Page:Isis very much unveiled - being the story of the great Mahatma hoax (IA b24884273).pdf/112

have been exposed in “Isis Very Much Unveiled.” What else is there? One Theosophist directs me to “our literature on the subject, which is copious.” I don’t doubt it; but it is not “literature” that I am in search of. Another declares “it does not all depend on Madame Blavatsky and Mr. Judge; others have seen Mahatmas.” It seems that Mrs. Besant has been telling her Australian audiences that she herself has been so favoured (just as she told the Hall of Science audience that she had been favoured with supernatural missives). Well, how did Mrs. Besant know her Mahatma? By his “portrait,” I suppose, as others have done. And how was that portrait produced? When Madame Blavatsky began to spell spiritualism “Theosophy,” and turned her “spirit-control” “John King,” of whom Colonel Olcott tells, into Master Koot Hoomi—whom she again subordinated, after the Kiddle exposure, to Mahatma Morya, whom she, in turn, after the S.P.R. Report, left over for exploitation by Mr. Judge—when Madame started the Mahatma on this chequered career, it was one of her earliest steps to secure a counterfeit presentment of her creation. Various artists and amateurs were set to paint portraits under occult inspiration. The results may all have resembled the Protean Mahatma; some of them were strikingly unlike each other. The two best were done by Mr. Schmiechen, now a society portrait-painter, partly out of his head, partly from directions given by Madame, and partly from a photograph of a typical Hindu which she gave him for the purpose. Madame identified one as Koot and the other as Morya, and declared they were speaking likenesses—an opinion which nobody else was in a position to contradict. They hang to-day in the “Occult Room” at Adyar, and are declared to have been painted from the respective “astral bodies” of their subjects. Colonel Olcott, president, who knows their origin perfectly well, exhibits them reverently to barefoot disciples doing “puja.” Photographs from the fancy portrait of “M,” in locked cases, have been distributed to the Esoteric few; Mrs. Besant always works with one facing her; Madame Blavatsky made it part of a chela’s course to spend some time daily staring at the image, and deliberately trying to “visualise” it in corners of the room. What wonder if some of them have succeeded? It would