Theos-Talk Archives (November 2002 Message tt00034)

--- In theos-talk@y..., "Daniel H. Caldwell" <comments@b...> wrote:
> Thank you for your comments on Blavatsky and the Mahatma Letters 
but 
> I find some of your statements questionable and dubious.

Which comment is it that you find dubious? If you are saying that 
Hodgson dealt fairly with his handwriting "experts" (Gribble was no 
expert) then I would have to say you are wrong. Hodgson's behavior 
was disgraceful. Don't defend himl please.

I do not disupute that Harrison examined the letters, but statements 
by K.H., Blavatsky, and Besant seem to me to have more force than his 
private opinions.

> ". . . 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

That she wrote them is admitted. What is at issue is 
the "consciously and deliberately" part. Was she a secretary taking 
dictation, or did she serve in some other capacity? It was not 
obvious at the time, but I think it would have been far better had 
she spelled out exactly what was the nature of her relationship to 
the purported authors of the letters for the purpose of letter 
production.

Q.W. Judge wrote letters entirely in the KH script just to show he 
could do it and that it could be done. There is no question that he 
disguised his handwriting.

> ". . . 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.

That was Yeats' theory. There is good reason believe they were real 
men, but there is a difficult problem determining whether and to what 
extent these real men were able to express themselves through the 
medium of the mahatma letters. Harrison's opinions seem to bear on 
this question.

To 
> what extent the sub-personalities are independent is a matter for 
> debate; but in no case would conscious fraud or imposture be 
> involved.

I agree. There are some alleging conscious fraud, but I am not one 
of them.

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."

Since Theosophical sources admit there were more than one amanuensis 
chela, this is not a difficulty.

> "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.

The problem with that is that the letters also say precipitation was 
forbidden by the chohan. Some of them must have been producd by some 
other means if the mahatma letters themselves are to be believed. 
The Shannon letter and the Gebhard letter are good candidates for 
evidence that some letters were delivered by phenomenal means. It 
appears most of them were merely palmed off on someone, so that there 
were phenomenal and non-phenomenal deliveries, consistent with what 
the letters themselves say.