The Alleged Mystical Todas
Sir,—I should be sorry to endorse Madame Blavatsky’s attacks on science, or on those travesties of Christianity which she made the bases of her assaults on it, on the assumption that they were its authorized opinions; but I do think that she has fair ground of defence against those who impugn her statements about the Todas, such instar omnium as “Late Madras C. S.”
He has evidently a thorough acquaintance with the region in which those of whom she writes dwell, and where some of them do now perhaps live; but may we not accept what he says as true, and yet find that she is correct in her statements also?
Are there not Todas and Todas? Has he not confounded the followers with their chiefs, the “hewers of wood and drawers of water” with the “chosen people?”
All he says refers possibly to the people whom I remember forty-three years ago called Todas generically, the inhabitants of the table-land of the Neilgherry hills, who, until they were accidentally discovered by the two tiger-hunting officers, were utterly unknown to the Indian Government, and who, stranger still, were equally ignorant of the people of the country below their hills. But were these the class of whom Madame Blavatsky writes, any more than an ordinary Hindoo is a Guru, an unitiated Turk a high Dervish, a vassal of the olden time a Thane, or the “pro-Fanum vulgus” adepts in the Eleusinian mysteries?
Accepting this view, we may well believe that, as she says, “nobody has ever seen more than five or six of them together;” that “they never marry;” that their Goparams and places of worship are “most splendidthat they have been “moving away to other parts as unknown and more inaccessible than the Neilgherry hills had formerly been,” and so on.
Nothing in such statements is inconsistent with the interesting record given by “Late Madras C. S.,” of his acquaintance with the ordinary inhabitants of those hills; the essential facts do not contradict one another.
April 22nd, 1878.
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Aryans and Freemasonry
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A Discourse
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Editor's notes
- ↑ The Alleged Mystical Todas by unknown author (signed as A. T. A), London Spiritualist, No. 296, April 26, 1878, p. 292
- ↑ notice by unknown author, Daily Graphic, The, Monday May 06, 1878
- ↑ image by unknown author
- ↑ Aryans and Freemasonry by unknown author
- ↑ image by unknown author
- ↑ A Discourse by unknown author
Sources
London Spiritualist, No. 296, April 26, 1878, p. 292