(Note: at this time spiritualism and spiritism
were considered the same thing.)
Several
historians consider that Blavatsky before founding the Theosophical Society was
a professed spiritist who was essentially guided by the spirit of John King, a
well-known character in professional mediumship séances in both hemispheres,
and it was only later that she showed herself publicly hostile towards spiritism
and used deliberate lies to hide her spiritist past.
The
arguments of these historians are mainly based on the book “A Modern Priestess of Isis” wrote by
Vsevolod Solovyov, but as I am going to show you below, this assetion is false.
To begin, it
has been demostrated that Vsevolod Solovyov wrote intentionally many lies in
his book to discredit Blavatsky (see link).
And while it
is true that Blavatsky was communicating with John King, you should know that
she was not communicating with an elementary posing as John King, but sometimes
it was an astral entity that Blavatsky manipulated, and sometimes it was the
Adept Hilarión who sometimes he posing as "the spirit of John King" (see link).
So what was Blavatsky's position towards spiritism?
Blavatsky's
position regarding spiritism is expressed in a letter she wrote to Professor
Hiram Corson on February 16, 1875 (seven months before founding the
Theosophical Society):
«
I am here in this country [The United States] sent by my Lodge on behalf of Truth in modern spiritualism, and it is my
most sacred duty to unveil what is, and expose what is not.
. . .
When I became a spiritualist, it was not through the
agency of the ever-lying, cheating mediums, miserable instruments of the undeveloped
Spirits of the lower Sphere, the ancient Hades.
My belief is based on something older than the
Rochester knockings, and springs out from the same source of information that
was used by Raymond Lully, Picus della Mirandola, Cornelius Agrippa, Robert
Fludd, Henry More, et cetera, etc., all of whom have ever been searching for a
system that should disclose to them the "deepest depths" of the
Divine nature, and show them the real tie which binds all things together. I
found at last, and many years ago, the cravings of my mind satisfied by this
theosophy.
. . .
In my eyes, Allan Kardec and Flammarion, Andrew
Jackson Davis and Judge Edmonds, are but schoolboys just trying to spell their
A B C and sorely blundering sometimes. »
(www.theosociety.org/pasadena/corson/cors-lt1.htm)
In a
letter written to Dr. Franz Hartmann on April 3, 1886, Blavatsky reiterated
what she had written to Professor Hiram Corson:
« I was sent to America on purpose and sent to the Eddies. There I found
Olcott in love with spirits, as he became in love with the Masters later on. I
was ordered to let him know that spiritual phenomena without the philosophy of
Occultism were dangerous and misleading.
I proved to him that all that mediums could do through
spirits, others [with their developed powers] could do at
will without any spirits at all; that bells and thought-reading, raps and
physical phenomena, could be achieved by anyone who had a faculty of acting in
his physical body through the organs of his astral body; and I had that faculty
ever since I was four years old, as all my family know. I could make furniture
move and objects fly apparently, and my astral arms that supported them
remained invisible; all this ever before I knew even of Masters. Well, I told
him the whole truth. »
(www.blavatskyarchives.com/blavatskyhartmann6.htm)
And in this
regard Colonel Olcott in his "Old Diary Leaves" commented:
« Strolling along with
my new acquaintance, we talked together about the Eddy phenomena and those of
other lands. I found she had been a great traveller and seen many occult things
and adepts in occult science, but at first she did not give me any hint as to
the existence of the Himalayan Sages or of her own powers. She spoke of the
materialistic tendency of American Spiritualism, which was a sort of debauch of
phenomena accompanied by comparative indifference to philosophy.
. . .
H.P.B. tried her best to make me
suspect the value of William Eddy’s phenomena as proofs of the intelligent
control of a medium by spirits; telling me that, if genuine, they must be the
double of the medium escaping from his body and clothing itself with other
appearances; but I did not believe her. I contended that the forms were of too
great diversities of height, bulk, and appearance to be a masquerade of William
Eddy; they must be what they seemed, viz., the spirits of the dead. Our
disputes were quite warm on occasions.
. . .
