Theos-Talk Archives (June 2004 Message tt00156)

In Old Diary Leaves (I, 40-42), Henry Olcott writes about
the following phenomenon:

=====================================================
An experiment [was] made by HPB, with myself 
as a passive agent after my coming to her house 
in Philadelphia. She was tipping tables for me, 
with and without the contact between her hands 
and the table, making loud and tiny raps—sometimes 
while holding her hand six inches above the 
wood and sometimes while resting her hand upon 
mine as it lay flat upon the table—and spelling 
out messages to me from the pretended John King, 
which, as rapped out by the alphabet, I recorded 
on scraps of paper. At last some of these messages 
relating to third parties seemed worth keeping, so 
one day, on my way home, I bought a reporter's 
notebook, and, on getting to the house, showed it 
to her and explained its intended use. She was 
seated at the time and I standing. Without touching 
the book or making any mystical pass or sign, she 
told me to put it in my bosom. I did so, and after a moment's pause 
she bade me take it out and look within. This is what I found inside 
the first cover, written and drawn on the white lining paper in lead 
pencil:

JOHN KING,
HENRY DE MORGAN,
his book.
4th of the Fourth month in A.D. 1875.

Underneath this, the drawing of a Rosicrucian jewel; over the arch of 
the jeweled crown, the word FATE; beneath which is her name, "Helen," 
followed by what looks like 99, something smudged out, and then a 
simple + [etc.]. I have the book on my table as I write, and my 
description is taken from the drawing itself. One striking feature of 
this example of psycho-dynamics is the fact that no one but myself 
had touched the book after it was purchased; I had had it in my 
pocket until it was shown to HPB, from the distance of two or three 
feet, had myself held it in my bosom, removed it a moment later when 
bidden, and the precipitation of the lead-pencil writing and drawing 
had been done while the book was inside my waistcoat. Now the writing 
inside the cover of the book is very peculiar. It is a quaint and 
quite individual handwriting, not like HPB's, but identical with that 
in all the written messages I had from first to last from "John 
King." HPB having, then, the power of precipitation, must have 
transferred from her mind to the paper the images of words traced in 
this special style of script; or, if not she, but some other expert 
in this art did it, then that other person must have done it in that 
same way—i.e., have first pictured to himself mentally the images
of 
those words and that drawing, and then precipitated, that is, made 
them visible on the paper, as though written with a lead pencil.
=========================================================

No doubt, Bart discounts this phenomenon. And I'm sure
he can show us the truthfulness of Hyman's statement
that "it is ALWAYS possible to 'imagine'
some scenario in which [for example] cheating
[or lying or trickery], no matter how implausible,
could have occurred."

Daniel