REPORT MADE ON BLAVATSKY ABOUT HER DEPARTURE FROM NEW YORK TO INDIA

 

 

 

The following text is an article that appeared in the newspaper The Sun of New York on December 19, 1878, p.1:

 

 

 

SILENCE IN THE LAMASERY

 

Madame Blavatsky and the Hierophant [Olcott] off for India.

Eager to See her Dear Heathen Again, and to Have a Little Tiger Shooting – Greetings by Phonograph – The Theosophical Cat.

 

 

On last Sunday night a farewell reception was given to the friends and the members of the Theosophical Society, by the famous heathen of Eighth avenue, Madame H. P. Blavatsky, who, together with Col. H. S. Olcott and another Theosophist, sailed yesterday for Liverpool, en route for Bombay.

 

The spacious rooms of the Lamasery were denuded of furniture, even the carpets having been torn up and sold, and the guests sat on two or three chairs hardly worth selling, and upon boxes and trunks corded and marked for transportation.

 

The usual refreshments were provided in the usual plenty. Tea was served in rotation, only three teacups being left from the sale, but every guest had either a pipe or a cigarette. The long series of "Sunday nights at home" was ending, and there was an unusual number of unusually subdued Theosophists present.

 

There was much talk of the probable future of the Theosophical Society, which, now that it is in coalition with the Arya Samaj of Aryawari, is expected to become a powerful factor in the development of the mental and religious freedom of the world. But, as was natural, there was far more talk of personal memories and anticipations. Madame Blavatsky carried fully her share of the conversation. Her memories of the years she has passed in America were far from cheerful.

 

 

"I hate the civilization you boast of," she said, emphatically.

 

But her anticipations were rose colored.

 

"I shall go to Bombay, and be with my dear heathen," she said, "who are free from the yokes of Christianity at least. I shall only stop for a day or two in England to visit our branch society, and then on to India. When I get there, the first thing I shall do will be to go tiger shooting. I shall go into the jungles with one friend, and no guides, and we will not come back till we get each of us a tiger skin."

 

"But it is not for that I go to India," she continued. "It is to work for the Arya Samaj. I promise you you will hear of it before long."

 

 

Presently a man came in with a phonograph which had been procured for the purpose of carrying greetings to India, without the possibility of any mistake in their delivery. A tall sculptor was dislodged from a barrel on which he sat, and the phonograph was put in position, after which the greetings were shouted into the paper funnel, and a song in pigeon Hindustanee was sung into it by a jolly English artist. Charles, a huge theosophical cat, was then induced to purr at the machine, and the various records were carefully put away.

 

Long after midnight the talk was kept up, and from the writings of the Church in the second century to the latest English attack on the Arya Samaj, religious themes were discussed. On Monday and Tuesday the packing was finished, and on Tuesday night the little party gathered in the Canada’s saloon.

 

Charles, in the mean time, had been sent to a good Theosophist’s house, but had disappeared from the basket in transitu, and has not been seen since. "I don’t know where he is," said the Hierophant, "but I presume we will find him in Bombay when we get there."

 

 

Yesterday morning a few of the most intimate friends of the travellers went to the steamer to bid them farewell. The Hierophant wrote dozens of last despatches on the cabin table, sending messenger after messenger away on various errands, and giving all sorts of instructions as to the future management of the society to the newly chosen officers.

 

Madame Blavatsky held high court in her stateroom, when the inevitable cigarettes were consumed in great numbers, and when a few of her most faithful disciples were telling her of their grief at her departure.

 

"I am glad to go, but I am sorry to leave the few good friends I have found here," she said, and one by one they bade her what was probably their last farewell on earth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

OBSERVATIONS

 

The Lamasery was the nickname given to the apartment where Blavatsky and Olcott lived in New York from June 1876 to December 1878.

 

I don't know if Blavatsky really said she was going to hunt tigers or if the journalist made that up, but she didn't really do it.

