Isis Very Much Unveiled/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII.
QUESTIONS AND CHALLENGES.
“Hath he said anything?”
“He hath, my lord; but, be you well assured,
No more than he’ll unswear.”—“Othello.”
“Next in importance, or perhaps equal in value, to Devotion, is Truth.”—Circular on “Occultism and Truth,” signed by H. S. Olcott, Annie Besant, B. Keightley, &c., July, 1894.
In my first chapter I set out certain conclusions. In succeeding chapters I have given the facts on which my conclusions were based. I now assert that the evidence for those facts, be it good or bad, is that of the Theosophical leaders themselves, written and signed as the case against the Vice-President, and adopted by Mrs. Besant as true. If it be not true, then Colonel Olcott, Mr. B. Keightley, Mr. W. R. Old, and the other official witnesses must be guilty of a conspiracy, as I said at the outset, “even more discreditable to the personnel of the society.” It is not I who accuse Mr. Judge. It is Mr. Judge and his colleagues who accuse each other. The rank-and-file of the Theosophists have paid their money; they may now take their choice.
The fact is, before Mrs. Besant got hold of the evidence, at least one set of complete and duly witnessed copies had been made, together with facsimiles of the documents. It is these which lately fell into my hands, under circumstances which left me free to take, as I do take, the moral and legal responsibility of that publication which the president first promised and afterwards shirked. ***** In regard to Mr. William Q. Judge, vice-president, I do not feel called on to labour any theory of my own as to that gentleman’s character and conduct. As the Society for Psychical Research long ago remarked, the precise line between rogue and dupe in the Theosophical Society has never been easy to draw. On any view of Mr. Judge I have at least as much respect for him as for his virtuously vacillating superior, whose mind seems to have been made up for him from one stage to another by whatever party happened to be at the moment nearest and most peremptory. With the facts of the preceding narrative before him, the reader can form his own opinion about both officials.
Equally unable am I to state what Mr. Judge’s own version of Mr. Judge’s acts may be. I have read and re-read his “statement” at the “Enquiry,” and his circular issued just previously. In these I have groped—faint, yet pursuing—among the mazes of that Theosophical verbiage which always seems to be coming to the point; but for me at least it has never quite got there. Where the denials are most explicit, the thing denied is vaguest; where admission is most candid, the thing admitted is least relevant to the issue. Mr. Judge admits, for instance, that he is a “fallible human being”; he denies that he has “forged.” I, for one, should never dream of disputing either position. The verb, to forge, definitely connotes in English the imitation of the signature of a person who really exists, and who has also an existent banking account. The worst I should dream of imputing to Mr. Judge in this connexion is the imitation of someone else’s imitation of the feigned signature of somebody who never existed.
Mr. Judge must see that between the mere human fallibility to which he confesses, and the felony of which no one has accused him, it does not need a sensitive ear to distinguish whole octaves of intervening notes. Thanks to Mrs. Besant, he has not yet been obliged to locate himself at any one point of the gamut. But, for all I know, he may now come forward and twit his associates with deficient humour for not seeing that the whole thing was just a rollicking hoax. Throwing off the rôle of an interpreter of Tibet, he may appear as William Q. Judge, the American Humorist. He might fairly claim that many have performed under a like title much less divertingly. He might say that the joke was so obvious that it never struck him his colleagues would take it seriously; that their evident determination not to spoil sport was an invitation no joker could have resisted; and that he only kept it up so long for the fun of seeing, through a graduated scale of absurdity, how much they really would stand. Of course, to carry through a big practical joke one may be excused a few taradiddles, to which the moralist might apply a harsher name. No doubt some might question the taste of making a friend’s funeral the starting-point of even the most innocent mauvaise plaisanterie. But American humour has never spared the cemetery. ***** From my own position, then, and Mr. Judge’s position, I now pass to Mrs. Besant’s. This is interesting from its bearing on the curious psychological puzzle offered by Mrs. Besant’s own mind, to the study of which she herself continually invites the public. Let us accept the invitation for a moment.
