Isis very much unveiled, being the story of the great Mahatma hoax

by Fydell Edmund Garrett

30, Linden-gardens, Bayswater, W.,

November 6.

Editorial Note appended in Westminster Gazette.

In regard to Dr. Keightley’s remarks on “the character of the witnesses,” from which, in view of the law of libel, we have had to omit one or two phrases, it is only fair to state that this letter was received before it had been made clear in the articles that the chief witnesses were, in fact, not Mr. Old, who has resigned office, but the President and Dr. Keightley’s brother, who retain it.

ANOTHER AVENUE-ROAD OFFICIAL: “VOLUMINOUS LITERATURE” v. HARD FACTS.

Sir,—Now that you have had the only answer it is possible for the present to make in connexion with that part of your articles which professes to disclose the affairs of a secret body, I am at liberty to make some remarks on that part of them which deals with the public affairs of the Theosophical Society, if you will grant me the opportunity of reply which, as a member of an attacked society, I have the right to demand.

In spite of all implications and assertions to the contrary, I must emphatically assert it as my opinion that the majority of members of the society do not join on account of phenomena; and I regard any attempt to prove the contrary as a conscious or unconscious misrepresentation of the actual state of affairs. A large mass of the public know well by this time that the chief activity of the society consists in making known and advocating a certain system of philosophy, and that appeals are made to the judgment and intellectual sense of the people as to whether they shall accept or reject it. I do not know whether your intelligent readers will consider themselves flattered when they read your contributor’s notion of the kind of procedure that is necessary to captivate them; but I am inclined to think that most of them must have common-sense enough to prefer judging a philosophy by its own merits to accepting or rejecting it according to the evidence for and against phenomena wrought in connexion with it. However, if there be any who, indifferent to all questions of ethical and philosophical truth, choose their faith according to its thaumaturgic properties alone, the society will not be sorry to lose them, for such weak natures are a source of weakness to every body in which they enrol themselves.

While declaring here my own belief in the integrity and sincerity of the persons attacked in your articles, and regretting my inability lo communicate all of that faith to others, I maintain, Sir, that Theosophy will not stand or fall by any personal scandals, whether true or false, and that the Theosophical Society will not cease to exist in Europe so long as there are even a few who believe as I do.

Your contributor has sought to convey the impression that the Theosophists, or at all events those who reside at the various headquarters, live in an atmosphere of constant thaumaturgy and intrigue; ever in expectation of some new wonder, ever ready to alter their deepest convictions at a moment’s notice in accordance with some enigmatical message or some trumpery sign. I call upon those who know the society, are habitués at its meetings, or have lived at headquarters, to say whether there is a grain of truth in this, or whether, on the contrary, we are a body of earnest students, living a prosaic life, and exhausting our energies in the endeavour to place before others the truths we have found so helpful to ourselves.

Your contributor makes much of his contention that the adepts were invented by Madame Blavatsky. What does he expect to gain by this? If he can succeed in discrediting Madame Blavatsky in the eyes of a few persons, he cannot disprove the existence of adepts for them unless he is also prepared to discredit every one of the other sources of information from which the evidence for the existence of such exalted men is drawn. Madame Blavatsky has reminded the world of the reality of those beings in which the more enlightened of its denizens have always believed. Of the few who may have accepted the belief on her testimony alone I would say, better they had taken the trouble to substantiate it from other sources. Whether Madame Blavatsky invented the adepts or not, at all events I here and now advance the theory, and refer for my evidence to the Theosophical literature on the subject, which is plentiful.