 

The collaboration with the Arya Samaj organization soon cooled.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHAT WERE THE BALLARDS LIKE BEFORE THEY BECAME FAMOUS?

 

 

 

 

Below we quote excerpts from letters written by people who knew one or both of the Ballards intimately:

 

“I have known Guy Ballard for more than thirty years,” writes one of his friends, who is amazed at Ballard’s sudden ascension into power. “He came to our home when I was a little girl, and at that time tried to be a medium. Edna, his wife, always has been ambitious, great for personal adornment, and has always been the man of the family.”

 

“We have known Mr. and Mrs. Ballard for years,” writes another party. “Mr. Ballard was a spiritualist in Chicago, and practiced spiritualistic mediumship. Your diagnosis of them is practically correct.”

 

“I have known Mr. Ballard for over thirty years,” says still another. “He has been a medium during all these years. He told me he had made a great discovery and that he has the answer to all the difficulties we encounter.”

 

 

We quote now from a much longer letter, written in the summer of 1938, which will give, perhaps, as vivid a picture of the Ballard background as it is possible to give:

 

« I know whereof I speak, for I have known the Ballards intimately for about twenty-six years. It was about 1915 we will say that I wrote a book on ancient Egypt. It had considerable to say about Egyptian Black Magic, and it was printed in an occult magazine. The story aroused considerable interest in several people . . . men who walk around apparently sane, but have a break somewhere in the brain fibre.

 

Well these people wrote to me and many of them were most interesting correspondents. One of them later spent about four years in a mad house; still, he now walks around and proves himself to be a very subtle and dangerous person.

. . .

I wrote to the Ballards for four years steady every week, then my husband died . . . They invited me to visit them in Chicago, which I did March 12, 1919. I lived with them for seven months, sharing their poverty, their sorrows, and their woes, for they were as poor as the proverbial church mouse.

. . .

They induced me to finance the trip to California . . . The baby Eudonia [Donald ] was just five years old . . .While in San Francisco this great idea of Guy’s was born.

 

We went to a fake _____ church, and there was a lot of chicanery. The Priest and Priestess sitting in two gold chairs with the twelve vestal virgins as the choir. Behind them was a great illuminated cross with flashing lights.

 

During the service the very lightly clad virgins threw flowers among the audience. It was a scream. Afterwards came the Love Feast. A virgin held a basket of strips of bread and the audience were asked to join this holy order, which was non-sectarian. Another virgin held a loving cup of wine. Talk of hypnosis, would you believe it, over one hundred and fifty people went forward and partook of that sacrilegious feast, a parody upon the Lord’s Supper!

 

During this scene Guy’s face was a study. He was enchanted with the show, but did not join the church. As soon as he reached the sidewalk, he could not stop talking about it . . . and from what I now hear, he has fashioned his church upon the same lines with his illuminated background. He could not stop talking about this laughable service.

. . .

Guy Ballard had one obsession. He wanted to find a gold mine. He had dabbled a bit in mining, prospecting, etc. He also studied hypnotism at this time, but was a bit afraid of it. His idea in bringing me to Chicago was that I might lead him to a gold mine, because I was a medium and had a spirit guide.

 

My guide offended them both, for one night he told Edna that she had better stop right where they were, that she would become . . . [Here this woman quotes what the spirit guide said about Edna launching a great deception.]

 

Thenceforth Edna had nothing more to do with my Ascended Master, but Guy thought he could manage him.

 

So we traveled to the top of the Sierras, and lived in a tiny cottage next door to a gold mine. Every day either he and I walked out on the mountains, or Edna and he wandered to far distant places while I took care of the dream child. Guy was determined to find that gold mine. There was no money in the house and we lived upon practically nothing.

 

One day in September, I remember it was the 21st, I was exploring the little village of about twenty houses, when I came across a tall white shaft numbered 10 up to 150.

 

-        “Why, what’s that?” I asked, “the game they play in Coney Island?”

 

-        “No, Ma’m,” replied the native, “that be the snow gauge. After this month you won’t see anything but the roofs of the houses; even the horses go on snow shoes.”

