Theos-Talk Archives (November 1996 Message tt00014)

FORWARDED TO THEOS-TALK FROM THEOS-L.
Daniel Caldwell

> Date: Thu, 14 Nov 96 23:04:29 -0800
> From: "Tim Maroney" <maroney@apple.com>
> Subject: Barborka: "The Mahatmas and Their Letters"
>
> I picked up Barborka's "The Mahatmas and Their Letters" (Adyar:
> Theosophical Publishing House, 1973) on the basis of a
> recommendation on this list.  I am at a loss as to what the
> recommender thought could be said for this book.  I have read the
> first seventy-plus pages and there is not even a vestige of
> argument for the authenticity of the letters so far.  There is a
> good deal of interesting biography and metaphysical speculation,
> but Barborka almost seems to delight in ignoring all the
> well-known contrary arguments to his positions.
>
> He never considers that Blavatsky's aunt might have assisted her
> in some minor tricks with letters, for instance, and dismisses
> Blavatsky's own possible authorship of the de Fadeyev letters
> based on nothing at all: "it is obvious that this letter was not
> written by Helena to her beloved aunt.  Its style and the
> language used show that it was written by another person", he
> writes, with no attempt to elucidate this argument.
>
> The famous Sinnett brooch incident is credulously recounted, but
> the reader finds not one word about the major contrary detail,
> admitted by Blavatsky herself: that Blavatsky possessed a brooch
> matching in description the one she "found" for Mrs.  Sinnett,
> that she gave it to a jeweler shortly before the manifestation
> for repair, and that she claimed to have sent it off to her
> family in Russia, angrily refusing to ask the family to provide
> any evidence of its receipt when challenged.
>
> Barborka is very impressed by the spiritualistic "raps" which
> Blavatsky could produce at will, and he insists that other
> mediums (unlike HPB) had to place their hands on a table to
> produce them.  Wasn't it the Fox sisters who made their raps by
> secretly cracking their toe knuckles, and wasn't it Hodgson who
> said Blavatsky's raps to the back of his head were
> indistinguishable from cracking his own knuckles against his
> skull? The reader will search in vain for Barborka's contribution
> to this decades-old debate.
>
> Probably the most embarassing passage is on page 41, where
> Barborka breathlessly asks the reader to "imagine how any of us
> would have felt to have had a handkerchief produced for us from
> within another handkerchief before our eyes!" The answer, of
> course, is that we would feel we were witnessing a conventional,
> if not trite, feat of legerdemain.
>
> I cannot say that there is no stronger argument later in the
> book, of course, but I do feel that the first seventy pages of a
> four hundred page book are likely to provide a fairly
> representative sample of its modes of argument....
>
> Tim Maroney