HPB-SB-8-261: Difference between revisions

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<center>July 14th, 1879</center>

  | publication date = 1879-07-14

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{{Style S-Small capitals|Sir}},—In 1870 I had the pleasure of making my appearance in your valuable paper, on the subject of a printing press, printing types, papers and other materials having been discovered buried after a thousand years in Benares and removed to the London Museum in the time of the Governor General Sir Wm. Bentinck. I opened the epistle with these words, “There is scarcely any thing of modern invention of whose previous existence there has not been found or will not be found a trace in my beloved country” and I have now still greater pleasure in following up that letter about the falsification of the so called new invention in Europe of A. D. 1441 by inviting the bewildered attention of my Educatedcountry men through this your esteemed organ of our native community to a paragraph out of a long leader in the New York paper called the “World” containing the substance of a conversation held at the residence of Madame H. P. Blavatsky in New York between herself and the Reporter of that world-wide circulating paper. The article is dated Wednesday the 28th of March 1877 and headed “Ahamasery in New York” speaking of the possibility of suspending life for an indefinite period. Madame Blavatsky is reported as follows:—“The British Government tested it (''viz.'' the possibility of suspending life) by hermetically sealing up the physical body of a Hindoo in a glass coffin in which it was kept for months, continually watched night and day by a military guard. When it was taken from the coffin the astral body and the soul rejoined the physical body and the apparent life was restored. In the case of the lower animals who have astral bodies this separation is easily accomplished. The very shepherds in Thibet—ignorant people—know the trick of doing this. They frequently put to temporary death such of their sheep or cattle as they wish to preserve for any time and then when they desire to do so, they bring them to life again. I have done this myself a number of times. It is done by certain manipulation of a certain artery in the neck. I prophesy to you that within a year from now scientists will discover, how this is done in the case of the lower animals?

Now the above prophesy would appear to have been fulfilled thus. The Brisbane Courier, from which the Pall Mall Budget and other London publications have copied the account, (they call the great discovery of anæsthetizing Sheep and other animals for an indifferent period by the use of a certain drug and then by the use of another bringing them to life again at pleasure) in an article dated January 11th 1879 says that a few months before that date “Signor Rotura called on Mr. Grant to invoke his assistance in a scheme for the transmission of live stock to Europe and averred that he had discovered the vegetable poison in South America allied to the well-known “Woolara” that had the power of perfectly suspending animation and that the trance thus produced continued till the application of another vegetable essence, which caused the blood to resume its circulation and the heart its functions.” The search for either of the drugs cannot but be supposed to have taken up less time than four months which places the discovery just at the period named by Madame Blavatsky and published by the “Now York World.”—To set people at rest who, Mr. Editor, have variously spoken against Mother Blavatsky what is any thing but fair and true to her belief in and to her power of essoteric knowledge, in reference to the paragraph published in the 15th column of the Bombay Gazette of the 18th ult. as also the quotation in the 20 column of the same paper from the Brisbane Courier under the head of “A wonderful discovery” I have endeavoured to prove that in this case Mother Blavatsky shewed once more her great science and prescience and also that this so called “wonderful discovery” which has made so much noise in England and has been noticed in subsequent vernacular publications is only another illustration of my opinion expressed thro’ you in 1870.—

I call this great woman—Madame Blavatsky—my mother in the widest sense. She has, I freely maintain, brought life to dead India by her arrival from America which I hope and am certain, will shortly induce other theosophists to come and infuse more blood into our veins and invigorate us to our duty and to our future amelioration.—I am Dear Mr. Editor.—Your most obedient servant.

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  | source title = Athenæum, The

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  | original date = 1879-05-29

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{{Style P-Align right|Oxford, May 29, 1879.}}

After an interval of stagnation, which threatened to be fatal to the new Theistic church at Calcutta, he was succeeded in his reforming work there by Debendranāth Tagore (son of the well-known Dwārakanāth Tagore), who is now sixty-one years of age. This second remarkable reformer gave organization to Rām Mohun Roy’s church, promulgated a Theistic Directory and rule of faith (called Brāhma-dharma), and was the real founder of the Adi-Brāhma-Samāj in 1844. But he, like his predecessor, is a Brāhman with an ineradicable vein of Brāhmanism running through his mind, and has done as little violence as possible to the old religion of his fathers, which he believes to have been originally monotheistic. It was reserved for a new reformer to break away entirely from the trammels of Vedic and Vedāntic theology, and acknowledge no other revelation than that written on creation, and engraved on man’s heart and inner consciousness—no other inspiration but that to be found in every good man and every good book.

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<nowiki>*</nowiki> His grandfather was Rām Comul Sen, a man well known to my predecessor here, Prof. H. H. Wilson, and the author of a useful English and Bengālī Dictionary, to which my own lexicography is under some obligations.

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