Journalist Alfred Sinnett wrote the following about the Hodgson Report which was published by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and in which they accused Blavatsky of being a liar (and in purple I added my comments):
The Report which has been addressed by Mr. Richard Hodgson to the Committee of the Psychical Research Society, “appointed to investigate phenomena connected with the Theosophical Society,” is published for the first time in the December number of the Proceedings of that Society, — six months after the meetings were held at which the Committee concerned announced its general adhesion to the conclusions Mr. Hodgson had reached.
In a letter addressed to review Light on the 12th of October, I protested against the action thus taken by the Psychical Research Society in publicly stigmatising Mme. JBlavatsky as having been guilty of “a long-continued combination with other persons to produce, by ordinary means, a series of apparent marvels for the support of the Theosophic movement,” while holding back the documentary evidence on the strength of which their opinion had been formed.
In a note to the present Report (page 276) Mr. Hodgson says:
« I have now in my hands numerous documents which are concerned with the experiences of Mr. Hume and others in connection with Mme. Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society. These documents, including the K. H. MSS. above referred to, did not reach me till August, and my examination of them, particularly of the K. H. MSS., has involved a considerable delay in the production of this Report. »
In other words, Mr. Hodgson has employed the time during which his Report has been improperly withheld in endeavouring to amend and strengthen it so as to render it better able to bear out the committee’s hasty endorsement of the conclusions he reached before he obtained the evidence he now puts forward.
But even if the committee had been in possession —which it was not— of the Report as it now stands, its action in promulgating the conclusions it announced on the 24th of June, would have been no less unwarrantable and premature.
The committee has not at any stage of its proceedings behaved in accordance with the judicial character it has arrogated to itself.
Hodgson is not qualified to investigate in India
It appointed as its agent to inquire, in India, into the authenticity of statements relating to occurrences extending over several years — alleged to have taken place at various parts of India, and in which many persons, including natives of India and devotees of occult science in that country were mixed up — a gentleman of great, of perhaps too great, confidence in his own abilities, but, at all events, wholly unfamiliar with the characteristics of Indian life and the complicated play of feeling in connection with which the Theosophical movement has been developed in India during recent years.
Nothing in his Report, even as it now stands — amended with the protracted assistance of more experienced persons unfriendly to the Theosophical movement — suggests that even yet he has begun to understand the primary conditions of the mysteries he set himself to unravel.
He has naively supposed that every one in India visibly devoted to the work of the Theosophical Society might be assumed, on that account, desirous of securing his good opinion and of persuading him that the alleged phenomena were genuine. He shows himself to have been watching their demeanour and stray phrases to catch admissions that might be turned against the Theosophical case.
He seems never to have suspected what any more experienced inquirer would have been aware of from the beginning, that the Theosophical movement, in so far as it has been concerned with making known to the world at large the existence in India of persons called Mahatmas — very far advanced in the comprehension of occult science — and of the philosophical views they hold, has been one which many of the native devotees of these Mahatmas and many among the most ardent disciples and students of their occult teaching, have regarded with profound irritation.
The traditional attitude of mind in which Indian occultists regard their treasures of knowledge, is one in which devotion is largely tinged with jealousy of all who would endeavour to penetrate the secrecy in which these treasures have hitherto been shrouded. These have been regarded as only the rightful acquirement of persons passing through the usual ordeals and probations.
The Theosophical movement in India, however, involved a breach of this secrecv. The old rules were infringed under an authority so great that occultists who found themselves entangled with the work could not but submit. But in many cases such submission has been no more than superficial.
Any one more intimately acquainted, than the agent of the S. P. R., with, the history and growth of the Theosophical Society would have been able to indicate many persons among its most faithful native members, whose fidelity was owing entirely to the Masters they served, and not to the idea on which they were employed — at all events not so far as it was connected with the demonstration of the fact that abnormal physical phenomena could be produced by Indian proficients in occult science.
Now for such persons the notion that European outsiders, who had, as they conceived, so undeservedly been admitted to the inner arcana of Eastern occultism, were blundering into the belief that they had been deceived, — that there was no such thing; as Indian occultism, that the Theosopliical movement was a sham and a delusion with which they would no more concern themselves — was enchanting in its attractions; and the arrivals in their midst of an exceedingly self-reliant young man from England attempting the investigation of occult mysteries by the methods of a Scotland Yard detective, and laid open by total unfamiliarity with the tone and temper of modern occultism to every sort of misapprehension, was naturallv to them a source of intense satisfaction.
Does the committee of the S. P. R. imagine that the native occultists of the Theosopliical Society in India are writhing at this moment under the judgment it has passed?
I am quite certain, on the contrary, that for the most part they are chuckling over it with delight. They may find the situation complicated as regards their relations with their Masters in so far as they have consciously contributed to the easy misdirection of Mr. Hodgson’s mind, but the ludicrous spectacle of himself which Mr. Hodgson furnishes in his Report — where we see him catching up unfinished sentences and pointing out weak places in the evidence of some among the Indian chelas, against whom, if he had better understood the task before him, he ought to have been most on his guard — is, at all events, one which we can understand them to find amusing.
The S. P. R. Committee did not investigate adequately
I regard the committee of the S. P. R. — Messrs. E. Gurney, F. W. H. Myers, F. Podmore, H. Sidgwick, and J. H. Stack — much more to blame for presuming to pass judgment by the light of their own unaided reflections on the raw and misleading report supplied to them by Mr. Hodgson, than he for his part is to blame, even for misunderstanding so lamentably the problems he set out naturally ill-qualified to investigate.
It would have been easy for them to have called in any of several people in London, qualified to do so by long experience of the Theosophical movement, to report in their turn on the privia facie case, so made out against the authenticity of the Theosophical phenomena, before proceeding to pass judgment on the whole accusation in the hearing of the public at large.
We have all heard of cases in which judges think it unnecessary to call on the defence; but these have generally been cases in which the judges have decided against the theory of the prosecution.
The committee of the S. P. R. furnish us with what is probably an unprecedented example of a judicial refusal to hear a defence on the ground that the ex parte statement of the prosecutor has been convincing by itself.
The committee brooded, however, in secret over the report of their agent, consulted no one in a position to open their eyes as to the erroneous method on which Mr. Hodgson had gone to work, and concluded their but too independent investigation by denouncing as one of the most remarkable impostors in history — a lady held in the highest honour by a considerable body of persons, including old friends and relations of unblemished character, and who has -undeniably given up station and comfort to struggle for long years in the service of the Tlieosophical cause amidst obloquy and privation.
She is witnessed against chiefly for Mr. Hodgson, as any one who will read his Report will see, in spite of his affected indifference to their testimony, by two persons [Emma and Alexis Coulomb] who endeavour to blacken her character by first exhibiting themselves as engaged in fraud and deception, and by then accusing her of having been base enough to make such people as themselves her confederates.
These are the persons whom his Report shows Mr. Hodgson to have made the principal allies of his inquiry. It is on the strength of writings obtained from such persons that the committee of the S. P. R. chiefly proceeds in coming to the conclusion that Mine. Blavatsky is an impostor.
(All the accusations the Coulombs made against Blavatsky have been proven to be lies.)
And this course is pursued by a body of men who, in reference' to Psychical phenomena at large (which the designation of their society would suggest that they are concerned with) decline all testimony, however apparently overwhelming, which comes from spiritualistic mediums tainted by receiving money for the display of their characteristics.
I am not suggesting that they ought to be careless in accepting such, testimony, but merely that they have violated the principles they profess — when the repression of unacceptable evidence is at stake — in a case in which, by their disregard, it was possible to frame an indictment against persons — whom I am not justified in assuming that they were prejudiced against from the first, but whom, at all events, they finished by condemning unheard.
