexion with the sinister hints of “Mahatma M,” sufficed to make this monstrous charge against their president currently believed at Avenue-road, for some weeks at least, by the very inmost and governing circle of his colleagues, with Mrs. Besant at their head!

A belief once discarded, it is easy to deny that it ever existed. But this particular belief, or half-belief, showed itself in action. Mrs. Besant deferred her visit to India, and to impatient Indian disciples wrote that “Master had forbidden her to come,” and “till that order was countermanded” she would not budge.

Now just pause a moment, and enjoy the exquisite irony of this unique situation. The Theosophic Society was to be “the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Mankind.” At this moment, taking the three chief exponents of this new Brotherliness, the president believed the vice-president to be fabricating bogus documents; the vice-president apparently 47believed the president to have designs to poison the high-priestess; and the high-priestess, having these two beliefs to choose from, coquetted at least, as we have seen, with the more heinous of the two.

Other Theosophists appear from their course of action to have accomplished the intellectual feat of believing both.

“Be these juggling fiends no more believed, that palter with us in a double sense!”—“Macbeth.”

“Masters, it is proved already that you are little better than false knaves.”—“Much Ado About Nothing.”

While the Mahatma was thus stealthily undermining the president, he was also busy strengthening his own outworks. In December one of the doubting ones, the Mr. Keightley who had been making up his mind whether to believe his own eyes ever since June, 1890, received in India a letter from Mr. Judge fortifying him against the heterodox influences to which he would be exposed on Colonel Olcott’s return to that country.

Mr. Judge warned his “dear Bert” that Olcott would try to shake his faith in the genuineness of Mr. Judge’s Mahatma-missives; that he might even have the baseness to suggest that they were fabricated by Mr. Judge himself. On opening this letter, Mr. Keightley found a small slip of peculiar paper, which turned out (on a prosaic scrutiny) to be the sort of tissue which is used to separate the sheets of typewriting transfer paper. On this slip appeared in Mahatmic script the words:—

There was, however, no seal impression. The Mahatma had grown chary of using that seal. From the material of this missive we gather that the Mahatma is not so remote from typewriters as one would 49expect in the Himalayas; from its diction we learn that, whatever the failings of his English, the august being has a racy command of Yankee.

I may remark here that when Mahatmas “precipitate” their own notepaper, as well as the writing upon it, it has always been the etiquette that the former should have an Indian look about it, however European the latter might be. Even tissue, as in this case, is considered more in keeping than commonplace stationery, with, perhaps, the watermark of some English firm upon it. But the “make” preferred, alike now and in the Blavatsky days, is a peculiar sort of hand-made rice-paper, which the Psychical Researchers had some difficulty in tracking to the maker’s. They were not assisted by Colonel Olcott. But now, the same mystic paper having turned up in the productions of Mr. Judge’s Mahatma (borrowed, perhaps, at the same time as the seal?) the Colonel resolves the mystery at once. Wishing to suggest that Mr. Judge got it ready-made from Madame Blavatsky, he mentions that Madame had gone about with a good supply of it, adding that it was originally bought in Cashmere. He had bought it himself at Jammos, in fact, as long ago as 1883, just as he had also been the purchaser of the brass seal; and just as he explains that the seal was got merely as a “playful present,” so he represents the original purpose of the Cashmere stationery as the humble one of “packing books—it being both cheap and strong.” From parcels post to astral notepaper is a distinct rise. But who first promoted it? Another side-light unintentionally thrown on the old Blavatsky days!

But to return to Mr. Judge’s Mahatma. His last attempt to bring Colonel Olcott to a better mind by persuasion was made that autumn. In October he had resorted to a bold device for overcoming scepticism, which he and Mahatma Koot Hoomi had patented in the early Blavatsky days—that of waylaying (astrally, of course) the post-bag of some disconnected and quite unconscious correspondent of the sceptic, and so introducing a message through an obviously untainted channel. For instance, Mr. Hume once “got a note from Koot Hoomi 50inside a letter received through the post from a person wholly unconnected with our occult pursuits, who was writing to him on some municipal business.” (“Occult World,” p. 21.) The letter happened to have a large and noticeable envelope, and long after, in the days of disillusion, Mr. Hume discovered that Madame’s servant Babula had carried off just such a letter from the postman for Madame, and then returned it to him with an apology for the mistake. (S. P. R. Report, p. 275.)

