Theos-Talk Archives (April 2003 Message tt00145)

More from Hugh Shearman on The Mahatma Letters.

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. . . . Setting aside any question of forgery or
malpractice in the original production of the [Mahatma
]letters, were all these letters really written by the
Masters and do they really represent the Masters'
words? 

We who look at the letters today look at them in an
atmosphere in which still hang some of the dust and
some of the glow of the aftermath of the S.P.R report
and the various refutations of it. We look at them
with the uncritical piety of a later generation and
have forgotten how they appeared to the eye of those
who were actually recipients of the letters or were
involved in that early period of the history of the
Society. 

It has been said that the right use of criticism is to
test by reason the promptings of the intuition. Many
members of the Theosophical Society have had feelings
of considerable doubt about some of these letters.
They have felt that the letters do not all represent a
direct expressions of the Master to whom they are
ascribed, that many passages have, as it were, no
Master behind them. 

Some have perhaps felt a little guilty at entertaining
such a thought, feeling that it involves a measure of
disloyalty to Madame Blavatsky to whom they owe so
much. A little research, however, shows that they need
not feel at all guilty in this respect; for Madame
Blavatsky herself held and expressed the very same
view of the letters, and indeed expressed it much more
sweepingly than any who came after her have ventured
to do. 

"It is hardly one out of a hundred occult letters, "
she wrote, "that is ever written by the hand of the
Master in whose name and on whose behalf they are
sent, and the Masters have neither time nor leisure to
write them; and when a Master says, "I wrote that
letter, " it means only that every word in it was
dictated by him and impressed under his direct
supervision. Generally they make their chela, whether
near or far away, write (or precipitate) them, by
impressing upon his mind the ideas they wish
impressed, and, if necessary, aiding him in the
picture-printing process of precipitation. It depends
entirely upon the chela's state of development how
accurately the ideas may be transmitted and the
writing-model imitated". (Lucifer, iii, p.93). 

Sinnett was himself familiar with and accepted the
view that many of the letters were written entirely by
chelas and were not direct communications from the
Masters, even though written in the Masters'
handwritings and carrying Their initials as
signatories. In 1888 Sinnett was shown by Colonel
Olcott a signed letter [the S.S. Shannon letter]in the
K. H. script, and he then wrote to C. W. Leadbeater,
"It reads to me very much en suite with the other
letters in blue handwriting that came during the 1884
crisis, when Mm. B. herself admitted to me after wards
that during that time the Masters had stood aside and
left everything to various chelas, including freedom
to use the blue handwriting". (C Jinarajadasa, The
K.H. Letters to C.W. Leadbeater, p75). 

We thus see that, if we accept what Madame Blavatsky
wrote and said on several occasions, and what is said
in the letters themselves, the majority of the Mahatma
Letters are likely to have been expressed as to detail
in the idiom and within the temperamental limitations
of various chelas, and many of them were written by
chelas without any supervision from the Master whose
signature is upon them. 

One may well ask, if this was so, why this aspect of
the letters was not more openly stated and explained
by Madame Blavatsky herself. To find the answer to
this we have to take note of certain curious traits of
her character. . . . 

"But, in a letter to Frau Gebhard, she herself
confessed that she had done the same thing with regard
to letters, evidently partly to avoid the trouble and
probable misunderstanding that would arise if she
tried to explain the methods by which these letters
were written. She referred to herself as "having
insisted that such and such a note was from Master
written in His own handwriting, all the time thinking,
jesuitically, I confess, "Well, it is written by His
order and in His handwriting, after all, why shall I
go and explain to these, who do not, cannot,
understand the Truth, and perhaps only make matters
worse". 

But this was not her only motive. She also confessed
to having "used Master's name when I thought my
authority would go for naught, when I sincerely
believed acting agreeably to Master's intentions". (C.
Jinarajadasa, The Early Teaching of the Masters,
Foreword, p.x). 

In this letter again she indicates that most of the
letters were written by persons other than the Masters
themselves, and she describes herself as "shocked and
startled, burning with shame when shown notes written
in Their handwritings ... Exhibiting mistakes in
science, grammar and thoughts, expressed in such
language that it perverted entirely the meaning
originally intended". She said that "it is very rarely
that Mahatma K. H. dictated verbatim; and when He did
there remained the few sublime passages found in Mr.
Sinnett's letters from Him." (Ibid). 

