Quest Magazine

Printed in the Summer 2012 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Besant, Annie. "Annie Besant: The Conditions of Occult Research" Quest  100. 3 (Summer 2012): pg. 106-113.

ANNIE BESANT (1847—1933) was one of the seminal figures in the early Theosophical movement. She joined the Theosophical Society in 1889 and was elected president of the international TS in 1907, a position she held until her death. She was the author of many books, including Esoteric Christianity, Thought Power, A Study in Consciousness, and The Laws of the Higher Life, and was active in many social and political causes as well.

This lecture was originally given at the second annual congress of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society, held in London in July 1905. It is a kind of sequel to Besant's "Occultism and Occult Training," reprinted in Quest, Spring 2012. The lecture is reproduced in full, with no changes except for some modernization and Americanization of orthography and punctua­tion. The "observations on the atoms" that she mentions toward the end of this article are probably those described in her book Occult Chemistry: Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements, coauthored with C.W. Leadbeater.

—Ed. 

     The subject we are to study this evening is one, I think, of practical and immediate interest to all members of the Theosophical Society. It is one on which a great amount of misunderstanding appears to exist, and I thought it might perchance be useful to try to lay before you some of the difficulties and conditions which surround occult research, and something, perhaps, about the attitude with which those who carry it on should be regarded.

     The conditions surrounding the work of occult research at the present time are entirely new in the history of the world. In the past a man who was gradually unfolding the faculties necessary for this research was practically shut away from the crowd and bustle of cities or large communities. The moment a pupil of a great teacher began to develop the faculties of the astral or mental sheaths he was called into retirement. He was shut into an atmosphere kept calm and serene by the thoughts of his Teacher, that mighty aura serving for him as a protection from the throng of outer influences. Everything that could be done to purify the bodies and to strengthen and concentrate the consciousness was done for him. He was necessarily somewhat ascetic in his life, but it was a careful asceticism, neither exaggerated in the hardships imposed upon the body nor in any sense lopsided in its conditions. With all physical things a medium path was followed. He must neither so strain the body that there would be a danger of hysteria nor pamper it so that it would not readily respond to the vibrations from the upper worlds. The whole arrangement was based on an experience that had lasted for tens of thousands of years, until it had reached perfection—an arrangement of all surrounding circumstances so that the least possible difficulty from outside might come in the student's way.

     For those who have to carry on occult research in the West or the ordinary East, under the conditions of normal human life to-day, it is obvious that none of these precautions exist; and in the West especially there is a certain impatience of any restrictions in relation to these matters, a vague confusion of psychic and spiritual development, and irrelevant questions asked, such as: "Can it make any difference to the Spirit whether I eat peas or mutton?" Well, it does not. The Spirit, as such, is not concerned with the question, but the vehicles in which the Spirit is to work are very much concerned with these matters; and I am bound to say to you that a fairly strict regimen along these lines is necessary if research is to be carried on with body. Among the various people whom I know who do follow lines of psychic evolution and occult research I do not know one single case where restrictions of diet have been disregarded which has not been followed by a breakdown of the health of the physical body; and the only ones I who carry it on without injury to the body are those who yield to the old rules with regard to these restrictions.

     Then, in addition to that physical training, it is necessary that the emotions shall be well under control, and that the mind shall be trained to concentration, for the simple reason that in the earlier stages research much difficulty arises on the astral and mental planes with regard to the nature of the objects observed, as to whether they are inhabitants or objects of the planes or projections from the investigator himself. This is one of the most fertile sources of error, and one which is far subtler and far more difficult to escape than many in their earlier investigations are inclined to admit. Obviously, if the emotions and the mind are uncontrolled the chaos on the astral and mental planes will be unspeakably increased, so that the old habit is not only to train and prepare the body, but also the consciousness as regards the emotions and thoughts.

     But it is not only a question of what is called purification. It is also a question of the higher and finer development of each of the bodies, the physical no less than the astral and mental. Certain changes in the atomic structure must take place with the bringing down of the consciousness of the higher planes into the physical brain. It is not only a question of being conscious on the higher planes, but of translating that consciousness by means of the physical brain, and in order to do this effectively certain parts of the atom have to change and evolve, and the higher orders of spirillae which, at our present stage of evolution, are lying with their sides against each other like limp India rubber tubes, have to be forced open by the currents from the higher planes, so that they may become physical instruments of consciousness. As physical matter yields but slowly to all forces, it is necessary to give time when those changes have to be brought about. They are brought about by the action of strenuous, definite thinking, and as that is carried on, one after the other of these more delicate spirillae begin to open. This shows itself by a heaviness of feeling in the brain, and if it be disregarded, then by pain growing more and more acute. Suppose, for instance, a person, in whose brain some spirillae are ready so far as the manasic consciousness is concerned, desires to pass on to the buddhic plane. He will at first lose physical consciousness and pass into a trance. In that condition he will be able to find the required knowledge, and by impressing it on the manasic sheath utilize the manasic spirillae in the physical brain. When he first tries to keep his physical consciousness at the same time that he is using his buddhic consciousness he will find a great physical pressure, and he dare not persist for more than the briefest space of time. Fraction of second by fraction of second he must lengthen the period of pressure, never carrying it on one iota beyond pressure to pain, for pain means absolute danger, whereas pressure is only the danger signal. It is not only the physical brain he has to prepare for the work; he must reorganize his astral and later his mental body in the same way.

     That reorganization can be simply described. I am taking it for granted that you are familiar with the ordinary facts as you find them in our books. You know that what we call the sense centres of the astral body are in full working order with every one of us, that it is these that build up the physical sense organs, and that these sense centres in the astral body have nothing to do with astral sight or hearing; they are merely the mechanism whereby the consciousness builds for itself the sense organs on the physical plane. A great deal of indefinite astral information, however, reaches the physical brain by way of these sense centres, in the case of undeveloped persons (the savage and types at about the same level)—the second-sight of the Highlander; the vague premonitions of approaching disaster, of sorrow or trouble; intimations of events on the threshold of the physical plane, and so on. All these things come from the astral plane by a general vibration caused in the astral body by vibrations coming out from the coming events. The whole astral body vibrates in answer, and when the vibrations pass down to the sense organs they often produce sights or sounds of various kinds, because any pressure on the nervous mechanism of the body produces, when you are dealing with a sense organ, the kind of result to which that sense organ normally gives rise; so that anything that comes from the astral centre of sight and touches the mechanism of the physical eye will start a vision.

     I came, in India, across one very interesting series of experiences of that kind, which the people thought to be astral experiences, but which, as a matter of fact, were physical. By a certain process of strain placed upon the sense organs—by external pressures, and so on—they were dulled for a time to external impact, and under those conditions a considerable number of people heard musical sounds. On looking into it I found there were two factors at work: one, the impressions on the astral body which, touching the astral center of hearing, passed down to the delicate harp-like mechanism within the ear and set it vibrating, and, two, the pressure on the auditory nerves which produced a vibration in those ultimate cells, and caused the sounds heard. I have even known them to be caused by purely physical means—by the pressure of blood, alterations of the pressure giving rise to vibratory action within the nerves, which again translated itself as musical sounds. Now I do not think there are so many observations on what may be called in psychological language "auditory hallucinations" as there are on "visual"; but no doubt they may be carried to an extreme extent.

     The occult researcher has nothing to do, in his researches, with these sense centers. He is concerned with those astral centres which serve him on the astral plane as the sense organs serve him on the physical—the chakras and the organs connected with them in the astral body itself. Whatever comes to them comes clearly, so far as the immediate sense impression is concerned; and I want now to make one general observation before going more into detail.

    When you are dealing with observations on the astral or mental plane you are dealing with observations that are made under the same laws as observations on the physical plane. You are dealing with consciousness using a vehicle in order to contact a particular plane, and there is no difference in principle between observations made by your eyes and ears on the physical plane and the observations made by your astral eyes and ears on the astral plane. Both are observations, not revelations. There is no sudden illumination which reveals to the seer the objects of another world. Illumination belongs to the inner consciousness, not to the outer observations, whether physical, astral, or mental. That which is gained by illumination is quite a different thing from occult research; it is not research at all, it is simply the higher mind illuminating the lower, sending a beam of light, and enabling the consciousness to understand, but not to observe. Observations belong to the vehicles, not to the consciousness. Much error arises from students imagining that when a person begins to develop astral sight, for instance, everything becomes known by some miraculous process of illumination. It does not. That depends on the evolution of consciousness—a very different thing—and has to be evolved in very different ways. It is the path of the prophet; it is not the path of the occult researcher.