And going further than this, they have not hesitated to publish, with all the authority their proceedings can confer, a groundless and monstrous invention concerning Mme. Blavatsky, which Mr. Hodgson puts forward at the conclusion of his report to prop up its obvious weakness as regards the whole hypothesis on which it rests.
For it is evident that there is a powerful presumption against any theory that imputes conscious imposture and vulgar trickery to a person who, on the face of things, has devoted her life to a philanthropic idea, at the manifest sacrifice of all the considerations which generally supply motives of action to mankind.
Mr. Hodgson acted maliciously
Mr. Hodgson is alive to the necessity of furnishing Mine. Blavatsky with a motive as degraded as the conduct he has been taught by M. and Mme. Coulomb to believe her guilty of, and he triumphs over the difficulty by suggesting that she may be a Russian political agent, working in India to foster disloyalty to the British Government.
It is nothing to Mr. Hodgson that she has notoriously been doing the reverse; that she has frequently assured the natives orally, by writings, at public meetings, and in letters that can be produced, that with all its faults the British Government is the best available for India, and repeatedly from the point of view of one speaking en connaisance de cause she has declared that the Russian, would be immeasurably worse.
It is nothing to Mr. Hodgson that her life has been passed coram populo to an almost ludicrous extent ever since she has been in India, that her whole energies and work have been employed on the Theosophic cause, or that the Government of India, after looking into the matter with the help of its police when she first came to the country, soon read the riddle aright, and abandoned all suspicion of her motives. Mr. Hodgson is careless of the fact that every one who has known her for any length of time laughs at the absurdity of his hypothesis.
Mr. Hodgson falsely accused Blavatsky of being a Russian spy
He has obtained from his guide and counsellor —Mme. Coulomb— a fragment of Mine. Blavatsky’s handwriting, picked up, it wTould seem, some years ago, and cherished for any use that might ultimately be made of it — which refers to Russian politics, and reads like part of an argument in favour of the Russian advance in Central Asia.
This is enough for the Psychical Researcher, and the text of this document appears in his Report in support of his scandalous insinuation against Mme. Blavatsky’s integrity.
The simple explanation of the paper is, that it is evidently a discarded fragment from a long translation of Colonel Grodekoff’s Travels in Central Asia (or whatever title the series bore) which Mme. Blavatsky made at my request for the Pioneer (the Indian Government organ), of which I was at that time Editor.
I will not delay this pamphlet to write to India and get the dates at which the Grodekoff series of articles appeared in the Pioneer. They ran for some weeks, and must have appeared in one of the latter years of the last decade, or possibly in 1880. By applying to the Pioneer printers, Mr. Hodgson could perhaps obtain, if the MS. of this translation has been preserved, several hundred pages of Mme. Blavatsky’s writing, blazing with sentiments of the most ardent Anglo-phobia.
It is most likely, as I say, that the pilfered slip of which he is so proud, was some rejected page from that translation, unless, indeed, which would be more amusing still, it should happen to have fallen from some other Russian translations which Mme. Blavatsky, to my certain knowledge, once made for the Indian Foreign Office during one of her visits too o Simla, when she made the acquaintance of some of the officials in that department, and was employed to do some work in its service.
The S. P. R. took advantage of the fact that Blavatsky had no money
I venture to think that if Mme. Blavatsky had not been known to be too ill-supplied with money to claim redress at the costly bar of British justice — if she had not been steeped to the lips in the flavour, so ungrateful to British law courts, of Psychic mystery, the committee of the S. P. R. would hardly have thought it well to accuse her, in a published document, of infamous conduct, which, if she were really guilty of it, would render her a public foe in the land of her adoption and an object of scorn to honourable men — at the flippant suggestion of their private agent in desperate need of an explanation for conclusions which no amount of pedantically ordered circumstances could render, without it, otherwise than incredible.
II
The falsehoods Mr. Hodgson told about the phenomena Mr. Sinnett recounted in his book "The Occult World"
I now pass on to examine in detail that portion of Mr. Hodgson’s Report which affects to criticise my own narrative of phenomena recorded in the Occult World.
I shall neither weary the reader nor myself by expanding this pamphlet into a detailed reply to the whole catalogue of minute conjectures which Mr. Hodgson has put together in his Report while abusing the hospitality which was extended to him at the head-quarters of the Theosopliical Society at Adyar, and while leading the guileless representatives of the movement in Madras to suppose, that by opening their hearts and records to his inspection, by giving him the freest access to their apartments and their diaries, they would best persuade him of the simple truthfulness of their lives and the improbability that they were slaving amidst penury and self-sacrifice for the propagation of an empty delusion and the cruel deception of their best friends. It will be enough for my present purpose if I blow out the keystone of the clumsy arch he has constructed; if I show the futility of the attempt he lias made to discredit the testimony I have myself given of the occult phenomena that have passed under my own observation. If my record stands, Mr. Hodgson’s general theory must fall to the ground. He has recognised this,and has directed a considerable portion of his essay to the criticism, of my own book.
Alfred Sinnett and the S.P.R. committee
He begins by quoting a passage from my "deposition to the committee.” A few words of explanation may be given here about this deposition. I had gladly tendered myself for cross-examination by the committee in reference to the story I had told in my published Theosophical writings.
The only members of the committee present on the only occasion when it was thought worth while to examine me were Mr. Gurney and Mr. Stack. A shorthand-writer recorded what passed. I do not know whether the testimony I gave has been written out in full. It has, at all events, never to my knowledge been published.
I fully recognise that no particular object would be served by its publication, for the committee never seemed to grasp the purpose with which I had conceived that it might be wrorth while to take my evidence. If there had been any weak points in any part of my story, inquiry directed to these might either have shown that I had not been sufficiently careful in stating my case, or such cross-examination would, in reality, have served to strengthen instead of disturbing it. But the committee had no questions to ask me, and merely wished to know, in a general way, what I had to say.
I had taken with me various letters and papers referred to in the Occult World. In the absence of any systematic direction by the committee of my examination, I showed some of these, and made some general statements as to the circumstances with which they had been connected, thus necessarily going over some of the ground already trodden in my original narrative.
The passage quoted in Mr. Hodgson’s report is apparently from such general statement. It relates to an incident described in the Occult World (pp. 96-7, 4th edition).
Koot Hoomi's response inside a sealed envelope
I obtained an answer from my Mahatma correspondent written inside a closed note of my own, the point of the whole story being that Mme, Blavatsky, to whom I confided the letter, had never been out of my sight for any appreciable interval from the moment she put my letter in her pocket to the time, a few minutes later, when she gave it me back with the answer written inside the unopened envelope.
In the deposition I appeal to have said:
« She was out of my sight but for an instant of time . . . . I will undertake to say she was not out of my sight for ten seconds. »
This account Mr. Hodgson compares with the original account of the transaction which appears in the Occult World. He writes:
« In the account given in the Occult World Mr. Sinnett undertakes to say only that she had not been away to her own room thirty seconds, admitting that she was also out of his sight for a minute or two in Mrs. Sinnett’s room.
After this I cannot feel certain that Mme. Blavatsky may not have been absent in her own room for considerably more than thirty seconds, nor do I feel certain that Mme. Blavatsky may not have retired to some other room during the interval of a few minutes which Mr. Sinnett assigns to her conversation with Mrs. Sinnett in the adjoining room.
Even apart from this uncertainty I cannot attach any importance to the case after finding that, on my second trial, I could open a firmly-closed ordinary adhesive envelope under such conditions as are described by Mr. Sinnett, read the enclosed note and reply to it, the question and the reply being as long as those of Mr. Sinnett, and reclose the envelope, leading it apparently in the same condition as before, in one minute, and it appears to me quite possible that Mme. Blavatsky, with her probably superior skill and practice, might have easily performed the task in thirty seconds. »
If Mr. Hodgson had said something quite different from all this, and if I had wanted to write a ludicrous caricature of some unsound argument he might have employed, it seems to me I could hardly have written anything more grotesque than the passage quoted above. It has been to me a source of inextinguishable wonder that a man exhibiting intelligence in some directions could present himself to the public with an argument like that in his mouth.
