6. The Mahatma Letters by Joscelyn Godwin
The letters attributed to Mahatmas (“great souls”) are one of the most crucial and puzzling aspects of the Theosophical movement: crucial, because of the part they played in the events of the early 1880s and in the transition from an occultist and “Egyptian” orientation to a universalist and “Oriental” one; puzzling, because of the circumstances surrounding the correspondence and the questions raised by their contents.
As often in Theosophical history, study of the letters has polarized along ideological lines. On the one hand are those who believe in the letters’ self-presentation as the phenomenal production of Masters, dwelling mostly in the Himalayas, and regard their contents as virtually sacred texts.1 On the other hand are those to whom the letters can only be the product of an elaborate hoax by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and those in her power.2 The present study avoids both extremes. It does not pretend to give a final answer but takes the agnostic stance that, in Brendan French’s words, “promises to contribute tremendously to a field of enquiry previously made barren by stubbornness and hauteur.”3
The primary documents, preserved in the Theosophical Society Archives in Adyar and in the British Library, represent four phases of communication ascribed to various “Brothers,” Masters, or Mahatmas. First is the unique, unsigned letter in the script later identified with Koot Hoomi, received in 1870 by Blavatsky’s aunt, Nadyezhda de Fadeyev, and assuring her that her niece was safe.4 Second is the series of letters that Henry Olcott received in 1875 from masters called Serapis and Tuitit Bey.5 Third is the heart of the matter: the letters of 1880–85 signed by Koot Hoomi and Morya and addressed to Alfred Percy Sinnett (1840–1921) and Allan Octavian Hume (1829–1912).6 Fourth are letters received by other members of the Theosophical Society.7 The physical evidence distinguishes these from subsequent claimed communications from Mahatmas, such as those of Alice Bailey, Helena Roerich, the Temple of the People, and Elizabeth Clare Prophet.8
The present chapter takes some of the possible avenues of approach to the letters, chosen to help the impartial reader draw his or her own conclusions.
It addresses six questions:
(1) To whom were they addressed, and why?
(2) By what stages did they reach public notice?
(3) What are their physical peculiarities?
(4) How do they present their alleged writers?
(5) What was Blavatsky’s role in their production?
(6) What was their purpose?
The Recipients: Sinnett and Hume
If we cannot say for certain who or what authored the letters, there is no such doubt about their recipients, nor about the reasons for their involvement. Sinnett had been raised in London by a widowed mother who struggled to support her family by freelance writing.9 After a short and unhappy spell at London University School he left to train as a mechanical draughtsman. At the age of nineteen his writing talent earned him a lucky break into journalism, which led to assignments in London and Sweden, three years in Hong Kong, a journey around the world, and in 1872, aged only thirty-two, the editorship of the Pioneer, the chief newspaper of the British colony in India. There Sinnett enjoyed a good income with all the luxuries and status of colonial life, and a friendly understanding with the Viceroy, Earl Lytton. When Blavatsky and Olcott arrived in 1879, he was at the height of his profession.
Sinnett had witnessed Mrs. Guppy’s mediumship in London and become a con- vinced, though not a pious spiritualist. He was eager to witness occult phenomena and could turn it into excellent copy, both in his newspaper and in the best-selling books, The Occult World and Esoteric Buddhism. These earned him recognition after he was dismissed from the Pioneer and returned, jobless, to London.
Hume, in contrast, grew up in the West End of London and a country house in Norfolk.10 His father, Joseph Hume (1777–1855), had made his fortune in the East India Company and bought a seat in Parliament, where he loudly supported every radical cause.11 Allan was educated at University College School and East India Company College, winning prizes in mathematics. He joined the Civil Service in Calcutta and held several senior posts, including Secretary to the Government (1870–79). The co-editors of Hume’s writings sum up his character: “Though in- tellectually arrogant and an elitist in many respects, he had a profound belief in representative government and a genuine concern for India’s social and economic betterment.”12 Disagreement with a less liberal governor led to Hume’s taking leave in May 1880 and devoting his energies to ornithology, for which he was already renowned. In the same year he began his brief but intense involvement with the Theosophical Society. When that ended, he took up the cause of Indian indepen- dence, earning a place in history as the founding father of the Indian National Congress (1885). He spent his later years in England, where he gave his unrivaled collection of birds, nests, and eggs to the Natural History Museum and devoted himself to botany.
