TOLD
FROM
SOURCES
ISIS MAINLY
VERY THEOSOPHICAL,
MUCH BY
UNVEILED, EDMUND
BEING GARRETT,
THE AUTHOR
STORY [Illustration] OF
OF “IN
THE AFRIKANDER
GREAT LAND,”
MAHATMA “IBSEN’S
HOAX. BRAND
IN
ENGLISH
VERSE,”
&c.
LONDON:
“WESTMINSTER GAZETTE” _All Rights Reserved._
OFFICE,
TUDOR STREET, E.C.
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 20, 33, 37, 38,
Handwriting, &c. 50, 52, 54, 115
Portrait Cartoon: “When Augur meets Augur” 119
[Illustration:
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 already 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.
F. EDMUND GARRETT.
ISIS VERY MUCH UNVEILED.
PART I.
THE STORY OF THE GREAT MAHATMA HOAX.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
“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?
Everybody 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”
of 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.