When, under circumstances when it is quite obvious that one could not have been tracking the moments with a watch, a man speaks of a limited number of seconds, a round number like thirty, it simply means a very short interval of time. Moreover the account as it really stands in the Occult World is as follows:
« She put it in her pocket, went into her own room, which opened out of the drawing-room, and came out again almost instantly. Certainly she had not been away thirty seconds. »
And because on another occasion I tell the same story and say “She was out of my sight but for an instant of time. I will undertake to say she was not out of my sight ten seconds.”
Mr. Hodgson has the comical assurance to say that my parallel statements betray discrepancy, and that the accuracy of my testimony therefore stands impugned. And this, in spite of the fact that I drew a sketch at the time of my “deposition" to show the committee how the rooms were actually arranged.
The drawing-room and Mme Blavatsky’s room were side by side, both opening out of the verandah in which my wife and Mme. Blavatsky were sitting, when I gave her the letter (not “in the drawing-room,” as the committee’s notes have inaccurately reported me as saying).
Mme. Blavatsky went into her room by one door —all standing open, be it understood, as is usual during the day in the cool weather in India— while I went via the drawingroom on my way back to my own writing-room.
The door of connection between the drawing-room and Mme Blavatsky’s room was but a few feet from the verandah and of the wall. It was at this that Mme. Blavatsky appeared before I had crossed the drawing-room, saying the letter had been already taken.
Any one else is in as good a position as I to estimate the number of seconds during which she can have been out of my sight. It was a very small number.
Dwelling on the matter it becomes clear that my loose estimate, thirty seconds —equivalent to a very brief interval, and used as an alternative expression to “almost instantly”— was excessive: that ten would certainly be nearer the mark.
Counting seconds now —as I write— and imagining myself pacing across that corner of my room at Allahabad, I am disposed to think that five would really be a better estimate again.
Now, Mr. Hodgson actually goes on in his Report to argue that I must be an inaccurate and untrustworthy narrator because of this discrepancy of my evidence about the ten and the thirty seconds.
When a man is guilty like this of the ne plus ultra of folly in an argument, one does not know what to say to him. One cannot emphasize by illustration the nonsense involved in his contention. Nothing could be more nonsensical than the contention itself.
But it is nevertheless the foundation of the major part of Mr. Hodgson’s subsequent, theorising about my book. I am an inaccurate man; I must be given up; I have been shown to have told one story at one time and another at another about the same thing, and there is an end of me. And whatever I may say after this, even if the thing itself does not betray error, it is impossible to have confidence in so careless an estimator of seconds.
And the picture Mr. Hodgson gives us of himself opening a letter — doubtless with ready appliances of boiling water and all that may be wanted, his monstrous assumption that Mme. Blavatsky has “probably superior skill and practice ” at such work — with water, it is to be presumed, always boiling in her pocket, is merely the beginning of the stupendous pyramid of extravagant conjecture which he builds, bottom upwards, upon the famous discrepancy of the seconds; and which men with reputations for intelligence to squander, are, marvellous to say, not ashamed to publish in the Proceedings of the Psychical Research Society.
As for the two or three minutes Mme. Blavatsky spent in my wife’s room —from which Mr. Hodgson drawrs erroneous conclusions he has never checked by frank inquiry— the two rooms were connected by a wide open door, through which Mme. Blavatsky, lounging about and waiting, only passed after my wife had entered her room coming round the other side of the house. Even while in my wife’s room she would not have been out of my sight had I risen from my chair and looked round.
(Mr. Hodgson, deliberately wanting to discredit Blavatsky, developed this entire invalid argument to try to discredit Mr. Sinnett's testimony. But what Mr. Hodgson did not take into consideration were the testimonies of other people who also received answers from the Trans-Himalayan Masters in a similar way, and in those cases they never lost sight of Blavatsky, and in some cases Blavatsky was not even there.)
The letter that fell from the air
The next matter Mr. Hodgson refers to is a case in which I describe a letter as dropped before me in a marvellous way in a room at Bombay.
He conjectures that it was dropped through a slit in the boards of the ceiling. Mr Hodgson thinks that, and I think differently, that is all that can be said about the matter, except that there is no particle of evidence to support Mr. Hodgson's belief, beyond the fact that Mme. Coulomb suggested it.
(Hodgson wanted to explain everything in a materialistic way, but several witnesses claimed to have received letters that fell from the air, and there could not have been a slit in the ceiling in all of those cases.)
Hodgson relies on what the Coulombs said
The committee says (p. 204 of the Report) that "where persons like the Coulombs have been concerned, their unsupported assertion cannot be taken as evidence."
Now one of the gross inconsistencies and unfair attributes of the present Report is, that while the committee thus affects to take credit for care in the reception of evidence, Mr. Hodgson devours, open-mouthed, anything the Coulombs say to him, presenting their statements in due course to his readers. He affects, at intervals, to regard their testimony as worthless, but still he gives it; and since the committee cannot shake off responsibility for the Report which forms the basis of their own judgment, and which they publish to the world, all that can be said in regard to the pretence they make in the sentence just quoted is, that they have not acted up to it.
They say such and such evidence must not be taken, and then they proceed to take it and to put it forward, and, as a careful examination of the Report will show, to build conclusions upon it, and use bricks made out of M. and Mme. Coulomb's statements as the foundation for the fantastic edifice they rear above.
(I agree that this attitude is hypocritical and unethical, but the worst thing is that it has been proven that everything the Coulombs said against Blavatsky were lies.)
An inicdent
The incident referred to at the bottom of page 258 is relatively trivial, and could not be elucidated properly without drawings and explanations out of keeping with its importance.
I mentioned the incident in the original story, page 96, as “interesting rather for its collateral bearings than by itself alone."
The plaster fragment
Mr. Hodgson next deals with a case I describe, in which a fragment of plaster bas-relief was apparently brought by occult means to me at Allahabad at about the time when the plaster cast from which it was taken fell and broke at Bombay, and the pieces, minus that conveyed to me, were collected by several persons present.
Mr. Hodgson’s conjecture is, that the fragment I found at Allahabad was previously broken off by Mme. Blavatsky and sent to Allahabad to be hidden there in my room by a confederate.
It is only by an examination of the fragments stiff in my possession that this groundless conjecture can be tested. The nature of the fracture, as it happens, is such as to make it appear to any reasonable observation mechanically impossible ; first, that the important piece could have been broken off by itself, leaving the plaque otherwise intact; secondly, that had the piece been thus broken off, the plaque in its fall, could not have starred in the way the fracture has actually occurred.
Notes that Mr. Sinnett received
Mr. Hodgson’s comments on certain notes which I received apparently by occult means at Allahabad about the same time, and in Mme. Blavatsky’s absence, form an amusing illustration of the way in which his indictment has been prepared. He says:
« This is curiously like the en cas which was provided by Mme. Blavatsky for General Morgan in connection with the Adyar saucer phenomenon, and which, as General Morgan did not ask any questions, remained in the possession of the Coulombs. »
Of course it is Mr. Hodgson's assumption that the scrap of paper thus produced by the Coulombs was prepared by Mme. Blavatsky, but, as usual, Mr, Hodgson’s empty guesses on one page become adamantine facts when referred back to at a later stage of his narrative.
(Again and again Mr. Hodgson seeks to explain all the phenomena by saying that they were tricks because he cannot conceive that they could be real.)
