Theos-Talk Archives (November 2002 Message tt00033)

Steve,

Thank you for your comments on Blavatsky and the Mahatma Letters but 
I find some of your statements questionable and dubious.

For example, you summarize:

"Fortunately in this case we have sufficient facts that it is not 
reasonable to doubt Blavatsky wrote the mahatma letters. What is kin 
[sic] doubt is whether they were her own thoughts or whether she was 
telling the truth when she said they were the thoughts of some 
distant Tibetan sage and that she merely held the pen? That is a 
difficult question and one which would require an analysis of all the 
letters. One thing that is certain is that whereas she disguised her 
handwriting when writing the mahatma letters, she did not disguise 
her writing style. Recognizable as a thumbprint it was, and her 
thumb print is all over all pof [sic]them." Quoted from:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/theos-talk/message/8393

But inquiring readers should COMPARE and CONTRAST what you write 
above with what Dr. Vernon Harrison has written on the same subject. 
He writes the following in his capacity as a professional examiner of 
questioned documents "for the past twenty years". I quote several of 
Dr. Harrison's relevant statements from his book: 

"I have studied the Hodgson Report as a legal document and I have 
examined the said Mahatma Letters not only in the holographs 
preserved in the British Library but also in reproductions of the 
same prepared and supplied by the British Library in the form of a 
set of 1323 colour slides. I have examined microscopically each and 
every one of the 1323 slides found in a complete set, and wherever 
appropriate I have read the writing in a line-by-line scan at a 
magnification of x5O diameters."

Elsewhere in his book, Harrison writes:

". . . I have found no evidence that the Mahatma Letters were written 
by Helena Blavatsky consciously and deliberately in a disguised form 
of her own handwriting developed over a period of several years, as 
claimed by Richard Hodgson. That is, I find no evidence of common 
origin between the KH, M, and HPB scripts. In any ordinary legal case 
I would regard them as different scripts and attribute them to 
different authors."

". . . If any of the KH and M scripts came through the hand of Madame 
Blavatsky while she was in a state of trance, sleep, or other altered 
states of consciouness known to psychologists and psychiatrists, KH 
and M might be considered sub-personalities of Helena Blavatsky. To 
what extent the sub-personalities are independent is a matter for 
debate; but in no case would conscious fraud or imposture be 
involved. Nor does this supposition circumvent the difficulty that 
there are KH letters which even Hodgson had to admit Madame Blavatsky 
could not possibly have written as she was too far away at the time 
and communications were bad."

Furthermore, Harrison states:

". . . Who KH was I do not know, but I am of the opinion that all 
letters in the British Library initialed KH originated from him. The 
basic characteristics of his handwriting are present from first to 
last, but in the earliest letters in particular there are variations 
in and distortions of some of the characters. These variations do not 
bear the hallmark of the apprentice forger." 

"I am satisfied that the Mahatma Letters were not dictated to chelas 
who wrote them in their own handwriting. However, it is stated in the 
letters themselves that many of them were transmitted in KH's 
handwriting by chelas using 'precipitation' or what seems to be a 
human FAX process. If this suggestion is plausible, it could be that 
the chelas were having difficulty with the system at first, which had 
to be 'debugged.' Most of the 'debugging' must have been done within 
a fortnight." 

The above extracts quoted from:
http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/hpb-spr/hpbspr-h.htm

Steve, I will deal with several other of your statements as time 
permits.

Daniel H. Caldwell
BLAVATSKY ARCHIVES
http://hpb.cc