AN OLD HERESY NEWLY DRESSED.

Otago Witness, Issue 3260, 6 September 1916, Page 55

AN OLD HERESY NEWLY DRESSED.

By Jesste Mackay

(Concluded.)

I am not now writing a life of Madame Blavatsky, or attempting to pronounce judgment on her extraordinary personality, with all its faults and potentialities, its uncanny powers and perceptions, its failures and its achievements. Only Omnipotence can judge a woman who, on obvious fraud, founded a faith which has uplifted many lives, and set on foot many schemes to" help suffering humanity. Madame Blavatsky's charities were bounded only Ivy her means at the moment, and she ' bore no malice. These things must be remembered. It is probable that wc have yet to learn the psychic laws which undoubtedly marked her out a lot unlike that of other women in many startling particulars. Her miracles were humbug; but the miracle of her own mind, which enabled her to piece out so many fragments of ancient belief into the new" gospel of her theosophy, is not so easily dismissed. Ever since she first fled "from Russia, a mutinous girl-wife, she had been formulating bold schemes for obtaining money from the credulous; but that money was far from being hoarded or lavished on herself.

All I wish to point out is that, in the curious recurrent waves of psychology and spirals of history. Madame Blavatsky's ultra-modern theosophy was founded on the same deflections of genuine Buddhism which the triumphant sacerdotalists of India called' the Great Vehicle two millenniums ago. The secret of Madame Blavatsky's wanderings from 17 to 27 went with her to the grave. True, she vouchsafed certain particulars, doubtless some of them true, about travels in Armenia, in Greece, India, and various countries round the Levant. But these particulars and chronologies never tallied even in the faithful records of her puzzled disciples in afterdays, when it suited Madame to bo more expansive in her reminiscences. For it was on the story of that hidden decade that theosophy is based. Finally, in 1881. when she had emerged from the partial obscurity of the second wonder-decade, she gave out for the first time the strange talc of the alleged seven yenrs' novitiate under the Great Masters or Mahatmas of Tibet, which followed a visit to India in the fifties. Whether seven years, as she said, or seven mouths, as later commentators have said, or whether she was ever in Tibet at all, has never, I third-:, been cleared up. On the face of it one gravely doubts whether she ever saw the " Kingdom of Snow " and its divine inhabitants, save in her dreams. Of the intermediate years between the shadowy Tibetan novitiate and her appearance as priestess of a new faith in 1881. there are more authentic records. It is said that she married a second and a third time; but this is not believed by her Part of the time she was living with her family and "raising spirits" as a profession. Sometimes she was conducting more dramatic seances in distant countries. She met the spiritualist Home in the middle yearjj of last century, and from him apparently learnt much in the way of turning her uncanny gifts to account. By the early seventies she was well equipped for an enterprise so bold as founding a " Spirit Club " in Cairo, where she gave out that she was controlled by some Egpytian Mahatmas of the magic past, whom she named the Brethren of Luxor. It was there she met and befriended M. and Madame Coulomb, her helpers in magic later on in India, and afterwards the betrayers of her " ; >*acle" methods. When she went to Air. • i subsequently she was able to rain spiritmarvels at the seances which she conducted with the brothers Eddv, at last in conjunction with " brethren" of a corporeal (and essentially Yankee) presence. It was remarked in other years how curiously the Masters of Tibet affected Yankeeisms in the astral letters they despatched so often to the earth.

It was there that Madame Blavntsky made the first of her notable trio of converts, Colonel Olcott. a journalist sent by the New York Sun to write up the Eddy seances. Colonel Olcott had a big, unworldly heart and certain worldly means, nenceforth devoted to spreading the teaching of the woman he revered. In 1879 the two set sail for India, where they joined the newest Hindu body of religions reform, ihc Arya Samaj. That body of questing, honest Hindu thought soon repudiated Madame Blavatsky and her marvels. But it appears that then was born the idea of sages in the eternal Himalalyan snow?., which she elaborated a year later in " Isis Unveiled." In that anVl the " Secret Doctrine," two remarkable books, written under some mysierious control, she gave for the first time to the world that story of her novitiate in tho fifties. She told with detail—overmuch detail for sceptical commentators and scholars—her entry in disguise into tho Forbidden Land, guarded by one

faithful Russian Shaman, disguised also. Marvels she found in those remote monasteries —miracles of reincarnation performed by Lamas, holy dervish dances and frenzies after the old Bacohantic style, huge libraries hidden in tho crypts. In one of those she found the " Book of Dzyan," written on imperishable papyrus, " in the oldest tongue of all the world," which her Mahatmas gave her power to read with ease. She learned the astonishing fact that the Buddhists and the Brahmins had joined in a conspiracy to delude tho public by issuing the orthodox writings of their respective faiths, while the true gospels were hidden away till the appointed time. Tho Vedas, according to her, are but the deliberate delusions sent to an unprepared world by those holy beings of the inaccessible crags and snows, who gave her their charge and made her their oracle. It will hardly be credited that the primary charge given her by Mahatma Morya and Mahatma Koot Hoomi Lai Singh was to put down spiritualism. Still, if the Mahatmas or Bodhisats of a later day were part and parcel of a scheme to blind the world with false gospels for 40C0 years, it was quite in keeping that their priestess should " put down " spiritualism by living on it for some 10 or 15 years to come. Passages, it may be noted, of this " Book of Dzyan" are quoted by Mr Arthur Lillie. They are of great literary beauty, and curiously reminiscent of translations of those very Vedas whose fake teaching she was now to supersede. All this is difficut to reconcile with Mrs Besant's adoption simultaneously of Madame Blavatsky as a teacher and of the Indian " Bhazar-ad-Gitn" (" Song Celestial ") as a guide of conduct and philosophy. But those who embrace modern theosophy embrace a heap of puzzles.

It is unnecessary for my purpose to follow out tho vexed record of later theosophy with its many schisms, and It-.; results, great or small, in moulding a national soul in India. That will be a fascinating page for years to como. As they stand now, the teachings of Madame Blavatsky show beyond doubt in what strange spiral fashion human thought and human delusion move generation alter generation.