BLAVATSKY MATERIALIZED A CUP, A SAUCER, A DIPLOMA AND WATER

 

 

One of the phenomena that Blavatsky carried out and about which much was commented, was the materialization of a porcelain cup together with its saucer, and in this chapter I am going to transcribe the testimonies that I have found about that event.

 

 

 

 

TESTIMONY OF COLONEL OLCOTT

 

Colonel Henry Olcott was present and mentioned that event in his history of the Theosophical Society:

 

« I now come to the much-mooted incident of the finding of an extra cup and saucer at a picnic. I shall give the narrative exactly as I find it told in my Diary entry for the 3rd of October, 1880.

 

A party of six of us —three ladies and three gentlemen— were leaving the house for a valley some distance from town, where we meant to find a suitable place for our purpose. The Sinnetts’ butler had packed the hampers and put in a half-dozen cups and saucers of a peculiar pattern — one for each of us.

 

Just as we were starting, another gentleman rode up, and was invited to join our party. The servants went on ahead with the hampers, and we leisurely followed in single file, down the sinuous and rocky path which led to the valley. After a somewhat long jaunt we came to a flat space on the comb of a ridge covered with green turf, and overshadowed by great trees.

 

Having decided to camp there, we dismounted, and flung ourselves upon the grass, while the servants laid the tablecloth upon the ground and arranged the provisions. They built a fire to boil the kettle for tea, and presently the butler came to Mrs. Sinnett, with an anxious face, telling her that there was no cup and saucer for the Sahib who had joined us at the last moment. I heard her say, in a vexed tone:

 

-      "It was very stupid of you not to put in another cup and saucer when you knew that the other gentleman would have to have tea."

 

Turning to us, she laughingly said:

 

-      "Two of you good people must drink out of the same cup, it seems."

 

I remarked that, once, in a similar quandary, we had settled the affair by giving the cup to one person and the saucer to the other. Thereupon, one of the company jokingly said to H.P.B.:

 

-      "Now, Madam, here is a chance for you to do a bit of useful magic."

 

We all laughed at the absurdity of the idea, but when H.P.B. seemed ready to accept the suggestion in sober earnest, there was an outcry of pleasure, and she was asked to forthwith do the phenomenon.

 

Those who were lying on the grass rose and gathered near her. She said that if she was really to do this, she must have the help of her friend Major. ... He being more than willing, she requested him to take something to dig with, and so, snatching up a table-knife, he followed her about. She looked intently over the ground, presenting the face of her great seal-ring towards one spot after another, and finally said:

 

-      "Please dig here."

 

The gentleman plied his knife-point vigorously, and found that beneath the grass the ground was filled with a net-work of fine roots of the adjacent trees. These he cut and pulled out, until presently, brushing away the loose soil, a white object was uncovered. It proved to be a tea-cup imbedded in the ground, and on being taken out, was found to be of the identical pattern of the other six.

 

Imagine the exclamations of surprise and the excitement of our little group!

 

 

H.P.B. told the gentleman to continue his digging in the same place, and after cutting away a root as thick as my little finger, he excavated a saucer of the identical pattern desired. This capped the climax of our excitement, and the gentleman who had plied the knife was loudest in his expressions of wonder and satisfaction.

 

To complete this part of my narrative, I will state that Mrs. Sinnett and I, reaching the house first, on the return of our party, went straight to the butler's pantry, and found the three other cups of the nine which she had left of the original dozen, put away on an upper shelf with their handles broken, and otherwise dilapidated. The seventh cup produced at the picnic had, therefore, not formed pan of her broken set

 

 

 

After luncheon, H.P.B. did another wonder which surprised me more than any of the rest. One of the gentlemen said that he was ready to join our Society if H.P.B. could give him his diploma then, and there duly filled out! This was, certainly, a large order but the old lady, nothing daunted, made a sweep of her hand, and pointing to a bush at a little distance, told him to see if he could not find it there; trees and bushes having often served as letter-boxes.

 

Laughingly, and in apparent confidence that his test would not be complied with, he walked over to the bush — and drew forth a diploma of membership filled in with his name and that day’s date, together with an official letter from myself, which I am quite sure I never wrote, but which was still in my handwriting!

