As Mr. Hume took a prominent part in the early development of the Theosophical Society in India, and even published two pamphlets on the subject, "Hints on Esoteric Theosophy," Nos. 1 and 2, it seems to me desirable to draw special attention to the considerable change which has taken place in his opinion concerning the phenomena connected with Madame Blavatsky. I enjoyed, while in India, the opportunity of having various long interviews with Mr. Hume, and have already referred to his conclusion (reached after a most careful inquiry) in connection with the incident of the recovery of Mrs. Hume's brooch, that Madame Blavatsky may very well have obtained the brooch previously by ordinary methods. Long before the publication of the Blavatsky-Coulomb letters in the Christian College Magazine, Mr. Hume had discovered that some of Madame Blavatsky's phenomena were fraudulent, and that some of the professed Mahatma writing was the handiwork of Madame Blavatsky herself Once or twice he had seen notes on some philosophic question which had been made by Mr. Subba Row (Vakil of the High Court, Madras), a leading native Theosophist. The substance of these notes appeared afterwards worked up into a Mahatma document (received by either himself or Mr. Sinnett), and worsened in the working. I inquired of Mr. Subba Row, the ablest native Theosophist I have met, whether he was aware of the episodes which Mr. Hume had described. He replied laconically, "It may be so." When the Blavatsky Coulomb letters were first published Mr. Hume expressed his opinion publicly that Madame Blavatsky was too clever to have thus committed herself; latterly, however, and partly in consequence of the evidence that I was able to lay before him, he come to the conviction that the letters in question were actually written by Madame Blavatsky, Further, he had never placed the slightest credence in the Shrine-phenomenon, which he had always supposed to be fraudulent. I may state also that his conclusions, reached independently of my own and from different circumstances, concerning the untrustworthiness of Messrs. Damodar, Babajee, and Babula, entirely corroborated those to which I had been forced. Yet Mr. Hume was originally just as fully committed to the genuineness of certain phenomena as Mr. Sinnett himself, as will be manifest from a perusal of his "Hints on Esoteric Theosophy". His present attitude is an admirable testimony not only to his readiness to accept the truth at the cost of negating so extensively his own past opinions, but also to the systematic pains he has taken in sifting the antecedents of the apparently marvellous phenomena which occurred in close connection with himself For example, he received a Koot Hoomi communication in a letter coming from a person who had no connection with Theosophy This may have been the incident referred to by Mr. Sinnett ("The Occult World," p. 21), as follows:

When this Society [the Simla branch of the Theosophical Society] was formed, many letters passed between Koot Hoomi and ourselves, which were not in every case transmitted through Madame Blavatsky. In one case, for example, Mr. Hume, who became President for the first year of the new Society ... got a note from Koot Hoomi inside a letter received through the post from a person wholly unconnected with our occult pursuits, who was writing to him in connection with some municipal business.

Mr. Hume has informed me that he himself received the letter, which was large and peculiar in appearance, from the postman's hands. A long time afterwards, when reinvestigating a number of supposed phenomena (not published) which had occurred at his house, he learnt incidentally from one of his servants that just such a letter had been taken by Babula from the postman early one morning, and carried off to Madame, and had been returned to the postman, when the postman came by again, by Babula, who said that it was not for Madame but for Mr. Hume. The servant had wondered at the time why Babula had not taken the letter to Mr. Hume himself, and he said that he thought he remembered that Babula had taken and returned letters in the same way on other occasions. In various cases, which it is unnecessary to reproduce in this Report, it will be seen that Madame Blavatsky may have been enabled in a similar way to tamper with the letters before they actually reached the addressees. It may be instructive here to quote Mr. Hume's testimony to the fact that peculiar envelopes and paper, like those generally used by Madame Blavatsky for the Mahatma communications, are procurable in the neighbourhood of Darjeeling, that they were not used for the earliest Mahatma documents, which appeared before Madame Blavatsky had visited Darjeeling, but were first brought into requisition for that purpose which coincided with her visit to that place. Mr. Hume's position at present is that "despite all the frauds perpetrated, there have been genuine phenomena, and that, though of a low order, Madame [Blavatskyj really had and has Occultists of considerable though limited powers behind her; that K. H. is a real entity, but by no means the powerful and godlike being he has been painted, and that he has had some share, directly or indirectly-though what Mr. Hume does not pretend to say-in the production of the K. H. letters." The reader already knows that I cannot myself discover sufficient evidence for the occurrence of any "occult phenomenon 11 whatever in connection with the Theosophical Society .... 
 