In October, then, Colonel Olcott, who was just returning to India, got a letter from a Mr. Abbott Clark, of Orange County, California, a gentleman who was under no sort of suspicion of having anything to do with Mahatmas. And in this, if you please, there had somehow found its way into the envelope a slip of paper bearing a message in the M script, with signature, but with seal too blurred to distinguish, in facsimile as follows:—

51

So much is in the usual red pencil; the part represented by shading above is smudged, as is the red blotch which represents the 52seal, apparently by being rubbed with the finger. Across a margin of the paper is the following postscript, in the black carbon usually devoted to the seal impression:—

Rather cryptic, this missive; but the meaning seems to be this. The Mahatma has to explain to the suspicious Colonel several things: why the missives habitually come in letters from Mr. Judge; why, nevertheless, Mr. Judge knows nothing of them; why he, the Master, has used a bogus seal which bungles his own cryptograph; and, above all, why the impressions of that seal have been illegible ever since an exposure of it was threatened. He hints, accordingly, that he “uses” Mr. Judge to assist in some undefined psychic way in the precipitation process; but Judge’s part in this is unconscious—it must be “when he does not know.” Also, the thing precipitated “fades out often”—and plump on the word comes an illustration.

In saying that “Judge did not write Annie” (i.e., Mrs. Besant, for this spirit is a familiar one), the Master is misinformed, as we have seen. Mr. Judge had just “written Annie,” enclosing the Master’s own warning against Colonel Olcott. Lastly, the remark 53about “facit per alium” (the Mahatma can use a tag of lawyers’ Latin on occasion) seems to mean that when Colonel Olcott had the “flap-doodle” seal made he was unconsciously prompted by the Master himself, who had now adopted it, overlooking the blunder in engraving. The prescience which foresaw that the “precipitation” would give out in just this letter is no less remarkable than that which provided for an unexpressed doubt by the assurance, “No, it is not pencil.”

But for Colonel Olcott the gem of this letter was none of these. It was the reference to the Panjab seal as the “Lahore brass.” All that Mr. Judge knew, as we have seen, was that the seal was made at a “certain city in the Panjab.” Mr. Judge’s Mahatma assumes that this city was the capital of the province. It was a likely guess—a good shot, if such a phrase may be used of the mental processes of a Tibetan sage—and one calculated to end the Colonel’s doubts—if correct. But that is just what it was not. The city at which the Colonel got the seal was quite another city; so the Mahatma, though he hints that he psychically presided over the purchase, does not even know where that purchase took place!

The result of this unlucky lapse of memory on the part of the Master was that the missive made bad worse. Despite the distance of California, where Mr. Clark’s envelope was posted, from New York, and the offices of Mr. William Q. Judge, the Colonel suspected Mr. Judge’s hand in it. He wrote to Mr. Clark, and discovered that Judge had spent two days in Orange County at the very date when the Master availed himself of Mr. Clark’s envelope. Thereupon the Colonel formed his own ideas as to how the Master had “used” his favourite chela on that occasion.

Can we wonder that the Master was incensed by this incorrigible scepticism—a spirit, as the Colonel himself had formerly taught, and as the event was to prove but too surely—fatal to Theosophy?

Persuasion failing, the Master resorted to threats!

In January, 1892, the Colonel received an amicable letter from Mr. Judge, reproaching him for not writing. On opening it, he found 54written along the margin of the first page the following laconic message in Mahatma script (signed, but again no seal: much reduced here):—

“Him” presumably means Judge. The bearing of the threat will be intelligible to readers of the last Chapter. Certain rumours from Avenue-road made it intelligible also to Colonel Olcott. The Master of Wisdom, the unapproachable sage of the Himalayas, He-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed by Mrs. Besant and the whole Theosophical Society, had thrown off the mask of benignity. Here he was plainly adopting, as a weapon against his own unlucky president, that impossible accusation which represents the lowest point of ethical squalor yet touched, in this story at any rate, by Theosophic “brotherhood”! This was miching Mallecho, thought the Colonel; it meant mischief with a vengeance. The voice was the voice of the Mahatma, but again the Colonel thought it the hand of Judge. So he wrote with some natural heat to ask that gentleman what he meant by his “base insinuation.”

Only to receive, however, the blandly innocent reply:—

I have puzzled my head over your reference to “poison,” as if in one of mine; as I never referred to it I cannot catch on, and have given it up in despair.

After this the Colonel seems to have given the Mahatma up in despair, too. But the Mahatma, on his part, was busily pushing up a column to take the Colonel in the flank, and bring this story to a crisis.

Secure in the support of Mrs. Besant, he was to make the pusillanimous president resign his office, and to enthrone William Q. Judge in his place!

“I did my utmost to prevent a public Committee of Enquiry of an official character.”—Mrs. Besant at T.S. Convention, July 12, 1894.

How even a “psychologised baby” like Colonel Olcott came to succumb to a movement for ousting him from office, backed by such methods as we have examined, is to me a mystery. No doubt he had his own reasons for avoiding a contest in disclosures with his old colleague Mr. Judge, who knows so much about Theosophy ever since the days of its foundation. At any rate, succumb he did. On receiving an emissary from Avenue-road, early in 1892, he threw up the cards in the unequal game with the Mahatma, and formally resigned his presidency.

Then was seen a touching sight. Cæsar pushed away the crown. Mr. Judge was loth to succeed. Who could doubt it? Why, he got a “message” countermanding the resignation, and forwarded it to the Colonel (March, 1892), just too late to be acted on before the American Convention in April, which, with decent reluctance, acclaimed Mr. Judge for the vacant office.