 

 

This put us all in hilarious spirits, and as H.P.B. was in the vein, there is no telling with what other phenomena she might not have treated us, but for most unexpected and disagreeable contretemps. On our way home we stopped at a certain place to rest and chat. Two of the gentlemen —the Major and the one who last joined us— strolled away together, and, after a half-hour, returned in a very serious mood.

 

They said that, at the time when the cup and saucer were exhumed, they thought the circumstances perfectly convincing, and were prepared to uphold that view against all comers. They had now, however, revisited the spot, and made, up their minds that by tunnelling in, from the brow of the hillock, the articles might have been put where they were found. This being so, they regretted that they could not accept the phenomenon as perfectly satisfactory, and offered H.P.B. the ultimatum of doing another phenomenon under conditions to be dictated by themselves.

 

I leave anyone who was acquainted with H.P.B., her family pride and volcanic temperament, to picture to himself the explosion of wrath that followed this speech. She seemed about to take leave of her senses, and poured out upon the two unfortunate sceptics the thunder of her wrath. And so, our pleasant party ended in an angry tempest.

 

For my part, in thinking over all the details of the cup and saucer incident, and with every desire to get at the truth, I cannot regard the theory advanced by the two skeptics as at all valid. Every one present saw that the cup and saucer were covered over with multitudinous roots which had to be cut and violently torn away to get at them, and both appeared to be imbedded in the soil as though they were fragments of stone; the turf above them was green and disturbed, and if they had been introduced through a tunnel, the disturbance of the surface could not have escaped the eyes of our whole party, who were clustered about the digger while he was work. »

(Old Diary Leaves II, chapter 15, p.232-236)

 

 

 

 

 

Olcott wrote to Damodar

 

Colonel Olcott was so impressed by what happened, that the next day (October 4, 1880) he wrote a letter to Damodar, who was one of the workers of the Theosophical Society and a disciple of Master Kuthumi, and you can read this letter in the next post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TESTIMONY OF MR. SINNETT

 

The person who most detailed this event was the journalist Alfred Sinnett, who was also present:

 

« We set out at the appointed time next morning. We were originally to have been a party of six, but a seventh person joined us just before we started. After going down the hill for some hours a place was chosen in the wood near the upper waterfall for our breakfast: the baskets that had been brought with us were unpacked, and, as usual at an Indian picnic, the servants at a little distance lighted a fire and set to work to make tea and coffee.

 

Concerning this some joking arose over the fact that we had one cup and saucer too few, on account of the seventh person who joined us at starting, and some one laughingly asked Madame Blavatsky to create another cup and saucer.

 

There was no set purpose in the proposal at first, but when Madame Blavatsky said it would be very difficult, but that if we liked she would try, attention was of course at one arrested. Madame Blavatsky, as usual, held mental conversation with one of the Brothers, and then wandered a little about in the immediate neighborhood of where we were sitting —that is to say within a radius of half-a-dozen to a dozen yards from our picnic cloth— I closely following, waiting to see what would happen.

 

Then she marked a spot on the ground, and called to one of the gentle men of the party to bring a knife to dig with. The place chosen was the edge of a little slope covered with thick weeds and grass and shrubby undergrowth.

 

The gentleman with the knife —let us call him X as I shall have to refer to him afterwards— tore up these in the first place with some difficulty, as the roots were tough and closely interlaced.

 

Cutting then into the matted roots and earth with the knife, and pulling away the debris with his hands, he came at last, on the edge of something white, which turned out, as it was completely excavated, to be the required cup. A corresponding saucer was also found after a little more digging. Both objects were in among the roots which spread everywhere through the ground, so that it seemed as if the roots were growing round them.

 

The cup and saucer both corresponded exactly, a regards their pattern, with those that had been brought to the picnic, and constituted a seventh cup and saucer when brought back to where were to have breakfast.

 

 

I may as well add once that afterwards, when we got home, my wife questioned our principal khitmutgar as to ho many cups and saucers of that particular kind we possessed. In the progress of years as the set was an old set, some had been broken, bat the man at once said that nine teacups were left. When collected and counted that number was found to be right, without reckoning the excavated cup. That made ten, and as regards the pattern, it was one of a somewhat peculiar kind, bought a good many years previously in London, and which assuredly could never have been matched in Simla.

