Isis Very Much Unveiled/Chapter 12
CHAPTER XII.
A MEETING OF THE (THEOSOPHICAL) PICKWICK CLUB.
The Chairman felt it his imperative duty to demand of the hon. gentleman whether he had used the expression “a humbug” in a common sense?
Mr. Blotton had no hesitation in saying that he had not—he had used the word in its Pickwickian sense. (Hear, hear.) He was bound to acknowledge that personally he entertained the highest esteem for the hon. gentleman; he had merely considered him a humbug in a Pickwickian point of view.
Mr. Pickwick felt much gratified by the candid explanation of his hon. friend. He begged it to be at once understood that his own observations had been merely intended to bear a Pickwickian construction. (Cheers.)—The Pickwick Papers.
We have now seen how, step by step, as by a resistless nemesis the rival Theosophical leaders were led on to bring their quarrel to that which neither of them had much stomach for—an inquiry into evidence. Bluff meeting bluff, the thing got as far as the summoning from three continents of a Committee of Investigation representing both parties. “Investigating” hidden forces in nature, as we saw in Chapter II., is one of the professed “Objects” of the Theosophical Society. The present chapter is to show what the Theosophical idea of investigating is like.
There lies before me a pamphlet, reprinted from Lucifer of August last, which bears the facetious title, “AN INQUIRY Into Certain Charges against the Vice-President, Held in London, July 1894.” Anybody is at liberty to get this publication—and make what head or tail of it he can.
BADGE OF THE T.S.
The plain matter of fact which lay behind the proceedings in question was this. Mrs. Besant and Colonel Olcott had given away their friends and compromised with Judge on the terms that he should give Olcott back his presidency, Judge’s election thereto being declared null and void, while they on their part should suppress the evidence which the Judicial Committee had been summoned to report on.
Mr. Judge had protested in a vehement circular, when first called on by the President to appear before the committee, against one of his accusers proposing to preside at his trial. There was reason in the objection at the time. He could not foresee that the proceedings would take the form of the presiding judge and the counsel for the prosecution combining to prevent the case from going to the jury.
This being the plain English of the affair, let us now see how it reads translated into what I may call Theosophistry.
The first part of the pamphlet consists of the Judicial Committee’s minutes. Of this, six-sevenths is devoted to an “Address of the President-Founder” proving that they ought to do nothing. The remaining page is devoted to doing it.
The “charges of misconduct preferred by Mrs. Besant against the vice-president” are nowhere formally stated at all. They are incidentally summarised by the president as follows:—
“That he practised deception in sending false messages, orders, and letters, as if sent and written by ‘Masters.’ … That he was untruthful in various other instances enumerated.”
The bulk of the address is occupied in discussing with great solemnity various reasons alleged by Mr. Judge why these charges should not be gone into by the committee.
One or two of these, such as the vice-president’s discovery that he had never been really vice-president at all, and the contention that, whichever way the decision went, it must “offend the religious feelings” of some member or another, and that this was against the rules of the society—these were, after the due amount of pomposity, declared against by the president.
But there were two other pleas of such irresistible force and weight that the president found himself convinced by them “that this inquiry must go no further.” Stripped of prolix circumlocutions, these may be put as an alternative, thus:—
Either the Mahatma missives are genuine or they are fabricated.
(a) If found to be genuine, that implies the affirmation of the existence of Mahatmas as a Theosophic dogma, and the abandonment of the society’s precious “neutrality.” Which is unconstitutional.
(b) If found to be bogus missives produced by the vice-president, then it is obvious that he must have done it in his private capacity; the production of bogus documents being no part of his official duties. Therefore he cannot be tried for it by an official tribunal.
Could anything be more delicious than this dilemma? It is worthy of a trial scene in Gilbertian comic opera.
Mrs. Besant, like the president, was “convinced that the point was rightly taken.” There was nothing more to be said.
The Judicial Committee “resolved” in the same sense, without any inconvenient discussion, and forthwith committed hara-kiri with the complaisance of a Chinese nobleman. Not only had they not investigated the case, but, as far as I can make out, they had not even heard what it was, except in the most abstract of summaries. Having gravely adjusted the bandage over each other’s eyes, they separated with a good conscience. For many of them—worthy investigators!—I believe I am the first to remove the bandage, and set them blinking at the truth.
From (a) it follows, as the president pointed out en passant in the course of his Address, that every Theosophist is in future free to circulate Mahatma messages, but no Theosophist to test their genuineness.
From (b) it equally follows that no officer of the society is in future responsible to it for any misdeed whatever, since such misdeed cannot well be among his official duties.
***** Perhaps it is not very surprising that the result of the Judicial Committee, which had been gathered to its task from the ends of the earth, was received with disgust by the generality of members then met in London for one of their interminable conventions. A demand was even heard for a private jury of honour; or, failing that, for publication of the case for both sides, the course to which one side, as we saw, had affected to pledge itself. Mr. Judge found himself unable to refuse his assent to the jury proposal. Again, Mrs. Besant dashed in and triumphed in the sacred cause of obscurantism. At the third session of the convention she announced that she and Mr. Judge had agreed upon a couple of statements representing their different points of view, and proposed that the convention should hear these, accept them, and let the matter drop. These two statements compose the second part of the pamphlet; and they are at least as bewildering as the first.