But now came a hitch. Colonel Olcott took the anti-resignation message au grand sérieux. He forgot all his doubts about Mr. Judge’s Mahatma missives in his simple joy at the tenor of this last one. It was but a typed copy which Mr. Judge sent him. Never mind, it was a declaration of peace; and if ever there was a man of peace it is the Colonel, despite his American brevet. He could not 56disobey the Master; he did withdraw his resignation. Such was his answer to Mr. Judge.

Mr. Judge expressed his delight. But in absence of mind—possibly excess of joy—he quite forgot to mention either the Master’s message or the Colonel’s consent at Avenue-road when, in the following July, the time came to make his succession to the Colonel’s office definite.

The result was that Mr. Judge was then and there elected president for life. Some voices were for a term; but Mrs. Besant arose in her eloquence and “swept up the floor” (in the phrase of one Theosophic enthusiast), and the election was “for life.” Alas! Contracts entered into for that period are notoriously apt to give out at an earlier date.

Perhaps one thing which explains the Colonel’s small show of fight is the fact that he was to be consoled with an “Olcott Pension Fund.” Unhappily the treasurer defalcated some eight or nine thousand rupees, and then committed suicide. Ill-luck seemed to dog the vanquished president.

But now came the turn of the tide.

On the announcement of Judge’s election, Colonel Olcott indignantly wrote to Avenue-road to point out that there was no vacancy. And he printed in the Theosophist the Master’s message which had led him to withdraw his resignation.

He did more. The Theosophist, the official journal of the Indian section, has come to be Colonel Olcott’s private property, just as Lucifer is Mrs. Besant’s, and The Path Mr. William Q. Judge’s—an illustration of the odd mixture of private and official capacities in this society. And now the Colonel plucked up heart to publish in his paper the first note publicly heard of criticism—yes, actual criticism—of Mr. Judge’s Mahatma.

Privately, there had been some troubled bleatings heard already among some of the less docile of the Theosophic sheep. Mr. Judge had been obliged to take up the cudgels for the merits of some of his Mahatma missives as philosophic compositions. I find him claiming (in the true oracular spirit) that:—

57A very truism, when uttered by a Mahatma, has a deeper meaning for which the student must seek, but which he will lose if he stops to criticise and weigh the words in mere ordinary scales.

A sentiment printed with approbation in Mrs. Besant’s paper. Again, he is parrying inquisitive questions about the Master’s seal. He “does not know” what they mean. An inquirer sends him a sample letter with a good impression to look at—one which had come from Mr. Judge himself, I presume—and gets it back with the impression rubbed out (“it fades out often,” as we have seen above), and the puzzled remark from Mr. Judge, “Where is your seal? I don’t see one.” Finally, pressed, Mr. Judge declares that “Whether He” (the Master) “has a seal, or uses one, is something on which I am ignorant.”

It was on this statement—which involves a total lapse of memory on Mr. Judge’s part of events narrated in Chapter V.—that he was challenged in the Theosophist of April, 1893, in an article signed by Messrs. W. R. Old and S. V. Edge, both T.S. officials (secretaries, Indian section). The article is hardly what would be called trenchant by non-Theosophical standards. But it just pointed out that little discrepancy in a polite foot-note; and that was enough.

If there is one thing more than another which is deemed to be bad form in circles Theosophical, it is to corner a Theosophist on a definite matter of fact. Anything undraped in verbiage is considered nude, even to indecency. The voice of questioning has to be stifled at once.

By virtue of their joint position as Outer Heads of the Esoteric section, to which they were elected under warrant of the very seal in question, Mrs. Besant and Mr. Judge promptly “suspended” Messrs. Old and Edge from their Esoteric membership.

In December, Mrs. Besant went to India. She had, therefore, thrown over the Mahatma’s warning. But she had not thrown over the Mahatma—not a bit. She declared that nothing on earth would induce her to give up believing that the missives were indeed 58“precipitated” by Mahatma M, unless Mahatma M in person appeared and repudiated them. If a person who had been told that the Man in the Moon daily “precipitated” the Times leading articles should decline to be convinced of the contrary till he heard it from the lips of the Man in the Moon himself he would probably be “of the same opinion still” for some considerable time.

In India, Mrs. Besant suddenly changed her mind. Had the Master indeed appeared and fulfilled her conditions? She does not say so. Yet it can scarcely have been on any mere, dull ground of fact and argument. She was presented with a set of depositions establishing all of the substantial facts of this narrative, given under the names of those personally cognisant of them, with Colonel Olcott at their head, and summed up in the form of certain definite charges against William Q. Judge. But many of these facts she already knew herself, as well as anybody, and made naught of.

What did work the miracle, then?—As far as I can make out, it was this. Mrs. Besant sat at the feet of G. N. Chakravati. And G. N. Chakravati just mentioned that he did not believe in Judge.

