File:SB-10-207-source-1.png

Summary

Description

Busiris the Ancient, framed bearded head matching H. P. Blavatsky's Scrapbooks, volume 10, page 207, item 2. The upward-looking face, eyes and nose, branches of hair and beard, small triangle beneath the beard, and repeated ring-and-petal border match the album. The album's handwritten annotations and stains are absent from this independent printed copy.

Source

The Medium and Daybreak, vol. XI, no. 509, London, 2 January 1880, first page [1], PDF page 1, in William Oxley's The Philosophy of Spirit, Chapter IV: The Ancient Wisdom of India. The first page has no visible printed folio; [1] is supplied sequence, confirmed by the following page's printed 2 and date. The printed caption names Busiris the Ancient and describes the image as a reduced facsimile of an original drawing. Its claim that the figure was the author of the Mahabharat is a historical statement of this publication, not an independently established identification.

Oxley's explanation on printed p. 2 reports a pencil drawing through the medium Mr. L., photographically transferred to wood and cut by an unnamed artist. This records the author's account, not verification of a supernatural origin. Oxley is the writer of the article; the draughtsman's and wood engraver's full identities are not established. The earliest publication and exact physical exemplar of the album cutting are not demonstrated here.

• Complete original issue, exact first-page illustration and explanation on p. 2.
• IAPSOP issue index and reuse statement.

Thank you to IAPSOP for freely providing the complete issue and public index.

Rights

The historical 1880 printed illustration is public domain by age. The current IAPSOP index labels its materials Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International, verified 4 November 2026. Credit: IAPSOP. Changes: lossless extraction of the isolated portrait component from the page and conversion to PNG; no pixel alteration. The noncommercial condition is retained.

File and processing

Lossless RGB PNG, 1159 × 1461 pixels. Native JPEG2000 image /P1 /Im0 within PDF page 1, recursively extracted through the page's Form resource. The actual embedded JP2 is 170979 bytes, SHA-256 3032f9fbc761ae723985c3f3c1bf625cc72aa119c65396751c5dbe3ea5b66843. Complete PDF SHA-256 3ced01b32df2bfeaf7a52e3d9dbf07ccdfad10601bf3e4450733a3ae2f7ce427.

The source component already isolates the complete portrait and frame, with only a narrow paper margin; no additional cropping could remove useful empty space without risking the outer frame. Five of eight long measured frame segments are horizontal, median slope 0°; minor local print irregularities remain. No rotation or resampling was needed. The PNG's decoded RGB pixels were independently reproduced from the actual embedded JP2 and match exactly. A previously exported JP2 has different container bytes but identical pixels; it is not represented as the original PDF byte stream.

The delivered scan has a very faint cream/grey paper tone. It is not claimed to be a camera master, richly coloured original print or a newly colourized portrait. No enlargement, tone or colour adjustment, sharpening, retouching or reconstruction. The separate printed caption outside this raster component is transcribed and contextualized above; it is not invented as part of this image's pixels. Portrait thumbnail limited to 200 pixels.