HPB-SB-7-262

T i

vol. 7, p. 262

H. P. Blavatsky Scrapbooks

from Adyar archives of the International Theosophical Society

vol. 7 (March-September 1878)

 

SBT, DT

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eng • рус

The Interlinked Rings

After waiting for a long time for the close examination of Mr. Gillis’s interlinked rings, which we have asked for every week, and had telegraphed to Mr. Aksakof, of St. Petersburg to furnish, at last decisive information has been obtained, pointing strongly, we regret to state, in the direction of intentional fraud. Mr. Gillis, who had been satisfied with the rings for two or three weeks, and had not adopted our suggestion of examining them with a microscope, has finally written to Mr. Christian Reimers: — “The keen eyesight of a friend detected indications of breaks in the wooden ring, and soon afterwards he placed imitations before me in which he himself was unable to point out the fine marks of junction. On putting these broken and glued rings into water along with mine, the inserted pieces separated, which fate was shared by my ring in company with the others.” Here, then, seems to be evidence of a most heartless fraud practised by one or more of the four mediums upon Mr. Gillis, who had treated them all most kindly. Nevertheless, uncertainty is placed upon this view of the case by inquiries made by Mr. Christian Reimers, resulting in the information that if in turning wooden curtain rings one is broken when it is very nearly finished, it is a common thing in the trade to glue the two pieces together. As a general rule such joints are difficult to detect, and the rings are as good for practical purposes as those which have never been broken. The circumstance that such joined rings exist in numerically small proportion to those which are entire gives a balance of probability in favour of shameless imposture; yet, on the other hand, the assumed impostor must have committed the punishable act with the certainty that it would be detected directly Mr. Gillis submitted the rings to proper scientific examination, so that in such case the criminal act would at the same time amount almost to criminal lunacy. Then, again, at the same stances the unquestionably genuine manifestation of the passage of matter through matter took place, some true knots having been obtained in an endless cord, as at Leipzig by Professor Zollner. With the power of obtaining these genuine manifestations the mediums had no temptation to resort to fraud; they were paid nothing extra for the interlinked rings; on the contrary, Mr. Gillis then held no further seances with them, but left England so precipitately with his supposed prize that there was no time to properly examine the rings, as we suggested, with a microscope, and the public mind was consequently kept in a state of vexatious uncertainty for weeks as to whether the evidence was complete or faulty.

If there is fraud in the matter, no punishment could be too severe for such a criminal and thoroughly heartless and ungrateful offence. And in such case there is the difficulty, perhaps but a temporary one, of tracing the guilt to the real person or persons. The four mediums vary more or less from each other in reputation, also in the number of years they have been tested and watched by Spiritualists of character. When the news of the result arrived last Saturday from Mr. Gillis, none of the mediums ran away in dread of legal punishment; Mr. Williams and Mr. Rita have since spent much time with Mr. Reimers, stating that so far as they know the manifestation was genuine, and suggesting that on their return from their present visit to Mr. A. J. Riko, at the Hague, they shall sit again with Mr. and Mrs. Herne in the endeavour to obtain the interlinking of other rings, whose structure is previously ascertained to be beyond dispute.

It will be remembered that at the past seances, when the same sitters and mediums first attempted to obtain knots in an endless cord, four tight knots came, but, after unpicking them with much difficulty, they proved to be but slip-knots. Had Messrs. Gillis and Reimers passionately broken up the sittings because of this impish trick, they would not have reached the root of the matter; they good-temperedly accepted it as a joke of the strange powers sometimes at work in physical manifestations, and the result of this patience was that a little later they obtained three true knots in an endless cord—knots which no mortal could make without free ends of the string to manipulate. But the fraudulent joining of the rings would be worse than the impish trick at first played with the string, for it would have been an act of imposture deliberately planned and executed beforehand in cold blood. Altogether the present position of the whole matter is unsatisfactory, and places alike the innocent and guilty—if guilty there be—under a cloud. Therefore, the sooner new sittings take place for the production of the manifestation in an unquestionable form, if such achievement is possible, the better will it be for all concerned. Wood will not do as the substance to constitute one of the rings. Sir Charles Isham has already pointed out in these pages that if a ring is placed half in a slit made in certain kinds of growing trees, the wood will heal in time round the inserted portion of the ring, after which a wooden ring could be cut out of the tree in one piece, yet linked into the ring of ivory. We presume the ivory ring would be stained, and otherwise suffer in this lengthy operation; also that in most cases an abnormal grain would be observable in the wooden ring. On this point Sir Charles Isham says in a letter we have just received from him:—

As to the ring, any one who has any knowledge of trees knows it is the simplest fact in the world that anything driven into a tree is soon covered with a new layer of wood, although this with regard to the ring test might not occur to them. You might saw the disc in two or more parts, and there would then be several rings linked round the embedded one; and were the latter left in the tree a few years, there would be no disruption or flaw in the grain of the wood. I intend making some, but for a large curtain ring three or four years might be required. A poplar or willow would produce the result quickest, as they are fast growers.

If the test is obtained at all it should be obtained with materials about which there can be no question, so wood of any kind should not be used. It should also be preferably obtained with materials which can be identified as real and sound without the aid of an expert. Bog-oak or jet would do to prove the phenomenon, but are so easily imitated in appearance that something which does not require examination by an expert, but proves its own genuineness to everybody at a glance, had better be chosen, and the substance selected should be very light in colour, so as to be easily examined for cracks. Cheap and scientifically unobjectionable materials would be a ring of true elephant ivory (showing the so-called engine-turned markings), linked into a large hole drilled through the centre of a mutton bone, say the middle of a leg or of a blade bone. If both the ivory ring and the bone were unbroken, the completeness of the test would be plain to observers of the meanest capacity. The tooth of a tiger or other large animal, with a hole drilled through it at right angles to the axis of the tooth, would form a suitable object for linking into a solid ring of that unobjectionable substance, true ivory.

At all events, the fierce fire of criticism brought to bear upon this ring interlinking problem, has had the result of promoting the selection of materials for the production of more conclusive results than had previously been sought.

Mr. Reimers called at the shops of three different upholsterers, all strangers to him, who each told him that brokenand glued curtain rings were common. At Bowman Bros., 108, High-street, Camden-town, he was told that one common curtain ring out of every twelve might be so broken. But one out of every twelve would not be so perfectly joined as in the case of Mr. Gillis’s ring, therefore probability is strongly in favour of the theory of imposture on the part of one of four persons, and this is hard upon three who may know nothing of the matter.

Editor's notes

Sources

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  London Spiritualist, No. 314, August 30, 1878, p. 97