There is a curious incident in Hume’s youth. On a visit to Paris in 1848 he made contact with an unidentified “Association” of mystics, which he mentioned many years later in a letter to the viceroy, Lord Ripon.13 Hume believed at first that the Theosophical Society was under the same inspiration. If, as his biographers suspect, the Parisian association was led by Éliphas Lévi (radical ex-priest and authority on ritual magic), Blavatsky’s known admiration for Levi’s writings might have been decisive for Hume. In any case, his was not a casual involvement. Upon joining the Theosophical Society he gave up shooting big game and killing birds for his collection and became a lifelong vegetarian. But Hume had no religious awe before the Mahatmas. Responding to Blavatsky’s bohemian style and vigorous language, he treated her less as an adept, even less as a lady, than as a pal to be affectionately joshed. Only Hume could write to her: “And tho’ I am desperately inclined at times to believe that you are an impostor I believe I love you more than any of them.”14
Both Sinnett and Hume were thus well disposed, for different reasons, toward the Theosophical Society and its claims, and from the point of view of the Society’s founders, they were a valuable catch. Blavatsky and Olcott’s arrival in India was newsworthy, and Sinnett lost no time in contacting them. They spent the Christmas holidays as his guests in Allahabad, and a longer stay (September 8 to October 21,
1880) at his summer residence at Simla (Shimla), in the western foothills of the Himalayas. There Blavatsky told her hosts of a brotherhood of adepts living in those mountains, watching over the human race and especially over the Theosophical Society. “After communicating mentally by her own occult methods with the distant Brother,” as Sinnett says,15 she obtained some short written messages. There were also inexplicable materializations or apports16 that convinced all present that some occult power was at work.17
His belief in such power now confirmed, Sinnett began to publish accounts of the phenomena in the Pioneer. But he craved a more direct contact with the Brothers, and in mid-October 1880 Blavatsky agreed to try to convey his letters to one of them.18 In his first letter, addressed “to the Unknown Brother,” Sinnett suggested that if a copy of the London Times were caused to appear at Simla on the day of its publication (at a time when the mails took several weeks), it would prove the exist- ence of occult powers beyond the limits of ordinary science.19
Arrival and Publication of the Letters
On October 17, 1880, Sinnett found on his writing table a reply of several pages signed by “Koot Hoomi Lal Singh,” explaining why this would not be a good idea. The world, Koot Hoomi wrote, is not ready for such a radical demonstration. “The ignorant—unable to grapple with the invisible operators—might someday vent their rage on the visible agents at work; the higher and educated classes would go on disbelieving as ever, tearing you to shreds as before.”20
Sinnett’s friend and neighbor Hume was sufficiently impressed by this response that on the same day he wrote to Koot Hoomi offering to give up all his other pursuits and come to study occultism with the Brothers, then “return to the world armed with powers which would enable him to demonstrate the realities of spir- itual development and the errors of modern materialism.”21 On November 1, he too received a long reply from Koot Hoomi touching on political matters, the errors of Western science, the relation of occult powers to the brain, and hinting at a theory of time-cycles.22 Both men were fascinated.
For Blavatsky and Olcott, the friendship with Sinnett and Hume was their entrée into colonial society, but it came at a cost. These gentlemen felt that the founders were going about matters in the wrong way: that they themselves, as cultivated Europeans, could better address the mentalities and needs of their countrymen. To that end they proposed an “independent Anglo-Indian Theosophical Society,” which would be guided directly by one of the Brothers, rather than by the founders. Koot Hoomi consented, with the reservation that it must “be, in fact, a Branch of the Parent body as is the British Theosophical Society at London, and contribute to its vitality and usefulness by promoting its leading idea of a Universal Brotherhood, and in other practicable ways.”23
The primacy of universal brotherhood, to which the Mahatma Letters constantly return, marks an ideological change in the Theosophical Society after it left America for India. As recent scholarship has shown, its original emphasis was on occultism,24 while Blavatsky’s own writings favored another of the society’s objects: the study of comparative religion and mythology. The new direction is evident in the Objects of the Society as stated on February 17, 1881, at a meeting in Bombay, which downplayed occultism and raised the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity to first place.25 But for all the Mahatmas’ insistence on this priority, the very idea of their existence and their mysterious manner of communication only raised curiosity on the occult side.
The Sinnetts (Alfred, Patience, and their son Denny) left Bombay for home leave in late February 1881. During the voyage, Sinnett wrote an account of the phenomena he had witnessed since Blavatsky entered his life, with excerpts from the Mahatmas’ letters. Soon after his arrival in London he received a letter from Koot Hoomi, mailed from Paris, which praised his forthcoming book as “a little jewel.”26
It was published that summer as The Occult World. The book caused a sensation among spiritualists and others, though the quotations from Koot Hoomi contained a time-bomb that would explode two years later as the “Kiddle incident.”