 

Now, the notion that human beings can create material objects by the exercise of mere psychological power, will of course be revolting to the understandings of people to whom this whole subject is altogether strange. It is not making the idea much more acceptable to say that the cup and saucer appear in this case to have been “doubled" rather than created. The doubling of objects seems merely another kind of creation — creation according to a pattern.

 

However, the facts, the occurrences of the morning I have described, were at all events exactly as I have related them. I have been careful as to the strict and minute truthfulness of every detail. If the phenomenon was not what it appeared to be —a most wonderful display of a power of which the modern scientific world has no comprehension whatever— it was, of course, an elaborate fraud.

 

That supposition, however, setting aside the moral impossibility from any point of view of assuming Madame Blavatsky capable of participation in such an imposture, will only bear to be talked of vaguely. As a way out of the dilemma it will not serve any person of ordinary intelligence who is aware of the facts, or who trusts my statement of them. The cup and saucer were assuredly dug up in the way I describe. If they were not deposited there by occult agency, they must have been buried there beforehand.

 

Now, I have described the character of the ground from which they were dug up; assuredly that had been undisturbed for years by the character of the vegetation upon it. But it may be urged that from some other part of the sloping ground a sort of tunnel may have been excavated in the first instance through which the cup and saucer could have been thrust into the place where they were found.

 

Now this theory is barely tenable as regards its physical possibility. If the tunnel had been big enough for the purpose it would have left traces which were not perceptible on the ground — which were not even discoverable when the ground was searched shortly afterwards with a view to that hypothesis.

 

But the truth is that the theory of previous burial is morally untenable in view of the fact that the demand for the cup and saucer —of all the myriad things that might have been asked for— could never have been foreseen. It arose out of circumstances themselves the sport of the moment. If no extra person had joined us at the last moment the number of cups and saucers packed up by the servants would have been sufficient for our needs, and no attention would have been drawn to them.

 

It was by the servants, without the knowledge of any guest, that the cups taken were chosen from others that might just as easily have been taken Had the burial fraud been really perpetrated, it would have been necessary to constrain us to choosy the exact spot we did actually choose for the picnic with a view to the previous preparations, but the exact spot on which the ladies' jampans were deposited was chosen by myself in concert with the gentleman referred to above as X, and it was within a few yards of this spot that the cup was found.

 

Thus, leaving the other absurdities of the fraud hypothesis out of sight, who could be the agents employed to deposit the cup and saucer in the ground, and when did they perform the operation?

 

 

Madame Blavatsky was under our roof the whole time from the previous evening when the picnic was determined on to the moment of starting. The one personal servant she had with her, a Bombay boy and a perfect stranger to Simla, was constantly about the house the previous evening, and from the first awakening of the household in the morning — and as it happened he spoke to my own bearer in the middle of the night, for I had been annoyed by a loft door which had been left unfastened, and was slamming in the wind, and called up servants to shut it. Madame Blavatsky it appears, thus awakened, had sent her servant, who always slept within call, to inquire what was the matter.

 

Colonel Olcott, the President of the Theosophical Society, also a guest of ours at the time of which I am speaking, was certainly with us all the evening from the period of our return from the abortive expedition of the afternoon, and was also present at the start. To imagine that he spent the night in going four or five miles down a difficult khud through forest paths difficult to find, to bury a cup and saucer of a kind that we were not likely to take in a place we were not likely to go to, in order that in the exceedingly remote contingency of its being required for the perpetration of a hoax it might be there, would certainly be a somewhat extravagant conjecture.

 

 

Another consideration — the destination for which we were making can be approached by two roads from opposite ends of the upper horseshoe of hills on which Simla stands. It was open to us to select either path, and certainly neither Madame Blavatsky nor Colonel Olcott had any share in the selection of that actually taken. Had we taken the other, we should never have come to the spot where we actually picniced.

 

The hypothesis of fraud in this affair is, as I have said, a defiance of common sense when worked out in any imaginable way. The extravagance of this explanation will, moreover, be seen to heighten as my narrative proceeds, and as the incident just related is compared with others which took place later.