    Let us, then, apply to the first observations on the astral plane some of the laws which we know work when we are dealing with observations on the physical plane. I am speaking now of early observations, because I want you to see how these are surrounded with difficulties. As the best seer has gone through these early stages, it is well that those who, perhaps are beginning to see shall understand some of the difficulties surrounding these earlier visions. One of the most misleading, because the most subtle, difficulties is the question of how much the astral eye sees and how much the consciousness, trained in physical experience, adds to the observations of the astral eye. Every student knows that when he says, "I see so-and-so" (on the physical plane), that sight carries with it a mass of previous experiences of similar observations. If you go into the country of a race differing very much from your own—say India—all the faces appear the same. Thirty people are introduced to you. You do not know one from the other. You constantly blunder. But the Indian will say the same thing when he comes for the first time over here. To us it seems absurd. I look at the faces in this audience. No two are alike, but an Indian who had never seen English people before would say: "How can you tell one from the other?"

     That means that you do not see very much; you supply by the mind much more than you see, and there is the first great difficulty of the astral seer. He sees the astral object, but he sees it as the baby sees a physical object—as a sort of blob, outline, color perhaps; no knowledge of astral distances, no power of realizing different dimensions. But into that he reads all the memories of the physical past, and he sees an astral outline with a physical content. He does not know that, and only finds it out after long experience. It is quite inevitable until his astral experience has gradually made up for him a content of astral consciousness, which he will gradually begin to read into the astral sight, and then he will begin to see more accurately the astral world. Hence you continually find in the records of seers that they are only giving you, when they tell you about heaven, copies of the earth—golden thrones, and streets of gold, and gates of pearl, etc. They have read into the heavenly colors that which down here they connect with the colors which they see. It is true that when the student is being taught he passes through this stage more rapidly than if he is quite alone; but nevertheless, for many a month, or many a year, more or less of that difficulty will surround his astral seeings.

     Pass from this to another difficulty—the difficulty of the confusion of one's own aura with the astral colors. That comes out very curiously if you talk to a number of different clairvoyants. You will find people read an aura in the same way, but if you ask them what colors they see they will tell you quite different colors. One clairvoyant, for instance, may say: "Oh, there's a great deal of green, yellow, and pink in that aura; it means so-and-so." The next clairvoyant may say: "There is a great deal of violet, red, and blue in that aura," and will read it the same; because the consciousness working in the astral body receives a distinct impression as to the temperament and the consciousness of the person who is being looked at, but the astral vision, confused by the aura of the observer, mixes that aura with the observed object, and you get a mixture of the two. I will mention a similar case on the physical plane, because it will probably strike you as even stranger. When palmists read the hand they have certain names for the lines, and by that tell the character of the person. I have had my hand read by both English and Indian palmists. Now the Indian names all the lines quite differently—the English "line of life" is the "line of head" and so on. Yet out of his different lines he reads the same character. The same thing happens as on the astral plane, and the reason is the same. He does not only go by the lines; he goes also by the impression made by the consciousness of the person at whose hand he is looking, and that is stronger than the lines.

     Not only does this take place in the looking at auras, but another difficulty arises from the crowd of thought-forms which when first he makes his astral observations. How often have we said: "If you find an astral person praising you, telling you you are a very wonderful person, mistrust that astral appearance. It is more than good opinion of yourself, appearing there as a thought-form, and translating your own idea of your merits into an outside testimony to the greatness of your evolution." And the other day, when I met a harmless gentleman who told me he had been hearing voices which told him that he was his last incarnation and could not commit any more sin, I knew very well the voice he heard was the voice of his own self-opinion, and not of some astral person on the level of a Master, as he imagined.

     These difficulties, of course, are obvious. What I want to point out to you is that they persist much longer than most of us are inclined to think; that the trained seer, unless his training has carried him to the threshold of Mastership, may still be liable to these blunders in his observations. Quite honestly his temperament will influence his observations; quite honestly something of himself will mingle in what he sees; and though he may have outgrown the coarser blundering of mistaking thought-forms and desire-forms for heavenly and astral inhabitants, none the less there will be a residue of that clinging round him for many a year.

    And even when that is over there is one other difficulty you must remember, you who read the books written by some of us in whom these faculties are partially developed. You may often find differences of observations, and such discrepancies are inevitable. Every man observes most the things which attract him most. If three or four people send you an account, say, of a foreign city, those accounts will differ greatly if the people have been working independently—one will have observed the architecture, another the type of people, another the contents of the shops, another will have gone to the libraries or the picture-galleries. Such discrepancies are a good test of observation. If you find with a general identity a large amount of detail discrepancy, you may take it that something has been observed. I look on those discrepancies as of value, partly as showing that the people are really trying to see for themselves, and not repeating the great thought-forms made by ages of thought in particular directions; and also because they may do something towards checking that tendency in the Theosophical student to repeat blindly on authority that which others have tried to see by careful investigation. Nothing is more fatal to the growth of faculty than the constant acceptance of unverified observations. The more discrepancies the better for the careful observing of the other world. We are not in a realm of miracle, but in the realm of observation, and human observation is subject to error on whatever plane it may be carried on.

     Let us pass from that to one other difficulty before I take up the latter part of my subject. According to the development of the vehicles of the student will be the amount of observation he can carry on at the same time that he is working in his physical consciousness. There are two ways of observing: in one you observe while your physical observation is also alive; in the other you try to shut out the outer world, and the more quiet your surroundings the easier will it be to let the astral sight play unchecked while the physical eyes are open. This double observation makes considerable strain upon the nervous system, which shows itself constantly in an increase of nervous irritability on the part of the person who is using the consciousness along two or three lines at the same time. Very often such a person may be blamed for his irritability. Certainly it would be better if he were not irritable; but it is almost inevitable until great progress has been made. It is for this reason that in the earlier days people were secluded in the carrying on of the work, for when a person has developed the astral faculties, and the physical body is becoming more sensitive at the same time, loud noises, as in the London streets, come like thunder on the nervous system. The mere rolling along of a dray shakes the physical system as though it were a great electric shock, and in this way you often get nervous irritability which the unfortunate person is fighting against, but cannot entirely control.

     Let us pass from that to the question of how the researcher can find out the facts which he is asked for—the method he must use and the limits of his power. Suppose, for instance, a question is asked, such as the question which led up to the observations made by Mr. Leadbeater and myself on the atoms some ten years ago. The process was first of all to get quiet. We went to Box Hill for a week, so that we could have pure air and surroundings which were not full of thoughts and vibrations of every kind. We lay down on the grass and shut our eyes. The next step was simply to intensify the sight, which means a projection of the will on the astral centre which corresponds to vision on the physical plane, and through that to stimulate the physical senses, so that the etheric sense would be active as well as that normally used in vision. The result was a very great increase of rapidity of vibration in the ether connected with the physical eye, and side by side with that a rapid magnetic action in the astral chakra and the corresponding physical centre between the eyebrows, so that there is a sense of great pressure and of rapid whirling between the eyes. Then comes the direction of the will to find an atom floating in the atmosphere around. One is selected. You may not know what it is, but you have before intensified vision the form of an atom. You then intensify more and more, just as you would screw a microscope into focus, until there comes out clearly before the intensified vision the subdivisions of the chemical atom. The first thing you get after seeing the atom as a  whole (by intensification, like magnifying it more and more) is the  first  subdivision of the atom on the next etheric plane, and by a further intensification the subdivisions within those; and so on, until you come to the ultimate atom. If you try to press it further you suddenly find a mass of astral matter. It is through those stages the observation goes, the will steadily kept at work and a slow, careful seeing of the parts, just as you would look at them through a microscope. And when you have done you are very tired. Your brain, your nerves, your attention, are tired. It is absolutely necessary in a task of that sort for the attention to be fixed on the one thing without wavering. You have to hold your attention for half-hours at a time without wavering. That process you must repeat over and over again, to be sure you have not blundered. You leave out all kinds of things you do not see, and, going back later, find these things out. It is the same as a physical observation carried on with a microscope, and you have to do it as carefully and as repeatedly. No answer on these matters is worth having which is not worked out in that way. Research work on the astral plane is as laborious as research work on the physical. I want students to realise that, because they ask one the most extraordinary questions, to find a really honest answer to which would mean weeks of research given to that one thing. And you know how much time the people who do this have left from the other pressing claims on their strength and their time. You cannot have much of this occult research unless a certain amount of time is set aside for it, and that has to be taken from other work, and it is all a balance as to which work is the most useful, not to a few people, but to the world. I want to ask you to be a little patient with those who have heavy burdens of work upon them, and who cannot, with the best goodwill, answer the innumerable questions poured upon them. The moment one fact is stated, twenty new questions start up, and the moment one of these is answered another crop immediately comes.

