issued answers to letters placed within its recesses, from which
secret facts were revealed, and a variety of interesting marvels
performed. Discords arose within the household, and led to the
publication by M. and Mme. Coulomb, her confederates, of letters
illuminating the tricks of the trade by which the miracles had been
produced. Mme. Blavatsky pronounced the letters to be forgeries,
but they were sufficiently momentous to bring Mr. Hodgson to India
to investigate for the Society for Psychical Research. He was able
to deprive many of the miracles of their mystery; to show how the
shrine from which the Mahatma's messages emanated was accessible to
Mme. Blavatsky by the aid of sliding panels and secret drawers, to
show that these messages were in style, spelling, and handwriting
the counterpart of Mme. Blavatsky's, to show that many of the
phenomena were the result of planned collusion and that others were
created by the limitless credulity and the imaginative exaggeration
of the witnesses,--"domestic imbeciles," as madame confidentially
referred to them. Through the Akasic force, the medium of which was
the mysterious world-ether, Akaz, were brought messages that suddenly
appeared in space or fluttered down from the ceiling; yet M. Coulomb
explained how by means of a piece of thread, a convenient recess
in the plaster of the ceiling, and an arranged signal, the letters
could be made to appear at the proper dramatic moment. When a saucer
was left standing near the edge of a shelf in the shrine, and the
opening of the door brought it to the floor shattered to pieces, the
same mysterious force was sufficient to recreate it, without flaw
or blemish; but when Mr. Hodgson finds that at a shop at which Mme.
Blavatsky had made purchases, two such articles had been sold at the
price of two rupees eight annas the pair, the miracle becomes more
intelligible.
In brief, the report of the society convicted "the Priestess of Isis"
of "a long continued combination with other persons to produce by
ordinary means a series of apparent marvels for the support of the
Theosophic movement;" and concludes with these words: "For our own
part, we regard her neither as the mouthpiece of hidden seers nor as
a mere vulgar adventuress; we think that she has achieved a title to
permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and
interesting impostors in history." Mme. Blavatsky died in 1891, and
her ashes were divided between Adyar, London, and New York.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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