Western Adepts and Eastern Theosophists

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 13 pages

From the November 1881 supplement to The Theosophist, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings III as Western "Adepts" and Eastern Theosophists. It is a record of a press campaign rather than a doctrinal piece. Since the appearance of The Occult World, the London Spiritualist had undertaken a series of weekly attacks on it: first doubting the existence of Koot Hoomi on the ground that Sinnett had never seen him, then advancing the hypothesis that nobody else had either.

What she objects to is the way each answer was met with a new objection. When seven Theosophists — four Indians and three Europeans — declared over their own signatures that they had seen him, a pretext for invalidating their testimony was immediately found: that since nobody in England knew whether the lives and characters of the witnesses entitled their evidence to be accepted, little confidence could be placed in it. It was then urged that neither Mrs Gordon nor Colonel Olcott had testified — and when both did send in their evidence, she notes drily that it remained to be seen whether the letters would be published, and what would be attempted to discredit them. For three months, she writes, the paper never appeared without an attack or two of more or less doubtful literary refinement.

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