The paranormal sounds produced by Mme. Blavatsky
Amongst the simplest of the incidents I described in the Occult World were those which had to do with the power Mme. Blavatsky possessed of emitting some kind of current from her hands, which made an audible sound on objects she touched, or even held her hand over.
On one special occasion a crowd of people, after a dinner-party at which she had been present, made a pile of their hands, held one above another on the table, and all declared when Mme. Blavatsky rested her hand on the top of the pile, and emitted the current I have spoken of, that they felt a slight shock pass through their hands, which we all heard record itself as a rap on the surface of the table. In reference to this incident, Mr. Hodgson remarks:
« I have not taken part in forming a pile of hands such as Mr. Sinnett describes” ([Sinnet´s note:] as if the deficiencies of his experience were a serious factor in these transactions), but I cannot,” he says, “attribute any importance to his confident statement concerning this and similar incidents, now that I have examined some of the possibilities in other cases about which he speaks with equal if not greater confidence. »
That is to say, now that the general accuracy of my testimony is impaired by the wonderful discovery Mr. Hodgson lias made about the ten and thirty seconds, for, ludicrous as the position is, that impeachment continues to underlie all the groundless pretences which Mr. Hodgson makes throughout this Report in regard to having shaken the value of my testimony.
The astral bells
As regards the bell sounds, of which so much has been said, Mr. Hodgson thinks they might at least have been produced by Mine. Blavatsky by means of a machine concealed about her person, crediting his own sagacity in this way with a suspicion he appears to think too profound to have entered any other mind previously.
It is enough to say that this elementary conjecture was of course a primary idea in all our minds when these bell-phenomena were first brought under our notice, only to be rejected as soon it arose on account of its manifest inapplicability to the case. It is true Mr. Hodgson fortifies his conjecture — writing:
« Mine. Coulomb asserts that they were actually so produced by the use of a small musical-box . . . . and showed me stains resembling iron-mould (on some discarded under-garments of Mme. Blavatsky) which she affirmed had been caused by contact with the metal of the machine. »
(I reiterate that the Couloms told lies.)
Mr. Hodgson says about the bell sounds:
« Mr. Sinnett seems to have overlooked the great uncertainty in all localisation of sounds (Mr. Sinnett having, of course, assumed that his readers would credit him with paying attention to childish simple considerations of that kind), and the possibility that, if Mine. Blavatsky had one such machine she might possibly have had two, does not seem to have occurred to Mr. Sinnett. »
If a savage, looking at a locomotive engine, suggested that there was a horse inside, and hearing that I had denied this, as inadequate to explain the motion of the train, remarked that "it does not seem to have occurred to Mr. Sinnett that there might be two,” he would have risen to the exact level of Mr. Hodgson’s sagacity as exhibited in this criticism.
Mr. Hodgson's calligraphic analyses
Later on, Mr. Hodgson shows great patience in counting g’s with their tails turned one way, or d’s with their stems turned another, and in one document finds a particular d, 1'106 times.
If any one exhibiting similar mechanical patience, would go through the whole Report, and count the number of times in which, as in the case just quoted, it breaks faith with the committee’s cleclaration that the assertion of the Coulombs cannot be taken as evidence, an array of cases might be compiled rivalling in number some varieties of Mme. Blavatsky’s g.
But certainly, if Mr. Hodgson had honestly refrained from imbibing ideas at the ever-flowing fountain of Mine. Coulomb’s evidence, he would have come home with a comparatively meagre stock of accusations to bring against the good faith of Mme. Blavatsky and her Theosophical colleagues in India.
The materializations that Mme. Blavatsky made in Simla
I must pass over some trifling criticisms, tempting as some of them are by their naivete, to deal with the elaborate comments now put forward in regard to the narrative of the Simla picnic.
This was the occasion on which a much talked-of cup and saucer were dug up from the ground. An important feature in connection with, this occurrence, as described by myself is “that Mme. Blavatsky had no share in the choice of the spot chosen for the luncheon,” as Mr. Hodgson now sums the matter up.
As a matter of fact the feast was a breakfast, and was so described by me in the Occult World. The inaccuracy, therefore, that Mr. Hodgson commits, in referring to it as a luncheon, is one that I should think well within the grasp of the S. P. R. committee, and calculated to give them much concern. But to pass on, Mr. Hodgson says:
« Almost the reverse of this appears from the opening sentences of Colonel Olcott’s account. »
This account was written by Colonel Olcott for circulation at the time among the Fellows of the T. S. at Bombay.
Now, in reference to Colonel Olcott, when dealing with his testimony, Mr. Hodgson convicts him of various instances of “unreliability,” “lapses of memory" and “extreme deficiency in the faculty of observation.” On these grounds he feels justified in putting Colonel Olcott’s testimony aside as worthless whenever it is convenient to do so.
But now that a narrative of Colonel Olcott is discovered, which fails to correspond with a narrative of the same events by myself, Mr. Hodgson’s volatile imagination at once invests it with all the attributes of an indisputable standard, and triumphantly points to the certain evidence thus afforded of my own inaccuracy.
A large part of the criticism on which we are now entering rests on this assumption —so daring, considering the previous passage— that if a difference is detected between my account and Colonel Olcott that proves that I am wrong.
But unfortunately for Mr. Hodgson’s argument it is only his own extraordinary faculty for stumbling over the literal phraseology of a sentence and failing to catch its essential meaning that lias made him think there is any difference of the least importance between Colonel Olcott’s narrative and my own.
The passage from Colonel Olcott’s Report now quoted is as follows:
« Although she had never been at Simla before, she directed us where to go, describing a certain small mill, which the Sinnetts, Major, and even the jampanies affirmed did not exist. She also mentioned a small Tibetan temple as being near it. We reached the spot she had described and found the mill at about 10 a.m., and sat in the shade and had the servants spread the collation. »
Now Colonel Olcott is, broadly speaking, right in his account, and yet it is true that Mine. Blavatsky had no share in the choice of the spot selected for our breakfast. The explanation of the simple paradox is as follows:
One objective point for our expedition was a Tibetan temple, which Mme. Blavatsky declared must exist somewhere down in the valley, and asserted to be near a mill. We wished to visit the temple because we had reason to believe it had lately been visited by a certain occultist.
Not to dwell upon details, which, as will be seen shortly are of no real importance, we found our temple, and, amidst some merriment, a very small water-wheel in the neighbourhood, a little native construction fixed in a stream, which justified Mme. Blavatsky’s clairvoyantc pertinacity about a mill. But then we proceeded on our journey.
There is the only imperfection in Colonel Olcott’s narrative, a hiatus which at the time was of no interest to him. I was on in advance with the gentleman here spoken of as Major-, and led the way to the spot which I had selected in my own mind, —a certain place beside the stream where I had once been before,— as that at which our breakfast should be spread.
There, however, we found the water of the stream dirty and disagreeable, and, moreover, discovered a little way down that preparation was being made for a Hindu cremation.
Major ___ and I then struck upwards into the wroods to choose a more suitable encampment, and of our own independent volition chose one, where the servants, when they came up, were ordered to prepare the breakfast.
All this, of course, Mr. Hodgson ignores, even assuming as the basis of his later remarks that the picnic took place at the spot chosen by Mine. Blavatsky, for he writes:
« As this place appears in Mr. Sinnett’s account as a place they are not likely to go to, we cannot attach much weight to his opinion that the cup and saucer were of a kind they were not likely to take. »
It is tedious to continue a repetition of the same remarks, but here again it will be observed that Mr. Hodgson finds fault with the particular statement in hand for no better reason than that one of its predecessors stands bespattered with his own groundless insinuations.
