founders, and the officials, and the official acts of the Theosophical Society are all thrown over—What remains of the society? “We have absolutely no creed,” the European secretary told an interviewer the other day—(all unfettered by the fact that he distributes broadcast Mrs. Besant’s “Introduction to Theosophy” with a complete pseudo-Buddhistic cosmology about the Seven Planes, &c., authenticated by direct reference to the Masters, and particularising, for instance, that “Devachan” lasts “for average persons some fifteen centuries” !)—“Absolutely no creed.” “You would simply call yours a moral or religious society, then?” asked the puzzled interviewer. To which Mr. Mead naïvely replies, “I don’t exactly know what you would call it.”—(Sunday Times, Nov. 11.)
Since scholarship has opened the stores of the East to Western culture, there has been a natural awakening of popular interest in Eastern directions. While that lasts, people discussing each other’s souls will continue to sprinkle their remarks, harmlessly enough, with those mingled jargons which make a true Orientalist smile. If “Theosophy” means that, “Theosophy” has certainly some life before it; but as for the Theosophical Society—“why cumbereth it the ground?” It is an organised machine for taking in the Honest Enthusiast at one end, passing him through the stages of the Willing Dupe and the Conscientious Humbug, and turning him out at the other end at worst a conscious fraud, at best a dreary and disillusioned cynic.
Enough of the logical and ethical fog that Theosophy diffuses!—the Mahatmosphere, as one might call it. It is a relief to escape from it into the fresh air of common honesty and common sense.
