Theos-Talk Archives (November 2001 Message tt00291)

Chuck: "how to read letters in sealed envelopes? Training methods? >> 
It's an old spiritualist trick. Any good book on stage magic will 
have a method. Whether or not HBP used those methods is another 
matter of course."

There where probably many places where one could learn about this 
during Blavatsky's time, this as mesmerism and later spiritualism was 
wide spread.

I myself once went into a spiritualist drive in church, trew in a 
folded piece of paper and had some amazing results, but probably 
that was just a case of syncronicity.

Blavasky on the other hand was a close friend of the Davenport's who 
tought Houdini. Houdiniwrote about the Davenports in his book : "hey 
(the Davenports) had always used trickery; however, for publicity 
reasons, they let their audiences decide for themselves as to the 
true source of their sensational demonstrations. (1)
Also Harry Kellar (1849-1922) another famous stage magician was a 
student of the Davenports. It are these same "learned" ability's, 
that lay on the foundation of Blavatsky's later "phenomena" in India 
and elsewhere.

First Blavatsky together with a few other people run a small  
spiritist group with medium -performances in Cairo for a few weeks, 
next in New York she tried to do something similar with a "magic 
club "( wich she later claimed she had been told to do this by a 
Master) upon wich soon followed the idea together with some other's 
like Emma Hardings-Britten who was working on writing "Art Magic"
at the time and seemed to have had a major influence at first, the 
TS whas started with as its goal the study of practical occultism.
(See John Deveney Astral Projection or Liberating of the Double and 
the Work of the Early Theosophical Society")
It is also from the Davenport's environment (she was a frequent 
quest at their house) Blavatsky first heared of a spirit guide 
John King. The Davenport's by the way used exactly the same kind of 
cabinet as Blavatsky later used in Adyar, and of wich Moncure Daniel 
Conway.reported: "After dinner the young men were all eager to have 
me go into the sacred room, though Mme. Blavatsky was rather 
reluctant. It was a small room and its only furniture the so-
called "shrine," - really a cabinet such as Spiritualists ordinarily 
use, though smaller, and such as Mme. Blavatsky herself probably used 
when a spirit-rapping medium in America.." 

New information is in the proces of being published soon by Patrick 
Deveney about this early spiritualist period of Blavatsky, and will 
also bring proof that Blavatsky whas not making certain travels that 
are claimed , and are used as evidence to make it look as if 
Blavatsky met spirit guide John King much earlier and it would  
have been some kind of real Master. Some of the new information 
involved regarding the conjuring of "phenomena" and Master 
visitations 

Are when Baburao had been hired by Thackersey at Blavatsky's 
request to deliver goods from "Master Goolab Singh" (see Old Diary 
Leaves, second series,46-61) with earliest stagings reminding of 
some of the later Master "appearances" like the Christofolo doll  
incident in Adyar... Such occasions occurred in 1876 when Blavatsky 
orchestrated the appearance of an "elemental" in her New York 
apartment by the simple means of promising a maid five dollars if she 
would dress for the part. It seems she never paid the debt. 
(http://blavatskyarchives.com/westbrook.htm)


John King was a spirit guide (and soon also John King's "doughter", 
Katie) channeled by Jennie and Nelson Holmes. The "Kings", father and 
daughter, gained much notoriety from an 1874 incident. It appeared 
that the Holmes' had employed Katie King as more than just a spirit 
guide: the elderly Robert Dale Owen (1801-1877)claimed publicly that 
the jewellery he had been giving "Katie King",via the Holmes, had 
turned up in the possession of a woman by the name of Eliza White, 
who acknowledged that she had been employed by the Holmes' to 
impersonate the spirit. 
Yet Writing in 1875, Blavatsky claimed her own association with the 
mysterious John King : 
[T]he spirit John King is very fond of me, and I am fonder of him 
than of anything on earth. He is my only friend, and if I am indebted 
to anyone for the radical change in my ideas of life, my efforts and 
so on, it is to him alone ...

