Isis Very Much Unveiled/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X.
THE MAHATMA TRIES THREATS.
“Be these juggling fiends no more believed, that palter with us in a double sense!”—“Macbeth.”
“Masters, it is proved already that you are little better than false knaves.”—“Much Ado About Nothing.”
While the Mahatma was thus stealthily undermining the president, he was also busy strengthening his own outworks. In December one of the doubting ones, the Mr. Keightley who had been making up his mind whether to believe his own eyes ever since June, 1890, received in India a letter from Mr. Judge fortifying him against the heterodox influences to which he would be exposed on Colonel Olcott’s return to that country.
THE “FOLLOW JUDGE AND STICK” MISSIVE.
Mr. Judge warned his “dear Bert” that Olcott would try to shake his faith in the genuineness of Mr. Judge’s Mahatma-missives; that he might even have the baseness to suggest that they were fabricated by Mr. Judge himself. On opening this letter, Mr. Keightley found a small slip of peculiar paper, which turned out (on a prosaic scrutiny) to be the sort of tissue which is used to separate the sheets of typewriting transfer paper. On this slip appeared in Mahatmic script the words:—
Judge leads right. Follow him and stick!
There was, however, no seal impression. The Mahatma had grown chary of using that seal. From the material of this missive we gather that the Mahatma is not so remote from typewriters as one would expect in the Himalayas; from its diction we learn that, whatever the failings of his English, the august being has a racy command of Yankee.
I may remark here that when Mahatmas “precipitate” their own notepaper, as well as the writing upon it, it has always been the etiquette that the former should have an Indian look about it, however European the latter might be. Even tissue, as in this case, is considered more in keeping than commonplace stationery, with, perhaps, the watermark of some English firm upon it. But the “make” preferred, alike now and in the Blavatsky days, is a peculiar sort of hand-made rice-paper, which the Psychical Researchers had some difficulty in tracking to the maker’s. They were not assisted by Colonel Olcott. But now, the same mystic paper having turned up in the productions of Mr. Judge’s Mahatma (borrowed, perhaps, at the same time as the seal?) the Colonel resolves the mystery at once. Wishing to suggest that Mr. Judge got it ready-made from Madame Blavatsky, he mentions that Madame had gone about with a good supply of it, adding that it was originally bought in Cashmere. He had bought it himself at Jammos, in fact, as long ago as 1883, just as he had also been the purchaser of the brass seal; and just as he explains that the seal was got merely as a “playful present,” so he represents the original purpose of the Cashmere stationery as the humble one of “packing books—it being both cheap and strong.” From parcels post to astral note-paper is a distinct rise. But who first promoted it? Another side-light unintentionally thrown on the old Blavatsky days!
But to return to Mr. Judge’s Mahatma. His last attempt to bring Colonel Olcott to a better mind by persuasion was made that autumn. In October he had resorted to a bold device for overcoming scepticism, which he and Mahatma Koot Hoomi had patented in the early Blavatsky days—that of waylaying (astrally, of course) the post-bag of some disconnected and quite unconscious correspondent of the sceptic, and so introducing a message through an obviously untainted channel. For instance, Mr. Hume once “got a note from Koot Hoomi inside a letter received through the post from a person wholly unconnected with our occult pursuits, who was writing to him on some municipal business.” (“Occult World,” p. 21.) The letter happened to have a large and noticeable envelope, and long after, in the days of disillusion, Mr. Hume discovered that Madame’s servant Babula had carried off just such a letter from the postman for Madame, and then returned it to him with an apology for the mistake. (S. P. R. Report, p. 275.)
THE “JUDGE IS NOT THE FORGER” MISSIVE.
