MAHATMAS A HOAX.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 9711, 5 January 1895, Page 1 (Supplement)

MAHATMAS A HOAX.

MRS. BESAWT, AND HOW SHE WAS BAMBOOZLED. (Concluded.) A demand was heard for a private jury of honour; or, failing that, for publication of tbo case for both sides, the course to which one side, as we saw, had affected to pledge itself. Mr. Judge found himself unable to refuse his assent to the jury proposal. Again Mrs. Besant dashed in and triumphed in tho sacred cause of obscurantism. At the third session of the convention she announced that she and Mr. Judge , had agreed upon a couple of statements representing their different points of view, and proposed that the convention should hear these, accept them, and let tho matter drop. These two statements compose the second part of the pamphlet; and they are at least as bewildering as tho first. Tho following are tho sentences which gyrate least round the point: — I do nob charge, and havo not charged, Mr. Judge with forgery in the ordinary sense of tho term, but with giving a misleading form to messages received psychically from the Master in various ways. . . . Personally I hold that this method is illegitimate. . . .1 believe that Mr. Judge wrote with his own hand, consciously or automatically I do nob know, in the script adopted as that of tho Master, messages which he roceived from the Master, or from chelas; and I know that in my own case I believed that the messages he gave me in the woll-known script were messages directly precipitated or directly written by the Master, When I publicly said that I had received, after H. P. Blavatsky's death, letters in the writing thab H. P. Blavatsky had been accused of forging, I referred to letters given to me by Mr. Judge, and as they were in the well-known script I never dreamt of challenging their source. I know now thab thoy were not written or precipitated by the Mastor, and thab they were done by Mr. Judge ; but I also believe thab the gist of these messages was psychically received, and bhat Mr. Judge's error lay in giving them to me in a script written by himself and not saying so. . . . Having beon myself mistaken, I in turn misled the public. The rest of Mrs. Besant's statement is easily summarised. Part is devoted to minimising the importance of the question, whether .Mr. Judge wrote, or the Mahatma precipitated, tho letters, by remarking that after all it did not matter so very much, as Mahatmas sometimes communicate (like spiritualist " controls ") by allowing ordinary people to write for them. "It is important," quoth Mrs. Bssant, naively, " that the small part generally played by Masters in these phenomena should be understood "—a remark with which the present writes quite agrees, and a main object of the present narrative. But in the sense in which Airs. Besanb meant it, it was not very relevant to an inquiry entirely dealing with letters passed off as having been precipitated, and precipitated without Mr. Judge's knowledge, by the Mahatma himself.

Beyond this, Mrs. Besant's statement consists about equally of blame directed at the theosophical " vindictivene»s " of Mr. Judge's accusers in pressing an enquiry " painful" to Mr. Judge, and of laudatory tributes to the character and Theosophical activity of Mr. Judge himself. Down Mrs. Besant sat, and uprose Mr. Judge, and read his statement. It contained tho following sentences —" I repeat ray denial of the said rumoured charges of forging the said names and handwritings of the Mahatmas, or of misusing the same. . . . I admit that I have rocoived and delivered messages from the Mahatmas . . . they werg obtained through me, bub as bo how they were obtained or produced I cannot state. . . . My own methods may disagree from the views of others. ... I willingly say that which I never denied, that I am a human being, full of error, liable to mistake, nob infallible, bub jusb the same as any other human being like to myself, or of the class of human beings to which I belong, And I freely, fully, and sincerely forgive anyone who may be thought to have injured or tried to injure me." QUESTIONS AND CHALLENGES. In my first chapter I sob out certain conclusions. In succeeding chapters I have given the facts on which my conclusions wore based. I now assert thab the evidonco for those facts, bo it good or bad, is that of the Theosophical leaders themselves, written and signed as tho case against the vicepresident, and adopted by Mrs. Besanb as true. If it be not true, then Colonel Olcott, Mr. B. Keightley, Mr. W. R. Old, and tho other official witnesses must be guilty of a conspiracy, as I said at the outset, "even more discreditable to tho personnel of the society." It is nob I who accuse Mr. Judge. Ib is Mr. Judgennd his colleagues who accuse each other. The rank and tile of the Theosophists havo paid their money ; they may now take their choice.

