Theos-Talk Archives (January 1997 Message tl00613)

> PART IV
> > > 
>      In this section, Mr. Caldwell says that my conclusion
> concerning the Tibetan cover story about Morya and Koot Hoomi
> is an "invention" used to explain away any evidence or
> testimony contradictory to my hypotheses about them.  In fact,
> well before I reached any hypotheses about Ranbir Singh and
> Thakar Singh, the Tibetan claims made by HPB had impressed me
> as highly suspicious and a likely cover story concealing the
> real location of the adepts.  This was a theme of several other
> researchers in the 1980s, including Ian Brown, an initiate
> into Gelugpa Tibetan Buddhism, and Robert Gilbert, a respected
> esoteric historian.  My paper at the 1986 Theosophical History
> Conference was devoted to this theme, but the focus was then
> Sufi connections rather than Hindu maharajas or Sikh
> reformers.  Mr. Caldwell also assumes for some reason that I
> "want" to believe that Mohini's investigation into Tibetan
> "Koothoompas" was bogus, not believing me able to reach
> conclusions that are not what I want to believe.  In fact, my
> Theosophical beliefs were repeatedly challenged in the
> course of research and writing, and I reached many conclusions
> that were not particularly welcome.  Mohini's short-lived
> affiliation with the TS and his later total repudiation of it
> led me to doubt the extent to which he was sincerely persuaded
> by his own "investigation"; the Mahatma letters to him do have
> a questionable tone, as in "Make it as strong as you can."  Mr
> Caldwell's point is well taken, however, concerning the
> unlikelihood that Mohini would concoct testimony using the
> names of prominent friends and relations as witnesses.  But
> whether or not the peddler and Brahmacharin were genuine
> witnesses themselves is the more important question.  No other
> evidence of "Koothoompas" having come to light, their
> testimonies remain suspicious and possibly staged.
> > > 
> PART V
> > > 
>      Here Mr. Caldwell provides ample evidence to associate the
> name "Kashmir" with Koot Hoomi rather than Morya, and points
> out my careless mistake concerning the drawing by HPB which I
> took to show only one adept but in fact shows two, "Morya" and
> "Kashmere."  My mistake was in taking the central drawing for a
> second depiction of Olcott (his higher self, perhaps) rather
> than a portrait of an adept.  Their identical beards in the two
> drawings led to that error.  Mr. Caldwell's research in
> Olcott's diary and other sources I did not consult both
> clarifies my error and raises another question.  "Kashmir" was
> a standard way of referring to Maharaja Ranbir Singh (as seen
> in a Mahatma letter, illustrating the general practice of
> calling maharajas by the names of their kingdoms) and Judge
> was being told that a Master "Kashmere" was one of the secret
> sponsors of the TS.  Olcott's diary identifies K.H. with
> "Kashmir," a name that was generally kept secret.  Even though
> other evidence makes Ranbir Singh seem more related to Morya
> than Koot Hoomi, Mr. Caldwell's research points out a link
> between the name "Kashmir" and the latter adept.  This is
> presented by him as conclusive proof of my scholarly ineptitude
> and the falseness of my hypotheses.  But another look at his
> findings from a different perspective shows them to be
> supportive of my approach.  In the world of Olcott and HPB, one
> adept name is sometimes found shading into another without any
> clear sense of what is happening behind the scenes. The lines
> between "John King" and "Serapis" are not entirely clear, while
> both "Sahib" and "Maha Sahib" seem to refer to Serapis in
> some places but not others.  If the name "Kashmir" was being
> bandied about privately as the secret name for one of the two
> main Indian Mahatmas sponsoring the TS, this is significant
> evidence for the possibility that the historical person known
> as "Kashmir" was one of those hidden sponsors.  If this
> indicates confusion between the personae of Morya and Koot
> Hoomi, that is not in itself fatal to my hypotheses.  Only in
> Mr. Caldwell's orthodox worldview do all references to the same
> Mahatma have to be taken as accurate references to the same
> historical person.  If Morya and Koot Hoomi are both composite
> characters, as I maintain, they can overlap without any crisis
> resulting for my hypotheses about their primary prototypes.
>      Mr. Caldwell has spent at least three and a half years
> hunting for "numerous serious mistakes and inaccuracies" in my
> three books, and has come up with five minor errors to which I
> will freely admit: one misreading of an illustration and its
> captions, one case of assuming that two passages refer to the
> same person when they might not, one question expressing
> suspicion about the meaning of a phrase in a Mahatma letter
> which on further inspection seems unjustified, one date that
> was three days off, and one case of confusing the publication
> history of one work with that of another by the same author.
> Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa.  None of
> these mistakes bears any weight in the total argument, and if
> all the passages containing them were removed the books (over
> 800 pages collectively) would be half a page shorter and
> substantively unchanged.  Therefore the "house of cards"
> analogy, in Mr. Caldwell's destructive meaning, does not
> withstand scrutiny.  The rest of his charges amount to a
> refusal to acknowledge any basis for weighing different
> testimonies about the Masters and judging some as less credible
> than others, insisting that all be taken at face value.
> > > 
> PART VI
> > > 
>      Here Mr. Caldwell attempts to read my mind, saying that
> "Johnson wants to believe that Das gave certain Tibetan
> manuscripts to Blavatsky," and later calling my admitted
> speculations about this possibility "assertions."  He goes on
> to say that "the Master M., coming to visit HPB and Olcott at
> Bombay, *does not* and *cannot* exist in Johnson's own version
> of Theosophical `reality.'"  My version of Theosophical reality
> is open-ended and ever-changing, so it hardly constrains my
> thinking in the way that Mr. Caldwell's version appears to
> contrain his own.  In fact, I have no particular
> reason to prefer one explanation to another concerning who came
> to Bombay that day, or about how Blavatsky's writings became so
> much better informed about Tibetan matters in the last ten
> years of her life.  But in the latter case it makes more sense
> to look at events during those years for an explanation; if
> she had acquired such information years before why are her
> early writings so ill-informed about Tibetan Buddhism?  There
> are coincidences of timing between Das's trip to Tibet and
> HPB's remarks about access to the "Chohan Lama" which led to my
> proposing the hypothesis that the latter is a name for the
> Sengchen Tulku, Das's host in Tibet.  But this is only a
> possibility, and others exist; I have no strong feelings in the
> matter.  As for Mr. Caldwell's questions about why I consider
> the quoted passages from HPB and K.H. about the visit to Sikkim
> to be disinformation, and why various claims about M. and K.H.
> living in Tibet appear to belong to the same category, I offer
> two compelling reasons.  These are both mentioned in
> *Initiates* but perhaps the import of these pieces of evidence
> was insufficiently stressed.  In a letter to Mary
> Hollis-Billings written in 1880, HPB wrote that the home of
> K.H. was "in Little Tibet [Ladakh] and now belongs to
> Kashmir."  She added that Morya frequently stayed at this
> house.  Along the same lines, Damodar wrote to Judge that he
> had made an astral journey to K.H.'s house at "the upper end of
> Kashmir at the foot of the Himalayas."  He went on to describe
> the "Chief Central Place" where the "Great Hall" is located,
> containing the "Chief's Throne" where "all those of our
> section who are found deserving of initiation into the
> Mysteries have to go for their final ceremony."  This was
> alleged to be in "an open plane in L----h."  Was the home of
> K.H. in Ladakh, Kashmir, or Shigatse?  HPB tells
> Hollis-Billings Ladakh, but tells Sinnett and Hartmann Shigatse.
> Damodar tells Judge it is in Kashmir.  Was the headquarters of
> the Masters in Ladakh or Tibet?  Damodar tells Judge one thing
> in 1884, but Mohini writes another in *The Theosophist* the
> very same year.  Such discrepancies suggest that whatever the
> truth of the matter, Theosophical claims about Tibet are
> riddled with disinformation.
> > > 
> THEOSOPHICAL ORTHODOXY'S HOUSE OF CARDS
> > > 
>      In three books that consist overwhelmingly of historical
> and biographical information, the number of real errors Mr.
> Caldwell has found in three and a half years of searching is miniscule.  
> I wish the mistakes were nonexistent, but feel confident that if
> Mr. Caldwell were to apply the same pedantic scrutiny to any
> other three books on Theosophical history he would find at
> least an equal number.  (Far more, in the most successful
> recent book on the subject, *Madame Blavatsky's Baboon*.)  My
> work was rejected by Theosophical University Press (after ten
> months consideration), Theosophical Publishing House (after a
> year) and Point Loma Publications (after a year).  None of
> these publishers, despite the long waits involved, offered me a
> single substantive criticism of my research or any of my
> hypotheses.  It cannot be said that I failed to make a sincere
> effort to have my works scrutinized and corrected by
> Theosophical authorities.
>      Since I became a Theosophist in 1978, there have been
> (according to the OCLC database) 585 books published about
> Theosophy.  Some of these are reprints and translations of
> existing books, but many are new releases.  Among those
> discussing the Masters were Marion Meade's *Madame Blavatsky:
> the Woman Behind the Myth*, Peter Washington's *Madame
> Blavatsky's Baboon*, Gregory Tillett's *The Elder Brother*, and
> Bruce Campbell's *Ancient Wisdom Revived*, all of which assume
> or imply that HPB's Masters are entirely mythical.  In another
> category were Jean Overton Fuller's *Blavatsky and Her
> Teachers*, Sylvia Cranston's *HPB*, and Noel Richard-Nafarre's
> *Madame Blavatsky ou la reponse du Sphinx*, all of which assume
> that HPB's claims about the Masters are entirely reliable.  In
> yet another grouping are Elizabeth Clare Prophet's *The Great
> White Brotherhood in the Culture, History, and Religion of
> America* and Benjamin Creme's *The Reappearance of the Christ
> and the Masters of Wisdom*, whose authors allege that the
> Masters of HPB are currently communicating through them.
