Isis Very Much Unveiled/Chapter 1
ISIS VERY MUCH UNVEILED.
PART I.
THE STORY OF THE GREAT MAHATMA HOAX.
CHAPTER I.—INTRODUCTORY.
“O my Theosophists … What a pack of fools you are!”—Madame Blavatsky.
This will be one of the queerest stories ever unfolded in a newspaper. Truth, as worshipped by the Theosophists, is indeed stranger than fiction. But it is not here told merely for entertainment. It has also a degree of importance and instructiveness measured by the growing wealth and numbers of the Theosophical Society, and the personal influence of Mrs. Besant. To-day the Theosophical Society numbers some three or four thousand members in Europe, India, and America. It supports two or three publishing businesses and several score of magazines in various languages. It boasts offices and house property in London, New York, and Adyar. It attracts donations and bequests. It numbers a title or two and some money-bags. It consists almost entirely of educated or semi-educated people, many of whom are intelligent, many sincere; a few both. And it is likely, amid that debauch of sign-seeking and marvel-mongering into which a century rationalistic in its youth has plunged in its dotage, to captivate an increasing number of those who are bored with the old religions and yet agog for a new.
It is especially to these that I dedicate the singular narrative which these articles are to unfold. It may save them betimes a painful disillusionment, such as it will, I fear, inflict on many who are as yet numbered among the faithful.
What is the situation at present?
Everybody knows that Madame Blavatsky, the original founder of the society, supported its pretensions to an occult origin by the production of phenomena which were pronounced by careful investigators to be due to systematic trickery; but which are still believed by the faithful to have been produced at Madame’s request, and in support of the Theosophic movement, by certain Eastern sages possessed of transcendental powers over mind and matter.
Everybody will remember that Mrs. Besant, on whom the mantle of Madame Blavatsky has fallen, made a sensational public assertion, some time after her teacher’s death, to the effect that those “powers” were still at work (they were indeed!), and that she was herself now the recipient of similar “communications” from the “Mahatmas.”
A few people are aware that as the result of a sort of split among prominent members of the society, there was recently a Theosophic meeting at which Mrs. Besant confessed to her friends that there had been something wrong with the “communications” which she had been in such a hurry to announce to the public; made certain Theosophically obscure charges against a brother official of the society; but persuaded those assembled to rest content with a general statement and not to inquire into the facts further—in short, generally to hush the matter up.
This the Theosophists, being a docile folk, conscientiously did; and as the accused proceeded with Mrs. Besant’s sanction to deny, still in general terms, what little assertion of fact Mrs. Besant herself had appeared to convey, after which there was an affecting reconciliation: it is not surprising that to the outside public the mystery remains exactly where it was.
Even of the Theosophists themselves the full facts are only known at present to a few of the inner ring.
In view of what has gone before, this reticence appears misplaced; and as circumstances have put me in possession of the facts, I propose to give them the same publicity as was enjoyed by Mrs. Besant’s original statement.
I propose to show:—
That Mrs. Besant has been bamboozled for years by bogus “communications” of the most childish kind, and in so ludicrous a fashion as to deprive of all value any future evidence of hers on any question calling for the smallest exercise of observation and common sense.
That she would in all probability be firmly believing in the bogus documents in question to this day, but for the growing and at last irresistible protests of some less greedily gullible Theosophists.
That the bamboozling in question has been practised widely and systematically, ever since Madame Blavatsky’s death, pretty much as it used to be during her lifetime.
That official acts of the society, as well as those of individual members, have been guided by these bogus messages from Mahatmas.
That the exposure of them leaves the society absolutely destitute of any objective communication with the Mahatmas who are alleged to have founded and to watch over it, and of all other evidence of their existence.
That Mrs. Besant has taken a leading part in hushing up the facts of this exposure, and so securing the person whom she believes to have written the bogus documents in his tenure of the highest office but one in the society.
And that therefore Mrs. Besant herself and all her colleagues are in so far in the position of condoning the hoax, and are benefiting in one sense or another by the popular delusion which they have helped to propagate.
I shall show, finally, that the only alternative to this set of conclusions is another which would be even more discreditable to the personnel of the society, and even more fatal to its continued existence on its present basis.