Theos-Talk Archives (February 2009 Message tt00374)

Dear Daniel and Anand,

Maybe the truth is somewhere in a third possibility in which everybody is seen as making both false and true statements:

1) HPB did produce both genuine and fake phenomena and made both true and false claims.

2) The Coulombs et al exposed some of the fraud, and by doing so think they also refuted the genuine stuff

3) CWL was both a clairvoyant and deluded/deluding hoaxter

Therefore:

1) There is no sufficient basis to construe HPB, CWL (or K for that matter) as 'sacred' persons and their writings as 'sacred' writings. It takes a leap of faith to do so, which is fine with me, but it's still a leap.

2) There is no sufficient basis to think that HPB, CWL (and K) are exposed as total frauds merely by finding some fraud.

Personaly I think it's good to waver between intuitive faith and rational doubt, even while sharpening both one's critical rational apparatus and intuitive sense, and the flexibility to manage their interaction. 

Govert

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

For training purpose I'd throw out the following and see how we'll deal with it:

HPB claimed to have met Morya in August of 1851 somewhere in England. She initially had told her friend Wachtmeister he meeting occured in Hyde Park (London), and in her scrapbook she had written that it was Ramsgate (on the North Sea coast, east from London, north from Dover). 

HPB: "Memorable night! On a certain night by the light of the moon that was setting at Ramsgate on August 12, 1851,* when I met [symbol] the Master of my dreams!!" 

Accompanying the text is a sketch of what looks like a seaside harbor. See; http://www.katinkahesselink.net/blavatsky/articles/v1/hlc_sketchbook.htm

The discrepancy was explained by HPB as being a 'blind' or disinformation with Ramsgate the blind for Hyde Park. 

Wachtmeister: "H.P.B. told me that it was a blind, so that anyone casually taking up her book would not know where she had met her Master, and that her first interview with him had been in London as she had previously told me." 

Why it was important that she had to disinform others about the spot is not clear and there is nothing obvious about it. On the contrary, there doesn't seem to be any reason at all for changing the location. What could be deduced form the location? And which was the original spot and which one the blind? I ask this because it can be the case that, once you allow such blinds, there is no reason to reject double blinds, i.e. that in this case that it really was Ramsgate where HPB met the Master of her dreams and Hyde Park was the blind, but then tells her friend it was other way around. 

The above hypothesis I'm putting forward because I recently acquired a short but very intriguing study that does put forward a plausible explanation: 

S.B. Liljegren "Bulwer-Lytton's Novels and Isis Unveiled" (Uppsala - Copenhagen - Cambridge, MA: A.-B. Lundequistska Bokhandeln - Ejnar Munksgaard - Harvard University Press, 1957)
 

Liljegren's proposal is that HPB in those days was very much influenced by the novels of Bulwer-Lytton, to the point of having developed something of an infatuation with the famous writer. With the help of Bulwer's son Liljegren established the fact that Bulwer was at Ramsgate during that summer. Both men found it "extremely probable" (p. 28) that, given Bulwer's status and whereabouts and HPB's high regard for him, that HPB's Master of her dreams was none other than the novelist and that she only merely saw him, but never met.

Now, back to this 'blind' business and fill out the full hypothesis: HPB had to use a double blind story about the actual wherabouts, Ramsgate, of her meeting with her master, as the actual spot might have given away the actual identity of this master, the novelist Bulwer-Lytton, as she might have thought it to be generally known that he was there that summer. (On top of that Bulwer's grandfather used to live close to Ramsgate and visited him in his youth). So, HPB's scrapbook entry is true, then she tells Wachtmeister it is a blind for Hyde Park, which story therefore by itself is the real blind to cover up the plausible deduction that her master of her dreams was a famous novelist and not an oriental prince, who recruited her for her life's work. In this light the latter story then of course also becomes problematic as it takes out one of the many parts that legitimize her life's work. 

One way to possibly rescue the 1851 HPB-Morya meet is to establish that the symbol she used for her master in her scrapbook could in no way be construed as referring to Bulwer-Lytton. In the quotes used by others (Goodrick-Clarke, Neff) the symbol is mostly reproduced as a capital m followed by the masonic triangular dots: " M.'. " In the reproduction of the scrapbook it actually looks more like "Mo.. " with the two dots just under and to the right of the o. So, "Mo" could be short for Morya with the two dots indicating something esoteric. (BTW, if it reads "Mo" that would more or less refute Paul K. Johnson's idea that the M stood for Mazzini, the italian nationalist who then resided in London).  

Any refutations or back-up for the above elaborate conjecture?



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]