THE BEGINNING OF MRS BESANT'S PRESIDENCY
Immediately following Mme Blavatsky's death a violent debate arose between Olcott, Judge, and Mrs Besant, each of the three claiming the succession and alleging direct communication with the 'Mahătmăs' while accusing the others of imposture. Moreover, each of the three intended to exploit to his or her advantage the rivalry of the three sections, Asian, American and European, which they respectively headed. Naturally, every effort was made at first to hide these dissensions. Blavatsky died on May 8, 1891, and on May 19 a statement was published in London in which, after a protest against the 'calumnies' to which the memory of the founder had been subjected, one reads the following:
Respecting those who entertain the bizarre notion that Mme Blavatsky's death could give rise to disputes 'over her place, which has become vacant,' allow us say that the organization of the Theosophical Society has not and will not undergo any change in consequence of her death. Mme H.P. Blavatsky was the founder of the Theosophical Society conjointly with Col. Olcott, President of the Society, and William Q. Judge, an eminent barrister from New York, Vice-President and head of the Theosophical movement in America, a situation which was not conferred-by 'coup d'état' or otherwise. Mme Blavatsky was, moreover, Secre-tary-Correspondent of the Society, an entirely honorific post,
and one which according to our statutes is not obligatory. For six months, owing to the growth of our Society, she took on the authority, delegated by Col. Olcott, of President for Europe with the aim of facilitating the good administration of our affairs, and through her death this office becomes vacant. Mme Blavatsky's important place was due to her knowledge, her power, and her firm loyalty, and not to the influence of the official position she filled. And so our outer organization will remain entirely unchanged. H.P. Blavatsky's primary function was to teach; whoever would succeed her must possess her knowledge.
This declaration bore the signatures of the leaders of the European section, including Annie Besant, C. Carter Blake, Herbert Burrows, Laura M. Cooper, Archibald Keightley, G.R.S. Mead, and also those of Walter R. Old, secretary of the English section, Countess Wachmeister, and Dr W. Wynn Westcott, who the following year would succeed Dr Robert Woodman as 'Supreme Magus' of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia.
The denial of the rumors that were starting to circulate did not correspond to the truth; this became noticeable when, on Jan 1, 1892, Olcott yielded the Presidency, offering his resignation in a letter addressed to Judge in which he put forward reasons of health and humbly requested his colleagues 'to consider him, not as a person worthy of honor, but as a sinner who was often wrong, but who had always tried to rise and help his fellow man.' Making this letter public on February 1 following, Olcott added a note showing a concern that each of the two opposing candidates, who stood in confrontation, be treated with consideration:
My visits to Europe and America have proved to me that the present state of the movement is very satisfying. I also noticed on my return to India that the newly formed Indian section is in good hands and on a solid basis. In Europe, Mrs Annie Besant, almost in a single bound, has entered the first rank. Through the well-known integrity of her character and conduct, her selfdenial, enthusiasm, and exceptional ability, she has surpassed all her colleagues and has deeply moved the spirit of those who speak the English language. I know her personally, and I know
that in India she will be as amiable and fraternal toward the Asians as H.P. Blavatsky and I have been.... In America, under the firm and capable direction of Judge, the Society has expanded through the length and breadth of the land, and the organization has grown each day in power and stability. The three sections of the Society are thus in very good hands, and my personal direction is no longer indispensable.
He then announced his intention to
retire to my little house in Ootacamund, where I will live from my pen and a part of my income from the Theosophist. I intend to complete an unfinished but essential part of my task, the compilation of the Society's history, and some books on religion and the occult and psychological sciences.... I will always stand ready to give to my successor any needed help, and to put at the disposal of the committee my best advice, based on the experience of forty years of public life, and seventeen years of the Presidency of our Society.
Olcott not having named his successor, this had to be done by voting for a new President. Meanwhile the outgoing President, still in office, decided that May 8, the anniversary of Mme Blavatsky's death, would be called 'White Lotus Day' and that it should be celebrated in all branches throughout the world
in a simple and dignified manner, avoiding all sectarianism, all fawning adulation and empty compliments, and expressing the general sentiment of loving recognition for the one who has brought us the map of the arduous path leading to the summit of the science.