Blavatsky apparently attempted to rehabilitate the reputation of 
Philadelphian Spiritualism - or at least so she had said at the time. 
It is during this period, however, that a subtle readjustment in 
explaining Spiritualist phenomena can be discerned in Olcott: 
Try to get private talk with "John King" - he is an initiate, and his 
frivolities of speech and action are meant to cover serious business.
There can be little doubt that Olcott's references to King's standing 
as an "initiate" were mediated to Olcott by Blavatsky. This shift 
from imaging the spirit entities as discarnate humans of no specific 
religious hue or status, to conceiving of them as in some sense 
spiritually adept is evidence of early Blavatskian revisionism. From 
the middle of 1875, Blavatsky would assign the impetus for the 
inception of Spiritualism, and indeed the governance and direction of 
esoteric orders as a whole, to a band of living adepts she called 
Masters: 
An attempt in consequence of orders received from T*** B*** [Tuitit 
Bey?] through P*** [the elemental?] personating J. K. [John King?]. 
Ordered to begin telling the public the truth about the phenomena & 
their mediums. And now my martyrdom will begin! I will have all the 
Spiritualists against me in addition to the Christians & the 
Skeptics! 
Thy Will, oh M:. [ Morya or Mazinni ? ] be done!

Olcott's occult tutelage passed from Tuitit Bey to Serapis Bey at a 
very early stage. From the middle of 1875 until the latter part of 
1879, Olcott received many Masters letters' from Serapis, sometimes 
in 
concentrated volleys, at other times only intermittently. Arriving by 
regular mail (postmarked from Philadelphia and Albany), the first 
several letters are in the main unremarkable and concern themselves 
with relatively mundane details of Blavatsky's and Olcott's domestic 
life. The central topics appear to be Blavatsky's financial woes and 
her by now failed second - and bigamist - marriage to the Georgian 
Michael Betanelly.
At one time Serapis exhorted Olcott to approach relatives of his 
divorced wife for money for the sake of the Cause'; at another he 
attempted to involve Olcott in highly questionable business deals 
with Betanelly, Blavatsky's erstwhile husband. Serapis' assured 
Olcott that his "distant future is at Boston" and that "there are 
millions in the future in store for Betanelly". In fact, there is 
little about Serapis' self-revelation which would justify 
Theosophical claims that with the emergence of Blavatsky's Masters a 
new spiritual dispensation had begun. 
Reg. John King of whom everybody knew (why otherwise the same name  
Crookes wrote a book in which he reprinted a first person report by 
Conan Doyle about how the woman who impersonated Kastie King tried to 
seduce him, by sitting in front of hime naked and said the clothes 
went into the spirit world.) that it was a spirit guide, is said by 
theosophical writers to have really showed up in Blavatsky's life 
during certain travels accompanied by Albert Rawson., however a 
closer look at this shows that .Rawson as he himself publicly told a 
group meeting of th.. was at the time in jail for steeling, so he 
could not have been travelling with HPB, or HPB with him for that 
matter. 
Also the famous theosophist Massey, proved to be the subject of a 
number of acts of Blavatskian engineered legerdemain. With the able
assistance of the Spiritualist Mary Hollis-Billing (1837-?) whose 
cooperation was guaranteed when Blavatsky assured her that her spirit 
guide, Ski, was none other than an Indian Master(a similar pattern as 
the John King/Mahatma coup Blavatsky tried to pul on Olcott per 
above), Blavatsky was able to insinuate some correspondence into 
various locations, including MasseyÕs coat pocket, apparently 
miraculously.
Hollis-Billing later admitted to the fraud ( See Leslie Price, The 
British Letter in Theosophical History, 1:3, 1985, 54-59 for C. C. 
Massey's correspondence with Henry Sidgwick regarding the debacle 
over Blavatsky's use of Mary Hollis-Billing to engineer phenomena.)

Brigitte

(1) A scrapbook compiled by the Davenport Brothers about their work 
has provided further evidence of trickery, according to sceptic Joe 
Nickell. Nickell saw the scrapbook on show at Lily Dale Assembly and 
was permitted to study it. It gives indications how their phenomena 
were produced, while suggesting that the surviving brother Ira who 
owned it was nevertheless a Spiritualist. 
The phenomena were defended by Arthur Conan Doyle. Among the places 
where Nickell reports his findings is: 
Joe Nickell " Davenport Brothers: Investigating the Houdini-Doyle 
Dispute" ACD (the journal of the Arthur Conan Doyle Society) vol. 9 
June 1999 p. 81-91. 
The Society's web site is at:-http://ww.ash-tree.bc/ca/acdsocy.html. 

(2)For more on that period in Blavatsky's life see: 
http://www.angelfire.com/mb/wu/mastershbp2.html