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Theosophy and Its Opponents [A Letter by Henry S. Olcott on the Hodgson Report] [Reprinted from The Harbinger of Light (Melbourne,
Australia), Mr. Reimers has received a long and interesting letter from Colonel Olcott on the above
subject, which he has handed to us for publication. In the opening sentences the
Colonel expresses his pleasure at being in direct correspondence with so earnest, able,
and honest a student of psychic science as Mr. Reimers, and proceeds as follows: --- “Since my book on the Eddy mediums (‘People from the Other World’)
appeared I have been occupying myself with the evidences for the reality of Asiatic
psychic science and testing the reasonableness of the Eastern esoteric doctrine.
Without going into needless particulars, I shall simply say that I have personal knowledge
of (a) the existence of adepts with developed psychic powers of the highest order;
(b) the existence of a complete system of spiritual philosophy transmitted from an
unknown antiquity; (c) of there being a genuine experimental science at its basis;
(d) of the reconciliation of the latter with our most modern scientific
discoveries; (e) of the fact of a personal relation between the aforesaid psychic
experts and Madame Blavatsky; and of her possession of certain abnormal powers covering a
wide range of phenomena, from the most elementary mediumistic rappings, tiltings, and
psychography up to those upon a plane where consciousness and the power of action are
enjoyed extra-corporeally. To pursue my work uninterruptedly I relinquished all
worldly interests in the year 1878, and since then my existence has been bound up and
merged in that of the Theosophical Society. We have had stormy times, sustained many
rude assaults, and suffered much cruel injustice; but the outcome of it all is that the
Society has expanded beyond all expectation, has 124 branches, and this month is forming
more --- among them one in Ireland and one in Africa. So whatever faults we may have
made in administration, whatever offences either of us may have been charged with or
committed, it is undeniable that our declared principles are good, and the platform upon
which our Society stands so strong as to defy even the most violent and malevolent attacks
upon personal character. As regards the recent crusade of the London S.P.R. against
Madame Blavatsky, there is one thing to be said which explains why it has so little
permanent effect upon our Society. The report is so full of personal pique and
malice, and shows so little familiarity with psychological science, that experienced and
unbiassed theosophists and spiritualists see that Mr. Hodgson has overshot his mark, and
that his blow will recoil upon himself. Nothing could have been more treacherous and
malicious than his attempt to give Madame Blavatsky the character of a ‘Russian
spy.’ That theory --- as Mr. Sinnett has shown, and as official documents in my
possession prove --- was abandoned within a short time after her arrival in India.
Its absurdity is but too evident to every one who ever passed a fortnight in Madame
B.’s company. She is the very last person in the world to whom any Government,
let alone the cautious Russian, would entrust such a delicate service. But, finding
absolutely no other than a philanthropic motive for her long courses of self-sacrificing
devotion to theosophy, and instinctively feeling that the whole force of the crusade
against her would be broken unless something wicked could be alleged against her, he
deliberately revived the exploded ‘spy’ theory --- after arguing the pros and
cons with myself and another gentleman here [at Adyar, Madras, India] and confessing its
inadequacy --- backing it up with a fragment of the MSS. of an old translation she made
five years ago for an Indian organ of Government --- the Pioneer --- which had been
pilfered and laid by with malice prepensa by the adorable Madame Coulomb! And
he further supported it with a quotation from a sympathetic private letter from myself to
a Hindu, written from New York in 1878, in the tone in which every true American would
write, in answer to the patriotic plaint that the Indian princes were stripped of all
their grandeur! In India the cry ‘A Russian spy’ has the same effect as
that of “A Prussian spy’ had in France of late, or that of the ‘Black Horse
Cavalry’ had in the United States at the time of Bull Run. Mr. Hodgson knew
this, and deliberately employed this convenient method of disposing of Madame B.’s
case. Perhaps more than any one else here, I have been grieved and shocked with Mr.