     There is one very great difficulty in occult research which very much limits its value for the outer world: you have absolutely no proof. We could not prove what we saw about the atoms; we could only say we saw them. When you look at a thing you see it; you cannot prove anything about it. We have not the mathematical, chemical, electrical knowledge necessary to explain the whole of that in the scientific way, and the occult researcher must always lie under the imputation of dogmatism. He can only say "I do not ask you to receive the results of my sight as though I could prove them." And he has no right to be offended if anyone says, "I do not accept your observation." If their minds or prejudices reject it, he can only repeat, "I see it." And that is not proof.

     What, then, is the value of occult research, if we cannot prove it? I think this: that it may give hints which may possibly, if scientific men would take them as working hypotheses, facilitate investigation and quicken the discoveries which otherwise might be long delayed. I do not claim any more than that. I do not think any scientific man ought to accept our visions and think them true, but I think he might utilize them if he sees anything in them to give a hint of a line of possible discovery. Therefore I think we ought to continue to make such observations as far as we can, and publish them without caring for what people say. Only, on the other side, let those who make the observations say, "That is the thing as I see it, but I may be reading into it conclusions that are not there. I may be drawing entirely erroneous deductions. I give you my best, but your best attitude towards it is that of careful analysis and rigorous scrutiny." That is the service that I think the occult researcher has the right to demand at your hands. For if you blindly swallow everything he says, if he is an honest man you make him hesitate to say; while, if he is a dishonest man, he is likely to mislead you. The honest man leaves it to time to justify his observations. Those observations on the atoms, by the way, I find are being justified. They have been verified because along other lines scientific men have gradually built up scientific proof, which we can never give. We are simply people who see, and record the facts seen.

     And another thing to remember is that we are not omniscient. Our observations are often very imperfect. We see a little bit of a thing, and give it out as the whole, or we see it out of relation, and that gives a wrong impression. There are so many difficulties in the way, and so few ways of getting help. For there are few people who have come to the point where they can look quietly on the astral world and record what they see there. Those who can have often difficulty in comparing observations, because separated far from each other, and have difficulty in meeting and joining forces so that the observations may be confirmed. I think, then, that in observations made by only one person they ought to be issued as seen only by the one person, leaving them open for later confirmation if that should come. So that we may gradually get a body of literature, however small, founded on occult research, which no one is asked to accept, no one blamed for rejecting, which shall be gradually verified by repeated observations of different people. If that is done, occult research will play a great and useful part in our movement; if it is not done, it is more a danger than a help—a double danger, for the seer may be misled by not having other observations to correct his own, and a danger that the readers may be misled by taking as some infallible revelation the single observation of a fallible man. It is under these conditions that I desire that occult research should go forward—a willingness to correct wherever wider knowledge shows error to have been made; a willingness to repeat and verify, and to accept no observations without investigation and careful thought. If that be done, there will be no danger in it, but there is a danger to-day where only a few people observe; where those people say they see and are continually warning people there may be errors, but where others who do not see but perhaps love and respect those who do, take criticism of them as though it were an insult instead of being the best help that can possibly be given to the researcher. And, on the other hand, I would say that ungenerous criticism, unkind remark, imputation of motives, which we find from those who are not in favor, perhaps, of these lines of research, are as mischievous as the over- receptivity on the other side. Cannot we be sane and rational, and keep our equilibrium in these matters? Give fair play to the researcher, but not blind acceptance. Do not accuse him of being conceited, opinionated, dogmatic, because he speaks out the things he sees honestly and frankly; but do not hamper him by giving blind faith where intelligent thought is demanded.

Printed in the Summer 2012 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Ashish, Sri Madhava . "Mirtola: A Himalayan Ashram with Theosophical Roots " Quest  100. 3 (Summer 2012): pg. 98-105.

Edited by Seymour B. Ginsburg

I met Sri Madhava Ashish (1920-1997), the third Mirtola guru, in September 1978. This was just a few months after joining the Theosophical Society. In an effort to understand H.P. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine and the Stanzas of Dzyan on which it is based, I came across Ashish's books of commentary on those stanzas. These books, Man, the Measure of All Things (coauthored with his guru, Sri Krishna Prem) and Man, Son of Man, opened up an inner world for me that I did not know existed. This caused me to go to India and to meet him. Our first meeting at Mirtola led to annual visits with Ashish and a rich correspondence for nineteen years until his passing in 1997.

     Mirtola is a farm of sixty acres with a Hindu temple at its center, about eighteen kilometers from Almora, a well-known Indian town in the foothills of the Himalayas northeast of New Delhi and near the borders of Tibet and Nepal. But Mirtola is more than that. Its rich history, with deep Theosophical roots, has been a source of wisdom since its founding in 1929. At the passing of Sri Krishna Prem in 1965, Sri Madhava Ashish became head of the Mirtola ashram and remained so until his passing in 1997. From that time, the Mirtola ashram has been maintained by Sri Madhava Ashish's stepson and follower, Sri Dev Ashish.

In addition to his several published books and articles, Madhava Ashish collected anecdotes and reminiscences about the history of Mirtola and about the two gurus who preceded him, Sri Yashoda Mai and Sri Krishna Prem, and about associated figures prominent in Theosophical history. In recent years a few of Ashish's pupils have undertaken to arrange these anecdotes and reminiscences with a view to their eventual publication as a book. The anecdotes and reminiscences recounted here are extracted from that manuscript. Insertions in square brackets [ ] are my own.

—Seymour B. Ginsburg

     Readers should take note of the fact that this is not a researched biography. It is a collection of anecdotes about the lives of the people who founded the Temple and Ashram of Uttar Brindaban at Mirtola in the Kumaon Himalaya. The deed of trust for the establishment is dated Almora, July 4, 1929. The people were: Sri Krishna Sevika Sri Sri Yashoda Mai Vairagini (1882-1944), born Monica Roy in 1882 and married to Dr. Gyanendra Nath Chakravarti, first vice-chancellor of Lucknow University; her first disciple, Sri Sri Krishna Prem Vairagi (1898-1965), born Ronald Henry Nixon, who came to India in 1921 as Reader in English at Lucknow and later Banaras Hindu universities; and Monica Chakravarti's youngest daughter, Arpita (1916-1951), otherwise generally known as Moti Rani or just Moti.

     Everything prior to 1946, when I joined the ashram, consists of stories I heard from Krishna Prem and Moti. In this sense it is mythology. The rest is my memory of events from 1946 to the time Krishna Prem died in 1965. My memory is by no means infallible, so many of the names, places, and dates may be hopelessly wrong. These are stories and emphatically not history, so I make no claim as to their reliability. I can often only state that something of the sort was told or has happened—even if the names, places, and dates are incorrect.

     At the time of writing, most of the people mentioned have been dead for a long time. It is because of this that I feel free to comment on their lives.

     I am heir to an account of events from a line of people who saw things from a viewpoint that is different from the published histories, especially the published histories of major figures in the Theosophical Society. This does not mean that the stories are more true, only that they are put forward from a different viewpoint. 

Sri Krishna Prem    

     A few minutes after birth, when Ronald Nixon was held up for his father to see him, his father got the strong impression that the infant looked around with the question, "Where have I come to this time?"

     Note that the elder Mr. Nixon was neither a Theosophist nor anything else in particular, certainly nothing that would lead one to expect thoughts about reincarnation. Mrs. Nixon, on the other hand, was a Christian Science practitioner, with quite a reputation for healing people.

     Ronald had little to say about his time at the Nonconformist school at Taunton in Somerset, England. He seems to have been brilliant in the field of science, reproducing a rather complex process for measuring the speed of light with interference. He then gave an exhibition in science at Kings College, Cambridge, but could not join till after World War I. War had broken out by the time Ronald went up to Cambridge for his exhibition. As soon as he was old enough, he felt it his duty to join up.

     It is high time that something like the true story of Ronald's strange escape from enemy fighters replaced the distorted, even mythologized versions which are still circulating in India. Ronald was on the usual dawn patrol, which in his case consisted of a flight of two-seater fighters patrolling the section of the front line for which their squadron was responsible. According to what he told me, the British at that period held air superiority on that sector of the front, even though the German single-seater fighters had greater altitude. The Germans would not attack a flight of two-seater British fighters, because the observer's backward-firing guns gave the British the advantage over the fixed, forward-firing guns of the German single-seaters. They therefore adopted the tactic of using their superior altitude range to watch British squadrons from their vantage point, and then descend in force to attack British stragglers. In those days of unreliable aero engines, stragglers with engine trouble were many.