This is the Hindu gentleman who was sent to represent the Theosophical Society at the Chicago Parliament of Religions, at an expense of £500. This is the teacher who has made “Annabai” so far a Hindu that she now protests against harsh mention even of the child-widow horrors, the 12,000 temple prostitutes of Madras, and the other religious indecencies of Hinduism. As Mr. Bradlaugh led Mrs. Besant from the Church to Materialism, as Mr. Herbert Burrows went hand-in-hand with her from Materialism to Madame Blavatsky, as Judge made her believe in Judge, so she could only abandon Judge with the aid of G. N. Chakravati. Whatever the explanation, the fact remains that, blessed by this worthy pundit, the case formulated against Mr. Judge became strong—convincing—irresistible. Mrs. Besant’s mind blossomed in a day into the full-blown view that she had been deluded, that Judge had himself written the missives to which she had pinned her faith—written them all with his own hand.

59Appalling bathos!—and one which an Enquiry must needs result in publishing to all the world. Yet an Enquiry there must be. The Indian section was threatening to secede from the society if Mr. Judge’s presidency were confirmed with the scandal unsifted. Judge himself, offered the alternative by cablegram of resigning all his offices quietly or facing a “full publication of the facts,” replied in a defiant sense which showed his conviction that there were others to whom “full publication of the facts” (which it was easy to threaten, but which it has been left for an outsider to carry out) would be more ungrateful even than to himself. What was Mrs. Besant to do?

A happy thought struck her. She offered to adopt the charges, turn prosecutor, and conduct the case against Mr. Judge herself.

The signatories of the evidence were delighted—especially Colonel Olcott, who got behind Mrs. Besant now with the same alacrity as previously behind Messrs. Old and Edge.

By this bold, yet simple stroke, the evidence, documents, and whole control of the case passed into Mrs. Besant’s hands, where they, as she fondly hopes, or hoped, now remain.

Not altogether!

The Chairman felt it his imperative duty to demand of the hon. gentleman whether he had used the expression “a humbug” in a common sense?

Mr. Blotton had no hesitation in saying that he had not—he had used the word in its Pickwickian sense. (Hear, hear.) He was bound to acknowledge that personally he entertained the highest esteem for the hon. gentleman; he had merely considered him a humbug in a Pickwickian point of view.

Mr. Pickwick felt much gratified by the candid explanation of his hon. friend. He begged it to be at once understood that his own observations had been merely intended to bear a Pickwickian construction. (Cheers.)—The Pickwick Papers.

We have now seen how, step by step, as by a resistless nemesis the rival Theosophical leaders were led on to bring their quarrel to that which neither of them had much stomach for—an inquiry into evidence. Bluff meeting bluff, the thing got as far as the summoning from three continents of a Committee of Investigation representing both parties. “Investigating” hidden forces in nature, as we saw in Chapter II., is one of the professed “Objects” of the Theosophical Society. The present chapter is to show what the Theosophical idea of investigating is like.

There lies before me a pamphlet, reprinted from Lucifer of August last, which bears the facetious title, “AN INQUIRY Into 61Certain Charges against the Vice-President, Held in London, July 1894.” Anybody is at liberty to get this publication—and make what head or tail of it he can.

BADGE OF THE T.S.

The plain matter of fact which lay behind the proceedings in question was this. Mrs. Besant and Colonel Olcott had given away their friends and compromised with Judge on the terms that he should give Olcott back his presidency, Judge’s election thereto being declared null and void, while they on their part should suppress the evidence which the Judicial Committee had been summoned to report on.

Mr. Judge had protested in a vehement circular, when first called on by the President to appear before the committee, against one of his accusers proposing to preside at his trial. There was reason in the objection at the time. He could not foresee that the proceedings would take the form of the presiding judge and the counsel for the prosecution combining to prevent the case from going to the jury.

This being the plain English of the affair, let us now see how it reads translated into what I may call Theosophistry.

The first part of the pamphlet consists of the Judicial Committee’s minutes. Of this, six-sevenths is devoted to an “Address of the President-Founder” proving that they ought to do nothing. The remaining page is devoted to doing it.

The “charges of misconduct preferred by Mrs. Besant against the vice-president” are nowhere formally stated at all. They are incidentally summarised by the president as follows:—

“That he practised deception in sending false messages, orders, and letters, as if sent and written by ‘Masters.’ ... That he was untruthful in various other instances enumerated.”

The bulk of the address is occupied in discussing with great solemnity various reasons alleged by Mr. Judge why these charges should not be gone into by the committee.

One or two of these, such as the vice-president’s discovery that he had never been really vice-president at all, and the contention that, whichever 62way the decision went, it must “offend the religious feelings” of some member or another, and that this was against the rules of the society—these were, after the due amount of pomposity, declared against by the president.