H.’s conduct, for --- as he himself admits --- I threw our most private records open
to him, gave him facilities he could otherwise never had secured for investigating, and
expected him to deal by us with absolute candour and loyalty. I am also sorry to be
obliged to say that, for the sake of impeaching the character of Mr. Damodar --- noblest,
most unselfish, and devoted of young Hindu philanthropists, and one of the most successful
of our psychic experimentalists --- Mr. Hodgson suppressed an account --- capable of
verification by Postal Department, and other proofs --- of an ‘Astral flight,’
or psychic journey, of Mr. D.’s from Cawnpore to Madras on the night of November 4,
1883, and of his transportation of a certain letter (to me from a gentleman in Italy) from
Madame Blavatsky, which very letter was posted to me to Aligarh, N.W.P., on the morning of
November 5, at Adyar, by Madame Blavatsky and duly reached Aligarh on the 10th, in regular
course of post, where I found it on the 12th. This is so irrefutable a case, so
outside of the possibility of any theory of collusion or deception, and it so upsets the
plan to impeach Mr. Damodar’s veracity and integrity, that it was quietly
ignored. I am sorry to have to say this, but what other inference is possible when
Mr. H. was shown the entries in my diary, from which he was quite willing to copy whatever
suited his purpose? The same may be said respecting the evidence for Madame
Blavatsky’s occult powers --- whatever seemed incapable of explanation upon a
gratuitous theory of fraud, falsehood, and collusion was omitted from his brief. I
have no time, and it would be useless to cite the mass of facts going to prove her strange
psychic endowments, as exhibited in America, Europe and Asia within the past twenty or
more years; for, as regards the outside public, occult things will ever be criticised from
the vulgar, material point of view, and the laws of subjective nature impertinently
ignored, while the educated occultist will never allow himself to come to snap-judgments,
but tests all tales of phenomena by the canons of arcane science. I recollect the
case of the seizure of Mrs. Florence Corner, which you yourself witnessed, when
personating a spirit at a London seance, and think it offers a very fair example in
point. Undoubtedly it was she who was seized by Sir George Sitwell and Mr. von Buch,
and equally certain is it that she had disrobed for the part. These sceptics,
unacquainted with the laws of mediumism, were fully warranted in hastily concluding that a
wilful deception was been practised by Mrs. Corner, and in so reporting to the Times.
But, being so ignorant, it was a shame, almost a crime, that they should have assumed the
role of exposers, and should have published anything whatever about the case until, by a
series of seances held under scientifically perfect test conditions, they had arrived at
clear proof as to the nature of the thing they were investigating. This was the
course of Professor Hare, Mr. Wallace, Professor Zollner, Mr. Crookes, and other real
investigators. It was also the theory upon which I worked with the Eddys, the
Holmeses, and Mrs. Compton, and my over-caution as to parading my personal opinions drew
from various men of science the declaration that my case was clearly proved by my
facts. This instinct of caution now leads me to refrain from any ex cathedra
declaration as to the merits of the Coulomb Missionary Hodgson S.P.R. case against my
friend and colleague Madame Blavatsky. Without omniscience nobody could penetrate to
the depths of her consciousness and absolutely know whether she had tricked at all, and if
so, when and how much? What we do know is that she has given numberless proofs of
psychic powers, that her erudition and literary and intellectual powers are of a high
order, and that for the past twelve years we have seen her labouring, like a galley slave
at his oar, to spread knowledge, encourage virtuous living, present noble ideals of life
for imitation, and diffuse the idea of mutual tolerance and religious comity --- and all
this without asking salary, fee, or reward for herself, but, on the contrary, giving
freely of her private means to help on the Society’s work. Whatever her faults
of character, however rough and repulsive she may seem to some, however incoherent and
inconsistent others may think her, the above facts cannot be denied. And now, let
such as can show a better record of useful work and unselfish life come to the tribunal
and sit in judgment upon her. Temperamentally she is doubtless so organised as to
constantly draw upon her own head the blows of the sceptic and the bigot; she is
emphatically her own worst enemy. Moreover, she has a sort of fatal knack of doing
her phenomena in a slipshod, unsystematic, and impolitic way, which too often tends to
arouse suspicion in the minds of outsiders. To so old a spiritualist as you I need
not say that the very same remark is to be made as regards mediums, nor that many an
innocent one has been branded with imposture by hasty, self-sufficient
‘investigators’ --- heaven save the mark! How futile and absurd is the
theory of the S.P.R. that Madame Blavatsky gradually developed the forged ‘K.H.’