In October, then, Colonel Olcott, who was just returning to India, got a letter from a Mr. Abbott Clark, of Orange County, California, a gentleman who was under no sort of suspicion of having anything to do with Mahatmas. And in this, if you please, there had somehow found its way into the envelope a slip of paper bearing a message in the M script, with signature, but with seal too blurred to distinguish, in facsimile as follows:—
So much is in the usual red pencil; the part represented by shading above is smudged, as is the red blotch which represents the seal, apparently by being rubbed with the finger. Across a margin of the paper is the following postscript, in the black carbon usually devoted to the seal impression:—
Rather cryptic, this missive; but the meaning seems to be this. The Mahatma has to explain to the suspicious Colonel several things: why the missives habitually come in letters from Mr. Judge; why, nevertheless, Mr. Judge knows nothing of them; why he, the Master, has used a bogus seal which bungles his own cryptograph; and, above all, why the impressions of that seal have been illegible ever since an exposure of it was threatened. He hints, accordingly, that he “uses” Mr. Judge to assist in some undefined psychic way in the precipitation process; but Judge’s part in this is unconscious—it must be “when he does not know.” Also, the thing precipitated “fades out often”—and plump on the word comes an illustration.
In saying that “Judge did not write Annie” (i.e., Mrs. Besant, for this spirit is a familiar one), the Master is misinformed, as we have seen. Mr. Judge had just “written Annie,” enclosing the Master’s own warning against Colonel Olcott. Lastly, the remark about “facit per alium” (the Mahatma can use a tag of lawyers’ Latin on occasion) seems to mean that when Colonel Olcott had the “flap-doodle” seal made he was unconsciously prompted by the Master himself, who had now adopted it, overlooking the blunder in engraving. The prescience which foresaw that the “precipitation” would give out in just this letter is no less remarkable than that which provided for an unexpressed doubt by the assurance, “No, it is not pencil.”
But for Colonel Olcott the gem of this letter was none of these. It was the reference to the Panjab seal as the “Lahore brass.” All that Mr. Judge knew, as we have seen, was that the seal was made at a “certain city in the Panjab.” Mr. Judge’s Mahatma assumes that this city was the capital of the province. It was a likely guess—a good shot, if such a phrase may be used of the mental processes of a Tibetan sage—and one calculated to end the Colonel’s doubts—if correct. But that is just what it was not. The city at which the Colonel got the seal was quite another city; so the Mahatma, though he hints that he psychically presided over the purchase, does not even know where that purchase took place!
The result of this unlucky lapse of memory on the part of the Master was that the missive made bad worse. Despite the distance of California, where Mr. Clark’s envelope was posted, from New York, and the offices of Mr. William Q. Judge, the Colonel suspected Mr. Judge’s hand in it. He wrote to Mr. Clark, and discovered that Judge had spent two days in Orange County at the very date when the Master availed himself of Mr. Clark’s envelope. Thereupon the Colonel formed his own ideas as to how the Master had “used” his favourite chela on that occasion.
THE “POISON-THREAT” MISSIVE.
Can we wonder that the Master was incensed by this incorrigible scepticism—a spirit, as the Colonel himself had formerly taught, and as the event was to prove but too surely—fatal to Theosophy?
Persuasion failing, the Master resorted to threats!
In January, 1892, the Colonel received an amicable letter from Mr. Judge, reproaching him for not writing. On opening it, he found written along the margin of the first page the following laconic message in Mahatma script (signed, but again no seal: much reduced here):—
“Him” presumably means Judge. The bearing of the threat will be intelligible to readers of the last Chapter. Certain rumours from Avenue-road made it intelligible also to Colonel Olcott. The Master of Wisdom, the unapproachable sage of the Himalayas, He-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed by Mrs. Besant and the whole Theosophical Society, had thrown off the mask of benignity. Here he was plainly adopting, as a weapon against his own unlucky president, that impossible accusation which represents the lowest point of ethical squalor yet touched, in this story at any rate, by Theosophic “brotherhood”! This was miching Mallecho, thought the Colonel; it meant mischief with a vengeance. The voice was the voice of the Mahatma, but again the Colonel thought it the hand of Judge. So he wrote with some natural heat to ask that gentleman what he meant by his “base insinuation.”
Only to receive, however, the blandly innocent reply:—
I have puzzled my head over your reference to “poison,” as if in one of mine; as I never referred to it I cannot catch on, and have given it up in despair.
After this the Colonel seems to have given the Mahatma up in despair, too. But the Mahatma, on his part, was busily pushing up a column to take the Colonel in the flank, and bring this story to a crisis.
Secure in the support of Mrs. Besant, he was to make the pusillanimous president resign his office, and to enthrone William Q. Judge in his place!