But there were two other pleas of such irresistible force and weight that the president found himself convinced by them “that this inquiry must go no further.” Stripped of prolix circumlocutions, these may be put as an alternative, thus:—

Either the Mahatma missives are genuine or they are fabricated.

(a) If found to be genuine, that implies the affirmation of the existence of Mahatmas as a Theosophic dogma, and the abandonment of the society’s precious “neutrality.” Which is unconstitutional.

(b) If found to be bogus missives produced by the vice-president, then it is obvious that he must have done it in his private capacity; the production of bogus documents being no part of his official duties. Therefore he cannot be tried for it by an official tribunal.

Could anything be more delicious than this dilemma? It is worthy of a trial scene in Gilbertian comic opera.

Mrs. Besant, like the president, was “convinced that the point was rightly taken.” There was nothing more to be said.

The Judicial Committee “resolved” in the same sense, without any inconvenient discussion, and forthwith committed hara-kiri with the complaisance of a Chinese nobleman. Not only had they not investigated the case, but, as far as I can make out, they had not even heard what it was, except in the most abstract of summaries. Having gravely adjusted the bandage over each other’s eyes, they separated with a good conscience. For many of them—worthy investigators!—I believe I am the first to remove the bandage, and set them blinking at the truth.

From (a) it follows, as the president pointed out en passant in the course of his Address, that every Theosophist is in future free to circulate Mahatma messages, but no Theosophist to test their genuineness.

From (b) it equally follows that no officer of the society is in future responsible to it for any misdeed whatever, since such misdeed cannot well be among his official duties.

63Perhaps it is not very surprising that the result of the Judicial Committee, which had been gathered to its task from the ends of the earth, was received with disgust by the generality of members then met in London for one of their interminable conventions. A demand was even heard for a private jury of honour; or, failing that, for publication of the case for both sides, the course to which one side, as we saw, had affected to pledge itself. Mr. Judge found himself unable to refuse his assent to the jury proposal. Again Mrs. Besant dashed in and triumphed in the sacred cause of obscurantism. At the third session of the convention she announced that she and Mr. Judge had agreed upon a couple of statements representing their different points of view, and proposed that the convention should hear these, accept them, and let the matter drop. These two statements compose the second part of the pamphlet; and they are at least as bewildering as the first.

“We come to you, our brothers, to tell you what is in our hearts,” Mrs. Besant read out. Her endeavour to “tell” fills four pages. The following are the sentences which gyrate least round the point:—

I do not charge, and have not charged, Mr. Judge with forgery in the ordinary sense of the term, but with giving a misleading form to messages received psychically from the Master in various ways.... Personally I hold that this method is illegitimate.... I believe that Mr. Judge wrote with his own hand, consciously or automatically I do not know, in the script adopted as that of the Master, messages which he received from the Master, or from chelas; and I know that in my own case I believed that the messages he gave me in the well-known script were messages directly precipitated or directly written by the Master. When I publicly said that I had received, after H. P. Blavatsky’s death, letters in the writing that H. P. Blavatsky had been accused of forging, I referred to letters given to me by Mr. Judge, and as they were in the well-known script I never dreamt of challenging their source. I know now that they were not written or precipitated by the Master, and that they were done by Mr. Judge; but I also believe that the gist of these messages was psychically received, and that Mr. Judge’s error lay in giving them to me in a script written by himself and not saying so.... Having been myself mistaken, I in turn misled the public.

The rest of Mrs. Besant’s statement is easily summarised. Part is devoted to minimising the importance of the question whether Mr. 64Judge wrote, or the Mahatma precipitated, the letters, by remarking that after all it did not matter so very much, as Mahatmas sometimes communicate (like spiritualist “controls”) by allowing ordinary people to write for them. “It is important,” quoth Mrs. Besant, naïvely, “that the small part generally played by Masters in these phenomena should be understood”—a remark with which the present writer quite agrees, and a main object of the present narrative. But in the sense in which Mrs. Besant meant it, it was not very relevant to an inquiry entirely dealing with letters passed off as having been precipitated, and precipitated without Mr. Judge’s knowledge, by the Mahatma himself.

Beyond this, Mrs. Besant’s statement consists about equally of blame directed at the untheosophical “vindictiveness” of Mr. Judge’s accusers in pressing an inquiry “painful” to Mr. Judge, and of laudatory tributes to the character and Theosophical activity of Mr. Judge himself.

Down Mrs. Besant sat, and up rose Mr. Judge, and read his statement. It contained the following sentences:—

I repeat my denial of the said rumoured charges of forging the said names and handwritings of the Mahatmas, or of misusing the same.... I admit that I have received and delivered messages from the Mahatmas ... they were obtained through me, but as to how they were obtained or produced I cannot state.... My own methods may disagree from the views of others.... I willingly say that which I never denied, that I am a human being, full of error, liable to mistake, not infallible, but just the same as any other human being like to myself, or of the class of human beings to which I belong. And I freely, fully, and sincerely forgive anyone who may be thought to have injured or tried to injure me.

