"The Man In The Stone Room: Koot Hoomi's Samādhi" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "H.P. Blavatsky And The Spr: An Examination Of The Hodgson Report Of 1885"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
September 27
The Man In The Stone Room: Koot Hoomi's Samādhi
A square stone building somewhere
beyond Ladakh, in the direction of the Karakorams… No windows, no doors—the
only way in is an underground passage running from a chamber in the monastery.
Inside, a man's body lies cold and stiff on the floor while his spiritual
superior comes and goes, tending it. The Himalayas stand to the right. There's
a lake nearby. The body will lie there for three months, and the man inside it
is not, in any sense his correspondents would recognize, dead…
That's the scene as Helena Blavatsky described it in a letter written on October 2, 1881, to Mrs. Hollis Billings. The man in the stone room was Koot Hoomi, and according to Theosophical chronology he had entered samādhi around September 27—a continuous trance undertaken to prepare for his initiation, the last but one, after which he would become one of the highest adepts. Nobody wrote anything down on the day itself, but what we can fix more firmly is the other end: “K.H.” came out of it on December 24, 1881, and resumed writing to A. P. Sinnett on New Year's Day.
Sinnett is the reason any of this is
documented, as he was the editor of The Pioneer, then the most important
English-language newspaper in India, and between roughly 1880 and 1885 he and
A. O. Hume received well over a hundred letters purporting to come from two
adepts—Koot Hoomi and Morya—through Blavatsky's mediation. Those letters became
The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett when A. T. Barker published them in 1923,
and they are the foundational document of modern Theosophy (the originals now sit
in the British Library). During
K.H.'s three-month absence, Morya took over the correspondence. The two voices
are not remotely alike, as Sinnett described K.H.'s letters as unfailingly
courteous and carefully phrased, a man who would write half a page rather than
risk a careless sentence wounding somebody; Morya, however, was blunt to the
point of rudeness. The handwriting differs too, consistently, across years and
hundreds of pages. In
December 1885, the Society for Psychical Research published the report of a committee appointed to investigate
the phenomena connected with the Theosophical Society. The bulk of it was written by Richard Hodgson, who had gone to India to
look into Blavatsky directly, and his conclusions were endorsed by Gurney,
Myers, Podmore, both Sidgwicks and J. H. Stack. The committee branded her “one
of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting impostors in history.” The
central charge was specific and documentary: that Blavatsky had written the
Mahatma Letters herself, in a disguised hand. That verdict stuck, and has been repeated in
encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries ever since, and for most educated
readers it is simply the settled fact about Madame Blavatsky.
Then, in April 1986, almost exactly a century later, the SPR's own Journal published a startling deconstruction of it. The author was Vernon Harrison, a professional examiner of questioned documents who had spent ten years as Research Manager at Thomas De La Rue ( the famed banknote printers—which is to say he detected forgery for a living). He was also a past President of the Royal Photographic Society. His paper was titled J'Accuse, and the SPR ran it, in its own words, in the interests of “truth and fair play,” and, on the eighth of May that year, the Society issued a press release stating that Blavatsky had been unjustly condemned.
Harrison found the Hodgson Report
riddled with slanted statements, conjecture presented as established fact,
uncorroborated testimony from unnamed witnesses, selective use of evidence and
outright falsehood. He noted that Hodgson had supplied no illustration at all
of the supposedly incriminating Blavatsky-Coulomb letters he made so much of,
and that the only reproductions of the Mahatma Letters in the Report were
fragments—mostly isolated characters. Hodgson had begun, by his own account,
favorably disposed toward the claims he was investigating; by the time he
wrote, Harrison argued, hostility and contempt had replaced inquiry. He then did what Hodgson had not: over
the following decade he examined, line by line and under magnification, every
one of the 1,323 color slides of the Mahatma Letters in the British Library
set. His 1997 monograph concluded that the Report was worse than he had first
thought—flawed and untrustworthy, to be read with great caution if not
disregarded entirely.
Yet, Harrison did not prove
that the Mahatmas existed, or that that Koot Hoomi wrote anything. What he
established is that the case against Blavatsky was built badly by a hostile
investigator who withheld his evidence and overstated his findings.
So where does that leave today's date? In an interesting position, actually. If Blavatsky forged the entire correspondence, then across those three months she sustained a second distinct handwriting and a second distinct personality (a relatively rude one, markedly unlike her own prose, and unlike K.H.'s), while simultaneously conducting her own enormous correspondence in her own hand. While that is not impossible (skilled hoaxers have done stranger things), it isn't trivial either, and the samādhi episode is precisely where the difficulty concentrates. A skeptical reading is equally available and equally fair: a three-month absence is exactly what you would arrange if you needed to change voices, buy time, or explain a gap. The convenience cuts both ways, and anyone who tells you this is settled in either direction is selling something.
But pay close attention to the
technical vocabulary of the letters … The condition Blavatsky described is not
a Victorian séance-room trance (a prolonged cataleptic samādhi, a body
prepared in advance, an attendant guarding it, the practitioner's consciousness
free of it for months). That framework belongs to Indic and Tibetan
contemplative literature, not to Western spiritualism, and in 1881 almost
nobody in Europe or America had access to it. Either it came from somewhere
real, or Blavatsky had absorbed enough genuine material to invent it
convincingly. Both possibilities are more interesting than the cartoon of the
fraudulent medium rapping tables—and Blavatsky was anything but that.
H.P. Blavatsky And The Spr: An Examination Of The Hodgson Report Of 1885
Vernon Harrison / Theosophical University Press, Pasadena, 1997
Vernon Harrison's H.P. Blavatsky and the SPR comes from the Theosophical University Press, not from any publisher on our regular roster. Harrison wrote the book in 1997, over a decade after the SPR's own Journal ran his original J'Accuse, and it is, in effect, the full case file behind the argument this blog just made in miniature: that Richard Hodgson's 1885 report condemning Blavatsky as fraudulent was not the careful forensic work it has been treated as for over a century, but a document riddled with unsupported assertions, selective evidence, and conclusions that outran what Hodgson had actually demonstrated. Harrison was not a Theosophist making a sympathetic case for a figure he admired. He was a professional examiner of questioned documents, ten years spent detecting forgery for Thomas De La Rue, the firm that printed banknotes and passports for half the world, and a past president of the Royal Photographic Society. When he says a document doesn't hold up, that verdict carries weight a century of encyclopedia entries simply don't.
What
makes the book worth your time rather than just the original SPR paper is the
sheer density of the evidence Harrison assembled after that first article. This
is the account of a decade spent examining, line by line and under
magnification, all 1,323 color slides of the Mahatma Letters held in the
British Library, comparing K.H.'s hand, Morya's hand, and Blavatsky's own hand
against each other with the same rigor he'd have applied to a disputed
banknote. The book reproduces plates the original Hodgson Report never bothered
to include, and lets you look at the actual evidence rather than take anyone's
word for it, Harrison's included.
Harrison's work does not prove the Mahatmas existed, and it doesn't hand Blavatsky a clean bill of health on every front. What it does, conclusively, is dismantle the specific case against her that generations of reference books have repeated as settled fact. That's a narrower claim than a believer might want, and a more interesting one than a skeptic might expect. If today's post left you wanting to look at the primary evidence yourself rather than take our word, or Hodgson's, or Harrison's, this is the primary source.
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