After Sinnett’s return to India, he and Hume settled down to the serious study of the teachings that were now coming, as he says, “through Madame Blavatsky.”27
Exactly how they came through her is unclear. Since Sinnett did not preserve them among the Mahatmas’ letters, they may have been given verbally. “The very first thing . . . was a sketch of the chain of worlds,” he wrote. “Then we got in a fragmentary way the materials on which Hume wrote the first of the ‘Occult Fragments.’ ”28
That refers to Hume’s attempt to organize the teachings on the sevenfold nature of man and his publication of them in the Theosophical Society’s monthly magazine as “Fragments of Occult Truth” in October 1881.29
The two pupils raised many questions that Sinnett recorded, with the answers received, as the first series of “Cosmological Notes.”30 A second series was given in January 1882, in which the answers were written in the hand of another Mahatma, Morya.31 The two series set out the metaphysical principles governing universal manifestation, the sevenfold divisions of both man and universe, with their Tibetan, Sanskrit, and English nomenclature and terse explanations of human evolution, death and survival, and cosmic cycles. More questions and answers followed from June until the autumn, filling out the scheme. By that time, Hume and Sinnett had noticed significant contradictions between Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled and what they were now learning about the after-death state, Devachan, and reincarnation. Koot Hoomi wrote many pages attempting to reconcile the two teachings.32
Hume and Sinnett were both anxious to share this wisdom with the world, and so it seems were the Mahatmas. In June 1882, Koot Hoomi told Hume that he had permission to instruct him, “and you will have work enough to ‘drop’ your Fragments at intervals of two or three months.”33 He also wrote presciently to Sinnett that “Mr. Hume—if he only holds on to his resolutions—has a grand and noble work before him—the work of a true Founder of a new social era, of a philosophical and religious Reform.”34 Hume, for his part, published two further “Fragments” and two small volumes of Hints on Esoteric Theosophy. The first of these had many testimonials from Indians describing the phenomenal delivery or appearance of the Mahatmas’ letters, and also reported the Vega incident, in which a letter was abstracted on board ship and a reply sent instantly from land. During the summer of 1882 Hume was planning a larger exposition of occult philosophy, for which he drafted a theological preface. On submitting this to the Mahatmas, he received two letters35 that remain troubling to many Theosophists for their atheism and their hostility to all religion. On the former subject Koot Hoomi wrote:
Our doctrine knows no compromises. It either affirms or denies, for it never teaches but that which it knows to be the truth. Therefore, we deny God both as philosophers and as Buddhists. We know there are planetary and other spiritual lives, and we know there is in our system no such thing as God, either personal or impersonal. Parabrahm is not a God, but absolute immutable law, and Iswar is the effect of Avidya and Maya, ignorance, based upon the great delusion.36
We may well wonder why the writer chose to live in Tibet, where Buddhism had become a state religion and a polytheistic one at that, and why he explains himself not in Buddhist but in Hindu terms.
The London Theosophists, especially Charles Carleton Massey, were unsettled by the contradictions between Isis Unveiled and The Occult World. At the end of August 1882, Hume wrote a letter to the Theosophist under his known pseudonym of “H. X.,” saying that it was time to stop trying to reconcile them and to admit that Blavatsky’s book was full of errors. He went on to scold the Mahatmas for not making their knowledge clearer and more accessible, adding that they, being Asiatics, regrettably had different standards from Europeans:
Again, even when disposed to teach, their ideas of doing this differ toto caelo from ours. If we wanted to teach anything, we should teach it piece by piece, and each branch with perfect accuracy. They on the contrary seem to care nothing about complete accuracy. All they appear to desire to convey, is a sort of general con- ception of the outline. They do not seem to wish, that any one, not bound to them by obligations rendering them practically their slaves, should learn even their philosophy, thoroughly. . . . We have to deal with a set of men almost exclusively Orientals; very learned in some matters, learned beyond the conception of most Westerns, very pure in life, very jealous of their treasured knowledge, brought up and petrified in a system that can only recommend itself to Eastern minds, and saturated with a stream of thought flowing directly at right angles to that in which runs all the highest and brightest modern Western Thought.37
Blavatsky was outraged by Hume’s chauvinistic and patronizing attitude, but the Mahatmas told her that the letter must not be suppressed. It was published, framed by protests by her, as editor, and by twelve Indian Theosophists, including the learned Brahmin Tallapragada Subba Row.38 The Mahatmas repaid Hume in kind, making scathing remarks about him and about Englishmen in general.39 Hume resigned as president of the Simla Eclectic Theosophical Society (as the Anglo-Indian branch was called) and made only one further intervention: an unsuccessful takeover bid at the time of the Hodgson Report.40
Sinnett’s involvement with Theosophy did not please the proprietors of the Pioneer, who gave him a year’s notice of dismissal in December 1882. He planned a new paper, the Phoenix, which would support Indian independence: a project that came to nothing, although the Mahatmas encouraged it and offered strategic and even financial advice.41 In the summer of 1883 Sinnett published Esoteric Buddhism, which contained the Mahatmas’ further explanations of planetary rounds, root races, sub races, and the after-death fate of the seven principles of the human being. Two younger Theosophists, Mohini Chatterjee and Laura Holloway, were also authorized by Koot Hoomi to quote from his letters in a book they were planning.42
They published it under the pseudonym of “Two Chelas”—the “Eastern Chela” and the “Western Chela”—as Man: Fragments of Forgotten History (1885). Blavatsky called the result “unutterable flapdoodle” and drew up a long list of corrections.43
After seeing the consequences of publishing his and Morya’s letters, Koot Hoomi changed his attitude. In summer 1884 he wrote to Sinnett that the letters were written for private use, and no more should be published, no more excuses made: “Leave to the Secret Doctrine the task of avenging you.”44 His letters became sparser until about May 1885, when they ceased. But from Sinnett’s point of view the contact was unbroken, for he found mediums in London who, he was sure, continued to bring him messages from Koot Hoomi.45
Sinnett preserved all his letters from the Mahatmas and from Blavatsky, along with other papers such as copies of the letters to and from Hume, in a special lockable box. There they remained for nearly forty years, while the Theosophical movement fragmented and the Adyar group took a different course. For example, Charles W. Leadbeater would turn his clairvoyant vision on the Mahatmas’ innermost retreats and report familiarly on their habits, dress, and previous incarnations.46
In 1919, Curupullumullage Jinarājadāsa published some of the documents held at Adyar as Letters from the Masters of the Wisdom. These included letters from the Mahatmas to Leadbeater, Annie Besant, and other Theosophists, and also the 1870 letter, in order to demonstrate that the Mahatmas had been watching over the Theosophical movement before the society’s foundation and had favored its current leaders. Four years later, in April 1923, Jinarājadāsa edited The Early Teachings of the Masters, using some of the letters to Sinnett and Hume that Besant had been allowed to copy or that had been sent to Adyar by Sinnett in redacted form.47 Early Teachings was probably rushed into print when news of Alfred Trevor Barker’s project was made known, and it became redundant when that appeared in September with more complete and accurate versions of the same letters. Jinarājadāsa’s second series of Letters from the Masters of the Wisdom (1925) contained more letters from the Adyar archives, including the “Serapis” letters received by Olcott in 1875, which are crucial to the early history of the Theosophical Society.
