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LETTER OF MADAME BLAVATSKY DR. ROTURA’S DISCOVERY
[Translation of the foregoing original French text]
You do not write to us any more then? And to diversify your Parisian amusements you demolish me in the Revue. Very good, I have sent you my answer. What, then, does this story of my “thirty years” mean? You ought to have understood that it was a printer’s error; but your paper took my part in the most charming way, though leaving its readers with the notion that I have tried to rejuvenate myself! My friends, I may be eccentric, and have my faults, but I have never had any ridiculous vanity; I have been an old woman for many years, and the idea of charging me with such folly is really a little strong. I have spent thirty years in India; I am as old as I look, with a face furrowed with deep wrinkles, and my thirty years have slept for a long time at the antipodes of my faded life. I present my portrait from Nature to whoever will take it as proof; I do not wish to pass as a fool. Have you read in the French papers the account of the recent great discovery in Australia, made by Professor Rotura? He plunges animals into a trance—deathly to all appearance—which lasts for about twenty days, two months, ten months, or more, as he wishes, and then he makes them revive at his will, perfectly well and happy; the whole thing is done by the manipulation of one of the arteries in the neck, in which he makes a tiny puncture with a needle 206 dipped in the juice of a plant; it anaesthetises them. The paper which announces this “Marvellous Discovery” which may revolutionize the marketing of cattle, shouts with triumph and delight because, it says, we shall now be able to send to London and elsewhere entire cargoes of living cattle at no cost for feeding; they will make the journey packed like dead carcasses. This paper, I say, published this matter on January the first. The Brisham-Courier, the Pall Mall [Gazette], and other English papers have spoken of it to satiety; this discovery was made some six months before the publication, in May or June, 1878. Please look in La Revue Spirite for July, 1878, and for October, 1878, where you have translated my interview with a reporter from the New York World, and compare it with what I told the reporter in regard to the liberation of the soul and of the astral body in animals by the Tibetan shepherds, who have possessed the secret for ages. And I added, “I predict that, within a year, science will have discovered that method with the lower animals.” Exactly a year afterwards Rotura discovered it. Am I a medium? No. It was not a prophecy, for in a letter from India from one of our Brothers and Chiefs there, they directed me to announce it to the world and I did so. I contradicted the reporter in my article in October, because I never said I had myself helped in the operation done by the Tibetan shepherds, who live in the Himâlayas at 28,000 feet above sea level, nor have I done it myself. But, as, until this day, it was one of the secrets of our Adepts I did not think I had the right to speak about it more than was necessary.
I have seen that operation done by our “Brothers” fifty times, on human beings. They have operated on me, and I once slept for eleven weeks, believing myself to be awake the whole time, and walking around like a ghost of Pontoise, without being able to understand why no one appeared to see me and to answer me. I was entirely unaware that I was liberated from my old carcass which, at that time, however, was a little younger. That was at the beginning of my studies.
As far as the animals are concerned, science will learn 207 the secret—for human beings it will have to wait, materialistic as it is. It is the great secret known to fakirs, who bury themselves for months and revive after a certain time. During our latest journey, three months ago, we saw this phenomenon at Jeypoor (Râjputâna), the land of the “Children of the Solar Race:” a fakir, or rather a Hindu yogi (for the fakirs are usually Mussulmans), put himself in a trance, and in the presence of a great crowd, including well educated, but as usual skeptical, persons, allowed himself to be immured in a chamber, and remained therein for twenty days; the officials of the Mahârâja’s Government opened the chamber and brought out the cadaver. At the end of a quarter of an hour the man came to himself and, greeting the public, went away. He accomplished this act of phenomenalism as a penitence.
We have no systems, but we have facts and hundreds of them, well authenticated and which are based on a philosophy known for thousands of years, which explains all these facts scientifically, bringing proof to support what it teaches.
It is not the English nor any other people who will ever lay their hands on the old manuscripts which explain these phenomena; neither the Brâhmanas nor the Buddhists, who have access to them, will hand them over to Max Müller and Co., but our Swâmi Dayânanda Saraswatî, first-class scholar, a man who knows his Sanskrit as no one else here, a Yogi who has spent seven years in the jungles (a brush forest, a dense virgin growth, deserts covered with tropical vegetation where live but ferocious beasts and Yogis who have no fear of them), who is deeply versed in the occult sciences and the secrets of the pagodas, a Brâhmana himself, would furnish us any manuscript, for we belong to the Society which is an integral part of the Ârya Samâj of Âryâvarta; as he is the Supreme Chief of the Vedist Section (those who study and recognize the Vedas pure and simple) of the Theosophical Society, you must understand that we have facilities for natural access to those old treasures of the ancient Vedic literature of the Âryas such as no one else has. In Ceylon, a branch of our Society is being formed under the direction of the High Priest of Adam’s Peak, the 208 most distinguished linguist in Ceylon, who has his Pâli at his fingertips. The Buddhists also place their manuscripts at our disposal and are glad to translate any of them we may wish, because they regard us as their brothers and sisters.
At Lhasa, in Tibet, another branch is being formed under the direction of initiated Lâmas. Within a few years you will see how our Society will be honored and sought after.
H. P. BLAVATSKY.