 

 

 

But I have not yet done with the incidents of the cup-morning. The gentleman called X had been a good deal with us during the week or two that had already elapsed since Madame Blavatsky's arrival. Like many of our friends, he had been greatly impressed with much he had seen in her presence.

 

He had especially come to the conclusion that the Theosophical Society, in which she was interested was exerting a good influence with the natives, a view which he had expressed more than once in warm language in my presence. He had declared his intention of joining this Society as I had done myself.

 

Now, when the cup and saucer were found most of us who were present, X among the number, were greatly impressed, and in the conversation that ensued the idea arose that X might formally become a member of the Society then and there.

 

I should not have taken part in this suggestion —I believe I originated it— if X had not in cool blood decided, as I understood, to join the Society; in itself, moreover, a step which involved no responsibilities whatever, and simply indicated sympathy with the pursuit of occult knowledge and a general adhesion to broad philanthropic doctrines of brotherly sentiments towards all humanity, irrespective of race and creed. This has to be explained in view of some little annoyances which followed.

 

The proposal that X should then and there formally join the Society was one with which he was quite ready to fall in. But some documents were required — a formal diploma, the gift of which to a new member should follow his initiation into certain little masonic forms of recognition adopted in the Society.

 

How could we get a diplomat?

 

Of course for the group then present a difficulty of this sort was merely another opportunity for the exercise of Madame's powers. Could she get a diploma brought to us by "magic?"

 

After an occult conversation with the Brother who had then interested himself in our proceedings, Madame told us that the diploma would be forthcoming. She described the appearance it would present — a roll of paper wound round with an immense quantity of string, and then bound up in the leaves of a creeping plant.

 

We should find it about m the wood where we were, and we could all look for it, but it would be X, for whom it was intended, who would find it. Thus it fell out We all searched about in the undergrowth or in the trees, wherever fancy prompted us to look, and it was X who found the roll, done up as described.

 

 

We had had our breakfast by this time, X was formally "initiated" a member of the society by Colonel Olcott, and after a time we shifted our quarters to a lower place in the wood where there was the little Tibetan temple, or rest-house, which the Brother who had been passing through Simla —according to what Madame Blavatsky told us— had passed the previous night. We amused ourselves by examining the little building inside and out, "bathing m the good magnetism," as Madame Blavatsky expressed it, and then, lying on the grass outside, it occurred to someone that we wanted more coffee.

 

The servants were told to prepare some, but it appeared that they had need up all our water. The water to be found in the streams near Simla is not of a kind to be used for purposes of this sort, and for a picnic, clean filtered water is always taken out in bottles. It appears that all the bottles in our baskets had been exhausted. This report was promptly verified by the servants by the exhibition of the empty bottles.

 

The only thing to be done was to send to a brewery, the nearest building, about a mile oft, and ask for water. I wrote a pencil note and a coolie went off with the empty bottles. Time passed, and the coolie returned, to oar great disgust, without the water. There had been no European left at the brewery that day (it was Sunday) to receive the note, and the coolie had stupidly plodded back with the empty bottles under his arm, instead of asking about and finding someone able to supply the required water.

 

 

At this time our party was a little dispersed. X and one of the other gentlemen had wandered off. No one of the remainder of the party was expecting fresh phenomena, when Madame suddenly got up, went over to the baskets, a dozen or twenty yards oft, picked out a bottle —one of those, I believe, which had been brought back by the coolie empty— and came back to us holding it under the fold of her dress. Laughingly producing it, it was found to be full of water. Just like a conjuring trick, will some one say?

 

Just like, except for the conditions. For such a conjuring trick, the conjurer defines the thing to be done. In our case the want of water was as unforeseeable in the first instance as the want of the cup and saucer. The accident that left the brewery deserted by its Europeans, and the further accident that the coolie sent up for water should have been so abnormally stupid even for a coolie as to come back without, because there happened to be no European to take my note, were accidents but for which the opportunity for obtaining the water by occult agency could not have arisen.

 

And those accidents supervened on the fundamental accident, improbable in itself, that our servants should have sent us out insufficiently supplied. That any bottle of water could have been left unnoticed at the bottom of the baskets is a suggestion that I can hardly imagine any one present putting forward, for the servants had been found fault with for not bringing enough; they, had just before had the baskets completely emptied out, and we had not submitted to the situation till we had been fully satisfied that there really was no more water left.