In regard to Mr. William Q. Judge, vicepresident, I do not feel called on to harbour any theory of my own as to that gentleman's character and conduct. As the Society for Psychical Research long ago remarked, the precise line between rogue and dupe in the Thcosophical Society has never been easy to draw. On any view of Mr. Judge I have at least as much respect for him as for his virtuously vacillating superior, whose mind seems to have been made up for him from one stage to another by whatever party happened to be at the moment nearest and most peremptory. With the facts of the preceding narrative before him, the reader can form his own opinion aboub both officials.

From my own position, then, and Mr. Judge's position, I now pass to Mrs. Begant's. This is interesting from _ its bearing on the curious psychological puzzle offered by Mrs. Besant's own mind, to the study of which she herself continually invites the public. Leb us accept the invitation for a moment. I take Mrs. Besant's statement ab the so-called "Inquiry," thab she believed now that Judge wrote with his own hand the missives which he had induced her, and she had induced the public, to regard ao precipitations from Tibet of the kind which "some people would call miraculous." If Judge " wroto 4 with his own hand" the answers gob from the cabinet oracle (May 23, 1891), did he also use sleight-of-hand or some similar artifice to make her accept the answers as precipitated in a sealed envelope in a closed drawer? If Judge " wrote," etc., the slip "Judge's plan is right," the sudden appearanco of which among Mrs. Besant's papers made her and him joint officials on May 27, 1891—did he also place it among those papers on purpose to be so discovered ? If Judge "wrote," etc., Mrs. Besant's message of July 12, 1891, which was across the inside flaps of a closed envelope—did he also insert the writing by the trick described in the chapter which I entitled " Every Man His Own Mahatma ?" If Judge " wrote," etc., all the various letters, notes, and endorsements to which the " Mahatma's" signature and seal were attached, missives backing Judge's own views, raising Judge's own Theosophical status, and bluffing other "servants" of that " Master," to whom he and they cannot allude without capital letters—did he also " with his own hand" take and affix the seal which he has persistently denied having ever set) eyes on ? If Mrs. Besanfc did not mean all this, and much more which hangs by the same logic, then her statement grossly calumniated Mr. Judge to the few who knew the tenor of the case against him. If she did mean it, then her statement! completely hoodwinked her audience and the public. , , a , Lastly, a few words to the rank-and-file of the Theosophical Society, a large proportion of whom are now gathering openmouthed ab Adyar. In Madame Blavatsky few of the better-informed of the flock nowadays affect to believe—except in public. They cling to her gifts, perhaps; they have thrown over her morals. For fresh evidence has boen coming to light, ever since fcbafc strange woman died, as to the tricks to which she condescended, and encouraged her chela to condescend; ana poor Colonel Olcofct, though he continues to work the old gold-mine in print, and has been compelled even there to enunciate the theory that Madame Blavatsky herself was redly killed ab the battle of Mebana, and

her body thereafter occupied by seven distinct spirits, who, of course, are not responsible for contradicting each other. Till May, 1891, Madame was tho principal witness'. to the objective existence and attributes of Mahatmas. Since that date, the principal witness is William Q. Judge, boon the faithful at Adyar will be filing into ; the Occult Room to gaze through peep-holes at the two August Portraits, illuminated and set off by all the artifices associated here with exhibitions by M. Jan van Beers. Will they dare, any of them, toask theiij, officials plainly what evidence they can now offer that either of the subjects of j those fancy portraits ever existed ? And if on this and other questions sug- | gested by these chapters, Mrs. Besant, I President Olcott, and Vice-president Judge do not succeed in satisfying their followers —what next ? No doubt each member of I the trinity will sit secure in his or her autocracy in his or her own continent, owning there, as I understand, the official organ and the publishing plant which the society as a whole has built up into prosperity. Yet something, surely, may be done by those who do not care to remain unwilling parties to tho great Mahatma hoax, to recover their own self-respect, if nob to save the Theosophical Society. It is for them to decide whether the society, on its non-fraudulent side, is worth saving. Ib may bo a kind of university extension for the popularising of Eastern philosophies. Or it may bo, as some rather think, a more smattering of catch-words out of cribs for the use of mutual mystification clubs, tending to a certain indigestion in the mental processes and a flatulent stylo of English composition. In either case there is no reason why the organisation should revolve about a vortex of tomfoolery and legerdomain into which honest members are apt to be sucked before they realise its true nature.