From first to last of these criticisms levelled against the Occult World phenomena I deny that there is a single allegation which has any rational foundation whatever, or one that could have stood the test of an honest discussion with myself before an impartial tribunal if the committee had conceived the fair treatment of tliis inquiry desirable, or had ventured to play the part of an impartial tribunal itself.
Mr. Hodgson says:
« Probably Mme. Blavatsky's native servant Babula, an active young fellow, who I am assured on good authority had formerly been in the service of a French conjuror, could throw even more light upon the day’s proceedings than Colonel Olcott’s account. »
Fresh insinuation —groundless, offensive, unintelligent— put forward with all the authority of the S. P. R. as the result of a special mission to India and an incubation of six months over its eggs.
Moderate common sense, by the light of the facts described, will show that neither Babula nor all the active young fellows in Simla together could have contributed to the result which actually occurred in the smallest degree.
The cup and saucer were dug up within a few yards of the spot where we breakfasted. That Mme. Blavatsky should “create” a cup and saucer was a joking suggestion of one of the ladies present, itself the consequence of fortuitous conditions, and all the silly and inappropriate objections that have been brought against my narrative of the occurrence —Mr. Hodgson’s among the number— leave the force of its evidence absolutely unimpaired.
Two other prominent phenomena took place during the picnic, besides that of the cup and saucer. Mr. Hodgson writes:
« The concealment of the diploma and the management of the bottle of water would have been still easier tasks for Babula than the burying of the cup and saucer in the rooted bank. »
In face of such remarks it is difficult to maintain our trust in the perfect good faith of the present Report, but we must imitate the plan adopted by Mr. Hodgson when, finding it difficult to face the unimpeachable good faith of Colonel Olcott — and justify his moral attitude at the expense of his understanding.
Neither with the diploma nor with the bottle of water could Babula have had anything to do. To do full justice to Mr. Hodgson’s criticisms I must trouble the reader with some further quotations.
Mr. Hodgson writes:
« In connection with this incident Mr. Sinnett has much to suggest about the abnormal stupidity of a certain cooly who had been sent with empty bottles to a brewery with a pencil note asking for water, and who, finding no European at the brewery to receive the note, brought back the empty bottles. It was apparently one of these empty bottles thus brought back that Mme. Blavatsky took for her experiment. Who was this abnormally stupid cooly? Surely not Madame Blavatsky’s personal servant, Babula? and yet Babula was in some way concerned.
Colonel Olcott wrote, —after saying that wanting some tea they found they were out of water,—
“Servants were sent in various directions, but could get none. While Babula was sent off on a second search, Madame quietly went to the lunch baskets, took an empty water bottle, put it in the loose sleeve of her gown, and came straight to where we were sitting on the grass. The bottle was full of the clearest and softest water, of which we all partook."
Granted that Babula was present, the fact that all the bottles became empty, and afterwards that one of them became full, may be easily accounted for without the necessity of supposing that there was anything more substantial than a smile in Mme. Blavatsky’s sleeve. It is curious how much Babula has been kept in the background of Mr. Sinnett’s account, carelessly, no doubt, and not carefully, but then, if carelessly, Mr. Sinnett must be charged with a grievous lack of ordinary perspicacity. »
One hardly knows where first to pick out the bits of false assumption, foolish reasoning, and self-sufficient perversity which constitute the tangled web of this whimsical criticism. Of course the a abnormally stupid cooly” was not Babula, but one of my own coolies employed on the service of the day. His journey to the brewery and return are covered in Colonel Olcott’s Report by the single sentence, “Servants were sent in various directions but could get none.”
The fact that Babula had gone “on a second search” (following Colonel Olcott’s description) when Madame contrived to fill one of the previously empty bottles, has no bearing on the event at all, any more than the great truth that there are milestones on the Dover Road.
What purpose has Mr. Hodgson in view in pressing upon the attention of the reader the fact that, while Mme. Blavatsky performed the feat described, with one of the empty bottles, which we all saw her take from the basket where we knew there were none but empty bottles—Babula had gone away on a second search?
If he was off the scene he could not be helping to do the trick. But Mr. Hodgson seems to think that any kind of darkly significant mention of Babula s name, on the cruel theory about the simple and devoted boy that he has constructed, will impress his readers with a general notion that there was trickery somehow going on.
The only trickery concerned really is the rhetorical trickery to which Mr. Hodgson thus descends, but of this, indeed, there is but too much in the present Report. That “Babula has been kept in the background of Mr. Sinnett’s narrative” is simply explained by his total insignificance on this occasion.
Mr. Hodgson has dragged him now into a European celebrity to suit the strained necessities of his own attack, and if Mr. Hodgson could have been seen looming on the horizon, in 1880, then Babula would perhaps have been left at home. Not that that would have mattered in the slightest degree to our present fertile critic, whose methods of analysing such occurrences as I have had to describe rises triumphant above the limitations of circumstance as of common sense.
But no matter how inapt, how illogical, how flippant from what ought to be the point of view of a psychic researcher, any silly insinuation he once makes against me, however gratuitous, is firm ground for him to stand upon thenceforward when misrepresenting me as found lacking in ordinary perspicacity.
(Once again Mr. Hodgson tries to explain the phenomena that Blavatsky produced, arguing that they were tricks carried out with the complicity of Babula, but if you read the testimonies you will see that this theory is not valid, and instead Blavatsky later explained that she carried out these materializations with the help of the Masters.)
The materialization of a brooch inside a cushion
I shall rest content with blowing a few more holes through this criticism of the Occult World at once the most elaborate and most irrational, the most patient and the pettiest, the most microscopic and the most undiscerning review, —and immeasurably the most unscrupulous,— to which that much discussed book has been subjected, and will leave some blocks of Mr. Hodgson’s shattered edifice for readers of intelligence, guided by the explanations here given, to break up into smaller fragments for themselves if they choose.
Let me pass on now to Mr. Hodgson’s treatment of the pillow incident. (Occult World, pp. 75-79.)
Mr. Hodgson writes:
« Mr. Sinnett’s subjective impressions of the previous night appear to be in close relation with the incident, if not to form part of it. But as they are not exactly described I am, of course, unable to deal with them. If they were neither hallucination nor extreme illusion suffered by Mr. Sinnett, they may have been due to Mme. Blavatsky’s boldness and cleverness, in which case the cushion may have been manipulated before Mr. Sinnett spoke of his impressions that morning. »
The use which Mr. Hodgson can make of the potential mood, when he has no solid evidence (derived from M. or Mme. Coulomb) to go upon, will amuse the patiently analytical reader of the wonderful composition under notice. But the real art of the sentence just quoted lies in the introduction of the idea that the point for Mme. Blavatsky to work at during the early morning of the day under discussion was the subsequently famous cushion.
Mr. Hodgson writes as if the whole difficulty were how Mme. Blavatsky or her assumed confederate, Babula, should get at the cushion.
The cushion, at that period, had not entered on the field of view. But Mr. Hodgson wishes us to suppose that its selection later in the day by myself, as a place where the token to be given me should be found, was something that Mme. Blavatsky could easily have foreseen.
Mr. Hodgson writes:
« Mme. Blavatsky’s intimate acquaintance with Mr. Sinnett may have enabled her to anticipate with considerable confidence that he would choose the cushion! »
For pure absurdity this remark deserves to rank among the first half-dozen gems of that sort in Mr. Hodgson’s collection.
An intimate acquaintance with any one might enable a friend to forecast his probable choice of a favourite author, or favourite opera, but would not suggest beforehand what horse he would be likely to draw in a sweepstakes, or what bean out of a bagful. Yet the “choice” of the cushion was an issue almost as unforeseeable in its nature as the choice of the bean would be.