Now, so far as these sentences were an answer at all to such charges as Mrs. Besant’s statement had allowed itself to convey, they were certainly a flat contradiction. But that point was naturally overlooked by eyes moist from the affecting “forgiveness” of Mr. Judge’s peroration, and his very handsome, if somewhat tautologously expressed, admission that he was only a “human being.” Without a word more, nemine contradicente, it was

65Resolved: that this meeting accepts with pleasure the adjustment arrived at by Annie Besant and William Q. Judge as a final settlement of matters pending hitherto between them as prosecutor and defendant, with a hope that it may be thus buried and forgotten, and—

Resolved: that we will join hands with them to further the cause of genuine brotherhood in which we all believe.

These resolutions were proposed by the Mr. Keightley (M.A. Cant.) whose name has occurred so often in our story among the bamboozled ones, and seconded by Dr. Buck, one of the nominees from Mr. Judge’s section to the abortive committee.

And there ends the Pamphlet—and the “Enquiry.” It has since appeared that the “joining of hands” between Mrs. Besant and Mr. Judge was for footlight purposes only; for no sooner was the curtain rung down than the two joint Outer Heads found they could no longer work together, and settled the matter by splitting the Esoteric section into independent dominions, Mr. Judge taking America, and Mrs. Besant Europe—to which she has since added India.

The result is one on which Mr. William Q. Judge must be congratulated. He retains all his offices as head of his lodge, of his section, and of the American Esoteric section; retains his vice-presidency of the whole society; retains the status of heir-presumptive, at least, to the presidency; retains, also, I suppose, either he or his Mahatma, the brass “flap-doodle,” to say nothing of the Blavatsky relic, with full freedom to continue using the same as heretofore.

In a word, the Theosophical Society has chosen to stand or fall with its vice-president.

Theosophy is a religion as well as a philosophy, and the T.S. masquerades as in some sort a Church. Imagine the situation, then, in any other religious denomination. Suppose that the Archbishop of Canterbury were to put forth missives which he alleged to have fluttered down direct from St. Augustine in heaven; and suppose after Convocation had governed the Church for years in conformity with 66directions so received, the Archbishop of York were to declare at a Church Congress his belief that his esteemed brother, whose services to the Church were beyond all praise, had written the missives himself, an expedient “which I personally hold to be illegitimate,” but into the details of which he begged the Congress not to pry: suppose, then, that the Archbishop of Canterbury on his part declared himself, like Mr. Pickwick, “much gratified with the candid explanation of his hon. friend,” that he “merely considered him a humbug in a Pickwickian point of view”—supposing all this, can you imagine the Church Congress rising as one man to “bury” the dispute, and “join hands” with the embracing disputants?

Probably not. But then, as Mrs. Besant remarked, the “standards of the world” are “lower” than those of the Theosophical Society—and of the “Pickwick Club.”

Nevertheless, I must ask leave to break in on the harmonious scene with a few troublesome questions.

“Next in importance, or perhaps equal in value, to Devotion, is Truth.”—Circular on “Occultism and Truth,” signed by H. S. Olcott, Annie Besant, B. Keightley, &c., July, 1894.

In my first chapter I set out certain conclusions. In succeeding chapters I have given the facts on which my conclusions were based. I now assert that the evidence for those facts, be it good or bad, is that of the Theosophical leaders themselves, written and signed as the case against the Vice-President, and adopted by Mrs. Besant as true. If it be not true, then Colonel Olcott, Mr. B. Keightley, Mr. W. R. Old, and the other official witnesses must be guilty of a conspiracy, as I said at the outset, “even more discreditable to the personnel of the society.” It is not I who accuse Mr. Judge. It is Mr. Judge and his colleagues who accuse each other. The rank-and-file of the Theosophists have paid their money; they may now take their choice.

The fact is, before Mrs. Besant got hold of the evidence, at least one set of complete and duly witnessed copies had been made, together with facsimiles of the documents. It is these which lately fell into my hands, under circumstances which left me free to take, as I do take, the moral and legal responsibility of that publication which the president first promised and afterwards shirked.

In regard to Mr. William Q. Judge, vice-president, I do not feel called on to labour any theory of my own as to 68that gentleman’s character and conduct. As the Society for Psychical Research long ago remarked, the precise line between rogue and dupe in the Theosophical Society has never been easy to draw. On any view of Mr. Judge I have at least as much respect for him as for his virtuously vacillating superior, whose mind seems to have been made up for him from one stage to another by whatever party happened to be at the moment nearest and most peremptory. With the facts of the preceding narrative before him, the reader can form his own opinion about both officials.