     On this occasion Ronald's engine started giving trouble. Meanwhile, he was watching his attackers over his shoulder. When he judged that the attacking plane was about to open fire, he side-slipped. Ronald began to slip left, when he felt his hand on the control column pushed over to the right. As he slid right, he saw the attacker's tracer bullets flash past just at the place he had expected to be. In times of great stress, like wartime, latent psychic powers are often activated, but people are shy of mentioning their experiences for fear of being treated as mad.    

     Ronald was by no means alone in the pursuit of interests which led him into Theosophy and Buddhism. Men who have had the contemplation of death forced upon them by war will often turn to enquiry into the meaning of life.

     One of Ronald's associates was Bob Alexander, a medical student some two years younger who had been under training for the Royal Air Force. They met in a bookshop, both looking for one of H.P. Blavatsky's books. "At that moment," said Bob, "I felt I had met a man I could follow for the rest of my life." When he had qualified, he took service in the Indian Medical Service so as to be close to Ronald, who by that time had just retired into an ashram. After ten years of service, Bob, too, entered the ashram and lived there with Ronald for the next nineteen years. Another was George Poole of Trinity, who went into the church at his father's insistence, but then joined Ronald in India and completed his teaching assignment for him when Ronald took monastic orders.

     Perhaps the best known of this fairly large group was Christmas (Toby) Humphreys, successful both in his legal career and in his organization of Western Buddhism. What is remarkable is not that so many young men went through a stage of youthful enthusiasm, but that so many of them kept up their interest throughout their lives.

     There was a lady they rudely called "The Airy Fairy Lilian," who gave the sort of occult teachings which are common to most such groups. They had to pair off and then attempt to meet each other in the astral body at some prearranged place. Ronald and his partner arranged to meet at the Cairo pyramids. Ronald, whose notions of what the pyramids looked like showed them with all the white marble coping stones in position, saw the piles of rough, stepped stone and dismissed the vision as a distorted dream image. It was not until some years later, when the first early photographs of the pyramids were not only taken but also reproduced and published, that Ronald discovered his mistake.

They also had a group exercise for constructing thought forms. Whether in this group or in others, they learned how to magnetize objects and perform similar bits of minor magic which are useful introductions to the factual presence of subtle energies.

Something happened to Ronald that was beyond Lilian's capabilities and was of great significance to someone who would later dedicate his life to the inner quest. Call it fact. Call it dream. Call it vision. Ronald found himself at night rushing out into space in company with a guide or teacher. They seemed to rush outwards at great speed and for a long time. At last they stopped and turned round. Before them was a vast, roughly egg-shaped mass, glowing with the light of myriads of stars. The light was irregularly distributed following the distribution of the stars. Ronald asked which of the concentrations of stars was our solar system. Pointing to a smallish cluster towards one end of the total mass, the guide said, "That is your universe." The shock produced by the attack this statement made on Ronald's concept of scale sent him back to his room in Cambridge.     

     Ronald was already attracted to the figure of the Buddha before the event which clarified his dedication to the search. He filled his rooms at Cambridge with oriental bric-a-brac, much of it Buddhistic in origin, and he took a Buddhist initiation from the Theosophical president, who was visiting Cambridge and its lively Theosophical lodges.

     Ronald had gone up to London, where he loved to browse in the Charing Cross Road bookshops. On this occasion he went to the British Museum, where he was confronted by the severe ceramic image of the Lohan Buddha. He knew that this image was made some fifteen hundred years after the Buddha's death, so there was no question of its being a photographic or realistic representation. This being the case, where did this impressive form and facial expression come from which was having so great an impact upon him? It could have come only from the heart of the sculptor, from the heart of a man. "What comes from the human heart," argued Ronald to himself, "can be realized by a man. And what is realizable must at some time have been realized. What one man has realized, another can realize." And so he determined to set out on the journey of the soul.         

     Ronald's intention was to get to India as quickly as possible. There, he felt, he might find a teacher who could speak from experience and not from books. But he had money neither to pay for a passage to India nor to support him when he got there. He had to have a job. So he wrote to the principal of the Theosophical school at Adyar, hoping that his Theosophical connections plus an honors degree might recommend him. The principal regretted that he had no vacancies, but forwarded Ronald's letter to Dr. Chakravarti, who was taking on staff for a new university at Lucknow. The outcome of all this was that Ronald was interviewed in London by Bertram Keightley, an old Theosophist and a member of the Lucknow University Senate who was visiting London. [Bertram Keightley and his uncle Archibald were wealthy Victorians who financed the publication of H.P. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine.] Keightley approved and lent Ronald enough money to get to Lucknow. One world had been left behind, and the next had not yet come. He arrived in Lucknow to find himself placed in the vice-chancellor's guest house, where newcomers stayed until they found themselves quarters.

    Ronald had some particular friends in Lucknow. Dilip Roy was one of them, and with him, he started a correspondence which lasted till his death in 1965. Between 1934 and 1936 Dilip arranged the three-sided correspondence between himself and Sri Aurobindo, on the one hand, and himself and Krishna Prem on the other. Krishna Prem's letters were shown to Aurobindo, and Aurobindo's replies were sent to Krishna Prem. 

Sri Yashoda Mai 

     Monica was the daughter of Rai Bahadur Gagan Chandra Roy, who was at the time of her birth the chief native official at the government opium factory at Ghazipur, Uttar Pradesh.

     These were the days before the railways were built, and the Ganga was still the route taken by much traffic and many passengers coming up country from Bengal. Ghazipur was one of the important ports for river traffic and a centre of trade.

     Gagan Chandra Roy was Bengali. He became a well-known figure both in Ghazipur and amongst travelers, who would often stay with him. One of these travelers was a Christian bishop who was staying the night that Gagan's only daughter was born. In the morning the bishop suggested she be called Monica because he had had a dream of St. Monica, mother of St. Augustine, that very night.

     Visitors from the boats traveling to and from Calcutta were often highlights in the child's life, for visitors included such figures as Keshab Chandra Sen, Swami Ram Tirtha, and Swami Vivekananda. Many of them came specifically to have the darshan [view] of the now famous Pauhari Baba, a Mahatma who lived in his ashram a mile or two from Gagan's house.

     As a child Monica heard many strange stories about this great man. It was said that he had hollowed out a cave for meditation in the floor of the temple (this is true) and that he would eat some medicinal root discovered on his travels and then enter the cave and meditate continuously for six months and, on one occasion, for six years.

     When Monica reached the age of twelve her marriage was arranged with Gyanendra Nath Chakravarti, a much older man whose first wife had died, leaving one daughter aged six. Monica so much liked the little girl that she said she was ready to marry in order to have her as a daughter.

     Chakravarti lived in Banaras with his old mother. He had done well at Allahabad University, studying law and making several lifelong friends who included Motilal Nehru and Tej Bahadur Sapru.  

     When he started legal practice, he was congratulated on his work by the judges. However, he was deeply disappointed in the law as practiced when compared with his own high ideals. He therefore left law and went into service with the education department, becoming inspector of schools. He had become interested in Theosophy, and met Mme. Blavatsky, who slightly shocked him by what he considered to be her lack of proper piety. He asked one of the standard questions about the relative merits of bhakti and gyan (the path of devotion and the path of knowledge) and she had replied, "Some people like jam with their bread and some like cheese." Chakravarti found this analogy altogether too crude. However, this did not stop him from becoming a Theosophist.

     The details of Chakravarti's Theosophical career are not available. However, he must have attained seniority fairly rapidly, for we find him representing the Indian branch of the Society at the Chicago Parliament of Religions, from where he wrote to Monica, describing the meetings and remarking on the excellence of Swami Vivekananda's speech. [One finds him along with Annie Besant in a photograph of dignitaries attending the Parliament.] At some point he became a close friend of Annie Besant, and Bertram Keightley became a disciple after being told by Blavatsky to go to India, where he would find his teacher.

     While in Banaras Monica took to visiting sadhus [holy men] of all sorts, including the then famous Bhaskar Swami. Monica made a habit of meeting anyone with spiritual pretensions and she asked her husband to invite outstanding people to the house so that she could meet them. After some time she went to him and asked for initiation, saying that she had met all these people but had found no one his equal.

     As there would have been in any Indian family, there was much concern because Monica did not immediately become pregnant. She was taken to all sorts of people for advice, and finally to an astrologer, who declared that there was no hope at all. But there was one faint possibility. "If she takes other people's children and brings them up as her own, then, perhaps, some of her own will survive."

      Over the next twenty years or so Monica adopted, educated, and married off some forty children. Monica had four children of her own: Bhalli, the eldest son; Bulbul, the eldest daughter; Ratan, the youngest son; and, fifteen years after Ratan, Arpita, known as Moti Rani, the youngest daughter.

