Theos-Talk Archives (September 2002 Message tt00082)

David Icke - less turdy than blokey in his blousons and slip-ons -may look =


like the Alan Partridge of conspiracy theorists, but his books
about a reptilian 'New World Order' actually sell, while his lectures
(slides, plus tunes by Boyzone) attract huge audiences in punchbowls 
across North America.

One question which puzzled many observers where Mr Icke found his 
extraordinary myths - the colour turquoise, the Lord of the Seventh
Ray, cosmic parents and the rest? He and his mediums put them down 
to inspiration, but in fact they are common currency in post-New Age 
and alternative History books, which draw in turn on a wide variety of 
traditional fables and theories.

David Icke's mythology has a central element, the idea of the Hidden 
Brotherhood, a spiritual collective which has existed throughout
history to oversee the fate of the planet. Its members are disembodied 
beings who may from time to time incarnate themselves in human form. 
Then there is the notion that Brothers occasionally reveal themselves to 
chosen individuals whom they appoint as spiritual teachers on their 
behalf. If successful, such teachers may eventually join the Brotherhood 
themselves after death, as Ascended Masters.

Christianity has always taught that certain individuals are semi
divine or at least directly inspired by God: the prophets, Jesus, John the
Baptist and the Apostles all transcend ordinary humanity. 

It was in the later nineteenth century that the gradual breakdown of 
traditional religious institutions allowed such religious concepts of
Brotherhoods and teachers to proliferate in the West. 

The inventor of the Great Brotherhood, H.P. Blavatsky accused of 
having paid a chambermaid to dress up and appear as an "elemental", 
claimed to be able to command spirits as she chose.

Having engineered her meeting retired Colonel Olcott at Chittenden
in 1874, she proceeded to introduce into the seances her own cast of  
spirits, including her uncle, two Russian servants, a Persian
merchant and a Kurdish warrior.

This allowed Blavatsky to contrast herself favourably with the 
fraudulence of the Eddy's. And it constituted according to
Blavatsky, the medium as a power in her own right, not a mere channel 
of communication with the other world.

Nevertheless, the events at Chittenden soon provoked accusa­tions
of cheating. Daniel Dunglas Home accused Blavatsky of fraud when
she claimed to recognise during the seances a silver buckle
suppo­sedly buried with her father in Russia and materialised in 
Vermont for the occasion. Careful for his own credibility, Home based 
his charge not on the impossibility of materialising objects (known as 
rapports') over distance, but on the assertion that the Russians do
not bury decorations with their dead, adding that Blavatsky had
already tried the same trick in Paris in 1858. 

 
Hydesville is in the middle of the notorious 'burned-over' district
of New York State, so called because of the extraordinary number of
religious fashions that swept through it in the early nineteenth century. 
Spiritualism blends easily with millenarian Christianity: though most
of its messages were trivial, the expectation remained that these were 
merely a prelude to news of real import from the Other World. Having 
confirmed its own existence through the Fox girls, that world was now 
expected to come through with the facts about life after death, 
immortality, and even the future of mankind.

 
Isolated encounters with ghosts and poltergeists were already common. 
Their spirit friends told the Fox sisters that they had been trying 
to 'come through' for over half a century. The novelty of the
Hydesville movement was the way in which it became a craze and 
rapidly took on social, moral and even political overtones. Phenomena 
hitherto regarded as both random and sinister now appeared to be 
organised prophetic tidings of a radiant future in which the living would 
eventually share in the joys of Summerland, the spiritualist heaven. 

 

But for those in earnest about a serious theory of spiritual science
- as opposed to the practical activities of mediums and would-be learned 
societies - there was already plenty of material available in the
work of two early western gurus, Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) 
and Franz Anton Mesmer (1735-1815), both candidates in the race to 
find a Key to Everything.

 
On 21 October 1888, with her sister Kate supporting her from the 
audience, Margaret Fox who had started the spiritualist movement with 
producing knockings, confessed publicly in New York City. 
The confession was published in the New York World. She told how the 
initial raps were made at their home to scare their mother. 

Undaunted by charges of fraud however , Blavatsky and Olcott moved on 
from their inconclusive investigations at Chittenden to Philadelphia, 
where a Mr and Mrs Nelson Holmes had been holding seances of their 
own. Their main apparition was an attractive, flirtatious young 'spook' 
(Blavatsky's word) called Katie King. Katie and her family were already 
familiar figures in spiritualist circles. She was said to be the
daughter of 'John King', the spirit name of a former buccaneer, Sir 
Henry Owen Morgan. Both John and Katie figured largely in seances 
throughout the middle years of the century and John King was used as a 
spirit guide by many popular mediums.

