Apparitions of the Blessed Ones

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · The Masque of Love Series · 5 pages

Five pages from "Projection of the Double," first published in The Theosophist in October 1883 and republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume V. A headnote states the position the article assumes rather than argues — that the existence of the Mahatmas, their power to travel at will in the inner or astral body, to keep full command of their intelligence while doing so, and to condense the phantom form into visibility or dissolve it at pleasure, are facts too well established to be treated as an open question.

What follows is testimony rather than doctrine, and the first account is the most detailed. A member of the editorial staff of the New York World described an evening at the Society's headquarters in New York in 1878. Someone among the visitors had doubted whether an adept could leave his physical body torpid in the Himalayas and cross land and sea in his Māyāvi-rūpa to the other side of the world. Three or four of the company were sitting facing two large windows giving onto the Avenue, then brightly lit by shop and street lamps. The doubt had barely been spoken when they simultaneously started and pointed at the left-hand window: everyone looking saw, passing slowly outside from left to right, first one and then another figure of Asiatic men, wearing fehtas on their heads and clad in the long white garments of the East. The figures passed out of sight, returned, repassed the window and were seen no more. Two of the witnesses, named as Colonel Olcott and the editor of the journal, recognised them from personal acquaintance. The value of the piece lies in its being contemporary reporting from an outside newspaper rather than an internal claim, and the file presents it that way.

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