The decision to publish the whole corpus of the Sinnett-Hume Letters was taken by Maude Hoffman, the friend and executor to whom Sinnett had unconditionally willed the originals. After his death in 1921, Hoffman entrusted the task to a young Theosophist, Barker (1893–1941). He transcribed them, ordered them by topic, assigned them Roman numerals from I to CXLIIb, and wrote an introduction urging Theosophists to return to the original doctrines and objects of their society. Two years later (1925) Barker published in a uniform volume The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett and Other Miscellaneous Letters. The correspondence of the early 1880s could now be appreciated in all its complexity.
Three later events deserve mention. On March 11, 1939, Hoffman gave the Mahatma and Blavatsky-Sinnett letters irrevocably to the British Museum (which then included the British Library), with the proviso that there should be no publicity about the gift, and that for ten years, only Barker should have access to them. In 1962 there appeared a “third edition” by Christmas Humphreys and Elsie Benjamin. Humphreys had had a small part in the original publication and was Barker’s executor. He and Benjamin went back to the manuscripts, checked every word, and repaired Barker’s misreadings and unnecessary corrections. With some misgiving, they preserved Barker’s topical arrangement (though not his Roman numerals). Humphreys was a most distinguished figure, both as a high court judge in London and as one of the most active promoters of Buddhism in the English- speaking world. His five years’ devotion to this project implies that he accepted the letters, in some sense, as an “esoteric Buddhism” compatible with his own convictions and mission.48
Finally in 1998 the Adyar society published an edition by Vincente Haó Chin, which renumbered the letters in a chronological sequence established by Virginia Hanson.49 While this made for easier reading, future scholars are obliged to work with two numbering systems.
The Physical Letters
The letters in the British Library are conserved in bound volumes and, when necessary, repaired.50 There is a wide variation of scripts, inks, and paper types. Morya writes a rapid, careless hand, mostly in red ink. Koot Hoomi’s is more careful, with extremely long crossings of the “Ts” and bars over the “Ms.” He calls the latter practice “useful,”51 which is true in the case of Russian cursive, in which the miniscule letters can be hard to distinguish.52 Most of his letters are in ink; some are in the blue pencil customarily used for correcting proofs (hence always at hand for the editor of the Theosophist), and of these, some but not all show a curious phenomenon: the script is formed from tiny parallel lines, about fifty to the inch and sloping downwards to the right.53
According to the Mahatmas and to Blavatsky, the writing was not always done by normal means, but “precipitated.”54 This required the writer to visualize every word in his or her imagination, then send it telepathically, phrase by phrase, to a competent disciple. The latter then used some occult method to make the script instantly materialize on the paper. Sinnett came to doubt the claim of precipitation, concluding that most of the letters were inspired by Koot Hoomi but dictated to a “competent clairaudient amanuensis, and Madame Blavatsky was generally the amanuensis in question.”55 Leading Theosophists, including Olcott, Besant, Leadbeater, Barker, and Blavatsky herself, downplayed the whole idea.56 Yet Hume, long after his parting with the Mahatmas, actually told Lord Dufferin, the viceroy, that “thanks to the transcendental brotherhood, he sometimes received ‘precipitated facsimiles’ of official state papers.”57
The closest to a scientific investigation of the physical letters was made by Vernon Harrison, who was employed for ten years as research manager for Thomas De la Rue, printers of banknotes, passports, and stamps.58 He was also past president of the Royal Photographic Society and a member of the Psychical Research Society, which had been founded to investigate just such interesting phenomena. After examining the letters with a pocket microscope (which he admitted was all he could do in the British Library), Harrison describes his own failed attempts to reproduce the parallel-line effect in the way some have suggested, by resting the paper on a book cover or other ribbed surface. He notes other odd features, such as ink apparently contained within the paper rather than on it, and corrections made with some chemical ink eradicator that neither disturbed nor stained the surface.59 He writes: “I am not saying that they are paranormal, but they at least excite interest.”60
Richard Hodgson, who conducted the 1885 investigation for the Society for Psychical Research, asserted that the handwriting of the letters was that of Blavatsky or her co-conspirators. Harrison, after a minute analysis of letter-types, writes: “I do not know who wrote the Mahatma Letters, but I do not find it plausible to assume that Madame Blavatsky wrote them—the great bulk of them at any rate.”61 Yet there is a third alternative that we will consider: that Blavatsky could produce material differing in both content and physical appearance from her usual styles of speaking and writing.
