Attended a great festival at a masonic lodge where about one hundred and fifty members of the order were present, among whom were men of nearly every nationality and religion. The Master’s degree was conferred on three brothers who knelt before the same altar. One was a Christian, and took his obligation with the hand on the Bible; one was a Mohammedan, who took it with the hand on the Koran; the third, a Hindoo, with his hand on the Shastra. The obligation was dictated by an English lord, judge of the supreme court, assisted by the secretary of the Grand Lodge, my friend Rustomji, a Parsee and fire-worshiper. With the religious intolerance in India, where all unite in hating the Christians, it is only among the Free Masons, who know of no nationality, race or other barrier, that such things are possible.
THE GODDESS KALI.
Visited the temple of the goddess Kali in a suburb of Calcutta. Kali is the goddess of hate and vengence, and this temple is one of the most celebrated in India. One hundred and fifty Brahmin priests officiate in the same. The chief priest, Roonish-Chunder-Mokerje, was a young man with liberal education. He had spent several years in American mission schools. His office is held by inheritance. He was a most agreeable companion, well versed in western as well as Sanskrit literature. Once upon telling him that I had an intimate friend in Sweden who was a Christian priest, he gave me some pictures of the goddess Kali and other idols to send him with his compliments. In return, I had the pleasure a few months later to present him with a Swedish Bible, with his name in golden letters on the cover, from my friend, the Swedish minister, which present he cherished very highly. This Bible is now kept in the temple of Kali.
At my request Mokerje prepared a brief extract of the religious doctrine of the Hindoos, which reads as follows:
“We believe in heaven and hell as temporary abodes of reward and punishment. When a man dies his good and evil deeds are weighed on the scales. First he goes to heaven to receive his reward, then to hell to suffer in proportion to his sins. When everything is squared up he again returns to the world in the form of another being, the same process is repeated again and again, and he can attain perfect bliss only after he has reached such a stage of development that he can do neither good nor evil deeds, but must lose himself in the contemplation of God until he finally ceases to exist as an individual being, and is reunited with God of whom he really constitutes a part.”
ABDUL, MY MOHAMMEDAN SERVANT.
Was invited to the home of Col. Gordon to see some proofs of occultation, which is very wide-spread in India, and witnessed phenomena, which were so strange, that I hesitate to write them down. I saw heavy objects moving in the air through the room above our heads, and a man with the chair on which he sat rising several feet from the floor without the aid of any visible force whatever. I heard a slate pencil, moved by an invisible power, writing on a slate, and read in plain English what was written. I also saw in the same manner a pen writing on paper with ink, and felt with my hand the moisture of the ink. I know not wherein the invisible power consisted which caused these phenomena, but that such a power does exist I know for certain, for in this case, at least, there was no chance for deception.
At the home of the prince Tagore I met the renowned Madame Blavatsky, and many Hindoo theosophists. She is a large, corpulent woman, with intelligent, though rather coarse, features. She believes that she is attended by Kut-Humis-Lal-Sing, a Buddhistic hermit who is claimed to be two thousand years old, and have the power of moving his “astral body” as swiftly as thought to the most distant places. For my part I saw nothing remarkable among the theosophists, but it is a common belief among the