     There was a curious story about Bulbul. Chakravarti had joined a group who were working with a medium in the attempt to open a channel of direct communication with Blavatsky's Masters following Blavatsky's death. Through this medium came the message that Blavatsky would be reborn as Chakravarti's daughter. It was the sort of thing guaranteed to create excitement in Theosophical circles, especially when Monica then produced a daughter. Special arrangements were made for the child's upbringing, and for quite a time she was cared for by a Theosophical lady in Paris, where she learned to play the violin. However, as it more and more became apparent that she was an ordinary though good-looking and pleasant child, she was soon sent home, where her marriage was arranged.

     Monica became very ill during one of her pregnancies when the child died in the womb. She was lying on the veranda of the house in Banaras, looking over the Ganga between Assi and Ramnagar where the Mahatma Hari Har Baba was performing tapasya [austerities]. Naked, he would stand on one leg on a sand bank in the middle of the river or, according to the time of year, up to his neck in water, staring open-eyed at the sun as it moved from horizon to horizon. He had gone blind. If anyone brought him food, he would eat. If not, as Monica often saw, he would take up a handful of mud from the river bed and eat it. Lying and suffering in her illness, she took strength from seeing Hari Har Baba's transcendence over the body.

     Years later she was staying in a houseboat moored off the end of the house at Banaras. Crowds of people started coming to have her darshan. "Why are you coming to me?" she said. "Go and have darshan of Hari Har Baba. He is a real Mahatma." Hari Har Baba, now old, was living on a houseboat moored off Assi Ghat. Hearing that Monica was sending people to have his darshan, he returned the compliment and sent them to see her.

     The Lucknow house seems to have had a constant stream of visiting Theosophists from England, some of them staying for considerable periods. There was a Mrs. Tibbets. Mrs. Cooper Oakley, who wrote on the Grail legend, was another.

     It will have been at about the time of Chakravarti's retirement from Lucknow and the move back to Banaras that Monica began to feel increasingly the conflict between what she had understood of the spiritual nature of the universe and the daily affairs of her household. It is therefore not surprising that Monica began to think in terms of leaving the family, taking sannyas [renunciation], and building the Krishna temple she had dreamed of since childhood.  

     One of the great stories of Monica's early life is that of the trip to Europe in about 1900–01, when there was an exposition in Paris and the Crystal Palace was still new in London. Monica went with her husband and Annie Besant, and there was a Bengali woman (Borodidi) who went with them as Monica's "companion." They went via Italy and visited St. Peter's in Rome. Monica was wearing a blue sari with silver stars embroidered on it. Some Italian peasants who were there saw this dark, big-eyed, beautiful woman in blue and silver and took her for an incarnation of the Virgin Mary. They surrounded her, tearing off bits of her sari. Annie hurried her out and into a cab, admonishing her never to wear that sari again.

     In India Monica was not considered beautiful because her complexion was dark. But in Paris they saw her features and declared her most beautiful. When they visited the Exposition, Monica in all her finery and laden with heavy gold ornaments was thought to be the queen of Madagascar.

     From Paris they went to London, visited the Crystal Palace, and stayed with Keightley's old mother in Windsor. There it was said she was noticed by Queen Victoria as she drove by in her carriage and was invited to the castle, but she refused on the grounds that an Indian woman goes nowhere without her husband, and the queen was not meeting men because she was in mourning.

     There are several stories about Annie. One is that she was furious with Chakravarti when he married Monica. "Marrying that child when you could have had me!" she is supposed to have said.

     There is a delightful story of how Colonel Olcott, president of the Society, was lecturing a group of Theosophists. "We will now meditate," he ordered. "One, two, three, begin!" Monica was watching. "Sahib," she whispered, "You're an old fraud!" Olcott put his finger to his lips. "Shhh!" he hissed.

     Monica did not like the new house at Banaras. Shortly after moving in she had a disturbing dream. The marble image of Ganesh she had in her puja [worship] room was cuddling up to her and shivering because he was feeling cold, behaving as if he were a little child. In the morning she insisted on climbing upstairs to have darshan of her thakurs [deities]. A temple had been built on the roof, as promised, but the temple itself had no roof. Her thakurs were unprotected from the weather, and the images themselves were wet with dew. She promptly ordered all the images removed to her own room where she could look after them.

     The same Ganesh came into her dreams shortly afterwards. He was flapping his ears and brushing his head as if irritated by something. When Monica got up to see what was wrong, she found that sugar syrup spilled from some sweets that had been offered had fallen unnoticed on Ganeshji's head and ants were running over it.

     Many years later in the [Mirtola] ashram Monica was lying sick and in pain on her bed in her room, whose walls were covered with pictures of many divine forms of the Hindu pantheon, of no artistic merit but there because of some special association which pleased her. There were large pictures of her husband, Blavatsky, Blavatsky's Masters, a large oil painting of Durga and another of Krishna she had commissioned. And there were photos of her favorite disciples. Right beside her bed, close to the head, in a narrow frame that fitted a particular bit of wall, was a bazaar print of Radha and Krishna on a swing. Half dazed by the pain, she felt little hands massaging her legs, as Indians love to do and have done to them when they are unwell—or indeed at any time. Looking up, she saw that Radha was missing from the picture.             

     When Monica Chakravarti decided, with her husband's permission, to leave the family, build a temple to Sri Krishna, and then to live as a vairagini [ascetic] in the deity's service, there were several factors at work. Firstly, Chakravarti's doctors had told him he should live by the seaside because of his very high blood pressure. Monica's doctors, on the other hand were saying that she had pleurisy and must go to the hills. Ronald's decision to accompany her as her first disciple had been taken when he left Lucknow.

     There had been some talk of building the temple in the plains, but the idea of having to have iron grilles to stop monkeys and thieves from getting into the sanctum was distasteful. Finally they settled on Almora because it was familiar to them from many hot weather holidays and there were many known people in the town. They rented Chilkapita house on the border of the town to stay in until they found a place for the temple. A puja room was immediately established in the house, the only image being a figure of Sri Krishna in Italian marble carved by an Italian artist according to the European canon of proportion. She had seen a similar Italian image of Sri Krishna in the palace of some maharaja and had asked her husband to bring her one from Italy, for he traveled quite often on Theosophical business. She intended this to be the main figure in her temple when she built it.

     Ronald was by now wearing the brahmachari's [celibate's] white dhoti and chadar, with shaven head, chutiya, the double strand of small tulasi beads round the neck, and the "caste mark" of the Gauriya sampradaya or Brahma sampradaya to which they belonged by virtue of Monica's initiation by Bal Krishna Goswami of Sri Radha Raman temple in Brindaban. In accordance with the ancient rule for brahmacharis, Ronald had to beg food in the town for his guru and himself.      

 Bertram Keightley    

     Bertram Keightley came from one of those wealthy Victorian families who would have considered it extremely bad manners had anyone enquired where the wealth came from. He went to Cambridge, studied mathematics, and became a wrangler. Then he got attracted to Theosophy along with his uncle, Archibald, who was about the same age. They were part of a group of London Theosophists who in 1887, after the trouble caused by the Hodgson report, went over to Ostend to persuade H.P. Blavatsky to come to London, where they would provide her with an establishment and she could complete her monumental work, The Secret Doctrine.

     Blavatsky came and Bertram made himself useful. He got the manuscript typed on the newfangled typing machine. He suggested that the Stanzas be made the backbone of the book. And he put himself at the service of Blavatsky for checking the quotations which she "pulled out of the air." In effect he became her disciple. Keightley had many stories to tell about the quotations. Blavatsky had very few books, but she quoted from many with remarkable accuracy. But if she was sure of the quotation, she was often unsure of its source, and this made checking difficult.

     She ascribed one bit of verse to Tennyson. Keightley knew his Tennyson and did not recognize the verse. When questioned Blavatsky swore at him and said it was Tennyson. This went on with Blavatsky getting more and more angry, so Keightley went to see Richard Garnett, who was then librarian at the British Museum. Garnett did not know it as from Tennyson or from anyone else. Back went Keightley to Blavatsky, who called him names but agreed to "look." She could not say where it came from, but was adamant that it was Tennyson. Back again he went to Garnett, saying that he had very good reason for believing it did actually come from Tennyson.

     Garnett now suggested there was a faint possibility. He said there had been an ephemeral magazine at Cambridge to which Tennyson had contributed. Since the British Museum has to receive a copy of everything published in Britain, the few copies of the magazine had to be there, so they went to the archives, found the magazine, and found the verse.

     Keightley took advantage of the opportunity to talk with Blavatsky. On his asking some question about phenomena and the nature of matter she gave him a private demonstration. She got him to sit opposite to her at a small table, put her hands in front of him, and made him watch as a ring on one hand went hazy, disappeared, and reappeared on the same finger of the other hand.