I take Mrs. Besant’s statement at the so-called “Enquiry,” that she believed now that Judge wrote with his own hand the missives which he had induced her, and she had induced the public, to regard as precipitations from Tibet of the kind which “some people would call miraculous.”
Apparently Mrs. Besant considers that this avowal sufficed to clear her honour towards her colleagues and the public whom she had “misled.” To me it appears admirably calculated to mislead them again. Remember, even those whom Mrs. Besant was addressing—much more the outside public—were ignorant of the facts. Mrs. Besant had taken good care of that.
They did not know, as the reader does, the circumstances which surrounded these various missives: The “Master Agrees” missive, the Telegram missive, the Cabinet missive, the “Note the Seal,” the “Judge’s Plan is Right,” the “Judge is the Friend,” the Envelope Trick, the “Withold,” the “Master will Provide,” the Bank-note, the Inner Group, the “Grave Danger Olcott,” the “Judge is not the Forger,” the “Follow Judge and Stick,” and the Poison Threat missive—as I have severally named them.
Referring to those circumstances, as the reader now knows them, I ask of what did and does Mrs. Besant mean to convict Mr. Judge?
If Judge “wrote with his own hand” the answers got from the cabinet oracle (May 23, 1891), did he also use sleight-of-hand or some similar artifice to make her accept the answers as precipitated in a sealed envelope in a closed drawer?
If Judge “wrote,” &c., the slip “Judge’s plan is right,” the sudden appearance of which among Mrs. Besant’s papers made her and him joint officials on May 27, 1891—did he also place it among those papers on purpose to be so discovered?
If Judge “wrote” &c., Mrs. Besant’s message of July 12, 1891, which was across the inside flaps of a closed envelope—did he also insert the writing by the trick described in the chapter which I entitled “Every Man his Own Mahatma”?
If Judge “wrote,” &c., all the various letters, notes, and endorsements to which the “Mahatma’s” signature and seal were attached, missives backing Judge’s own views, raising Judge’s own Theosophical status, and bluffing other “servants” of that “Master,” to whom he and they cannot allude without capital letters—did he also “with his own hand” take and affix the seal which he has persistently denied having ever set eyes on?
If Mrs. Besant did not mean all this, and much more which hangs by the same logic, then her Statement grossly calumniated Mr. Judge to the few who knew the tenor of the case against him.
If she did mean it, then her Statement completely hoodwinked her audience and the public.
For will anybody assert that this, which has just been outlined, or anything like it, was the picture naturally called up by Mrs. Besant’s carefully worded description of “Mr. Judge’s error” as the negative one of “not mentioning” certain circumstances, her suggestion that personal opinions might reasonably differ on the “legitimacy” of his methods, her laudatory allusions to his general character and Theosophic services, her public sanction of a statement on his part which on this theory must have been utterly misleading, her eager lead in the attempt to cloak up for ever the Great Mahatma Hoax, and to shield the hoaxer?
But there is another point. Mrs. Besant professes still to cling to the belief that the Mahatmas had something to do with the letters. Mr. Judge wrote them, she says, but what he wrote he had first “received psychically from the Master.”
Faith, fanatic faith, once wedded fast
To some dear falsehood, hugs it to the last.
Nobody can prove that those missives, or, for that matter, these articles, or Shakespeare’s plays, were not due to the Master’s “psychical” authorship. Mr. Judge and Mrs. Besant are both quite free to say so. But again I must point out to Mrs. Besant the logical inferences from her position. In the attempt to hold on to one spar in the general wreck, she just says enough to inculpate the Mahatma, and not enough to exculpate Mr. Judge.
For, to apply theory once more to concrete fact: Does Mrs. Besant attribute to the Mahatma the preposterous insinuations against Colonel Olcott? And does she mean that the Mahatma made these insinuations and various direct false statements in order to co-operate with Mr. Judge in shielding from discovery a prolonged use of a bogus imitation of the Mahatma’s own seal and signature?