Equally unable am I to state what Mr. Judge’s own version of Mr. Judge’s acts may be. I have read and re-read his “statement” at the “Enquiry,” and his circular issued just previously. In these I have groped—faint, yet pursuing—among the mazes of that Theosophical verbiage which always seems to be coming to the point; but for me at least it has never quite got there. Where the denials are most explicit, the thing denied is vaguest; where admission is most candid, the thing admitted is least relevant to the issue. Mr. Judge admits, for instance, that he is a “fallible human being”; he denies that he has “forged.” I, for one, should never dream of disputing either position. The verb, to forge, definitely connotes in English the imitation of the signature of a person who really exists, and who has also an existent banking account. The worst I should dream of imputing to Mr. Judge in this connexion is the imitation of someone else’s imitation of the feigned signature of somebody who never existed.

Mr. Judge must see that between the mere human fallibility to which he confesses, and the felony of which no one has accused him, it does not need a sensitive ear to distinguish whole octaves of intervening notes. Thanks to Mrs. Besant, he has not yet been obliged to locate himself at any one point of the gamut. But, for all I know, he may now come forward and twit his associates with deficient humour for not seeing that the whole thing was just a rollicking hoax. Throwing off the rôle of an interpreter of Tibet, he may appear as William Q. Judge, the American Humorist. He might fairly claim that many have performed under a like title much less divertingly. He 69might say that the joke was so obvious that it never struck him his colleagues would take it seriously; that their evident determination not to spoil sport was an invitation no joker could have resisted; and that he only kept it up so long for the fun of seeing, through a graduated scale of absurdity, how much they really would stand. Of course, to carry through a big practical joke one may be excused a few taradiddles, to which the moralist might apply a harsher name. No doubt some might question the taste of making a friend’s funeral the starting-point of even the most innocent mauvaise plaisanterie. But American humour has never spared the cemetery.

From my own position, then, and Mr. Judge’s position, I now pass to Mrs. Besant’s. This is interesting from its bearing on the curious psychological puzzle offered by Mrs. Besant’s own mind, to the study of which she herself continually invites the public. Let us accept the invitation for a moment.

I take Mrs. Besant’s statement at the so-called “Enquiry,” that she believed now that Judge wrote with his own hand the missives which he had induced her, and she had induced the public, to regard as precipitations from Tibet of the kind which “some people would call miraculous.”

Apparently Mrs. Besant considers that this avowal sufficed to clear her honour towards her colleagues and the public whom she had “misled.” To me it appears admirably calculated to mislead them again. Remember, even those whom Mrs. Besant was addressing—much more the outside public—were ignorant of the facts. Mrs. Besant had taken good care of that.

They did not know, as the reader does, the circumstances which surrounded these various missives: The “Master Agrees” missive, the Telegram missive, the Cabinet missive, the “Note the Seal,” the “Judge’s Plan is Right,” the “Judge is the Friend,” the Envelope Trick, the “Withold,” the “Master will Provide,” the Bank-note, the Inner Group, the “Grave Danger Olcott,” the “Judge is not the Forger,” the “Follow Judge and Stick,” and the Poison Threat 70missive—as I have severally named them.

Referring to those circumstances, as the reader now knows them, I ask of what did and does Mrs. Besant mean to convict Mr. Judge?

If Judge “wrote with his own hand” the answers got from the cabinet oracle (May 23, 1891), did he also use sleight-of-hand or some similar artifice to make her accept the answers as precipitated in a sealed envelope in a closed drawer?

If Judge “wrote,” &c., the slip “Judge’s plan is right,” the sudden appearance of which among Mrs. Besant’s papers made her and him joint officials on May 27, 1891—did he also place it among those papers on purpose to be so discovered?

If Judge “wrote” &c., Mrs. Besant’s message of July 12, 1891, which was across the inside flaps of a closed envelope—did he also insert the writing by the trick described in the chapter which I entitled “Every Man his Own Mahatma”?

If Judge “wrote,” &c., all the various letters, notes, and endorsements to which the “Mahatma’s” signature and seal were attached, missives backing Judge’s own views, raising Judge’s own Theosophical status, and bluffing other “servants” of that “Master,” to whom he and they cannot allude without capital letters—did he also “with his own hand” take and affix the seal which he has persistently denied having ever set eyes on?

If Mrs. Besant did not mean all this, and much more which hangs by the same logic, then her Statement grossly calumniated Mr. Judge to the few who knew the tenor of the case against him.

If she did mean it, then her Statement completely hoodwinked her audience and the public.

For will anybody assert that this, which has just been outlined, or anything like it, was the picture naturally called up by Mrs. Besant’s carefully worded description of “Mr. Judge’s error” as the negative one of “not mentioning” certain circumstances, her suggestion that personal opinions might reasonably differ on the “legitimacy” of his methods, her laudatory allusions to his general character and Theosophic services, her public sanction of a statement on his part which on this theory 71must have been utterly misleading, her eager lead in the attempt to cloak up for ever the Great Mahatma Hoax, and to shield the hoaxer?

But there is another point. Mrs. Besant professes still to cling to the belief that the Mahatmas had something to do with the letters. Mr. Judge wrote them, she says, but what he wrote he had first “received psychically from the Master.”