 

Furthermore, I tasted the water in the bottle Madame Blavatsky produced, and it was not water of the same kind as that which came from our own filters* It was an earthy-tasting water, unlike that of the modern Simla supply, bit equally unlike, I may add, though in a different way, the offensive and discoloured water of the only- stream flowing through those woods.

 

How was it brought?

 

 

The how, of course, in all these cases is the great mystery which I am unable to explain except in general terms; but the impossibility of understanding the way adepts manipulate matter is one thing; the impossibility of denying that they do manipulate it in a manner which Western ignorance would describe as miraculous is another. The tact is there whether we can explain it or not.

 

The rough, popular saying that you cannot argue the hind leg off a cow, embodies a sound reflection which our prudent sceptics in matters of the kind with which I am now dealing are too apt to overlook. You cannot argue away a fact by contending that by the lights in your mind it ought to be something different from what it is. Still less can you argue away a mass of facts like those I am now recording by a series of extravagant and contradictory hypotheses about each in turn. "What the determined disbeliever so often overlooks is that the scepticism which may show an acuteness of mind up to a certain point, reveals a deficient intelligence when adhered to in face of certain kinds of evidence.

 

I remember when the phonograph was first invented, a scientific officer in the service of the Indian Government sent me an article he had written on the earliest accounts received of the instrument — to prove that the story must be a hoax, because the instrument described was scientifically impossible. He had worked out the times of vibrations required to reproduce the sounds and so on, and very intelligently argued that the alleged result was unattainable.

 

But when phonographs in due time were imported into India, he did not continue to say they were impossible, and that there must be a man shut up in each machine, even though there did not seem to be room. That last is the attitude of the self-complacent people who get over the difficulty about the causation of occult and spiritual phenomena by denying, in face of the palpable experience of thousands —in face of the testimony in shelves-full of books that they do not read— that any such phenomena take place at all.

 

 

X, I should add here, afterwards changed his mind about the satisfactory character of the cup phenomena, and said he thought it vitiated as a scientific proof by the interposition of the theory that the cup and saucer might have been thrust up into their places by means of a tunnel cut from a lower part of the bank.

 

I have discussed that hypothesis already, and mention the fact of, X's change of opinion, which does not affect any of the circumstances I have narrated, merely to avoid the chance that readers, who may have heard or read about the Simla phenomenon in other pages, might think I was treating the change of opinion in question as something which it was "worth while to disguise. And, indeed, the convictions which I ultimately attained were themselves the result of accumulated experiences I have yet to relate, so that I cannot tell how far my own certainty concerning the reality of occult power rests on any one example that I have seen. »

(The Occult World, p.66-77)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OBSERVATIONS

 

I suspect that it was not Blavatsky who materialized these objects and the water, but it was Master Kuthumi who did it with the help of Blavatsky, and I think he realized this phenomena because he sought to impress the people present (and in particular Mr. Sinnett and Mr. Hume) so that they would collaborate with him in the diffusion of theosophy.

 

And I make this assumption based on the fact that before making these materializations, Blavatsky seemed to ask to Master Kuthumi telepathically, and also due to the much more difficult phenomenon that she produced later that same day, and you can read in the previous post.

 

And later Mrs. and Mr. Sinnett gave that cup and saucer to Colonel Olcott, and these objects can still be seen in the Adyar museum.

 

 

 

 

 

And I put down an example of a diploma awarded by the Theosophical Society:

 

 

 

 

 

After having analyzed the phenomena and the testimonies, I consider that for the materialization of the cup and its saucer to have been a trick, the complicity of the Sinnetts would have been required, but I see it very unlikely, because Mr. Sinnett have risked to lose his reputation and his professional career, since no newspaper would have hired him again.

 

And the wealthy Sinnett family life led would have turned into misery. So I don't see that Mr. and Mrs. Sinnett would have ventured to lose everything just to participate in a charade.

 

And for the diploma, there the complicity of Major Henderson would have been required, but there also the discrediting that would have caused him would have collapsed his career in the army (which for a high-ranking military man would be catastrophic) and it was the Mayor himself who later sought arguments to discredit the phenomenon, which makes no sense if he had been an accomplice.