     There came a day when Keightley sadly went to say goodbye to Blavatsky because of some family business matter in northern England. It was the last place he wanted to go to, but he believed it was his duty. He said that Blavatsky's face changed, and her voice changed. "If you go," said this person, "you will bring your family down in ruins." He did not go, and shortly afterwards in 1890 Blavatsky sent him to India, saying that he would find his teacher there. Blavatsky herself died a few months later.

     In India Keightley stayed with Annie Besant, ate her biscuits by the tinful, called her "Dear Annie," and disliked her. At some point he met Chakravarti, decided that this was his teacher, like Ronald became a member of the family, and lived with them. Unlike Ronald, however, except for wearing thin cotton kurta pyjama in the hot weather, he remained wholly a British sahib.

     Keightley was a member of the University Senate and a bit of a figure in public life. As many people did in those days, Keightley slept naked. That would have been no problem had he stayed in his room. But on the occasion of Mrs. Tibbets's delayed arrival he wandered out onto the roof of the porch in full view of the arriving guest. In the hot weather he would sleep out on the lawn with the other men and in the middle of the night wander past Monica's female guests and household women in the veranda. And in the morning he could be seen doing physical exercises on his bed in full view of everyone.

     Anyone might suppose that such a man could not possibly do anything in the spiritual life, but when staying at Mirtola and his hernia strangulated, he lay in agony for some time before help could come, with no fuss, and afterwards gave a blow by blow description of all he had gone through: sensations, feelings, and thoughts.

     Keightley was delighted with Krishna Prem's first draft of his commentary on the Stanzas of Dzyan. "Surely you aren't going to take two bites of a cherry," he said when Krishna Prem was dissatisfied with his work. In the end it took more than two bites. But it was good to have encouragement from a man who had done so much work on the original and had been so close to its author.

     And at his end in Allahabad at his house, the Villa Italiana, which he had taken after Chakravarti's death, with his brain deteriorating from lack of blood, he suddenly came out of a coma, sat up and exclaimed "Ma!" as he saw Yashoda Mai, and fell back dead.

Printed in the Summer 2012 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Sender, Pablo. "Psychic Phenomena and the Early Theosophical Society"Quest  100. 3 (Summer 2012): pg. 95-97.

by Pablo Sender 

In the early years of the Theosophical Society there was a strong proclivity towards psychic phenomena, a facet that was increasingly abandoned as the Society grew. Was this due to a change in the aims of the TS? Was this a response to the public reaction to such phenomena? Or was this just a natural result of the evolution of the Theosophical movement? Let us explore the formative years of the Society and see if we can throw some light on these complex questions.

H.P. Blavatsky was born with remarkable psychic abilities and a strong spiritual inclination. In 1849, when she was eighteen years old, she began to travel around the world in search of the ancient wisdom. About three years later she met Morya, an Indian initiate whom she had seen in visions during her childhood. He offered to take on Blavatsky as a disciple and train her in the occult sciences and the esoteric philosophy. This training would not be merely for the purpose of personal development, but to help in an attempt to promote a deeper spirituality in the world.^[1]

At the end of the nineteenth century, Western civilization was being torn between the opposing influences of materialistic science and blind religious belief. Scientists claimed that, by the end of the century, they were going to be able to explain everything in terms of material reality, thus proving spirituality a fantasy. Religion, incapable of responding to the awakening intellectual interest of the masses, denounced scientific knowledge as evil and something to be rejected. An impassable chasm between science and religion had been created, and many (especially the educated class) were turning to atheism and materialism.

The Mahatmas were planning to spread the forgotten accumulated wisdom of the ages, which would offer humanity a much-needed synthesis between science and spirituality. It was for this task that they chose HPB as their agent.

After spending the next twenty years undergoing occult training, gaining knowledge, and traveling around the world, HPB was now ready to begin her mission. But where would she find ears willing to listen? Religious people were too dogmatic, and those attracted to science were too materialistic. One of the few options left was the spiritualist movement, which was quite popular at the time. Through the phenomena witnessed at sances, this group of people had become familiar with a reality that did not fit within the frame of conventional religion or science. Hence spiritualism seemed a logical place to start.

The problem was that although many of the spiritualistic phenomena were real, they were not what the mediums of the time believed them to be. HPB's first attempt was to explain the nature of phenomena from the deeper point of view of occult science. Thus, in 1871 in Cairo, Egypt, she formed the Socit Spirite ("Spiritist Society") for the investigation of the Spiritism of the French occultist Allan Kardec. Blavatsky's sister Vera de Zhelihovsky, who was in correspondence with her during these years, wrote that HPB chose to start in this way "since there was no other [philosophy available]; to give people a chance to see for themselves how mistaken they were. She would first give room to an already established and accepted teaching and then, when the public would see that nothing was coming out of it, she would then offer her own explanations"(Algeo, 21). However, the Socit Spirite did not succeed, as Blavatsky could not find honest and qualified mediums to do the kind of research she had envisioned.

In 1873 HPB received an order from her Indian teacher to go to the United States and to meet Henry Steel Olcott. He was quite a remarkable individual who had a notable career in agricultural science, served during the Civil War as a special commissioner investigating fraud and corruption, and became a successful lawyer. He was now about to become a journalist reporting on spiritualistic phenomena. It was in this capacity that, a year later, he met Blavatsky and they quickly became friends.

As Olcott began his instruction in the occult science and esoteric philosophy, he and Blavatsky started working together in connection with the spiritualist movement in the U.S., on similar lines to HPB's attempt in Egypt.

During this time, HPB performed many phenomena that were supposed to be possible only for disembodied spirits, and published articles in different spiritualistic journals explaining the origin and nature of these psychic incidents. Most spiritualists were not pleased with her attempt at reforming their theories, sometimes quite radically. Nevertheless, she gained the attention of the public and attracted people to her teachings and occult abilities.

Under orders of "T.B."(most likely Tuitit Bey, an adept belonging to the Egyptian section of the Brotherhood) Olcott and HPB formed an organization of their own.^[2] The beginning of 1875 saw the formation of the "Miracle Club," where the phenomena of spiritualism would be studied, tested, and demonstrated. This attempt also failed, because the medium that was to be involved wanted to earn money from this endeavor, something HPB always opposed. (Olcott, Old Diary Leaves, 1:25-26)

After the failure of the Miracle Club, the Tibetan section of the Brotherhood came on stage. In July 1875, HPB wrote in her scrapbook: "Orders received from India direct to establish a philosophico-religious society and choose a name for it—also to choose Olcott"(Caldwell, 73). As we can see, the Mahatmas wanted the new society to be based not upon occult phenomena but upon spirituality and the esoteric philosophy. However, phenomena would still be prominent for about the next seven years.

In September 1875 Olcott and HPB organized a lecture by G.H. Felt entitled "The Lost Canon of Proportion of the Egyptians,"in which Felt claimed to be able to make elemental spirits visible "by simple chemical appliances."Because of the interest raised by the lecture, Olcott proposed "to form a society to pursue and promote such occult research."This was the beginning of the Theosophical Society.

While the first years of the TS continued to show a marked interest in occult phenomena, there was also emphasis on the study of different philosophies, especially (though not exclusively) those of the East. In her first book, Isis Unveiled, published in New York in 1877, HPB wrote: "The object of its founders was to experiment practically in the occult powers of Nature, and to collect and disseminate among Christians information about the Oriental religious philosophies"(Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 1:xli).

In a circular entitled The Theosophical Society: Its Origin, Plan, and Aims, distributed on May 3, 1878, the idea of universal brotherhood was already described as central for the TS. The circular states, "The objects of the Society are various"and after a lengthy description of a variety of related aims, it closes with the following objective: "Finally and chiefly, to aid in the institution of a Brotherhood of Humanity, where in all good and pure men, of every race shall recognize each other as the equal effects (upon this planet) of one Uncreate, Universal, Infinite, and Everlasting Cause"(Blavatsky, Collected Writings, 1:376—77).