In this case, we are entitled to challenge Mrs. Besant to say whether she herself now believes that the insinuations against Colonel Olcott were justified. If yes, then I can only leave her to settle that matter with the Colonel. If no, then what becomes of the supernal wisdom and lofty character of “Those Who to some of us are most sacred”? Must it not be confessed that They have made uncommon fools of Themselves?—not to give a stronger name to the extremely shady methods of which Tibetan diplomacy is thus found guilty.
The public will await satisfactory answers to these questions. It will not, I hope, for a moment suspect Mrs. Besant of conscious fraud, or of sordid motives. I most certainly do not. With some of the lesser fry, who would be bankrupt in every sense if Theosophy failed them, the consideration of pleasant board and lodging at other people’s expense may be a governing one. With Mrs. Besant, who brings far more to the organisation in the shape of gate-money, no doubt, than she ever condescends to accept from it, the motives are subtler. Had she boldly cut herself free from the rottenness at the core of the Theosophic movement as soon as it was shown to her, she might have saved her reputation for straightforwardness, if not for intelligence. In choosing instead the equivocal policy of hushing up a scandal at all costs, she doubtless convinced herself that she was acting only for the ends of edification and the good of her church. That is the old, old story of priestcraft, and Mrs. Besant has been playing the high priestess now for three years. But were there not also some more personal motives at work? There is one thing which even the most candid hate to confess—and that is, that they have been thoroughly bamboozled. It does not improve matters when they have themselves helped in their own bamboozlement. To confess how recklessly inaccurate were her statements about “the same handwriting,” the “semi-miraculous precipitation,” the absolute assurance of her own senses, and so forth; to let the public see for itself the childish twaddle which she accepted, and helped to force upon others, as profound and oracular: all this would have been a sad come-down from the Delphic tripod. I do not wonder the poor lady shrank from it. I do wonder that Mrs. Besant cared to evade it at the expense of a sort of confidence-trick. To this has come the woman whom we once thought, whatever her other faults, at least fearless and open—the woman whose epitaph, so she tells us, is to be— She Sought To follow Truth!
Lastly, a few words to the rank-and-file of the Theosophical Society, a large proportion of whom are now gathering open-mouthed at Adyar. In Madame Blavatsky few of the better-informed of the flock nowadays affect to believe—except in public. They cling to her gifts, perhaps; they have thrown over her morals. For fresh evidence has been coming to light, ever since that strange woman died, as to the tricks to which she condescended, and encouraged her chels to condescend; and poor Colonel Olcott, though he continues to work the old gold-mine in print, has been driven even there to enunciate the theory that Madame Blavatsky herself was really killed at the battle of Mentana, and her body thereafter occupied by seven distinct spirits who, of course, are not responsible for contradicting each other. Till May, 1891, Madame was the principal witness to the objective existence and attributes of Mahatmas. Since that date, the principal witness is William Q. Judge. Soon the faithful at Adyar will be filing into the Occult Room to gaze through peep-holes at the two August Portraits, illuminated and set off by all the artifices associated here with exhibitions by M. Jan van Beers. Will they dare, any of them, to ask their officials plainly what evidence they can now offer that either of the subjects of those fancy portraits ever existed?
And if on this and other questions suggested by these chapters, Mrs. Besant, President Olcott, and Vice-President Judge do not succeed in satisfying their followerswhat next? No doubt each member of the trinity will sit secure in his or her autocracy in his or her own continent, owning there, as I understand, the official organ and the publishing plant which the society as a whole has built up into prosperity. Yet something, surely, may be done by those who do not care to remain unwilling parties to the Great Mahatma Hoax, to recover their own self-respect, if not to save the Theosophical Society.
It is for them to decide whether the society, on its non-fraudulent side, is worth saving. It may be a kind of university extension for the popularising of Eastern philosophies. Or it may be, as some rather think, a mere smattering of catch-words out of cribs for the use of Mutual Mystification clubs, tending to a certain indigestion in the mental processes and a flatulent style of English composition. In either case there is no reason why the organisation should revolve about a vortex of tomfoolery and legerdemain into which honest members are apt to be sucked before they realise its true nature.