Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.
INTRODUCTORY.
FOR the past fifteen years, despite repeated scandals, exposures, and even the damning evidence produced in various court cases, Mrs. Besant still persists in her blind and fanatical support of the sex pervert and pseudo-occultist C. W. Leadbeater, and the promulgation of his delusive, immoral, and poisonous teachings among the members of the Theosophical Society she rules, and the public at large, to whom she is known chiefly as an able speaker and an astute politician. Goaded by a revival of the well-known evidence against Mr. Leadbeater, and a severe criticism of her own actions, Mrs. Besant published in her official organ (Theosophist, March, 1922.) an article entitled "Whom Will Ye Serve?" and a long Supplement addressed to the members, reiterating her support of Mr. Leadbeater, and making statements in justification of him and herself that call imperatively for a dispassionate review of the history of this ill-omened partnership, and the strongest possible protest against the complete stultification and perversion of H. P. Blavatsky's life-work and teaching that it involves.
I have no personal quarrel with Mrs. Besant, whose brilliant intellectual gifts we all so much admired in the early days, and who accomplished such splendid work for the Cause during H. P. Blavatsky's lifetime. I had already been a member of the Society for four years when Mrs. Besant joined in 1889; and as we both subsequently became members of the Inner Group of H. P. B.'s personal pupils, I feel I am in a position to review the facts, and entitled to utter this protest. In fact, I can no longer remain silent in the face of so much that is abhorrent to every true Theosophist, to every devoted follower of H. P. Blavatsky, her Masters, and Their teachings.
In a private letter to Mr. Judge, in or about 1887, H. P. B. writes: "I am the mother and creator of the Society; it has my magnetic fluid.... Therefore I alone and to a degree ... can serve as a lightning conductor of Karma for it. I was asked whether I was willing, when on the point of dying—and I said 'Yes'—for it was the only means to save it. Therefore I consented to live...." Obviously, the only possible conclusion to be drawn from this is that, when in 1891 H. P. Blavatsky passed away (or rather was "recalled") nine years before the limit of time within which the Masters' help could be given,[2] it was because They saw that the T. S. had definitely failed, that it could no longer be kept alive.
A long and, in this connection, very important letter was written by H. P. Blavatsky in 1890 "To my Brothers in Aryavarta," giving the real reason why she did not return to India. Among other significant statements which she makes (Theosophist, January, 1922.), there is one which shows that she must clearly have foreseen the ultimate disintegration of the Society, which occurred in 1895. Writing of the shameful way in which she was thrown overboard, like a second Jonah, by Colonel Olcott and the T. S. Council at Adyar in their cowardly panic during the crisis of 1884-85, H. P. B. says: "It was during that time ... that the seeds of all future strifes, and—let me say at once—disintegration of the Theosophical Society [Italics mine.—A. L. C.] were planted by our enemies.... In a letter received from Damodar in 1886 [He had been called by his Master to Tibet the previous year.—A. L. C.] he notified me that the Masters' influence was becoming with every day weaker at Adyar." Further on in the letter H. P. B. again refers to Adyar, and to an invitation to return to India which "came too late ... nor can I, if I would be true to my life-pledge and vows, now live at the Headquarters from which the Masters and Their spirit are virtually banished. The presence of Their portraits will not help; They are a dead letter." [Italics mine. Yet Mrs. Besant asks us to believe that They returned when she was elected President in 1907, and even nominated her!—A. L. C.]
In the same letter H. P. B. says that she was pledged never to reveal "the whole truth" about the Masters to anyone, "excepting to those who like Damodar, had been finally selected and called by Them." She also speaks of him as "that one future Adept who has now the prospect of becoming one day a Mahatma, Kali Yuga notwithstanding." It is he again of whom she spoke four years earlier, when she wrote: "During the eleven years of the existence of the Theosophical Society I have known, out of the seventy-two regularly accepted chelas on probation and the hundreds of lay candidates—only three who have not hitherto failed, and one only who had a full success." ("The Theosophical Mahatmas." Path, December, 1886.) Damodar is the only chela she ever spoke of as a "full success" in her lifetime; and it is worthy of special note that he was a high caste Brahmin who did not hesitate to give up caste and become a Buddhist (so Colonel Olcott states).