Mr. Hodgson argues to suit the facts of the moment:
« Simply because such places as the ground and the tree had been chosen before, they were not likely to be chosen again. »
Had the circumstances been different, and his object to disparage the choice of a spot of ground, can we doubt that Mr. Hodgson would have written “Simply by observing his previous habits of choice, Mme. Blavatsky must have known that the ground or a tree would be selected."
But on the theory that these were ruled off by previous experiments, why was I precluded from selecting, as a place of concealment under the table-cloth on the grass, for example, or inside the then uncut cake (which I remember crossed my mind as a place to choose, but was mentally discarded in favour of the cushion), or inside one of my own pockets, or underneath my wife’s jampan set down at random on the ground, or underneath any other of the half-dozen jampans present, or underneath a napkin spread on the ground for the purpose, or on the roof of the stone hut near where we were sitting, or somewhere within that hut (such an obvious place!
Mr. Hodgson would have said if that had been selected), or in one of the luncheon-baskets — or so on for another page or two. And yet Mr. Hodgson lias either the simplicity or assurance to say the cushion was likely to be chosen.
Of course he proceeds to fortify this hypothesis with others of a like nature, trusting that his readers will regard three or four untenable conjectures as perhaps in the mass more tenable than either separately.
If the cushion had not been chosen “some conversation might ensue as to whether the place fixed upon was best, and ultimately it might be decided they should look for it in one of the cushions.”
Provided the occult feat under notice had actually been faulty in thus involving preliminary conversation as to the place to be chosen, Mr. Hodgson might have had some ground for suggesting that this destroyed the point of the performance; but seeing that the feat was performed straight off, without hesitation, as I desired, the suggestion that under different circumstances it would have been suspicious, does not seem very forcible or sagacious.
If I were to point to an animal and say “that is a donkey” (and a naturalist should confirm my opinion), I am so far shown to know a donkey when I see one, and my judgment in such matters is not impugned if any one tells me, “Suppose you had first said it was a cow and then a pig, you might have gone on guessing till you got right in the end.”
The evidential value of the “Pillow Incident” remains, in truth, absolutely untouched by Mr. Hodgson’s gratuitous hypothesis.
His pretence is, that he is suggesting ways in which the result accomplished might have been brought off by ordinary means, and he merely staggers about among the facts, ignoring one while he is framing a hypothesis, incompatible with it, to explain another, and then attempting to get over the first fact by suggesting some other alternative hypothesis incompatible with the second.
The multiplication of theories on this principle ad nauseam is not legitimate argument, but disingenuous trickery with words, by which it is hoped the intelligence of careless readers may be ensnared, — or else it shows what so many other characteristics of Mr. Hodgson’s Report exhibit, indeed but too plainly, that he is distinguished by a singular inability to apply anything but the coarsest material reasoning to any problem ; and while tolerably skilful with boiling; water and sealing wax, is correspondingly deficient in the gifts required for estimating probabilities.
And while quite in his proper sphere when trying experiments with sealing wax and gum, to try how long it would take him to get inside a letter and fasten it up again so as to look as it did at first, Mr. Hodgson shows himself a gobemouclie of the first water when he scents a new suspicion.
(Mr. Hodgson would have his readers believe that Blavatsky manipulated Mr. Sinnett into choosing the materialization of Mrs. Sinnett's brooch inside thisushion, but Mr. Sinnett, both in his reply above and in his book, emphatically stipulated that the choice of that cushion was entirely random.)
The Jhelum telegram
Passing on to criticise the circumstances of the incident known to readers of the Occult World as that of the Jhelum telegram, he appends the following note to the statement that “afterwards Mr. Sinnett was requested through Mme. Blavatsky to see the original.”
Mr. Hodgson writes:
« I may here mention a curious document that was unintentionally lent me for several days by Mr. Damodar.
I had with some difficulty obtained several specimens of Mahatma writing, and in an envelope inclosing some of these I afterwards found a slip of paper which had not —as I concluded when later I discovered that it was not enumerated among those lent to me— been observed in the envelope when Mr. Damodar gave me permission to take the specimens away.
This document was a single small fragment of paper, undated and unsigned. On one side of it were written the following words in red ink, and the writing resembles that attributed to Mahatma M. [Morya]:
‘Send this by copying telegram and original telegram to A. P. S. [Alfred Percy Sinnett] Charge to my account and send bill. Let Deb. study more carefully hs part.’
Whether this document had anything to do with the above incident I can, of course, only conjecture. »
This note is interesting in two ways. First, it shows us that Mr. Hodgson did not hesitate to use as evidence against the Theosophical group at Adyar, and Mr. Damodar in particular, a paper which he thought had slipped into his possession "unintentionally" —which, therefore, he had no better moral right to use, than he would have had if he had taken it off or out of Mr. Damodar’s desk in his absence.
Secondly, it shows us the temper of mind in which this scientific, careful investigator collected and reported on his evidence — and won from the committee to whom he made his report the public declaration that “they have satisfied themselves as to the thoroughness of Mr. Hodgson’s investigation, and have complete reliance on his impartiality.”
For a longer acquaintance than Mr. Hodgson possessed with the course of my relations with the Mahatmas would have shown him that the slip of paper he fastened on with so much interest, believing himself to have got hold of it “unintentionally,” related to one of several transactions occurring long after the incident of the Jhelum telegram, though long before the “investigation” at Madras.
Mahatma M. sent me two or three telegrams at various times through Mr. Damodar on business relating to the Society, during the cold weather of 1881-82, and as the original of one such telegram in Mahatma M.'s handwriting coming to me by post from Mr. Damodar, and following the transmission of the same words over the wires, is still in my possession, in all probability this is the message to which the directions on the slip of paper referred.
They could not have any reference to the Jhelum telegram for two reasons—-firstly, because Mahatma M. had nothing whatever to do with the Jhelum telegram, the original of which was in Mahatma K. H.’s handwriting.
Will Mr. Hodgson here introduce his favourite potential mood, and suggest that whoever wrote the message in Mahatma M.'s hand, may also have written the Jhelum message in Mahatma K. H.'s?
Then I will recommend to attention my second reason, which was that I obtained a sight of the original of the Jhelum telegram not by having it sent me by Mr. Damodar, but by favour of the officials of the telegraph department, who had it forwarded, to oblige me, from their Jhelum to their Allahabad office [which is where Mr. Sinnett resided].
Mr. Hodgson infects me with a disposition to make conjectures, so I will hazard a suggestion that the slip of paper in this case may have been included but not enumerated among the series lent to Mr. Hodgson, rather less "unintentionally" than he supposes.
It looks to me only too much like an experiment on his credulity — perhaps already conjectured to be voracious for suspicions which might point to knavery lying hidden in the midst of guileless integrity — and perhaps as a test for the question how far he might be disposed to make use of information he might think “unintentionally” conveyed to him.
Mr. Hodgson has not much to say that is very crushing about the Jhelum incident itself except to suggest that Mme. Blavatsky may have read my letter, and “have telegraphed the right reply to a confederate at Jhelum, one of the various people who, to suit Mr. Hodgson’s hypotheses, is taught beforehand, in the interests of the ever-ramifying fraud, to produce a fair imitation of the handwriting I conceive to be that of the Mahatma K. H.
It is amusing to observe how at every turn Mme. Blavatsky, whose means, to judge from her ordinary life all this while in India, are not at all superabundant, is freely credited with maintaining confederates and bribing servants, and the a peons,” or messengers of the post office, all over the country.
This feature of Mr. Hodgson’s criticism is only one more illustration of a psychological fact which he emphasises strongly also in many other ways, though quite unconsciously, that a considerable degree of physical cunning is quite compatible with a marvellous inability to appreciate moral probabilities.