Harrison’s verdict on the letters applies equally to the manner of their de- livery.62 Conjuring skills and accomplices might account for those that appeared to drop from above, even in railway carriages, and the insertion of messages in the Mahatmas’ scripts in sealed letters delivered by mail. Many cases can be thus explained (which is not to say that the explanation is the true one), but there are stubborn cases, such as the Mahatma’s telegram,63 the Vega incident,64 and some of those reported by Indian Theosophists,65 for which a materialistic explanation requires such a complex sequence of plotting, stage-management, and deception as to be itself unbelievable. The annals of Western mysticism and mediumship, together with the feats of shamans and yogis, provide a well-documented context within which unprejudiced minds can weigh these phenomena.66
Personae of the Mahatmas
An openness to parapsychological possibilities does not preclude skepticism to- ward the claims of the Mahatma Letters, beginning with the personae of Koot Hoomi and Morya. We are told that Koot Hoomi lives in a kind of monastic enclave with Morya and some of their chelas, making long trips on horseback and returning to enjoy his large library and his pianoforte. (Leadbeater adds a three-manual organ, made in Tibet.67) He has a wide, if selective, knowledge of European culture and has spent some time studying in Germany. He watches every scene in the Theosophical drama, especially the troubles with the London Lodge and the rise of Anna Kingsford. Against Blavatsky’s will he supports Kingsford’s presidency, but in terms peppered with snide remarks on the rival’s appearance and character. Morya, who was Blavatsky’s own master, is older, rather gruff and impatient, hardly knows English, and hates writing. He borrows the language for his letters from Blavatsky, Olcott, Koot Hoomi, or Djual Kul.68 He reluctantly takes over the correspondence from October through the end of 1881, while Koot Hoomi is on a retreat, and makes occasional appearances thereafter.
In many ways the Mahatmas act like the much-abused Personal God. For instance, they are always watching over their charges: “As you see I am with you constantly,” Koot Hoomi tells Sinnett.69 They also eavesdrop: “When, watching you at Allahabad I saw you making instead copious extracts for [Stainton Moses] from my letter, I again saw the danger but did not interfere for several reasons.”70 Morya reports: “On the night of the 25th, my beloved Brother told me, that having heard Mr. Hume say in H. P. B.’s room that he had never himself heard O[lcott] state to him that, he, O., had personally seen us.”71
Koot Hoomi, in turn, reports on the vigilance of Morya, who has been “carefully though unseen—protecting yourself, family and reputation from all possible harm—aye, brother, to the length of watching for nights and days a ruffian Mussulman menial bent upon having his revenge of you, and actually destroying his evil plans.”72 Morya also intervenes at a séance at Colonel and Mrs. Gordons’s: “Last week then M., stalking in, into the motley crowd took the spooks by the skin of their throats and,—the result was the unexpected admission of the Brothers.”73 Morya himself writes of his surveillance of Sinnett among the London Theosophists, using a disjointed, jocular style like that of Dickens’s Mr. Jingle:74
Knew premises well, felt amused and watched with your leave. Why feel so disgusted? Spooks worked remarkably well nothing abashed by my presence of which neither W. E. nor his bodyguard knew anything. My attention was attracted by their forging H. P. B.’s handwriting. Then I put aside my pipe and watched. Too much light for the creatures coming from a Piccadilly Street though Sotheran emanations helped good deal. I would call your friend Mr. Myers’ attention to psychic fact of rotten emanations. Raise a good Bhoot crop. Yes; the room with windows overlooking Piccadilly is a good place for psychic development. Poor entranced wretch.75
The intrusion goes both ways, for the Mahatma hears the call of the chela. Koot Hoomi writes: “During the past few months, especially, when your weary brain was plunged in the torpor of sleep, your eager soul has often been searching after me, and the current of your thought been beating against my protecting barriers of Akàs as the lapping wavelets against a rocky shore.”76
Koot Hoomi had a fatherly concern for Chatterjee, the young chela who accompanied Blavatsky to London: “He suffered greatly from cold in that high room where there is no fireplace in your house, and K. H. had to surround him with a double shell against a death cold that threatened him. Remember Hindus are exotic plants in your inclement pays [French for “country”] and cold, and those who need them have to take care of them.”77 In another scene, Koot Hoomi reads a Theosophist’s mind: “It was Mme. Gebhard whom I had promised to visit subjectively. I saw her, one morning, when I was busy with Mohini making him impermeable—descending the stairs. She had heard his teeth chatter . . . and as I looked into her I heard the words pronounced mentally: ‘Well, well . . . [ellipsis in original] if his Master only knew!’ ”78
