The Theosophistry of Throwing Over the Society’s Personnel.
But that brings me to the most barefaced Theosophistry of all: “Even if all our officials be proved to have lied and cheated, there still remains untouched their grand ethical teaching!”
I simply state this, and leave it. Like the coster when his barrow broke down, “Friends, I ain’t ekal to it.” I cannot do justice to such colossal impudence. “Truth survives all attacks”; she does; she will even survive Theosophical defences. “The noble religions and philosophies of the East exist”; they do, as they did long centuries before the Theosophical Society was heard of, and will do long centuries after it has been forgotten. But when Mahatmas, and miracles, and the founders, and the officials, and the official acts of the Theosophical Society are all thrown over—What remains of the society? “We have absolutely no creed,” the European secretary told an interviewer the other day—(all unfettered by the fact that he distributes broadcast Mrs. Besant’s “Introduction to Theosophy” with a complete pseudo-Buddhistic cosmology about the Seven Planes, &c., authenticated by direct reference to the Masters, and particularising, for instance, that “Devachan” lasts “for average persons some fifteen centuries”!)—“Absolutely no creed.” “You would simply call yours a moral or religious society, then?” asked the puzzled interviewer. To which Mr. Mead naïvely replies, “I don’t exactly know what you would call it.”—(Sunday Times, Nov. 11.)
Since scholarship has opened the stores of the East to Western culture, there has been a natural awakening of popular interest in Eastern directions. While that lasts, people discussing each other’s souls will continue to sprinkle their remarks, harmlessly enough, with those mingled jargons which make a true Orientalist smile. If “Theosophy” means that, “Theosophy” has certainly some life before it; but as for the Theosophical Society—“why cumbereth it the ground?” It is an organised machine for taking in the Honest Enthusiast at one end, passing him through the stages of the Willing Dupe and the Conscientious Humbug, and turning him out at the other end at worst a conscious fraud, at best a dreary and disillusioned cynic.
Enough of the logical and ethical fog that Theosophy diffuses!—the Mahatmosphere, as one might call it. It is a relief to escape from it into the fresh air of common honesty and common sense.
POSTSCRIPT.
A MAHATMA AT BAY:
THE VICE-PRESIDENT’S TRUMP CARD.
The following appeared in the Westminster Gazette, under the headings: “OPEN SPLIT BETWEEN THEOSOPHICAL OFFICIALS”; “RIVAL REVELATIONS FROM THE SAME MASTER”; “MR. JUDGE GETS A MISSIVE DEPOSING MRS. BESANT”:—
Just as the Story of the Great Mahatma Hoax is going to press in its collected form, just in the nick of time to be included, comes the material for a new chapter of more extravagant humour than all the rest. Readers of the “Isis” chapters will recall that the Theosophic embroglio has gone through the following stages:—(1) The vice-president’s “Mahatma” makes reflections on the president. (2) The president and other officials make charges of “forging” Mahatma missives against the V.P. (3) Mrs. Besant, after some vacillation, adopts these charges, and joins with the others in offering the V.P. the choice of retiring quietly or an exposure. (4) The V.P. bluffs them all into silence, and they all join in inducing the “Convention” of last July to separate without looking further into the matter. (5) Mrs. Besant and the V.P. “join hands,” in public, on her statement that though he wrote the alleged missives “with his own hand,” yet he had “psychically received” their contents from the Mahatma. (6) In private, Mrs. Besant separates herself from the V.P. by dissolving their joint headship of the Esoteric Section (“the core of the Theosophical Society,” as Mr. Judge justly calls it below): Mr. Judge, V.P., to retain the American section of the section, and she herself the European, to which she has since added the Indian.