We have already related an incident that illustrates just how well Theosophists observe this recommendation to avoid 'all fawning adulation'!
On April 24 and 25, 1892, the annual Convention of the American section met in Chicago. It was disposed to refuse Col. Olcott's resignation, and to ask him to retain his functions (no doubt they feared that Mrs Besant might be elected), and expressed the wish
that Judge should be chosen in advance as President for life on the day the Presidency should become vacant. Soon after, it was learned that 'giving in to the wishes of his friends and the American Convention, as well as to the necessity of terminating several legal matters, Col. Olcott has deferred his resignation indefinitely [sic]' [1]; on the following August 21st he finally withdrew his resignation, naming Judge as his eventual successor.
Nevertheless, a bit later, after several regrettable incidents, especially the suicide of the Administrator of Adyar, S.E. Gopalacharlu (whose pilfering of large sums from the Society had gone undetected for years), there was a reconciliation between Olcott and Mrs Besant. In January 1894 the latter went with the Countess Wachtmeister on a tour of India, and Olcott accompanied them everywhere they went; in March, when Mrs Besant left for Europe, Olcott assigned to her the direction of the 'esoteric section', excepting its American part, which was kept by Judge. In November of the same year Judge tried to remove Mrs Besant from office, but was supported by only one segment of the members of the American section; in return he was accused more than ever of deception by Mrs Besant's partisans. Just then, the journal of the French section published, under the initials of Captain D.A. Courmes, [2] an article which reads as follows:
Rightly or wrongly, one of the main personalities of the present Theosophical movement, William Q. Judge, is accused of passing off as deriving directly from a 'Master' certain communications perhaps of mental provenance but written down by W.Q. Judge alone.... The neutrality of the Theosophical Society and the occult character of the communications allegedly 'precipitated' would have prevented W.Q. Judge from explaining himself completely regarding the events for which he was reproached. Moreover foolishness, daughter to human imperfection, would
have again aggravated the incident . . . and it can be said that the English-speaking Theosophists are presently divided into two camps, for and against Judge. [3]
Some time later the Path warned the members of the Theosophical Society that 'hoaxers and ill-intentioned people were sending socalled occult messages to those they believed to be naive'; [4] never had so many supposed communications from the 'Masters' been seen, even during Mme Blavatsky's lifetime. Finally, on April 27, 1895, Judge's partisans separated completely from the Adyar Society to form an independent organization with the name of 'Theosophical Society of America'; this organization, which still exists, was presided over by Ernest T. Hargrove, then by Catherine Tingley, who moved its headquarters from New York to Point Loma (California). [5] It has branches in Sweden and Holland.
Concerning the accusations made against Judge, the following instructive clarifications were offered a short time after the split in an article that Dr Pascal published in Lotus Bleu:
Almost immediately after Mme Blavatsky's death, many messages were sent through W.Q. Judge as coming from a Hindu Master, messages allegedly 'precipitated' by occult means and bearing the imprint of the cryptograph of the said Master. It was soon recognized that this impression came from a facsimile of the Master's seal, which Col. Olcott had had engraved at Delhi, in the Punjab. [6] Due to an error in the drawing made by Col. Olcott, this facsimile was easily recognizable because it gave an imprint resembling a 'W' where there should have been an 'M'. [7] This pseudo-seal had been given to H.P. Blavatsky by
Col. Olcott, and a number of Theosophists had seen it during her lifetime, although it had disappeared after her death.... When Col. Olcott for the first time saw the imprint accompanying the messages from W.Q. Judge, he noticed that it was the seal he had had engraved in the Punjab, and which had disappeared. He remarked that he hoped that whoever had stolen it would not use it to deceive his brothers, but that in any case he would be able to recognize its imprint among a thousand. From this time forward new messages no longer carried the imprint of the cryptograph, and the old messages, still accessible to W.Q. Judge, had the imprint erased. [8]
It should be added that a Belgian Theosophist, Opperman, who was a partisan of Judge, sent a response to this article; but after announcing its publication, the management of the Lotus Bleu suddenly withdrew it, refusing to print it under the pretext that 'the question had been settled' in July at the London Convention. [9] At this Convention Olcott had simply recorded the 'secession' and cancelled the charters of the dissident American branches and then reorganized from the groups that had not followed Judge a new American section with Alexander Fullerton as Secretary-General (an Australian section had also been founded recently with Dr. A. Carol as Secretary-General); then Sinnett was named Vice-President of the Society as a replacement for Judge. After vainly protesting in favor of Judge, certain members of the European section officially left in order to form in their turn a distinct body under the title 'Theosophical Society of Europe', and under the honorary Presidency of Judge; among them was Dr Archibald Keightley, whose brother Bertram, however, remained Secretary-General of the Indian section; Dr Franz Hartmann also joined the dissidents.