I thought it a veritable John
King then, for its personality had been as convincingly proved to me, I
fancied, as anybody could have asked. But now, after seeing what H.P.B. could
do in the way of producing mayavic (i.e., hypnotic) illusions and in the
control of elementals, I am persuaded that “John King” was a humbugging
elemental, worked by her like a marionette and used as a help towards my
education. Understand me, the phenomena were real, but they were done by no
disincarnate human spirit. Since writing the above, in fact, I have found the
proof, in her own handwriting, pasted in our Scrapbook, Vol. I.
She kept up the illusion for
months—just how many I cannot recollect at this distance of time—and I saw
numbers of phenomena done as alleged by John King—as, for example, the whole
remarkable series at the Philadelphia residence of the Holmeses and that of H.P.B.
herself, above referred to. He was first, John King, an independent personality,
then John King, messenger and servant—never the equal—of living adepts, and
finally an elemental pure and simple, employed by H.P.B. and a certain other
expert in the doing of wonders.
. . .
Little by little, H.P.B. let me
know of the existence of Eastern adepts and their powers, and gave me by a
multitude of phenomena the proofs of her own control over the occult forces of
nature. At first, as I have remarked, she ascribed them to “John King,” and it
was through his alleged friendliness that I first came into personal
correspondence with the Masters.
. . .
Some, like Damodar and H.P.B.,
have first seen them in visions while young; some have encountered them under
strange guises in most unlikely places; I was introduced to them by H.P.B.
through the agency that my previous experiences would make most comprehensible,
a pretended medium-overshadowing “spirit.” John King brought four of the
Masters to my attention, of whom one was a Copt, one a representative of the
Neo Platonist Alexandrian school, one—a very high one, a Master of the Masters,
so to say—a Venetian, and one an English philosopher, gone from men’s sight,
yet not dead. The first of these became my first Guru. »
(Vol. I, p. 6-19)
In a
letter that Blavatsky wrote to William Quan Judge, she expressed her repudiation of
spiritualism:
« The more I see of spiritist seances in this cradle and hotbed of
Spiritism and mediums, the more clearly I see how dangerous they are for
humanity. Poets speak of a thin
partition between the two worlds. There is no partition whatever. Blind people have imagined obstacles
of this kind because coarse organs of hearing, sight, and feeling do not allow
the majority of people to penetrate the difference of being.
Besides, Mother-Nature has done well in endowing us
with coarse
senses, for otherwise the individuality and personality of man would become
impossible, because the dead would be continually mixing with the living, and
the living would assimilate themselves with the dead. It would not be so bad if
there were around us only spirits of the same kind as ourselves, the
half-spiritual refuse of mortals who died without having reconciled themselves
to the great necessity of death.
. . .
And the wider the doors are opened to them the further
the necromantic epidemic is spread; the more unanimous the mediums and the
spiritists in spreading the magnetic fluid of their evocations, the more power
and vitality are acquired by the glamour.
. . .
It stands to reason that this mere earthly refuse,
irresistibly drawn to the earth, cannot follow the soul and spirit — these
highest principles of man's being. With horror and disgust I often observed how
a reanimated shadow of this kind separated itself from the inside of the
medium; how, separating itself from his astral body and clad in someone else's
vesture, it pretended to be someone's relation, causing the person to go into
ecstasies and making people open wide their hearts and their embraces to these
shadows whom they sincerely believed to be their dear fathers and brothers,
resuscitated to convince them of life eternal, as well as to see them.
. . .
Oh, if they only knew the truth, if they only
believed! If they saw, as I have often seen, a monstrous, bodiless creature
seizing hold of someone present at these spiritistic sorceries! It wraps the
man as if with a black shroud, and slowly disappears in him as if drawn into
his body by each of his living pores. »
(The
Path, February 1895, p.379-381)
Thy Will, oh M . . . be done!
And in her scrapbook Blavatsky wrote with a pen:
« Orders received from T*** B*** [Tuitit Bey] through P*** personating J. K. [John King].
He ordered to begin telling the public the truth about spiritistic phenomena and their mediums. And now my martyrdom will begin! I will have all the Spiritists against me in addition to the Christians and the skeptics!
H. P. B. »
(Vol. I,
p.27 [35])
CONCLUSION
As you can see, Blavatsky produced mediumistic
phenomena, but not because she was a spiritualist, but to show with real
examples what spiritualistic phenomena consisted of and the reason why spiritism
is dangerous and deceptive. But despite the evidence, many spiritists did not
accept her explanations and rejected her.
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