Isis Very Much Unveiled
Being the Story of the Great Mahatma Hoax
9781465631046
211 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
This will be one of the queerest stories ever unfolded in a newspaper. Truth, as worshipped by the Theosophists, is indeed stranger than fiction. But it is not here told merely for entertainment. It has also a degree of importance and instructiveness measured by the growing wealth and numbers of the Theosophical Society, and the personal influence of Mrs. Besant. To-day the Theosophical Society numbers some three or four thousand members in Europe, India, and America. It supports two or three publishing businesses and several score of magazines in various languages. It boasts offices and house property in London, New York, and Adyar. It attracts donations and bequests. It numbers a title or two and some money-bags. It consists almost entirely of educated or semi-educated people, many of whom are intelligent, many sincere; a few both. And it is likely, amid that debauch of sign-seeking and marvel-mongering into which a century rationalistic in its youth has plunged in its dotage, to captivate an increasing number of those who are bored with the old religions and yet agog for a new. It is especially to these that I dedicate the singular narrative which these articles are to unfold. It may save them betimes a painful disillusionment, such as it will, I fear, inflict on many who are as yet numbered among the faithful. What is the situation at present? Everybody knows that Madame Blavatsky, the original founder of the society, supported its pretensions to an occult origin by the production of phenomena which were pronounced by careful investigators to be due to systematic trickery; but which are still believed by the faithful to have been produced at Madame’s request, and in support of the Theosophic movement, by certain Eastern sages possessed of transcendental powers over mind and matter. Everybody will remember that Mrs. Besant, on whom the mantle of Madame Blavatsky has fallen, made a sensational public assertion, some time after her teacher’s death, to the effect that those “powers” were still at work (they were indeed!), and that she was herself now the recipient of similar “communications” from the “Mahatmas.” A few people are aware that as the result of a sort of split among prominent members of the society, there was recently a Theosophic meeting at which Mrs. Besant confessed to her friends that there had been something wrong with the “communications” which she had been in such a hurry to announce to the public; made certain Theosophically obscure charges against a brother official of the society; but persuaded those assembled to rest content with a general statement and not to inquire into the facts further—in short, generally to hush the matter up. This the Theosophists, being a docile folk, conscientiously did; and as the accused proceeded with Mrs. Besant’s sanction to deny, still in general terms, what little assertion of fact Mrs. Besant herself had appeared to convey, after which there was an affecting reconciliation: it is not surprising that to the outside public the mystery remains exactly where it was. Even of the Theosophists themselves the full facts are only known at present to a few of the inner ring. In view of what has gone before, this reticence appears misplaced; and as circumstances have put me in possession of the facts, I propose to give them the same publicity as was enjoyed by Mrs. Besant’s original statement.