handwriting and simultaneously eliminated her own caligraphic peculiarities; and how
useless the trouble and expense they went to to prove this fact you have yourself shown in
your letter under reply, where you tell me that for months you exchanged letters with an
unseen intelligence, or ‘spirit,’ through different mediums, ‘under
circumstances that made the theory of trickery sheer nonsense to think of, and yet the
handwriting much resembled that of the medium.’ Why, it requires little more
than common sense to see that this must be so, and that where a foreign influence is
writing through the hand or (by precipitation) through the aura of an intermediate agent,
it takes time to overcome the habitual personal peculiarities of that agent. With
very negative intermediaries, of feeble will and unpronounced personality, this vicarious
writing may quickly become perfected; but when the psychic agent is such a raging lion of
temperament as my colleague the personal idiosyncracies must assert themselves whenever
they are not quelled and made dormant by an exercise of will. With mediums, as every
spiritualist knows, any temporary disturbing cause --- such as bad health or a change of
health, despair about money matters, grief, violent irritation about something, fear, or
any one of fifty things which affect the normal action of the brain or nervous system ---
is liable to stop phenomena, or may even destroy the mediumship entirely by breaking up
the passive state which had favoured its development and continuance. Even adepts
recognise and conform to this law by secluding themselves from scenes and relationships
which disturb the mental calm and purity of surroundings in which the psychic powers are
best developed. This is the chief though not the sole reason why such men seek the
solitude of the cave, the jungle, and the mountain. You have also shown me that such
incidents as the apparent
plagiarism of Mr. Kiddle’s language in a ‘K.H.’ letter have no
evidential value in support of a theory of conscious fraud, by citing the startling fact
that in the great Handel’s oratorios ‘there are whole choruses, note by note, by
Stradella’
--- a composer who died a half-century before his time. Surely it would be an
impertinent sceptic who should aver that he whom Beethoven styled the ‘greatest
composer that ever lived,’ had consciously plagiarized from Stradella, an inferior
genius! How many examples are there not of this unintentional literary appropriation
not merely noted in mediumistic annals, but in those of general literature? The
materialist, who has scarcely yet begun to suspect the possibility of telepathic action of
thought-waves, has until now been believing that ideas, unless preserved in print or by
other mechanical device, unless communicated orally to hearers of retentive memories, died
away. In fact, the common proverb, Scripta manent, verba volant
embodies this belief. As regards Mr. Hodgson’s re-examination of the witnesses
to appearances of the Mahatmas, all that can be said is that he has got about as near the
truth as prepossessed investigators --- e.g. the late Dr. W. B. Carpenter and the
present Dr. Lankester --- usually get in handling psychical matters. Take the
testimony of witnesses to any ordinary circumstance after the lapse of two or three years
--- as he did in this instance --- let alone any wonder-exciting phenomenon like the
appearance of a phantom, living or dead, that was originally seen without previous
expectation or prepared test conditions, and see what confusion one will get! And to
think that a pretended scientific Society, with a professedly trained scientific
detective, should ruthlessly traduce the characters for veracity and intelligence of as
honest a body of gentlemen as can be found upon such researches as Mr. H. reports to the
S.P.R. is something astonishing! Well, your spiritualism has survived nearly forty
years of that sort of injustice, and perhaps theosophy will not be quite destroyed by this
petard, even though its engineer may." [The conclusion of the letter explaining a discrepancy in Col. Olcott’s evidence
before the Committee of the S.P.R. is unavoidably held over till next month. --- Ed. H.
of L.] |