Theos-Talk Archives (May 2006 Message tt00672)

Friday, May 19, 2006

 

Dear Friends:

 

Recent exchanges speak of some personal experiences on recollection  of
which some individuals claimed to have seen. met or communicated with HPB –
as she appeared in her last personality.

 

As this subject was considered as early as in 1883, here is a reprint of
that statement.

 

 

            HPB NOT COMMUNICATING AFTER DEATH

            ==========================================

 

 

UNDER THE SHADOW OF GREAT NAMES

 

                        H P B 

 

 

[The Theosophist, Vol. IV, No. 6, March, 1883, p. 137]

 

 

The common vice of trying to palm off upon the world the

crude imaginings or rhapsodical concoctions of one’s own

brain, by claiming their utterance as under divine

inspiration, prevails largely among our esteemed friends,

the Spiritualists. 

 

Many clever persons known as “trance

speakers” and “inspirational writers” keep the thing up at

a lively rate, turning out oration after oration and book

after book as coming from the great dead, the planetary

spirits, and even from God. 

 

The great names of antiquity

are evoked to father feeble books, and no sooner is it

known that a prominent character is deceased than some

mediums pretend to be his telephones, to discourse

platitudes before sympathetic audiences. Shakespeare’s

imagination pictured to his mind the mighty Caesar, turned

to clay, being made to ‘stop a hole to keep the wind

away,”* [* [Hamlet, Act V, Sc. I, 235.] ]but had he made a 

forecast of our Modern Spiritualism, he would have found 

an even worse satire upon the impermanency of human 

greatness, in the prospect of the dead Caesar 

being forced to say stupidities that, alive, he

would not have tolerated in one of his foot soldiers. 

 

Some of our more optimistic friends of the spiritualistic party

postulate a halcyon time when mediumistic utterances will

be judged according to their intrinsic merit, like other

oratorical and literary productions, and it is to be hoped 

they may not deceive themselves. 

 

The number of bright minds that are occupying

themselves with this great subject is assuredly on the

increase, and with such men as “M.A. (Oxon),” Mr. Massey,

Mr. Roden Noel, and others of that class, spiritualistic

literature is always being enriched. 

 

But at the same time we see no diminution as regards bogus 

platform sermons claiming to come from Judge Edmonds, 

Robert Dale Owen, Epes Sargent, and Professors Hare and 

Mapes, or books ascribed to the inspiration of Jehovah and 

his ancient Spirits. 

 

Our poor Mr. Bennett, of the Truthseeker, had scarcely had time

to die before he was paraded as a spirit-control by an

American medium. 

 

The future has a gloomy look indeed to us

when we think that, despite their best endeavours to the

contrary, the Founders of the Theosophical Society are

quite as liable as either of the eminent gentlemen above

mentioned—with all of whom the writer was personally

acquainted, and neither of whom, in all probability, ever

communicated one word that their alleged mediums attribute

to them—to an involuntary post-mortem recantation of their

most cherished and avowed ideas. 

 

We have been prompted to these remarks by a convincing 

demonstration, by the Religio-Philosophical Journal, that a 

recent “trance address” by our dear deceased friend Epes 

Sargent, through a certain medium, was a sheer fabrication. 

 

A comparison of the same with Mr. Sargent’s last and greatest

spiritualistic work, The Scientific Basis of Spiritualism,

shows beyond question that he could never have inspired any

such mediumistic oration. 

 

While it is yet time, both the founders of the Theosophical 

Society place upon record their solemn promise that they 

will let trance mediums severely alone after they get to

 “the other side.” 

 

 

If after this, any of the talking fraternity take their names in

vain, they hope that at least their theosophical confrères

will unearth this paragraph and warn the trespassers off

their astral premises. 

 

So far as we have observed, the best trance speakers 

have been those who bragged least about their controls. 

“Good wine needs no bush,” says the adage. 

 

=======================

 

 

 

Dallas

 



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