THE "RAMASWAMYS ARM" PHENOMENON

The teak door in its new position seems to have been utilised in connection with the following phenomenon:

Supplement to The Theosophist, February, 1884.

In these days of scepticism and unbelief, the following testimony to a phenomenon, not capable of being explained on any theory of trick or fraud, will be not without use in exciting at least a spirit of calm inquiry in reasonable minds,

On the 24th of November, Mr. S. Ramaswamier and myself both went to the Adyar headquarters at about 9 p.m. We found Madame Blavatsky seated in the verandah in front of the main building conversing with General and Mrs. Morgan and Miss Flynn, then on a visit to the headquarters, and a number of Chelas and officers of the Theosophical Society. After about an hour's conversation there, Madame Blavatsky wished good-night to our European brethren and went upstairs to her own room, asking us to follow her thither. Accordingly we went up. There were seven in all in the room, which was lighted. Madame Blavatsky seated herself facing west on a chair near a window in the northeastern corner of the room. S. Ramaswamier and myself sat on the floor, one behind the other, right in front of and facing Madame Blavatsky, close by an open shelf in the wall on our left. Babu Mohini Mohun Chatterji, M. A., B. L., (solicitor, Calcutta) Messrs. Babajee, Ananda, and Balai Chand Mallik, also seated on the floor near us, opposite the wallshelf and facing it. What had originally been a window was closed with a thick wooden plank, which on careful examination I found was immovably fixed to the window frame and thus converted into a wallshelf with two cross boards. The plank behind was hung and the boards were covered and ornamented with black oil cloth and fringe. About half-an-hour after conversation began, while S. Ramaswamier was talking about certain important matters concerning himself and the others were listening, a slight rustle of the oil cloth, hanging in the back of the middle compartment of the wall-shelf, was observed by the four gentlemen seated opposite the same. From it, immediately after, was extruded a large hand more brown in complexion than white, dressed in a close fitting white sleeve, holding an envelope between the thumb and the forefinger. The hand came just opposite my face and over the back of S. Ramaswamier's head, a distance of about two yards from the wall, and at a jerk dropped the letter, which fell close by my side. All, except S. Ramaswamier, saw the phantom hand drop the letter. It was visible for a few seconds, and then vanished into air right before our eyes. I picked up the envelope, which was made of Chinese paper evidently, and inscribed with some characters which I was told were Tibetan. I had seen the like before with S. Ramaswamier. Finding the envelope was addressed in English to "Ramaswamy 1yer," I handed it over to him. He opened the envelope and drew out a letter. Of the contents thereof I am not permitted to say more than that they had immediate reference to what S. Ramaswamier was ipeaking to us rather warmly about, and that it was intended b) his Guru aj a check on his i-ehemence in the matter. As regards the handwriting of the letter, It was shown to me, and I readily recognised it as the same that I had seen in other letters shown me long before by S. Ramaswarnier as having been received from his Guru (also Madame Blavatsky's master). I need hardly add that immediately after I witnessed the above phenomenon, I examined the shelf wall, plank, boards, and all inside and outside with the help of a light, and was thoroughly satisfied that there was nothing in any of them to suggest the possibility of the existence of any wire, spring, or any other mechanical contrivance by means of which the phenomenon could have been produced.
 

V COOPOOSWAMY IYER, M.A., ETS. Pleader, Madura 27th November, 1883

alone downstairs. He was very doubtful about the distance of the hand from the wall, and seemed surprised that in his account the distance was given as two yards. He said it might be a yard or a yard and a half He had not observed anything beyond the hand and part of the arm, had not looked beyond this,---could not say whether it ended in a stick, or in nothing at all. The hand and arm appeared from behind the hangings of the shelf, dropped the letter, and were immediately gone. His examination of the shelf and planks behind appears to have been very incomplete. I took him upstairs and asked him to describe the positions, and to hold his finger at the point which the "hand" reached. Madame Blavatsky was in the room, and requested me to get the tape and measure the distance. The measuring tape was in another room. I observed closely the position of Mr. C. Iyer's finger before I left for the tape. I was away about half-aminute, leaving Madame Blavatsky talking with Mr. C. Iyer about the position. When 1 returned the finger was at least a foot further away from the wall. The distance then measured was 4 ft. 9 in.