Had the Jhelum incident stood alone, and had I endeavoured to rest large inferences on the circumstances under such conditions, there might have been some force in the conjecture that it might have been brought about by confederacy; but when, in the midst of an immense multiplicity of occult phenomena that manifestly could not be promoted by all the confederacy in creation, there stand a considerable number of the kind that could only be explained by highly complicated confederacy ramifying all about India, costing much money, and subject to innumerable dangers of betrayal: when it is manifest that Madame Blavatsky could not be thus supported by a regiment of confederates, the confederacy hypothesis in each case shares the discredit that attaches to it as a comprehensive theory.
The portrait produced phenomenally
It will, perhaps, have been apparent already that Mr. Hodgson’s criticisms on the Occult World phenomena sin sometimes against fairness and candour, and sometimes against intelligence, but the final remark which closes the series ingeniously unites both characteristics.
I tell a story in the Occult World, pp. 137-139, concerning the production of a certain profile portrait on a sheet of previously white paper which lay under plain observation, in a book, on the drawing-room table, during the interval of time which elapsed between its last inspection as blank paper and its discovery impressed with the portrait.
On this narrative Mr. Hodgson remarks:
« It is not necessary to say any more concerning the exiguity of Mr. Sinnett’s account than that Mme. Blavatshy is exceedingly skilful in the use of both pencil and brush. I have seen specimens of her handiwork, not only on certain playing cards which Colonel Olcott showed me, each card being a clever humorous sketch, but in drawings precisely similar to that mentioned by Mr. Sinnett, where the face on the white paper was defined by contrast with cloudy blue shading. »
The sneer here at what is called the exiguity of my account is ill placed, because the point of the incident, regarded as a test phenomenon, resides in its extreme simplicity.
Here is no congeries of circumstances to be weighed and compared with one another, claiming a long elucidation, as in -the case of the Vega incident, or even the Jhelum telegram.
The charm of the portrait incident as an occult test turns on the utter simplicity of the transaction. The paper was seen to he blank before breakfast, left in a book on the table in sight of us all while we had that meal, and found to bear a portrait when we went to look at it immediately afterwards.
Mr. Hodgson can hardly suggest confederates here, nor count g’s, nor exhibit his cleverness in opening closed envelopes with steam from boiling water.
There is, of course, nothing to allege or urge against the story. II I am telling what I believe to be the truth — and hitherto my bitterest opponents have recognised that people who know me would think it stupid to suggest the contrary — there is no getting out of the conclusion that on this occasion an occult phenomenon was wrought.
I think there is no getting out of that conclusion, compatibly with sound sense, in a great many other cases as well; but we may keep for a moment to the portrait incident.
Mr. Hodgson would obviously have complimented my story if he had called it concise, under the circumstances, but by using a synonymous expression, carrying a slight flavour of opprobrium, he may entrap a weak-minded reader in thinking there must be something wrong about a narration that can be regarded as exiguous.
But then comes another insinuation, groundless and irrelevant, but quite on Iago’s pattern, as vaguely suggestive of an undefined suspicion.
Mme. Blavatsky is skilful with pencil and brush! As to the fact it is not worth arguing the matter. The testimony of her intimate friends would, I think, be quite the reverse, in spite of the pen-and-ink illuminations on the playing cards above referred to, and I conjecture that the blue shading drawings shown to Mr. Hodgson as hers were shown to him as occult precipitations of hers, though he now calmly suppresses this.
But in any case the remark has no practical or logical bearing on the case in hand at all. Mme. Blavatsky might have had the artistic genius of Michael Angelo and the resources of a drawing school in her bed-room, and it would not have made an atom of difference to the phenomenal character of the transaction Idescribe, for she was eating her breakfast with us the whole time during which the sheet of white paper became impressed with the blue portrait.
The paragraph under review, in fact, is a mere snarl without any sense or meaning in it, and I can only interpret the action of the committee in allowing it to stand in their published Proceedings by supposing that they preferred, as I have been told they desire, to repudiate responsibility for the report as to its details.
If they began to edit it they would very likely have been puzzled to know where they should stop. They elected a course, therefore, which bade fair to get the Theosophical Society blackened as much as possible, while by professing to shirk the responsibility it was their duty to bear, they have tried to prevent any of Mr. Hodgson’s black from coming off on their own fingers.
(Colonel Olcott also mentioned other portraits that Mme. Blavatsky produced phenomenally and these are in the Adyar museum.)
Conclusion
Complacently pluming himself in conclusion on the success which he has not attained in showing that the Occult World phenomena can be satisfactorily accounted for by trickery, Mr. Hodgson gives me up as an observer who does not exercise due caution.
He has riddled each of my stories in detail with the lightning of his penetrating sagacity, and now the reck can be put aside once for all, out of the path of a Psychic Research, carried on, in harmony with prevailing modes of thought, by the help of measuring tapes and caligraphic experts.
I think that all reasonable men, on the contrary, especially if they start from any moderate familiarity with the psychic fermentation going on in the world will be rather drawn over to the conclusion that the independent investigation of a man so glaringly unable to deal fairly with the investigations of others, and so ill prepared, to judge by the exhibition he unconsciously makes of the quality of his own mind, to enter into sympathy with spiritual ardour or self-devotion to a lofty cause, is itself discredited by his absolute failure to shake the solidity and coherence of the plain and unvarnished tale told in my book.
Nothing I can say, I am well aware —it is unlikely that anything any one can say— will disturb the supreme satisfaction with which Mr. Hodgson contemplates the fruit of his Indian mission enshrined in his long-studied Report.
He is so content with his own conclusions that he never, it would seem, cares to check them for his own guidance by consultation with others.
During the half year he has spent in polishing his Report he has never referred to me to find out what I could say in defence of my narrative, how I could answer for this or that circumstance that appeared to him suspicious.
He has preferred to blunder alone into the quagmire of inconsistency and misapprehension the foregoing pages have shown to constitute his Report so far as it deals with my own work.
To confront with suspicions that arise in his mind the person against whom they are levelled would appear to be a course of action foreign to Mr. Hodgsons instincts.
He came into possesson while at Madras of the famous Coulomb letters (or, at all events, obtained some of them); he knew that Mme. Blavatsky had declared them to be replete with forged interpolations. He never took them to her and said, “What part do you declare to be forged, and how do you account for the apparent cohesion of the letters?”
From the depths of his own consciousness, and by meditating profoundly on the tails of g’s, as it may fairly be presumed the forgers, if there were forgers, had in their turn meditated before him, he decided that Mme. Blavatsky must be an impostor. A suspicion, it would seem in Mr. Hodgson’s mind, is a precious treasure to be guarded from rude contact with the rough airs of Heaven until, nourished by careful accumulation of circumstance, and fortified by consultation with persons known to be in sympathy with the young serpent in the egg, it grows big enough to be let loose for mischief.
And careful all the while to observe the spirit of the maxim about treating your friends as though they might one day be your enemies, Mr. Hodgson makes notes to be used against them of unfinished phrases that drop from the lips of his hosts at Adyar, and getting himself photographed in fraternal association with a crowd of Theosophists at the convention, so cleverly guides them to invert his policy themselves, that they guilelessly treat as a friend the investigator who can hardly, the while, have been unaware that he was destined to develop into their enemy.
III
Final notes
I do not, as the title of the pamphlet will have shown, design it to be a reply adequately meeting the whole battery of attack now directed by the Psychic Research Society against the honour and credit of the leaders in the elevated philosophical movement the committee seems so little able to appreciate.
The enormous pile of entirely one-sided evidence collected by its agent during the first half of the past year and worked into what has been thought to be the most damaging shape it could assume, during the second half, manifestly constitutes a paper which I cannot profess a readiness to deal with in all its details offhand and within a few days.
But Mr. Hodgson’s second-hand suspicions concerning the shrine, and the multifarious accusations by Mme. Coulomb of which lie has meekly made himself the channel, beat in vain against the Theosophical position if my narrative stands.