The unfortunate Sinnett is constantly reminded of his worldliness. At the end of a letter already quoted, Koot Hoomi, figuratively holding his nose, adds the post- script: “The brandy atmosphere in the house is dreadful.”79 When Holloway is staying with the Sinnetts in London, the Mahatma writes: “Your house, good friend, has a colony of Elementaries quartering in it, and to a sensitive like her it was as dangerous an atmosphere to exist in as would be a fever cemetery to one subject to morbific physical influences.”80
Being accepted by the Mahatmas as a chela required abstinence from meat, alcohol, and sexual activity. Given the tradition of asceticism among yoga practitioners and the vegetarian diet already followed by Brahmins, this was no surprise to the Indian Theosophists. It was more difficult for Europeans. Blavatsky was no strict vegetarian, and while militantly teetotal, she smoked constantly (which was apparently a crime in Tibet). Koot Hoomi, though liberal in many ways, had a phobia about sex. He was horrified by the pioneering birth-control book, Fruits of Philosophy, calling it “infamous and highly pernicious in its effects.” He did not need, or intend to read it: “I have its unclean spirit, its brutal aura before me, and I say again in my sight the advices offered in the work are abominable; they are the fruits of Sodom and Gommorah [sic] rather than of Philosophy, the very name of which it degrades.”81 Did Koot Hoomi know when he recommended DeRobigne Mortimer Bennett to the Theosophists, and defended this plain-spoken American to his snobbish correspondents, that Bennett had served two years in an American jail for selling that very book?82
Djual Kul, an advanced chela of Koot Hoomi’s who flits through the pages of the letters running errands for his superiors, seems more tangible than they. In one episode, Blavatsky quarrels with him about whether some remark of Hume’s has been entered into the minutes of the Simla Eclectic Theosophical Society; she says yes, Djual Kul says no. “Of course he was right and she wrong,” Koot Hoomi remarks, adding: “At the time I paid no attention whatever to the fling. Nor had I come to know of it through H. P. B., but through D. Khool who had heard it himself and has an excellent memory.”83
This kind of casual familiarity has led some to identify the Mahatmas with known individuals—with a Djual Kul, for instance, who was one of the people at that meeting. There is a third-hand report that Koot Hoomi was the linguist Nisikanta Chattopadhyay (1852–1910), the first Bengali to gain a doctorate from a European university.84 Other considerations apart (such as Koot Hoomi’s failure to write a single word of German), Chattopadhyay was in Zurich during the crucial years, completing his PhD in 1883.85 Morya, whom Blavatsky said she first met in London in 1851, has been identified with a certain Lal Singh Khutree, attached to the Nepalese Embassy.86 In his seminal book The Masters Revealed,87 Paul Johnson argues for the highly placed Sikhs, Maharaja Ranbir Singh of Kashmir, his cousin Thakar Singh Sandhanwalia, and the liberal newspaper owner Dayal Singh Majithia, as models for Morya, Koot Hoomi, and Djual Kul, respectively. This makes sense if one considers their political interests and the possibilities that Blavatsky’s movement offered to them. Many of the sentiments in the letters may have been theirs. But it is hard to imagine them dictating the cosmological doctrines with which the correspondence opened or becoming so embroiled with the personalities of the London Lodge. The great value of Johnson’s work is in opening up the vista of Blavatsky’s contacts around the world, especially her entanglement with Indian colonial and anticolonial politics. From these contacts, as I understand Johnson’s thesis, Blavatsky created the characters of the Mahatmas as a fiction-writer might use her own friends as partial models.
Blavatsky’s Role: Claims and Theories
Long ago the Hare brothers analyzed the language and content of the letters, leaving little doubt of the linguistic and cultural kinship between the Mahatmas’ writings and Blavatsky’s own. The two collections share keywords, grammatical quirks, and the tell-tale signs of a writer more at home in French, her English influenced by American usages—which is exactly what Blavatsky was. Koot Hoomi also shares her magpie-like erudition, her misquotations from the Bible, and her “dog-Latin.” It matters not that the Mahatmas are so condescending, anti-feminist, even cruel in their remarks about the “Old Lady.” That could have been part of her act.