 

Well sir, I prayed hard to get out of discovering a gold mine. And strange to relate in a day or two a registered letter came to me inviting me to Ontario, Canada.

 

I took the next train out of the nearest station, and that’s the last I saw of the Ballards, until I ran into a group of people who with bated breath and fear in their eyes told me of the wonders they perform.

. . .

I don’t believe a word of the Mt. Shasta story. Poppy-cock! He got the idea wandering around the top of the Sierras. They would be gone for days together and camp out under the stars.

 

The people I met in New York nearly mobbed me when I told them that the Ballards were frauds. One of them, not yet touched by their crazy ideas, gave me your letters, and this story of the killing of dear little trusting animals has induced me to write to you.

. . .

I am told that thousands seem to be paralyzed or under a spell while they hold their meetings. He must have turned into a wizard of some sort. No wonder they bothered my life to try and give them the names of certain books.

. . .

They are just very ordinary people, but clever. But again, they may be dealing in black magic. Guy was crazy about it. »

 

 

From this graphic description of the early history of the Ballards, two facts stand out:

 

First, Guy Ballard and his wife Edna had what became almost an obsession with gold mining.

 

Secondly, they craved hidden powers and dominion over others.

 

And her books and statements are clear evidence of these two desires and confirm what this woman says in her letter, since when she wrote it, she had not read any of Ballard's books and had only attended one or two of his meetings.

 

 

(This is the first part of chapter 17 of the book Psychic Dictatorship in America)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE SOURCES THAT THE BALLARDS USED TO PREPARE THEIR CULT

 

 

 

 

Guy and Edna Ballard initially wandered around mountaintops with mediums to see if they could find gold mines, but they never found them.

 

And in their search for hidden powers, they wandered from teacher to teacher. But not from the “Ascended Masters” as their books would have the gullible believe, but simply from esoteric pseudo-instructors of the physical plane: occult lecturers, Hindus, Egyptians and others in the magical world of esotericism.

 

But mainly they were interested in mediumship and varied the business by transmitting some spiritualistic messages for themselves, as any other ordinary medium would do. Most of those who knew the Ballards before they became famous attest that the Ballards were very prone to spiritism.

 

They became wandering metaphysical vagabonds, sitting at the feet of false guides of the earth plane who would be too numerous to mention them all, but the principals were the following:

 

They drank a little Christian Science, read a little Walter CS Method, moved to the Unity School in Kansas City, became involved with the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), joined the Order of Mystics Christians, they studied with Pelley the Silver Shirt, sat at the feet of some of the Swamis, examined the magic of Yogi Philosophy and Eastern Mysticism.

 

But above all they were interested in Baird T. Spalding and his “Far Eastern Masters”, who gave them the idea, undoubtedly, together with the Pseudo-theosophy of Charles Leadbeater, to invent their “Ascended Masters”.

 

And from this curious mixture of heterodoxy emerged the books of Guy Ballard, books of which Saint Germain himself has said "none in the world had been written like them", which is false since Guy Ballard also plagiarized a lot.

 

The Ballards used what they wanted, changed and distorted what they wanted, flavored the whole smorgasbord with literary spices from Deadwood Dick-type novels, salted it with pseudoscientific facts from pulp magazines, sweetened it with a certain amount of soul-catching goodness, hungry for spirituality, and wrapped it in cellophane wrappers with an Arabian Nights glow.

 

They labeled it as “Instruction from the Ascended Master of the Mighty I AM”, transmitted by the three and only divinely appointed Messengers (i.e. Guy, Edna and their son Donald) and sold it hot on the counters for huge profits in the sacred temples of the I AM movement.

 

And the money they could not obtain with their fruitless search for gold mines, they obtained by cajoling the people with their trickster cult.

 

And this mixture is the strange and delirious concoction with which so many thousands of sincere people are being fed morning, noon and night, believing in the lies that those liars told them. And most of them will need a good psychological purge to get so much garbage out of their system.