A further problem with regard to the Mahatma Letters
remains to be discussed in connection with Madame
Blavatsky, though probably it can never be solved.
Several members have lately told the writer that they
have felt sure that some of the material in the
letters came from H.P. B herself and represented her
own thoughts and opinions. As we shall see, A.P.
Sinnett held this view, and some confirmation of it
can be found in her own words. The idea is not that
she wrote the letters but that, since she was to a
large extent the medium through whom their delivery
became possible, much material from her found its way
unconsciously into them. 

We do know that much of the language in the letters
comes at least from the same pool of language which
she herself used. One of the most plausible and
telling lines of criticism advanced by Richard Hodgson
was his demonstration that the language, usage,
spelling and sentence structure of the K. H. letters
were on many points identical with the same features
in Madame Blavatsky 's writings. (Proc. S.P.R, iii,
306). She herself admitted in the letter to Frau
Gebhard which has already been quoted, that "Two or
three times, perhaps more, letters were precipitated
in my presence by chelas who could not speak English
and who took ideas and expressions out of my head".
(Early Teaching, xi.) 

Here we see that not only could language pass from her
into the letters but also "ideas". Some have felt that
this leaking of Madame Blavatsky 's own ideas into the
letters was much more extensive than she herself
realized. An example that has been proposed to the
writer and which may be examined by any interested
student is the case of those teachings about the
after-death condition of suicides and of the victims
of sudden death which appear in the Mahatma Letters
and in the writings of Madame Blavatsky herself but
which do not seem to have found any subsequent
confirmation in the experiences of any psychic inside
or outside the Theosophical Society. Could it be that
these teachings originated solely with Madame
Blavatsky herself? 

She has given a vivid description of how in her youth
things which she believed herself to have been writing
down at the dictation of a dead person proved to have
come entirely from the unconscious resources of her
own memory ([A.O. Hume] Hints on Esoteric Theosophy,
I, 120). Could something similar have occurred through
her connection with the production of the letters? Of
some interest in this connection is Letter 134 in the
The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett. She claimed that
she wrote this down at the dictation of the Master M.,
but later in the letter she said that she was
"translating" what M. said (the last phrase of M's. I
translate ...). The tone and contents of this letter
were such that when it was later published Colonel
Olcott denied its authenticity and wrote in The
Theosophist of April, 1895, that it "grossly violates
that basis principle of neutrality and eclecticism on
which the T.S. has built itself from the beginning. " 

Sinnett seemed to believe that Madame Blavatsky' s own
mediumship greatly reduced the value of the letters
and for this reason he held that they ought not to be
published. He wrote in 1905, "The correspondence as a
whole was terribly contaminated by what one can only
treat as Madame Blavatsky 's own mediumship in the
matter ... The extracts I published in The Occult
World were selected with great care and they, I feel
sure, reflected the Master's thought with sufficient
accuracy. But it must always be remembered that
correspondence from a Master, precipitated through the
mediumship of a chela cannot always be regarded as His
ipsissima verba" C. Jinarajadasa, The Story of the
Mahatma Letters, p.25) 

The writers of the letters themselves directed that
they were not to be printed. "My letters must not be
published ...., " wrote K.H. And again, , "The letters
... were not written for publication or public comment
upon them, but for private use, and neither M. nor I
will ever give our consent to see them thus handled."
(The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, letter 63). The
contents of the letters were described as "crude and
complicated materials" (Ibid). 

Those who came after Madame Blavatsky in this present
century said that little about the letters. Mrs.
Besant would not have said anything that might have
been construed as an adverse criticism of her teacher,
H.P.B. She certainly deplored the publication of the
letters to Sinnett. Bishop Leadbeater also said little
about the letters, though he was the recipient of
several, but he recorded in his little book Messages
from the Unseen the view that they were written
largely by chelas (quoting H.P. B to that effect) and
so are not to be regarded as all direct communications
from the Masters or as an exact rendering of Their
teaching. Mr. Jinarajadasa, who wrote much about the
letters, generally referred to them as if, in a formal
way, they came from the Masters, but at the same time
- as is clear from the source references in this
article - he published most of the evidence on which
one may form a clear impression of the obscure and
composite authorship of the letters. Mr. A Trevor
Barker, who published The Mahatma Letters to A.P.
Sinnett , seems to have been alone, among those
associated with the letters, in putting forward the
letters as the actual words of the Masters and as a
definitive authority on the topics with which they
deal. . . .

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Excerpted from:

MADAME BLAVATSKY AND THE MAHATMA LETTERS
By HUGH SHEARMAN
The Theosophist June 1967