In December 1878, Olcott and Blavatsky departed for India, where they established the international headquarters of the TS. Soon after their arrival in Bombay they made the acquaintance of A.P. Sinnett, the editor of The Pioneer, the leading English daily of India. Sinnett was interested in spiritualism and psychic phenomena. Thinking that HPB and Olcott were spiritualists, he invited them to come visit him and his wife in Simla. During their second visit to the Sinnetts', in September 1880, Blavatsky produced some wonderful phenomena with the aid of the Mahatmas from the Tibetan section of the Brotherhood. (For a full account of these see Sinnett's book The Occult World.) It was at this time that Sinnett and A.O. Hume began their famous correspondence with two of the adepts—Koot Hoomi (K.H.) and Blavatsky's teacher, Morya (M.). Sinnett addresses his first letter "To the Unknown Brother"and suggests that the Brother produce an occult phenomenon that the world would be unable to deny or explain away. In reply, K.H. flatly refused to do any such thing. In his following letter Sinnett suggested a reorganization of the TS. He wanted to move away from the idea of universal brotherhood (which HPB and Olcott had evidently discussed with him) to focus on the occult. In October 1880 he received a second letter from K.H. saying: 

You have ever discussed but to put down the idea of a universal Brotherhood, questioned its usefulness, and advised to remodel the T.S. on the principle of a college for the special study of occultism. This, my respected and esteemed friend and Brother—will never do! (Chin, 8) 

This refusal must have sounded strange, since HPB had already produced many phenomena with the aid of these Mahatmas. Thus Hume wrote to K.H. saying that it was "the Brothers"who had set the stage for the phenomena that took place in Simla. In December 1880 K.H. answered: 

If it has been constantly our wish to spread on the Western Continent among the foremost educated classes "Branches"of the T.S. as the harbingers of a Universal Brotherhood it was not so in your case...The aspiration for brotherhood between our races met no response—nay, it was pooh-poohed from the first—and so, was abandoned even before I had received Mr. Sinnett's first letter. On his part and from the start, the idea was solely to promote the formation of a kind of club or "school of magic."It was then no "proposal"of ours, nor were we the "designers of the scheme."Why then such efforts to show us in the wrong? It was Mad[ame] B[lavatsky]—not we, who originated the idea; and it was Mr. Sinnett who took it up. (Chin, 30; emphasis here and in other quotations is in the original) 

The Mahatma then says that, in view of HPB's insistence, he had reluctantly given her his consent to try this approach: 

But, this consent, you will please bear in mind, was obtained solely under the express and unalterable condition that the new Society should be founded as a Branch of the Universal Brotherhood, and among its members, a few elect men would—if they chose to submit to our conditions, instead of dictating theirs—be allowed to begin the study of the occult sciences under the written directions of a "Brother."But a "hot-bed of magick"we never dreamt of. 

It is understandable that Sinnett and Hume thought the TS was meant to be a "school of magic", since HPB had placed so much emphasis on phenomena. But why did she do this? And why did the Mahatmas agree to it? When asked about the purpose of occult phenomena some years later, HPB explained: 

They failed to produce the desired effect...It was supposed that intelligent people, especially men of science, would, at least, have recognized the existence of a new and deeply interesting field of enquiry and research when they witnessed physical effects produced at will, for which they were not able to account. It was supposed that theologians would have welcomed the proof of which they stand so sadly in need in these agnostic days, that the soul and the spirit are not mere creations of their fancy, due to ignorance of the physical constitution of man, but entities quite as real as the body, and much more important. These expectations were not realized. The phenomena were misunderstood and misrepresented, both as regards their nature and their purpose...An occultist can produce phenomena, but he cannot supply the world with brains, nor with the intelligence and good faith necessary to understand and appreciate them. Therefore, it is hardly to be wondered at, that [a] word came to abandon phenomena and let the ideas of Theosophy stand on their own intrinsic merits. (Blavatsky, Collected Writings, 9:47-50) 

The "word"could be a reference to a conversation one of the Mahatmas had with Blavatsky in February 1881. This visit took place a couple of months after the above mentioned letter to Hume. Olcott recorded in his diary: 

A Master visited her on the 19th...One result of this visit was that, on the 25th of the month, she and I had a long and serious discussion about the state of affairs, resulting—as my Diary says—"in an agreement between us to re-construct the T.S. on a different basis, putting the Brotherhood idea forward more prominently, and keeping the occultism more in the background."(Olcott, Old Diary Leaves, 2:294-95) 

Sinnett travelled to England and published his book The Occult World. Upon his return in July 1881, K.H. began to instruct him in the esoteric philosophy, and the TS shifted towards metaphysics and spirituality.

According to M., the TS was founded as an "experiment"to see how the world would receive the esoteric philosophy. But to be successful, this kind of attempt cannot be imposed or forced by "external agencies."This is why the Mahatma wrote to Sinnett: "It was stipulated, however, that the experiment should be made independently of our personal management; that there should be no abnormal interference by ourselves"(Chin, 125).

Thus the Mahatmas gave Blavatsky and Olcott general directions about what they wished, intervening only on relatively few and important occasions. In HPB's words:

The two chief Founders were not told what they had to do, how they had to bring about and quicken the growth of the Society and results desired; nor had they any definite ideas given them concerning its outward organization all this being left entirely with themselves...But if the two Founders were not told what they had to do, they were distinctly instructed about what they should never do, what they had to avoid, and what the Society should never become. (Blavatsky, Original Programme, 2—3)

The formative years of the Theosophical Society provide a wonderful story of trials and errors, failures and successes, of learning and rectifying. But they are ultimately a tale of philanthropy and selflessness, of a group of people who did not spend their energies, time, and skills to gain position, accumulate money, or work for self-gratification, but devoted themselves to foster the spiritual evolution of humanity.

References

Algeo, John, ed. The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky, vol. 1: 1861-79. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 2003.

Blavatsky, H.P. Collected Writings. Edited by Boris de Zirkoff. 15 vols. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1977-91.

———. Isis Unveiled. 2 vols. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1972.

———. The Original Programme of the Theosophical Society and Preliminary Memorandum of the Esoteric Section. Adyar, India: Theosophical Publishing House, 2002.

Caldwell, Daniel H. The Esoteric World of Madame Blavatsky. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 2000.

Chin, Vicente Hao, Jr., ed. The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett in Chronological Sequence. Manila: Theosophical Publishing House, 1998.

Olcott, Henry Steel. Old Diary Leaves. 6 vols. Adyar, India: Theosophical Publishing House, 1974-1975. 

Printed in the Summer 2012 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard. "A Blavatsky Revival: An Interview with Michael Gomes" Quest  100. 3 (Summer 2012): pg. 90-94.

by Richard Smoley 

Michael Gomes is one of the world's most distinguished scholars of Theosophy. A historian and author, he is also director of the Emily Sellon Memorial Library in New York. He is also one of today's most respected writers on esoteric movements, well known to both students of esoteric literature and to scholars of religion. His works include an abridged and annotated version of H.P. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine (reviewed in Quest, Summer 2010) and an edition of The Secret Doctrine Commentaries: The Unpublished 1889 Instructions (reviewed in Quest, Spring 2011). After the publication of his book The Dawning of the Theosophical Movement he was awarded the Herman Ausubel Prize for historical achievement by Columbia University in 1989. He will be appearing at this summer's annual convention of the Theosophical Society (see ad on page TK) to conduct a workshop on writing your own lodge history. The following interview was conducted by phone and e-mail in February-March 2012.

—Richard Smoley

Richard Smoley: Could you say a little bit about how you came to Theosophy?

Michael Gomes: I was introduced to H.P. Blavatsky through a photograph. It was the well-known one of her and Colonel Olcott in London, in 1888/89: he with his long gray beard, and she with her tobacco basket before her. There was something that seemed to call to me, like a voice from the past. I was about fourteen or fifteen at the time, and everything that could be located in encyclopedias described Mme. Blavatsky as a discredited medium. When I was sixteen, I got my parents to give me a copy of Isis Unveiled for Christmas. I read through it voraciously, and a year later, in 1968, when I was seventeen, I joined the Toronto Theosophical Society. This lodge had a long and distinguished history, so many of its members being contributors to the arts and literature of Canada. Its charter was one of the last issued bearing HPB's signature.

     My interest in Theosophical history was fueled by the work of Beatrice Hastings, an Englishwoman who had taken up the case for Mme. Blavatsky in the 1930s, comparing what had been written about her with the documented events. Hastings had outlined a number of studies taking up some critical issues, but her death in 1943 brought the project to an end. My search for her books and papers led me to eventually catalogue her papers in my early twenties, and I wrote an introduction to one of her projected studies when it was printed in booklet form. This led me to continue my research at a number of great libraries throughout the world. I was able to use the great resources of the reference division on the New York Public Library, the old British Museum Library in London, and the Adyar Library and Archives of the Theosophical Society in Madras, where I would spend three years.

Smoley: Who would you list as influences on your work?

Gomes: Beatrice Hastings, certainly. She showed that a well-documented narrative need not be uninteresting. We all owe a debt to Boris de Zirkoff, the compiler of the Blavatsky Collected Writings series. Aside from his compiling Blavatsky's literary output in these volumes, the inclusion of his chronologies and biographies of the individuals involved were great time-saving devices. The chance to spend time with two of the leading researchers in the field of Blavatskiana, the late K.F. Vania in Bombay, India, and Walter Carrithers in Fresno, California, and our correspondence over the years helped shape my views on certain matters. The opportunity to work with so many distinguished colleagues on related panels over the years, and my exchanges with many of the independent researchers connected with this work could also be counted as influences.

