Page:Isis very much unveiled - being the story of the great Mahatma hoax (IA b24884273).pdf/19

Rh too, and such twadding, such very twaddling, treatises! One disciple—Damodar K. Mavalankar, a youth passionately ambitious of fame—even advanced to the acquirement of some of these extraordinary powers in his own person. Merely to have seen the astral body of a Mahatma became in a manner a cheap accomplishment. Damodar boasted that he had once or twice projected his own—slipping spook-like through a brick wall.

Most of these marvels, as I have hinted, required the mise en scène of the Adyar bungalow. Here Madame and the Colonel, and a few favoured chelas, had apartments. “Our domestic imbeciles” and “our familiar muffs” the latter are termed in one of the letters attributed to Madame. Here, too, in the “Occult Room” adjoining Madame’s bed-chamber, hung the famous “Shrine,” a sort of cupboard containing a fancy portrait in oils of the condescending Koot. This became associated with as many marvels as the image of a mediæval saint. Suppose you are an intending Theosophist—a hesitating convert, especially a moneyed one, like Mr. Jacob Sassoon. You call at headquarters. You are shown round by Damodar, or by M. or Madame Coulomb, librarian and secretary. With natural curiosity you ask to gaze upon the Master’s features. You are told of his indulgent concessions to deserving neophytes seeking for a sign. When the cupboard has been shut again, you are asked if there is anything you particularly desire from the Master. You indicate, not unnaturally, a message. It is about even chances whether the said message—reading generally not unlike Mr. Martin Tupper in his more oracular vein—is discovered in the cupboard immediately on reopening the door, or descends from the ceiling on to the top of your head.

The fame of these things, set out in the driest possible detail in the pages of “The Occult World,” aroused a furore of curiosity in this country, where people were just beginning to take a new interest in questions of psychical research. It was about the time when family circles played the “willing game,” and sat in the dark trying to see purple flames coming out of a magnet. Quick to seize the psychological moment, Madame Blavatsky came to England and “starred” London in the season of 1884. In her train came