I received two accounts within a few minutes from Mr. Ramaswarnier as to the respective positions of the sitters, and in his second account both he and Mr. C. Iyer were represented as sitting in places quite two feet nearer the shelf than as described in his first account. Moreover, the words in the letter received by Mr. Ramaswamier were not more specific than might easily have been written before the conversation referred to took place. They were a general injunction beginning "Patience! Patience!"

Mr. Babajee did not see the hand, he was not looking in that direction at the moment. He heard a slight noise and saw the letter on the floor.

Ananda (Mr. T. Vijiaraghava Charloo) saw the curtain before the shelf stirring as though a wind was passing. He then saw a hand and arm come out from behind the curtain. It came out about a foot or a foot and a-half, about up to the elbow. The letter fell, and his attention was drawn to the letter. Then hand and arm were gone,

After the sliding panel was shown in the teak door, the defence made was that the arm had come from the right side of the shelf, whereas the sliding panel was on the left side. I found it perfectly easy, however, to thrust my arm through the gap made when the panel slid, and to turn it in the shelf recess (which was concealed by the curtains) so that it should appear beyond the curtains in front of the right panel instead of the left, and as far forward as described by Ananda. I discussed the discrepancies in the different accounts with Messrs. Ramaswamier and Coopooswamy Iyer; and Mr. Lane-Fox, who afterwards heard of the different accounts, expressed his conviction of the worthlessness of the phenomenon as a test, and assured me that in a later conversation with Madame Blavatsky she admitted that the "phenomenon" probably originated with and was carried out by the Coulombs for the purpose of enabling them afterwards to discredit other "phenomena" more easily. Yet Madame Blavatsky had shortly before been endeavouring to persuade me that the arm must have been "astral," and urging how infinitely impossible it was for the "phenomenon" to have been other than a genuine manifestation of the "occult power," which the initiates of the "esoteric science" are alleged to possess.

According to M. Coulomb it was Babula's hand that appeared, by Madame Blavatsky's instructions. This explanation fits in well enough with Ananda's account.
 

What the ethics of a real Mahatma would be we perhaps have no means of judging, but those of Madame Blavatsky's Mahatma certainly are, in some points, those which we should expect would commend themselves to a person engaged in producing fraudulent phenomena. There is evidence in one of the K. H. documents that K. H. actually endeavoured to incite the recipient to what I think every honourable Englishman would regard as a falsehood. The moral is tolerably obvious, and the reader will perhaps rather expect the advanced Chelas of "Mahatmas" to be, by virtue of that very position, untrustworthy individuals. That there are persons whose actions are marked by the highest integrity, and who have devoutly and sincerely believed themselves to be acting under the tutelage of a "Mahatma," I do not for a moment question; though there can be little doubt that there are also instances where Madame Blavatsky has endeavoured to persuade natives to pretend falsely that they were Chelas, and in some cases, as I think I have shown, has succeeded, but in other cases has failed. Mr. Hume has stated to me his conviction, founded on their own confessions, that certain natives had been instigated by Madame Blavatsky to fraudulent assertion of their Chelaship, and to the conveyance of "Mahatma" messages in the guise of Chelas; this would appear also from some of the documents forwarded to me by Mr. Hume; and, quite independently of this evidence, I was assured by an educated native with whom I had a personal interview, that Madame Blavatsky had used her powers-not only of persuasion, but of threatening-to induce him to further her objects, as explained to him, and to play the We of a dawning Adept. It is, in short, quite certain that there are natives who have charged Madame Blavatsky with inciting them to the fraudulent personation of Chelas of "Mahatmas," and she seems to have worked upon patriotic feeling for the purpose of securing their assistance.