> Finally, there is Joscelyn Godwin's *The Theosophical
> Enlightenment*, which basically shares my perspective on the
> Masters as fictionalizations of real people, but does not dwell
> on the topic or endorse specific hypotheses about various
> Masters.  Of all the recent books discussing HPB and her
> Masters, *The Masters Revealed* was the only one attacked
> vigorously (in two lengthy and scathing reviews) by John Algeo, the
> president of the Theosophical Society in America, similar in
> tone to Mr. Caldwell's diatribe.  *The Theosophist* of Adyar,
> edited by TS international president Radha Burnier, ran a
> non-review by Dara Eklund entitled "The Masters Revealed" which
> never acknowledged the book's existence overtly, but implicitly
> pronounced its goal of historical identifications chimerical.
> And, of course, my book is the only one to receive years of
> relentless nitpicking from Mr. Caldwell.  Finally, I am the
> only Theosophical author who has been denounced as "pious" and
> "deferential" toward HPB in the pages of a prestigious literary
> journal.  What is going on here?  Why does my work make so many
> people so angry or fearful?  Why has Mr. Caldwell devoted such passionate
> effort to discrediting my work, at the same time that he
> promotes as reliable almost every other book on Theosophical
> history produced by Theosophists?  More puzzling to me, why
> does he virtually ignore the large body of works that are
> hostile to Blavatsky and dismissive of the Masters' existence,
> while spending years publicly bombarding me, a basically friendly
> Theosophical author, with blame and disdain?  During the last
> three and a half years that I have been regularly attacked by
> Mr. Caldwell, these questions have arisen again and again, and
> they remain perplexing.  One likely incentive suggests itself:
> Mr. Caldwell has ingratiated himself with Theosophical
> orthodoxy by leading the charge against my work.  Since he and
> John Algeo have emerged as the chief denouncers of my books,
> Dr. Algeo has announced that under his editorship Theosophical
> Publishing House will reprint Mr. Caldwell's compilation of
> laudatory accounts of HPB.  Theirs is to be the official party
> line (in which criticism of HPB is minimized) whereas my work
> is to be the officially repudiated "house of cards."
>      The behavior of Mr. Caldwell and Dr. Algeo in response to
> my work conveys an air of desperation.  Not content to point
> out a few flaws and praise a few strengths, they ignore the
> evidence on behalf of the hypotheses offered ("No evidence" is
> repeated like a mantram in Dr. Algeo's reviews) and attempt to
> demolish my credibility.  Such extreme tactics directed toward
> a member of the same spiritual organization suggests that they
> perceive the stakes to be very high.  Why is my work perceived
> by them as more "dangerous" than others which address the same
> topic?  What they are defending has all the earmarks of a true
> "house of cards": a complex structure resting on a chain of
> inferences and rooted in demonstrably false assumptions.  (That
> HPB and Olcott's accounts of the Masters are consistent and
> reliable, most notably.)  My hypotheses provide a paradigm
> shift in approaches to the Masters, a shift that is extremely
> unwelcome in orthodox circles.  If the Theosophical movement
> advances toward recognizing the need to sort out truth from
> fiction on the topic of the Masters, many things become
> subject to question.  Most notably for Mme. Burnier and Dr.
> Algeo, these are the legitimacy of the Esoteric Section based
> on its alleged sponsorship by the Masters, since the TS remains
> dominated by this secret inner group.  Most importantly for Mr.
> Caldwell, it might become necessary to reevaluate the spiritual
> status of Mme. Blavatsky and her Masters and the authority of
> texts he considers sacred.  In order to forestall such
> developments, they have chosen to kill the messenger through
> an intellectualized form of character assassination.  I can
> only hope that perceptive readers will recognize such tactics
> and what they reveal about those who use them.  They strain
> at the gnat of my minor errors, while swallowing the camel
> of HPB's total credibility.  This is their only strategy for
> propping up the house of cards in which orthodox Theosophists
> have been living for the past century.  Until they can offer
> their own explanation of the evidence I have presented, and
> arguments for their interpretation of HPB, it will be obvious that they
> are more interested in defending dogmas than in searching for truth.
> This, in the words of the Gospel of Matthew, is the behavior of
> "blind guides."
> 
>