As one might think, all the events that we have just described did not fail to penetrate to the outside as soon as they happened; at first it was pretended in Theosophist circles that gossip in the London
press would be excellent publicity for the Society.
The newspapers, it was said in September 1891, made much fuss about the letters Annie Besant claimed to have received from the 'Mahātmās' since the death of H.P. Blavatsky. The Daily Chronicle opened its columns to the discussion and our brothers took advantage of this good publicity to put forward our doctrines: more than six columns per day were filled with Theosophical and anti-Theosophical correspondence, not forgetting the 'clergymen' and members of the Society for Psychic Research. [10]
But things looked different in the following month when this harsh judgment was seen in precisely the paper just mentioned:
The Theosophists are deceived and many will discover their deception; we are afraid that they have opened the doors to a veritable carnival of deception and imposture. [11]
This time, those referred to kept a prudent silence as to this 'wonderful publicity', the more so as the Westminster Gazette soon began publishing under the signature of F. Edmund Garrett a whole series of well-documented articles said to have even been prompted by members of the 'esoteric section' and that were printed together in 1895 under the significant title Isis Very Much Unveiled. Moreover, a famous 'thought reader', Stuart Cumberland, offered a prize of £1,000 to anyone who could produce in his presence even one of the phenomena attributed to the 'Mahātmās'; this challenge, of course, was never taken up. In 1893, Nagarkar, a member of the Brahma Samāj and as such little suspected of biased hostility, said in London that Theosophy was regarded in India as 'nothing but vulgar nonsense,' and replied to his contradictors:
You do not have the pretension, I suppose-you who hardly know about your own country-to teach me things concerning my country and my competence; your Mahātmās have never existed and are simply a joke by Mme Blavatsky, who wanted to
know how many fools would believe it; to take this joke for a truth, is to make oneself an accomplice in forgery. [12]
Finally, on October 2, 1895, Herbert Burrows, the very man who had introduced Mrs Besant into the Theosophical Society, wrote to W.T. Stead, then editor of Borderland:
The recent disclosures of fraud which have divided the Society have led me to new investigations proving conclusively that for years deception has reigned in the Society. . . . Col. Olcott, President of the Society, and Sinnett, the Vice-President, believe that Mme Blavatsky was in part dishonest. To the accusations of fraud made by Mrs Besant against Judge, the former Vice-President, can be added accusations against Col. Olcott, which have been brought at the same time by Mrs Besant and Judge. . . . After this I can no longer give my recognition and support to an organization where such suspect things and still others have taken place; and although I do not give up the main ideas of Theosophy, I quit the Society because in its present form I believe it to be a permanent danger to honesty and truth, and a perpetual open door to superstition, deception, and imposture.
And in December 1895 it was said in the English Theosophist, the dissidents' journal:
Sinnett himself has said that Judge learned all these frauds from Mme Blavatsky. . . . Mrs Besant knows that Olcott and Sinnett believe Mme Blavatsky was dishonest; but still she has had neither the moral courage nor honesty to say it.
It can be seen, then, in what conditions Mrs Besant took over the leadership of the Theosophical Society; in fact, she exercised it unopposed from 1895, although it was only a rather long time afterward that Olcott officially relinquished it in her favor (we have been unable to ascertain the exact date of his final resignation). It seems, moreover, that he submitted only with rather bad grace to relinquishing his title of President, even after it had become purely
honorific. He died on February 17, 1907, [13] after having carried out his project of writing-in his own fashion-the history of the Society, which appeared under the title Old Diary Leaves; but his bad temper at having been ousted was so obvious, and certain passages seemed so compromising, that the Theosophical Publishing Company hesitated for some time to publish this work.