06-12-2009, 06:42 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-12-2009, 06:44 PM by Helen Reyes.)
Alfred Percy Sinnett moved to India in 1879 and was the editor of The Pioneer, the leading English daily newspaper in India. He and his wife Patience hosted Henry Olcott and Helena Blavatksy at Allahabad and in Simla. He was the first (and only?) recipient of the Mahatma Letters from "Koot Hoomi" (a spiritual working name supposedly based on Tibetan) who was said to be a Punjabi educated in Britain, migrating in the area between Ladakh and Kashmir. K.H. was one of the Brothers of the Great White Brotherhood and agreed to carry on a correspondence with Sinnett after he applied through Blavatksy. HP Blavatsky's regular contacts in the Brotherhood were uninterested but KH agreed to it. This application process was carried on psychically by HPB.
Sinnett describes a number of strange events and psychic phenomena while HPB was present, including the conjuring of objects that were subsequently dug out of the ground where HPB instructed. She used coins, tobacco and cagarette papers to perform these things, and it is slightly reminiscient of some of the MIB activities reported by UFO contactees/witnesses. These events convinced him and others that HPB was not a charlatan, and that she was neither interested much in proving her authenticity.
As the editor of the major English paper, Sinnett was probably not as disinterested his book The Occult World would have it: he stood to profit from the sensation. The first chapters are interesting in several ways, in respect to the topic at hand. He describes HPB as early on in India being suspected of espionage for Russia. He also dismisses the American spelling conventions of his Mahatma, the Punjabi educated in Britain:
I'm still working through it, but here it is, if anyone else is interested, attached.
Sinnett describes a number of strange events and psychic phenomena while HPB was present, including the conjuring of objects that were subsequently dug out of the ground where HPB instructed. She used coins, tobacco and cagarette papers to perform these things, and it is slightly reminiscient of some of the MIB activities reported by UFO contactees/witnesses. These events convinced him and others that HPB was not a charlatan, and that she was neither interested much in proving her authenticity.
As the editor of the major English paper, Sinnett was probably not as disinterested his book The Occult World would have it: he stood to profit from the sensation. The first chapters are interesting in several ways, in respect to the topic at hand. He describes HPB as early on in India being suspected of espionage for Russia. He also dismisses the American spelling conventions of his Mahatma, the Punjabi educated in Britain:
Quote:The language of the note given above embodied many little points which had a meaning for us. All through, it bore indirect reference to the conversation that had taken place at our dinner-table the previous evening. I had been talking of the little traces here and there which the long letters from Koot Hoomi bore, showing in spite of their splendid mastery over the language and the vigour of their style, a turn or two of expression that an Englishman would not have made use of; for example, in the form of address, which in the two letters already quoted had been tinged with Orientalism. "But what should he have written?" somebody asked, and I had said, "under similar circumstances an Englishman would probably have written simply: "My dear Brother." Then the allusion to the Kashmir Valley as the place from which
the letter was written, instead of from a Lodge, was au allusion to the same conversation; and the underlining of the "k" was another, as Madame Blavatsky had been saying that Koot Hoomi's spelling of "Scepticism" with a "k" was not an Americanism in his case, but due to a philological whim of his.
I'm still working through it, but here it is, if anyone else is interested, attached.