I have now dealt with the main points of the evidence for the alleged marvellous phenomena in connection with the Theosophical Society which were directly associated with my investigations in India, and I regard the details which I have given as sufficient to warrant the conclusion which I expressed at the beginning of my Report, that these alleged marvellous phenomena have been fraudulent throughout. The force of the evidence leading to this conclusion will hardly be appreciated except by those who have followed the accounts given, and it certainly cannot be conveyed in a mere summary. Yet I think it well that the reader should be reminded of the most important considerations which have arisen in the course of the inquiry, and I shall therefore suggest these once more-in as few words as possible. But, before doing so, there are one or two collateral questions which demand some brief reference.

At the time of our First Report, it appeared to us a serious difficulty in the way of adopting the hypothesis of fraud that we should have to suppose Mr. Damodar to have exchanged, within a comparatively short time, the character of a confiding dupe for that of a thorough-going conspirator. This difficulty was impressed upon us all the more strongly by the account of Mr. Damodar which we received from Colonel Olcott, who stated:

His father was a wealthy gentleman occupying a high position in the Government secretariat at Bombay; and the son, besides the paternal expectations, had, in his own right, about 50,000 or At the time when Mr. Damodar desired to give up all claims to the property, he was, I think, not a confederate. When he first began to suspect fraud, I have no means of ascertaining; but as regards the transition from being a dupe to becoming himself a conspirator, there is this to be said.-There can be little doubt that patriotic feeling which, I believe, has much more to do with the underworkings of the Theosophical Society than the followers of Madame Blavatsky in England commonly imagine-was one of the strongest influences which attracted him to the Society, and which afterwards kept him an active worker in the movement. His bitter antipathy to the "conquering race" was sufficiently obvious in those letters of his which I had the opportunity of perusing. To this we must add the fact that he had espoused the Theosophical cause and the claims of Madame Blavatsky with a burning intensity of antagonism to those who alleged that these claims rested on a foundation of dishonesty It was not easy to confess to the world that the flaming ardour which resisted the tender and wise advice of his father, and perhaps was fed by the importunate cautions and scoffings of his friends, was but the folly of an aspiring youth, who was not quite clever enough for Madame Blavatsky. And, after all, he might have the honour of posing as a Chela, with rapidly-developing powers, and receiving reverence and glory, not only from his native associates, but from Englishmen themselves. In the face of such considerations as these, the psychological revolution in which Mr. Damodar was transformed from a dupe, capable of deceiving his father, to an impostor in the supposed interests of his country, is perhaps not very difficult to understand. There is no necessity for me to give all the results of my inquiries concerning the personal characters and antecedents of those persons whom I regard as confederates of Madame Blavatsky. As Mr. Damodar is the only one of her followers who has deprived himself of any substantial property by his action in connection with the Theosophical Society, or who, in my opinion, can be said to have sacrificed his worldly prospects, I have thought it desirable to draw special attention to the circumstances under which the sacrifice was made.

After reviewing the instances I have given of the unreliability of Colonel Olcott's testimony, some readers may be inclined to think that Colonel Olcott must himself have taken an active and deliberate part in the fraud, and have been a partner with Madame Blavatsky unsettled by any trivial things"-such as, among others, the making of trap-doors and other apparatus for trick-manifestations by Madame Blavatsky-he wrote also:

I do not think it right or fair that you should continue to be a member of a Society which you thought flourishing by the aid of trickery and false representation. If I thought my Society that I would leave it, and wash my hands of it for ever.

This, however, is a course which probably Colonel Olcott's mind will never be "unsettled" enough to take, and he still apparently continues to believe in the genuineness of the alleged occult phenomena.  
 

CONCLUSION

I may now draw attention to the main points involved in the forgoing inquiry.

In the first place, a large number of letters produced by M. and Madame Coulomb, formerly Librarian and Assistant Corresponding Secretary respectively of the Theosophical Society, were, in the opinion of the best experts in handwriting, written by Madame Blavatsky. These letters, which extend over the years 1880-1883 inclusive, and some of which were published in the Madras Christian College Magazine for September 1884, prove that Madame Blavatsky has been engaged in the production of a varied and long-continued series of fraudulent phenomena, in which she has been assisted by the Coulombs. The circumstantial evidence which I was able to obtain concerning the incidents referred to in these letters, corroborates the judgment of the experts in handwriting.