Nobody can prove that those missives, or, for that matter, these articles, or Shakespeare’s plays, were not due to the Master’s “psychical” authorship. Mr. Judge and Mrs. Besant are both quite free to say so. But again I must point out to Mrs. Besant the logical inferences from her position. In the attempt to hold on to one spar in the general wreck, she just says enough to inculpate the Mahatma, and not enough to exculpate Mr. Judge.

For, to apply theory once more to concrete fact: Does Mrs. Besant attribute to the Mahatma the preposterous insinuations against Colonel Olcott? And does she mean that the Mahatma made these insinuations and various direct false statements in order to co-operate with Mr. Judge in shielding from discovery a prolonged use of a bogus imitation of the Mahatma’s own seal and signature?

In this case, we are entitled to challenge Mrs. Besant to say whether she herself now believes that the insinuations against Colonel Olcott were justified. If yes, then I can only leave her to settle that matter with the Colonel. If no, then what becomes of the supernal wisdom and lofty character of “Those Who to some of us are most sacred”? Must it not be confessed that They have made uncommon fools of Themselves?—not to give a stronger name to the extremely shady methods of which Tibetan diplomacy is thus found guilty.

The public will await satisfactory answers to these questions. It will not, I hope, for a moment suspect Mrs. Besant of conscious fraud, or of sordid motives. I most certainly do not. With some of the lesser fry, who would be bankrupt in every sense if Theosophy failed them, the consideration of pleasant board and 72lodging at other people’s expense may be a governing one. With Mrs. Besant, who brings far more to the organisation in the shape of gate-money, no doubt, than she ever condescends to accept from it, the motives are subtler. Had she boldly cut herself free from the rottenness at the core of the Theosophic movement as soon as it was shown to her, she might have saved her reputation for straightforwardness, if not for intelligence. In choosing instead the equivocal policy of hushing up a scandal at all costs, she doubtless convinced herself that she was acting only for the ends of edification and the good of her church. That is the old, old story of priestcraft, and Mrs. Besant has been playing the high priestess now for three years. But were there not also some more personal motives at work? There is one thing which even the most candid hate to confess—and that is, that they have been thoroughly bamboozled. It does not improve matters when they have themselves helped in their own bamboozlement. To confess how recklessly inaccurate were her statements about “the same handwriting,” the “semi-miraculous precipitation,” the absolute assurance of her own senses, and so forth; to let the public see for itself the childish twaddle which she accepted, and helped to force upon others, as profound and oracular: all this would have been a sad come-down from the Delphic tripod. I do not wonder the poor lady shrank from it. I do wonder that Mrs. Besant cared to evade it at the expense of a sort of confidence-trick. To this has come the woman whom we once thought, whatever her other faults, at least fearless and open—the woman whose epitaph, so she tells us, is to be—

Lastly, a few words to the rank-and-file of the Theosophical Society, a large proportion of whom are now gathering open-mouthed at Adyar. In Madame Blavatsky few of the better-informed of the flock nowadays affect to believe—except in public. They cling to her gifts, perhaps; they have thrown over her morals. For fresh evidence has been coming to light, ever since that strange woman died, as to the tricks to which she condescended, and encouraged her chelas to condescend; and poor Colonel Olcott, though he continues to work 73the old gold-mine in print, has been driven even there to enunciate the theory that Madame Blavatsky herself was really killed at the battle of Mentana, and her body thereafter occupied by seven distinct spirits who, of course, are not responsible for contradicting each other. Till May, 1891, Madame was the principal witness to the objective existence and attributes of Mahatmas. Since that date, the principal witness is William Q. Judge. Soon the faithful at Adyar will be filing into the Occult Room to gaze through peep-holes at the two August Portraits, illuminated and set off by all the artifices associated here with exhibitions by M. Jan van Beers. Will they dare, any of them, to ask their officials plainly what evidence they can now offer that either of the subjects of those fancy portraits ever existed?

And if on this and other questions suggested by these chapters, Mrs. Besant, President Olcott, and Vice-President Judge do not succeed in satisfying their followers——what next? No doubt each member of the trinity will sit secure in his or her autocracy in his or her own continent, owning there, as I understand, the official organ and the publishing plant which the society as a whole has built up into prosperity. Yet something, surely, may be done by those who do not care to remain unwilling parties to the Great Mahatma Hoax, to recover their own self-respect, if not to save the Theosophical Society.

It is for them to decide whether the society, on its non-fraudulent side, is worth saving. It may be a kind of university extension for the popularising of Eastern philosophies. Or it may be, as some rather think, a mere smattering of catch-words out of cribs for the use of Mutual Mystification clubs, tending to a certain indigestion in the mental processes and a flatulent style of English composition. In either case there is no reason why the organisation should revolve about a vortex of tomfoolery and legerdemain into which honest members are apt to be sucked before they realise its true nature.