“We come to you, Our brothers, to tell you what is in our hearts,” Mrs. Besant read out. Her endeavour to “tell” fills four pages. The following are the sentences which gyrate least round the point:—
I do not charge, and have not charged, Mr. Judge with forgery in the ordinary sense of the term, but with giving a misleading form to messages received psychically from the Master in various ways. Personally I hold that this method is illegitimate. … I believe that Mr. Judge wrote with his own hand, consciously or automatically I do not know, in the script adopted as that of the Master, messages which he received from the Master, or from chelas; and I know that in my own case I believed that the messages he gave me in the well-known script were messages directly precipitated or directly written by the Master. When I publicly said that I had received, after H. P. Blavatsky’s death, letters in the writing that H. P. Blavatsky had been accused of forging, I referred to letters given to me by Mr. Judge, and as they were in the well-known script I never dreamt of challenging their source. I know now that they were not written or precipitated by the Master, and that they were done by Mr. Judge; but I also believe that the gist of these messages was psychically received, and that Mr. Judge’s error lay in giving them to me in a script written by himself and not saying so. … Having been myself mistaken, I in turn misled the public.
The rest of Mrs. Besant’s statement is easily summarised. Part is devoted to minimising the importance of the question whether Mr. Judge wrote, or the Mahatma precipitated, the letters, by remarking that after all it did not matter so very much, as Mahatmas sometimes communicate (like spiritualist “controls”) by allowing ordinary people to write for them. “It is important,” quoth Mrs. Besant, naïvely, “that the small part generally played by Masters in these phenomena should be understood”—a remark with which the present writer quite agrees, and a main object of the present narrative. But in the sense in which Mrs. Besant meant it, it was not very relevant to an inquiry entirely dealing with letters passed off as having been precipitated, and precipitated without Mr. Judge’s knowledge, by the Mahatma himself.
Beyond this, Mrs. Besant’s statement consists about equally of blame directed at the untheosophical “vindictiveness” of Mr. Judge’s accusers in pressing an inquiry “painful” to Mr. Judge, and of laudatory tributes to the character and Theosophical activity of Mr. Judge himself.
Down Mrs. Besant sat, and up rose Mr. Judge, and read his statement. It contained the following sentences:—
I repeat my denial of the said rumoured charges of forging the said names and handwritings of the Mahatmas, or of misusing the same…. I admit that I have received and delivered messages from the Mahatmas … they were obtained through me, but as to how they were obtained or produced I cannot state…. My own methods may disagree from the views of others…. I willingly say that which I never denied, that I am a human being, full of error, liable to mistake, not infallible, but just the same as any other human being like to myself, or of the class of human beings to which I belong. And I freely, fully, and sincerely forgive anyone who may be thought to have injured or tried to injure me.
Now, so far as these sentences were an answer at all to such charges as Mrs. Besant’s statement had allowed itself to convey, they were certainly a flat contradiction. But that point was naturally overlooked by eyes moist from the affecting “forgiveness” of Mr. Judge’s peroration, and his very handsome, if somewhat tautologously expressed, admission that he was only a “human being.” Without a word more, nemine contradicente, it was
Resolved: that this meeting accepts with pleasure the adjustment arrived at by Annie Besant and William Q. Judge as a final settlement of matters pending hitherto between them as prosecutor and defendant, with a hope that it may be thus buried and forgotten, and—
Resolved: that we will join hands with them to further the cause of genuine brotherhood in which we all believe.
These resolutions were proposed by the Mr. Keightley (M.A. Cant.) whose name has occurred so often in our story among the bamboozled ones, and seconded by Dr. Buck, one of the nominees from Mr. Judge’s section to the abortive committee.
And there ends the Pamphlet—and the “Enquiry.” It has since appeared that the “joining of hands” between Mrs. Besant and Mr. Judge was for footlight purposes only; for no sooner was the curtain rung down than the two joint Outer Heads found they could no longer work together, and settled the matter by splitting the Esoteric section into independent dominions, Mr. Judge taking America, and Mrs. Besant Europe—to which she has since added India.
The result is one on which Mr. William Q. Judge must be congratulated. He retains all his offices as head of his lodge, of his section, and of the American Esoteric section; retains his vice-presidency of the whole society; retains the status of heir-presumptive, at least, to the presidency; retains, also, I suppose, either he or his Mahatma, the brass “flap-doodle,” to say nothing of the Blavatsky relic, with full freedom to continue using the same as heretofore.
In a word, the Theosophical Society has chosen to stand or fall with its vice-president. ***** Theosophy is a religion as well as a philosophy, and the T.S. masquerades as in some sort a Church. Imagine the situation, then, in any other religious denomination. Suppose that the Archbishop of Canterbury were to put forth missives which he alleged to have fluttered down direct from St. Augustine in heaven; and suppose after Convocation had governed the Church for years in conformity with directions so received, the Archbishop of York were to declare at a Church Congress his belief that his esteemed brother, whose services to the Church were beyond all praise, had written the missives himself, an expedient “which I personally hold to be illegitimate,” but into the details of which he begged the Congress not to pry: suppose, then, that the Archbishop of Canterbury on his part declared himself, like Mr. Pickwick, “much gratified with the candid explanation of his hon. riend,” that he “merely considered him a humbug in a Pickwickian point of view”—supposing all this, can you imagine the Church Congress rising as one man to “bury” the dispute, and “join hands” with the embracing disputants?
Probably not. But then, as Mrs. Besant remarked, the “standards of the world” are “lower” than those of the Theosophical Society—and of the “Pickwick Club.”
Nevertheless, I must ask leave to break in on the harmonious scene with a few troublesome questions.