In the second place, apart altogether from either these letters or the statements of the Coulombs, who themselves allege that they were confederates of Madame Blavatsky, it appears from my own inquiries concerning the existence and the powers of the supposed Adepts or Mahatmas, and the marvellous phenomena alleged to have occurred in connection with the Theosophical Society,

(1) That the primary witnesses to the existence of a Brotherhood with occult powers,-viz., Madame Blavatsky, Mr. Damodar K. Mavalankar, Mr. Bhavani Shankar, and Mr. Babajee D. Nath,-have in other matters deliberately made statements which they must have known to be false, and that therefore their assertions cannot establish the existence of the Brotherhood in question.

(2) That the comparison of handwritings further tends to show that Koot Hoomi Lal Sing and Mahatma Morya are fictitious personages, and that most of the documents purporting to have emanated from these "personages," and especially from "K. H." (Koot Hoomi Lal Sing), are in the disguised handwriting of Madame Blavatsky herself, who originated the style of the K. H. handwriting; and that some of the K. H. writing is the handiwork of Mr. Damodar in imitation of the writing developed by Madame Blavatsky.

(3) That in no single phenomenon which came within the scope of my investigation in India, was the evidence such as would entitle it to be regarded as genuine, the witnesses for the most part being exceedingly inaccurate in observation or memory, and having neglected to exercise due care for the exclusion of fraud; while in the case of some of the witnesses there has been much conscious exaggeration and culpable misstatement.

(4) That not only was the evidence insufficient to establish the genuineness of the alleged marvels, but that evidence furnished partly by my own inspection, and partly by a large number of witnesses, most of them Theosophists, concerning the structure, position, and environment of the Shrine, concerning "Mahatma" communications received independently of the Shrine, and concerning various other incidents, including many of the phenomena mentioned in "The Occult World," besides the numerous additional suspicious circumstances which I have noted in the course of dealing in detail with the cases considered, renders the conclusion unavoidable that the phenomena in question were actually due to fraudulent arrangement.

The question which will now inevitably arise is-what has induced Madame Blavatsky to live so many laborious days in such a fantastic work of imposture? And although I conceive that my instructions did not require me to make this particular question a province of my investigation, and to explore the hidden motives of Madame Blavatsky, I should consider this Report to be incomplete unless I suggest what I myself believe to be an adequate explanation of her ten years' toll on behalf of the Theosophical Society. It may be supposed by some who are unfamiliar with her deficiencies and capacities that the Theosophical Society is but the aloe-blossom of a woman's monomania, and that the strange, wild, passionate, unconventional Madame Blavatsky has been "finding her epos" in the establishment of some incipient world religion. But a closer knowledge of her character would show such a supposition to be quite untenable; not to speak of the positive qualities which she habitually manifested, there are certain varieties of personal sacrifice and religious aspiration, the absence of which from Madame Blavatsky's conduct would alone suffice to remove her ineffably far from the St. Theresa type.

As Madame Blavatsky in propria persona, she can urge her followers to fraudulent impersonations; under the cloak of Koot Hoomi she can incite "her" Chelas to dishonourable statements; and as an accomplished forger of other people's handwriting, she can strive to save herself by blackening the reputation of her enemies. She is, indeed, a rare psychological study, almost as rare as a "Mahatma"; she was terrible exceedingly when she expressed her overpowering thought that perhaps her "twenty years"' work might be spoiled through Madame Coulomb; and she developed a unique resentment for the "spiritualistic mediums," whose trickeries, she said, she "could so easily expose," but who continued to draw their disciples, while her own more guarded and elaborate scheme was in danger of being turned inside out. Yet I must confess that the problem of her motives, when I found myself being forced to the conclusion that her claims and her phenomena were fraudulent, caused me no little perplexity.

It appeared to me that, even should the assertions of Theosophists that their Society has been partly dependent upon the gifts of Madame Blavatsky prove to be the reverse of truth, the sordid motive of pecuniary gain would be a solution of the problem still less satisfactory than the hypothesis of religious mania. More might be said in support of the supposition that a morbid yearning for notoriety was the dominant emotion which has stimulated and sustained her energetic efforts in the singular channel which they have so long pursued. But even this hypothesis I was unable to adopt, and reconcile with my understanding of her character.