It has seemed to me desirable, therefore, to show without delay what hasty readers, less conversant with the whole case than myself might not so quickly have perceived, that in truth there is no force whatever in the objections which Mr. Hodgson brings against any one of the long series of experiences related in my book. It is only by beginning with criticisms so absurd that it is difficult to understand how he can have vanquished the sense of shame he must have felt in first endeavouring to work with them —those concerning the ten and thirty seconds— that he was able to inaugurate the system on which he has striven to damage the credit of my story.
That system has been to level an undue reproach at me, and to keep referring to me as a man who has incurred that reproach. And each fresh reference of that kind is an excuse for suggesting that I am probably at fault again. A man open to so much reproach can hardly be trusted even when you cannot prove him wrong. And so the long indictment rolls like a snowball.
Very little would it have concerned me, indeed, under other circumstances, what Mr. Hodgson might think or say about my book or my capacity or incapacity for describing events as they occur.
I have not trembled before possibilities of ridicule or incredulity in helping to explain recent Theosophical developments to the world. I write for those who might understand, and have faculties of mind to catch the value of my message ; and these have proved far more numerous than I ever hoped in the beginning would be the case, and for the rest, whoever may disbelieve or think my statements of no importance, those are people with whom I have no intellectual business to transact.
When they like to jeer, it amuses them, and there is an end of the matter. But other interests of far greater importance than my literary credit have become involved in the attack now made upon me, and it has, therefore, been my duty to expose the worthless character of Mr. Hodgson’s fault-finding.
The Psychical Research Society for its part seems to follow a different policy from that I have just indicated as my own, and striving above all things to keep well with public opinion, to make terms with prejudice, to hold at arm's length whatever may entangle it with psychical developments, for which the general sense of the community is not yet ripe, it has conceived itself bound to shake off with every appearance of detestation the brief association into which it was at one time tempted with the leaders of the Theosophical Society.
These persons were under a cloud of suspicion; the published letters of Mme. Coulomb’s collection raised doubts of their probity.
I do not for one moment blame the leading members of the S. P. R. for resolving on a searching inquiry.
It is the manner in which that inquiry was carried out from first to last that I condemn, and I condemn that most unreservedly. There has been no step taken that looks as if it had been dictated by a careful sense of justice only, anxious to arrive at the truth.
The examination of the Coulomb letters, conducted as it has been, has been but the mockery of an examination. The committee and the agent they employed have equally shrunk, at every fresh turn their investigation took, from calling on the persons they have accused, for any defence.
To any one acquainted with the people concerned and familiar with the circumstances of the case, the spectacle of Mr. Hodgson winding his way as he describes among the chelas at Adyar, conceiving suspicions and hiding them from everyone in a position to explain them away, disguising his mind to the last —never diverging into the candour which ought to have characterised his action throughout— is one which makes the whole proceeding in which he has been employed a comprehensive outrage on all the principles of justice and fair play.
With adequate pains taken I believe that every allegation which Mr. Hodgson makes in his Report to the moral prejudice of each and all of the Theosophical group in India, and of Mme. Blavatsky in particular, could be demolished and shown to be the result of false testimony or of misunderstanding, to be stupid beside other facts, that are in themselves indisputable and totally undeserved. But it is relatively easy to circulate injurious charges, it is sometimes a task of Herculean magnitude to disprove them in detail.
(I agree that Mr. Hodgson and the S. P. R. did not investigate but only sought to disparage Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society.)
For the present I do not intend to go into a wearisome examination of Mr. Hodgson’s hearsay evidence about the shrine. I content myself with giving in an Appendix to this reply some extracts from evidence of an opposite kind collected at the time by some of the Theosophists at Adyar to check the apparent testimony of the Coulomb letters.
And in regard generally to all that concerns Mme. Blavatsky in the present Report, I would suggest that people who fancy Mr. Hodgson has made out a prima facie case against her (he cannot have done more, for the defence has not yet been heard), I would suggest that before rivalling the committee of the Psychical Research Society in precipitately giving judgment on an ex parte statement, they at least await the appearance of certain Memoirs of Mme. Blavatsky which, driven by what has now been published to make a somewhat premature use of materials in my hands, I am engaged in preparing for the press.
These Memoirs will appear, no doubt, in the course of the spring. Meanwhile the flood of calumny which is now directed against her is only effective in the estimation of persons who remain outside the circle of her intimate acquaintance, and inoperative with those for whom personal knowledge of her life and character render inherently absurd the conclusions now derived from the circumstantial evidence Mr. Hodgson has so laboriously scraped together, and that the S. P. R. has recklessly hurled against her without waiting to hear how it might be analysed or elucidated by any competent critic.
NOTE
Mr. Mohini's clarifications
(Mohini was a member of the Theosophical Society.)
Mr. Mohini, knowing me about to issue a pamphlet dealing with Mr. Hodgson’s Report, wishes to comment on the random attacks Mr. Hodgson levels against his veracity.
His analysis —with explanation sufficiently detailed to illuminate Mr. Hodgson’s mistakes— of the various comments on his evidence and statements scattered through the Report, would extend this pubcation to inconvenient length.
Moreover, I do not wish for a moment that it should be regarded as a complete reply. It is only designed to bring about the leading features of Mr. Hodgson’s methods, and to exhibit plainly a few of the considerations which render his Report so discreditable to himself and to the committee which has assumed the responsibility of publishing it.
However, I cannot deny Mr. Mohini this opportunity of pointing out one salient blunder winch Mr. Hodgson falls into in dealing with his testimony.
Referring to the evidence about “the strange voice” (see pp. 35 7-8 of the Report) Mr. Mohini now says:
« Briefly stated, the phenomenon consisted in my hearing at the same time two voices —Mme. Blavatsky’s and another— while sitting with her alone in her room in the house of the late Mr. Nobin K. Bannerji at Darjiling. »
Concerning this incident, Mr. Hodgson says:
« I need only remind the reader of the hollow in the wall which was near the corner of Mme. Blavatsky’s room. The confederate may have been Babula, previously instructed in the reply, and with a mangoedeaf in his mouth to disguise his voice. »
In regard to this hypothesis I, in my turn, need only remind the reader that the incident did not take place at Madras, where Mr. Hodgson examined Mme. Blavatsky’s rooms, but at Darjiling, in the Himalayas, months before the house at Madras was bought or occupied.
What light is thrown on Mr. Hodgson’s conclusions by this inaccuracy, after all his patient and searching inquiry, in which great attention is always professed to have been paid to facts, I leave others to determine.
The following protest by Mr. Mohini, on behalf of an absent person misrepresented by Mr. Hodgson, must not be withheld.
« In conclusion, I protest against the cruel misrepresentation of the position of Mr. Babaji, which occurs on p. 247. He is not u entirely homeless, apart from the Theosophical Society,” in the sense in which alone the words will be understood by the English reader.
He is homeless as any man of respectable parentage may be if he takes monastic vows. His family, who are well off, will gladly find him a home if ever he should want it. But in adopting a religious life he as, in accordance with custom, set himself apart from he world and its ties. »
Mr. Gebhard
I regret that I cannot, without unduly delaying the issue of this pamphlet, insert a letter I have received from Mr. Rudolph Gebhard, witness of certain phenomena which Mr. Hodgson has criticised in his Report in the same spirit he has shown in dealing with my own narrative. Mr. Gebhard conclusively shows that Mr. Hodgson’s theory as to how the Elberfeld letter phenomenon may have been produced, is quite untenable and incompatible with the facts.
(This text was published in Mr. Sinnett's book "The Phenomena of the Occult World and the Society for Psychical Research", pp. 3-48; and I added subtitles for ease of reading.)
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