Smoley: Of your books, what would you recommend to a new reader?

Gomes: The introduction to my edition of The Secret Doctrine puts Blavatsky and her theories in the context of her period. This being the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of my first book The Dawning of the Theosophical Movement, I cannot fail to mention it. For those who feel they are already familiar with the events that led to the meeting of Olcott and Blavatsky and the founding of the Theosophical Society, the book's final chapter on HPB's last days in New York will help make her seem more personable.

Smoley: What advice would you give to someone interested in researching this field?

Gomes: To be aware that aside from accessing the mental world that the people around Blavatsky existed in, there is the temporal aspect of the lives. The physicality of it, the place itself. This is why I have always stressed the value of on-the-ground research. Finding A.O. Hume's home in Simla, India, walking through its grounds, gave a spatial understanding about the events that had occurred when Blavatsky was his guest there. In knowing the limitations and extremes of these situations, one begins to understand and appreciate the remarkable contribution of these early members, who risked ridicule and scorn so we could enjoy freedom of belief.

My work has been for a better appreciation of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. I hope that my contribution has been in the raising of awareness of how much documentation there is for Theosophy, and that I have helped by bringing some of this source material to light in my books and articles.

Smoley: What do you find most inspiring about Theosophy?

Gomes: That it offers freedom of thought in an area where belief is so strong. There is a great quote in Isis Unveiled that says, "It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight, but the inalienable right of private judgment." There has been this tension in Theosophy. Blavatsky had certain definite beliefs, but the Society itself is an open house for freedom of belief. Although, as one old lady told me here at the New York lodge, "It's freedom of thought as long as you keep it to yourself."

Smoley: So there's a kind of tension here between belief and the freedom to believe what you like.

Gomes: That has kept the movement healthy. In other groups, you believe this or you're anathema. You can believe all kinds of crazy things if you're a Theosophist. That much said, a lot of what Blavatsky writes about you'll find in Neoplatonism, Mahayana Buddhism, Brahmanism, so there is this tradition. She took on the whole academic world; she took on leading orientalists like Max Muller. The irony is that she's still being discussed while they've been superseded.

Then there's the number of people she influenced.You always keep discovering new people. One of the pioneers of Mayan studies in America, William Gates (not to be confused with Bill Gates of Microsoft), was a Theosophist. The Buddhist scholar Edward Conze once told Mircea Eliade that he believed Blavatsky was the Tibetan master Tsongkhapa reincarnated.

Smoley: What do you admire most about Blavatsky?

Gomes: Her tenacity. Her remarkable contribution in opening the field up to women. There were other figures—Anna Kingsford, the women of the Golden Dawn, Emma Hardinge Britten—but no other big theorist who was able to pull it all together. None of the books by these other figures speak to people today.

I've seen Blavatsky's picture in Manhattan penthouses and garlanded with marigolds in family shrines in little Indian villages; her influence has been far-reaching. Should I live long enough, I would like to address some of the other charges against her, as I did in my monograph on The Coulomb Case, such as plagiarism. It's ironic: Blavatsky is charged with inventing her teachings, and at the same time she's charged with plagiarizing.

Today she is finally starting to get the recognition she deserves. Twenty years ago, she was just considered a fraud, but today there's an increased interest in her in academe. Mitch Horowitz has quoted me as saying that we're in the throes of a Blavatsky revival. [See "New Yorkers Get a New Look at Madame Blavatsky," Quest, Spring 2012.] I would say that today there's more of an attitude that, "Well, she had this impact, and that we know for sure," as opposed to "she was just a fraud." But the fields of esoteric studies has changed too. Most of the people who are taking their degrees in these fields are coming from a practitioner's viewpoint, so they're more open to these ideas.

Smoley: The language of the classic Theosophical works by Blavatsky and others have a highly Eastern flavor, with many Sanskrit terms and so on. Yet many academic scholars see Theosophy as fundamentally a part of the Western esoteric tradition. Where do you think the truth is?

Gomes: Modern Theosophy is a good example of the hybrid spirituality that characterizes so much of the later manifestations. Its roots lie in the evolving spiritual tradition of the West, but it used Eastern terminology when no English equivalents existed. The ideal of the Mahatma harks back to Pico della Mirandola's magus of the Renaissance—the idea that individuals could control their destiny. This was a powerful idea. But in truth there is no Western or Eastern esotericism, just gradations and aspects, as Blavatsky would have it, of the same theme.

Smoley: What is the connection between Theosophy and Western traditions such as Gnosticism and Kabbalah?

Gomes: As time moves on, the Theosophical movement has taken on an image of a classical example of modern esotericism. As a set of beliefs, some of the ideas presented could be traced back to the emanationism and theurgy of the Neoplatonists; the correlation of human and astral bodies owed much to Paracelsus. It is interesting to see what one of the modern exponents of the Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem, had to say about Blavatsky in a 1944 letter to a colleague: 

You are certainly too harsh on Madame Blavatsky, it is surely too much to say that the meaning of the cabala has been forgotten in the Secret Doctrine. After all, the Lady has made a very thorough study of Knorr von Rosenroth in his English adaption [sic], and of Franck's "Cabale Juive."^[1] She certainly knew more about cabalism than most of the other people you mention...I think it would be rather interesting to investigate the cabalistic ideas in their theosophical development. There is, of course, a lot of humbug and swindle, but, at least in Blavatsky's writings, yet something more.

Smoley: One of the most powerful themes in Theosophy is human evolution as part of a much larger process of evolution of consciousness. This is a theme that seems to be absent from the esoteric traditions before Theosophy came along. Where did this idea come from, and what, if anything, does this concept of evolution owe to older traditions?

Gomes: Perhaps the early Theosophists like Blavatsky saw that in the coming century, space would be the final frontier, and that part of the esotericist's work was to present an enduring mythos that could withstand materialistic science and dogmatic religion. The Greco-Roman world had precise systems of cosmology, but it hadn't been relegated to the realm of esoteric, the fringe of belief. In India, cosmic origins permeate the tradition, especially Samkhya philosophy, which Blavatsky was certainly familiar with. Remember Giorano Bruno was burned only two and a half centuries earlier for expounding his cosmological beliefs.

Smoley: Could you talk a little bit about Blavatsky's connections with Tibet? Do you think she actually visited the country?

Gomes: The remarkable thing about Blavatsky's Tibetan narrative is how little she says about the matter. She briefly mentions visiting Shigatse, the seat of the Panchen Lama, but little else. Seven years is usually the length given for her stay in that country, but, as she points out, it was not continuous. We must remember that at the time of her Tibetan journey, areas such as Ladakh went under the name of "Little Tibet." This is one of those mysteries in her life that may never be resolved. Then we have the testimony of Major-General Charles Murray, who was stationed in the Darjeeling hills in 1854-55 and remembers having to bring Mme. Blavatsky back from the Tibetan border. Beatrice Hastings believes that she was coming out of Tibet at the time.  

Smoley: What do you think are the most common misconceptions about Blavatsky?

Gomes: That she was a medium, in the spiritualist sense, that is, a channel for the deceased to communicate with the living. In that case, no, her situation was closer to the "mind to mind contact" that is practiced by some occult groups. As she reminds the practitioner, "Space and distance do not exist for thought," so it's not impossible for individuals in sympathy to be able to exchange ideas.

Smoley: Where do you stand on the debate about the Masters? What kind of historical authenticity would you be inclined to grant them?

Gomes: I believe that the wide range of interpretation on the subject is the sign of a healthy movement. When I was in India I gathered together all the accounts by Indian members who had met the Mahatmas physically. I had the opportunity to meet some of their descendents, and the family tradition upholds their testament. This research was published by the Adyar Lodge of the Theosophical Society in 1992 as Indian Chelas on the Masters. I hope one day to write more on this subject.

Smoley: What do you think are the most common misconceptions about Theosophy today?

Gomes: That it is some kind of religion or cult. This is the prevalent portrayal online at present. Usually after attending a Theosophical meeting people find that this is not the case.

Smoley: On the basis of your historical knowledge, where do you see the Theosophical movement headed at present? What kind of future does it have?

Gomes: I think we are in one of the most exciting periods in the history of the movement. To an extent, the Society's outer work to educate the world that such as a thing as Theosophy exists is done. Hopefully the movement will become a smaller and more cohesive inner group that works to uphold the beacon light of Theosophy in an ever-changing world. The opportunity to be part of history lies before each of us.