George Robert Stowe Mead, who as Blavatsky’s secretary during her London years had a great part in the compilation of The Secret Doctrine, qualified his own mention of “the Master K. H.” by adding “whatever meaning we may attach to that phrase (whether that of a living person or of a psychic complex).”88 The copy of Mead’s article in the Hare brothers’ scrapbook bears the following note: “I may add here a statement on my own authority that Mr. Mead accepted our view that the Letters were from the mind & hand of H. P. B. in a private talk with me in Chelsea. W. L. H.”89
But “mind” and “hand” here are ambiguous terms. Blavatsky had in the past concocted a large body of writing in a handwriting not her own, which was a mixture of clairvoyant perception and fictitious elaboration. The story, as Blavatsky wrote it to Mrs. Gebhard, is briefly as follows.90 Every night from the ages of eight or nine to fifteen, with her family and friends as fascinated onlookers, she wrote at the dictation of an old spirit, Mrs. Tekla Lebendorff. The writing was “in her clear old fashioned, peculiar handwriting and grammar, in German (a language I had never learnt to write and could not even speak well) and in Russian—accumulating in these six years to a heap of MSS. that would have filled ten volumes.” The dictations told of visions, a petition to the emperor, the suicide of Mrs. Lebendorff ’s son, his experiences in the afterlife, and much else. But when Blavatsky’s uncle investigated the matter, it turned out that while many details about the Lebendorffs were accurate, both the lady and her son were alive and well. The son had attempted suicide but survived. Blavatsky’s explanation need not concern us here; it is sufficient to note the parallel with the Mahatma Letters, and to consider the hypothesis that Blavatsky could write “at dictation” in good faith, but in fact at the mercy of her own imagination.
This incident also offers a plausible explanation of the 1870 letter in the Koot Hoomi script, which, significantly, is unsigned by him or anyone else. The script could already have belonged to one of Blavatsky’s “informants” or alternate personalities, and ten years later she simply resumed it, now giving it an attribution.
There are many statements, both by eyewitnesses and by Blavatsky herself, that parts of Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine were written in a state of dissociation from normal consciousness, as though she were taking dictation. The syndrome known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID, formerly Multiple Personality Disorder) can produce writings and scripts utterly different from those of the primary personality, and in extreme cases, such as that of Patience Worth, such productions can far exceed the capabilities of the conscious mind.91 The borderlines between DID, mediumism, possession, and channeling are not clearly defined, partly because there is little conversation between psychiatrists (to whom the phenomenon is a “disorder”) and those to whom it may be something of a “higher order.” But obviously there are resemblances. Under this hypothesis, Blavatsky wrote the great cosmological series in such a state, drawing on whatever source the reader deems possible. But thereafter the Mahatmas seem to have descended to a lower plane, with moralizings, defense of the Kiddle plagiarism, advice about the Pioneer project, and an obsession with Kingsford and the London Lodge, evidently polluted by Blavatsky’s own preoccupations—though she may still have believed (as in the Lebendorff episode) that she was receiving from the same source.
Harrison, in his later study, allows for something of the sort. He writes,
If any of the KH and M scripts came through the hand of Madame Blavatsky while she was in a state of trance, sleep, or other altered states of consciousness known to psychologists and psychiatrists, KH and M might be considered sub-personalities of Helena Blavatsky. To what extent the sub-personalities are independent is a matter for debate, but in no case would conscious fraud or imposture be involved. Nor does this supposition circumvent the difficulty that there are KH letters which even Hodgson had to admit Madame Blavatsky could not possibly have written as she was too far away at the time and communications were bad.92
Such letters bring their own problems, as witness the two received by Olcott: one from an obscure master called Hilarion, the other in Morya’s script.93 The first says “You are asked by Maha Sahib to put your whole soul in answer to A. P. S. from K. H. Upon this letter are hinged the fruits of the future. Let it be one that can be shown with honour to every one including [Sir William] Crookes.” The second: “Be careful about letter to Sinnett. Must be a really Adeptic letter.” Evidently Olcott, too, was writing letters purporting to be from the Mahatmas, and not merely at their dictation but composing them.
The Theosophical leaders were at pains to explain this away while maintaining faith in the Mahatmas’ existence and some semblance of respect for their founder, but their efforts only made matters worse. After Blavatsky’s death, when William Q. Judge was accused of forging letters in the Mahatma’s script, Besant told the European Convention on July 12, 1894, that “I believe [Judge] has sometimes received messages for other people, and that he believed himself to be justified in writing them down in the Script adopted by H. P. B. for communications from the Master.”94 This was as good as admitting that the letters were not precipitated but written by Blavatsky. Leadbeater wrote on February 25, 1912, to William G. John, the General Secretary of the Theosophical Society in Australia: “Remember that the letters to Sinnett and Hume were not written or dictated directly by a Master, as at the time supposed, but were the work of pupils carrying out general directives given to them by the Masters, which is a very different thing.”95 So “at the time” Sinnett and Hume were deliberately deceived as to the source of the letters. Jinarājadāsa, a firm believer in precipitation, admitted “the remarkable fact . . . that, while this hand- writing is personal to a master, it is also like an office handwriting, from a particular office with a particular chief. Thus, certain pupils of the Masters M. and K. H. were given the right to precipitate . . . in Their official handwriting.” He compared it to the use of “a particular typewriter which is used by the head of the organization, but which it is perfectly allowable for the Private Secretary to use, when once per- mission is granted.” Jinarājadāsa then produced a letter of Blavatsky to back up this hypothesis. She wrote to Mrs. Gebhard in June 1886: “How many a time was I (no Mahatma) shocked and startled, burning with shame when shown notes written in Their (two) handwritings (a form of writing adopted for the T. S. and used by chelas, never without Their special permission or order to that effect) exhibiting mistakes in science, grammar and thoughts, expressed in such language that it perverted entirely the meaning originally intended.”96