At last a casual conversation opened my eyes. I had taken no interest in Central Asian perplexities, was entirely unaware of the alleged capacities of Russian intrigue, and had put aside as unworthy of consideration the idea-which for some time had currency in India-that the objects of the Theosophical Society were political, and that Madame Blavatsky was a "Russian spy." But a conversation with Madame Blavatsky, which arose out of her sudden and curious excitement at the news of the recent Russian movement upon the Afghan frontier, compelled me to ask myself seriously whether it was not possible that the task which she had set herself to perform in India was to foster and foment as widely as possible among the natives a disaffection towards British rule. Madame Blavatsky's momentary emotional betrayal of her sympathies in the onset of her excitement was not rendered less significant by the too strongly impressed "afterstroke" of a quite uncalled-for vituperation of the Russians, who, she said, "would be the deathblow of the Society if they got into India." That she was ever seven years in Tibet there is much reason for disbelieving. In a letter she wrote to a Hindu from America, she professed no more than that she had acquired some occult knowledge from some wandering Siberian Shamans, which, being interpreted, probably means, if her statement has any foundation of truth at all, that she learnt their conjuring performances. According to her own account, in one of the Blavatsky-Coulomb letters, it appears that before her acquaintance with Madame Coulomb at Cairo, in 1872, she had been filling a page which she wishes to be "torn out of the book"  of her life. This part of her history does not at present concern us, except that it proves the story of her Tibetan experiences to be fabulous. But the letter also refers to her sojourn at Cairo and her later adventures, and it appears that she and a certain Madame Sebire had established a Society in Cairo, which was evidently "spiritualistic," and which failed; that shortly after parting with Madame Coulomb in Cairo, she went to Odessa, taking Madame Sebire, who dragged her into an enterprise of "making some extraordinary inks," which proved a losing speculation.

This is the end of this 4 part publication on line with the most important parts of the SPR Hodgson Report.

The Theosophists' resident expert on Hinduism, T. Subba Row, broke off his support of Blavatsky after reviewing an early draft of The Secret Doctrine. Not only that, he organized an Indian campaign opposing publication of the work as it stood and requesting a host of revisions.

Blavatsky paid little heed to her Indian opponents. As the manuscript came together she was greatly assisted by others, especially Archibald and Bertram Keightley, her secretary G. R. S. Mead, William Q. Judge, and E. D. Fawcett, all of whom both edited her writing and wrote at least a few pages on their own.  At last, after years of hard work, illness, changes in residency, and a horrendous process of re-editing and rewriting, the first volume went to press in October 1888.

After Blavatsky died, the Theosophical Society quickly fell to squabbling and factionalization. William Q. Judge and Annie Besant produced Mahatma letters which supported their claims to the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society. Olcott was skeptical of these letters, especially since they bore a seal that Olcott himself said he had made as a gift for Morya through Blavatsky. Besant then backed off from judge, saying "I do not charge ... Mr. Judge with forgery in the ordinary sense of the term, but with giving a misleading material form to messages received psychically from the Master.,'92 In other words, he had palmed off letters he had written himself, based on visions, as letters physically received from the Masters. (Had Blavatsky acted differently?) In 1895, Judge's American section seceded from the Adyar Theosophical Society, which remained under Olcott and Besant. The division continues to the present day.

A few years later further schism and more resignations resulted from the scandal over Bishop Leadbeater, who was found to have not only counseled boys in masturbation, but provided them a helping hand. Besant and Leadbeater were later to found a group called the Order of the Star in the East to promote Krishnamurti, one of Leadbeater's proteges; Krishnamurti would dissolve the group himself in 1929, calling organized religion counterproductive.

The Theosophical Society or Societies and its descendants continued to grow after Blavatsky's death despite all the squabbling, and they still exist in the present day. Lately the membership in the primary groups has experienced the sharp decline that is characteristic of traditions that have ceased to appeal to the young, although Theosophy in its various branches may be expanding elsewhere in the world. The thriving New Age movement with its emphasis on channeling owes a tremendous debt to Blavatsky, even though it takes place well outside the jealously guarded confines of the Theosophical Society. Blavatsky inspired numerous direct spiritual descendants, of whom the most prominent have been Annie Besant, C. W Leadbeater, Krishnamurti, Rudolf Steiner, Katherine Tingley, Manly P Hall, Alice Bailey, Max Heindel, and Elizabeth Clare Prophet. Many of these have had their own revelations from "the Masters."

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