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of all a servant took a letter from the postman and brought it directly to
Madame Jelihowsky. It was addressed to a lady, a relative of Madame Blavatsky,
who was then visiting her, and came from another relative in Russia. Madame
Blavatsky, seeing that it was a family letter, remarked that she would like to
know its contents. Her sister ventured the suggestion that she read it before it
was opened. Helena held the letter against her forehead and proceeded to read
aloud and then write down what she said were the contents. Then, to demonstrate
her power further, she declared that she would underscore her own name, wherever
it occurred within the letter, in red crayon, and would precipitate in red a
double interlaced triangle, or "Solomon's Seal," beneath the signature. When the
addressee opened the letter, not only was H.P.B.'s version of its contents
correct to the word, but the underscoring of her name and the monogram in red
were found, and oddly enough, the wavering in several of the straight lines in
the triangle, as drawn first by Madame Blavatsky outside the letter, were
precisely matched by the red triangle inside. Postmarks indicated it had
actually come from Russia.34
While at Elberfeld, Germany, with her hospitable benefactress, Madame Gebhard,
some of the usual manifestations were in evidence. Mr. Rudolph Gebhard, a son,
recounts several of them. One was the receipt of a letter from one of the
Masters, giving intelligence about an absent member of the household, found to
be correct.
The Countess Constance Wachtmeister, who became Madame Blavatsky's guardian
angel, domestically speaking, during the years of the composition of The Secret
Doctrine in Germany and Belgium, has printed her account of a number of
extraordinary occurrences of the period. She speaks of a succession of raps in
H.P.B.'s sleeping room when there was special need of her Guardians' care. She
also tells of the thrice-relighted lamp at the sleeper's bedside, she herself
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having twice extinguished it. She tells of her receiving a letter from the
Master, inside the store-wrapper of a bar of soap which she had just purchased
at a drug store.
It was under the Countess Wachtmeister's notice that there occurred the last of
Madame Blavatsky's "miraculous" restorations to health. She had suffered for
years from a dropsical or renal affection, which in those latter days had
progressed to such an alarming stage that her highly competent physicians at one
crisis were convinced that she could not survive a certain night. The great work
she was writing was far from completed; the Countess was heart-broken to think
that, after all, that heroic career was to be cut off just before the
consummation of its labors for humanity; and she spent the night in grief and
despair. Arising in the morning she found Madame at her desk, busy as before at
her task. She had been revivified and restored during the night, and would not
say how.
The Countess records the occasion of an intercession of the Masters in her own
affairs, on behalf of their messenger. At her home in Sweden, while she was
packing her trunks in preparation for a journey to some relatives in Italy, she
clairaudiently heard a voice, which told her to place in her trunk a certain
note-book of her containing notes on the Bohemian Tarot and the Kabala. It was
not a printed volume but a collection of quotations from the above works in her
own hand. Surprised, and not knowing the possible significance of the order, she
nevertheless complied. Before reaching Italy she suddenly changed her plans, and
postponed the trip to Italy and visited Madame Blavatsky in Belgium instead.
Upon arriving and shortly after greeting her beloved friend, she was startled to
hear Madame say to her that her Master had informed her that her guest was
bringing her a book dealing with the Tarot and the Kabala, of which she was to
make use in the writing of The Secret Doctrine.
This must end, but does not by any means complete, the chronicle of "the
Blavatsky phenomena." The list, long as it has become, is but a fragment of the
whole. Without the narration of these phenomena an adequate impression of the
personality and the legend back of them could not be given. Moreover they belong
in any study of Theosophy, and their significance in relation to the principles
of the cult is perhaps far other than casual or incidental. If her own display
of such powers was made as a demonstration of what man is destined to become
capable of achieving in his interior evolution, these things are to be regarded
as an integral part of her message. They became, apparently in spite of herself,
a part of her program and furnished a considerable impetus toward its
advancement. Theosophy itself re-publishes the theory of man's inherent theurgic [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]