Young Katie had made such a strong impression on one of the 
Holmeses' clients, the seventy year old Robert Dale Owen,' that 
he had given her a number of valuable jewels in return for a lock of 
golden hair. When she vanished at the end of the seance the jewels 
went with her, though the hair remained intact. 

Writing in 1875, Blavatsky claimed her own association with the 
mysterious John King : 
"The 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."

On 3 March 1875, Colonel Olcott received a letter. Written in gold
ink on green paper and folded into a black envelope, it came from a 
certain Tuitit Bey who lived at Luxor in Egypt - Luxor being the African 
base of a Great White Brotherhood of Masters to which Tuitit Bey 
belonged. The colonel was invited to become his pupil, supervised by 
Madame Blavatsky, who already knew about the offer because she had 
been ordered to forward Tuitit Bey's letter to Olcott under cover of her
own explanatory note. Furthermore, it seemed that the colonel's 
correspondent had not posted his message from Egypt in the normal 
way, but 'precipitated' it into HPB's room.

Having returned to New York from their investigations of Katie King,
they were living in adjacent apartments, though that did not prevent HPB 
from contractin a brief marriage to another man.

 
The Georgian Michael Betanelly was an unsuitable husband on several 
counts, being many years younger than his wife, near to insolvency
and probably a crook. The new Madame Betanelly's marriage was also 
bigamous, as General Blavatsky was still alive.

She soon regretted the liaison and letters from Serapis began
imploring the colonel to save his chum from her new husband. To make 
things worse, she had also injured her leg, which swelled. She Mile limb 
herself, by applying a white puppy poultice for two days, as 
recommended by Francis Bacon in his Historia Vitae et Mortis, on the 
grounds that dogs give off great therapeutic heat. 

 
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.

Blavatsky entered into an arrangement with Eldridge Gerry Brown, 
Editor of the Spiritual Scientist. In return for financial support he
agreed to publicise Olcott's communications from Serapis and Tuitit Bey. 
Brown's magazine closed soon afterwards and he went bankrupt.

As J.Godwin pointed out in "The Theosophical Enlightenment"(1994) 
there where a number of entities whose existence was claimed by 
esotericists in Blavatsky's and Olcott's acquaintance, and which could be 
considered cognates of the "Masters." For example William Stainton 
Moses, transmited the teachings of a cabal of spirit guides through the 
technique of automatic writing that incorporated neo-Gnostic and 
Hermetic teachings.

And Frederick Hockley whose communications claimeded post mortem 
human souls rise through seven spheres and swell the ranks of the 
angels. 

One of Blavatsky's rivals and leading co-founder of the Theosophical 
Society in 1875 was Emma Hardinge Britten, who published a book 
entitled "Art Magic" in the same year.

Britten who had been a medium Frederick Hockley when she was a 
child, explains in her preface that she is not really the author of
this book, only a stenographer for the Chevalier Louis, an Adept and said
to be a member of the 'Ellora Brotherhood' in India resembling
Blavatsky's Masters. Britten claimed in her book published a year before 
Blavatsky's"Isis Unveiled" that the Ellora Brotherhood's
task was to inculcate a progressivist occult current within human society.

 
Art Magic was a product of the astral light, a term used by
spiritualists (and later Blavatsky in her book "The Voice of Silence" to
describe the source of their power and knowledge. Divine dictation was 
a popular method among American occultists, prompted by spiritualism 
and encouraged by an interest in the prophetic books of the Bible. Its
most celebrated nineteenth century practitioner was Joseph Smith, he 
responded by founding his own church, inspired by an angel called 
Moroni. Smith dictated his book of Mormon to a scribe, sitting behind a 
blanket strung over a rope while his scribe took down his words from 
the other side of the room.

Isis Unveiled is an exposition of Egyptian occultism popular in the
occult revival of the mid 1880's.

A French Saint-Simonist group of which Alphonse Constant was a 
member , proclaimed in 1832 the immanent appearance of Isis as a 
female messiah, and symbolically kept an empty chair for her to
preside over their meetings . When she failed to appear in France, a 
vision showed her appearing in Egypt in 1833, resulting in an expedition 
to search for her there; she was never found. 

After the utopians' hopes for an earthly paradise were dashed by
the failure of Europe's revolutions of 1848, Alphonse Constant took
to dabbling in the Kabbalah, and began calling himself `Eliphas
Leévi.' He played a major role in the 19th-century occult revival.

 
During the two years following its foundation most of the original 
members of the T.S. however drifted away and few joined. By the end 
of 1878 Blavatsky and Olcott were almost alone. Combined with the 
failure of Olcott's book about his spiritual investigations,
"People From the Other World", shortage of money, and the feeling that 
NewYork had little more to offer prompted them to set out for India.


This change of destinanition may be symptomatic of a general shift
of interest in occult circles from Egypt to the Himalayas, and after
1878 we hear little from Blavatsky about Egyptian Masters.

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