While all of this fuels the skeptics’ case, Johnson cautions that “First, the [Hares] assume that the Mahatmas did not exist unless they physically produced the letters. Second, they regard the Theosophical teachings as discredited unless they are a pure, authoritative transmission from an individual lineage as was claimed.”97
Purpose and Effects of the Myth
Finally, we consider the purpose and effects of the myth of the Himalayan Masters, whether as Mead says they are living persons or psychic complexes. Ever since Blavatsky and Olcott’s arrival in India, their allegiance had moved explicitly from Western esotericism to that of the East. They publicly embraced Buddhism and spurned colonial society (even after meeting Sinnett and Hume) in favor of the company of educated Indians. For all her apparent disadvantages of race, sex, and language, Blavatsky had no difficulty in gathering a following from this class (which continues to this day). Damodar Mavalankar broke with his high-caste family to become one of her most faithful disciples. Subba Row, the most learned in esoteric matters, paid her the unprecedented compliment, coming from a Brahmin, of accepting her as an interlocutor in metaphysical arguments. He also gave every sign of believing in the Mahatmas.98 By calling their teaching “the Philosophy of the Ancient Brahminical religion and Esoteric Buddhism”99 he showed his allegiance to the Theosophical view of a primordial esoteric philosophy transcending religious differences. When Blavatsky asked him to collaborate on the Secret Doctrine he refused, because he felt that she was disclosing too much of the esoteric doctrine to undeserving Europeans.100
Much of this doctrine had made its first appearance in the letters received be- tween July 1881 and July 1882. The two Mahatmas there unfolded a complete system of cosmological evolution, human evolution both collective and individual, and the destiny of the various components of man. In October 1882 they added information on the former races of Lemuria and Atlantis. Their information was keyed in to the current opinions of science, which they found wanting but more accurate than religious myths. It was a most impressive and coherent system, and if Blavatsky invented it out of her own fantasy, it was a work of imaginative genius. It was sufficiently acceptable to educated Hindus for them to join the Theosophical Society in their thousands.
The agnostic approach cannot exclude the alternative hypothesis, which attributes the Mahatma Letters in part to an exterior source. Religious believers readily accept such a thing in the case of their own sacred texts, while the presence of daemons, angels, Unknown Superiors, adepts, and so on runs through the whole occult tradition. There is also the large body of sightings or meetings with the Mahatmas to be considered. Daniel Caldwell’s casebook lists sixty-two,101 each of which needs to be scrutinized, while guarding against any tendency to devalue the reports from Indian witnesses as more prone to “superstition.”
An example of the alternative hypothesis is the statement by Dion Fortune (1890–1946), one of the most influential occultists of the post-Blavatsky generation. Trained as a lay psychotherapist, she wrote novels, a classic volume on Psychic Self-Defence, and founded the Society of the Inner Light, whose principles were Christian, Hermetic, and Rosicrucian, rather than Oriental. In 1936, she wrote in her society’s cyclostyled newsletter the following answer to the Hares’ accusations:
My verdict is “Guilty, with a strong recommendation to mercy.” Being myself the head of an occult organization with Masters behind it, I know the difficulties [Blavatsky] had to contend with and the temptations to which she was liable. I think she faked the Letters, but I do not think she faked the Masters.102
Fortune goes on to relate her own experience of contacting the Himalayan Masters with the help of Bahman Pestonji Wadia.103 It was a genuine contact, she says, but though not evil, the Mahatmas seemed “alien, unsympathetic, and hos- tile to [her] race.” The experiment shut her off temporarily from contact with her Western Masters “under the sign of the Rose and the Cross,” to whom she returned with relief.
The suggestion of separate, even rival Masters (or psychic complexes) presiding over East and West reflects the split within Western esotericism that became
evident in the twentieth century. The crux of the matter is that for Fortune, Rudolf Steiner, the Rosicrucians, and most other representatives of the Western mystery tradition, the “Christ Event” is cosmologically significant, if not central. For the Eastern traditions, as for classical paganism, this is not the case. In the cosmology and anthropology of the Mahatma Letters and their development in Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, Christ plays no part, and the Abrahamic tradition, with its Personal God, is treated with disdain. Instead, they teach that there is an impersonal yet evolutionary process behind the visible universe, manifesting in cycles too vast for comprehension in our present state. Humans are not judged by God but by their higher selves, as every action brings its karmic consequence, if not in this life then in a subsequent incarnation. By promoting such ideas, with their demonstrably Vedāntic and Buddhist roots, the Theosophical Society had placed itself firmly on the Eastern side of that great theological divide. Whatever view one takes of the Mahatmas, it was their intervention that transformed the society into a vehicle for Eastern philosophies to penetrate the Western world.
For the notes and Bibliography @ the book > Imagining the East: The Early Theosophical Society by Tim Rudbog (Editor), Erik Sand (Editor)
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