Mahatma Letter No. 50

Quick Facts
People involved
Written by:	Koot Hoomi
Received by:	A. P. Sinnett
Sent via:	unknown
Dates
Written on:	March 11, 1882
Received on:	unknown
Other dates:	unknown
Places
Sent from:	unknown
Received at:	Allahabad, India
Via:	unknown

This is Letter No. 50 in The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett, 4th chronological edition. It corresponds to Letter No. 88 in Barker numbering. See below for Context and background.

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Cover sheet

Short Note received at Allahabad during stay of Olcott and Bhavani Rao.

NOTES:

Page 1 transcription, image, and notes

My good friend — it is very easy for us to give phenomenal proofs when we have necessary conditions. For instance — Olcott's magnetism after six years of purification is intensely sympathetic with ours — physically and morally is constantly becoming more and more so. Damodar and Bhavani Rao being congenitally sympathetic their auras help — instead of repelling and impeding phenomenal experiments. After a time you may become so — it depends on yourself. To force phenomena in the presence of difficulties magnetic and other is forbidden, as

NOTES:

Page 2

strictly as for a bank cashier to disburse money which is only entrusted to him. Mr. Hume cannot comprehend this. And therefore is "indignant" that the various tests he has secretly prepared for us have all failed. They demanded a tenfold expenditure of power since he surrounded them with an aura not of the purest — that of mistrust, anger, and anticipated mockery. Even to do this much for you so far from the Headquarters would be impossible but for the magnetisms O. and B.R. have brought with them — and I could do no more.

K. H.

NOTES:

Page 3

P.S. — Perhaps, tho' I could: put down for you to-day's date March the 11th, 1882.

NOTES:

Page 4

Back of page 2, slide 37074

NOTES:

Context and background

The three letters that follow are connected because of the times and the circumstances under which they were received. All were received at Allahabad during the visit of Col. Olcott and the chela Bhavani Rao Shankar.

On the day before A. P. Sinnett received this letter, he had written to K.H. and had given the letter to Bhavani Rao. The next morning Bhavani Rao found this note under his pillow. He explained that Sinnett's letter had been taken the evening before.

It happened that on the day this was written (March 11), Sinnett had returned home in the evening to find several telegrams awaiting him. These, he said, were all enclosed in the usual way in envelopes securely fastened before being sent out from the telegraph office. The telegrams were all from ordinary people about business matters. However, inside one of the envelopes he found a little folded note from the Mahatma M. "The mere fact that it had been thus transferred by occult methods inside the closed envelope was a phenomenon in itself," he says, but the phenomenon about which the note gave him information was "even more obviously wonderful." In his book, The Occult World (pp. 164-166), he wrote:

"The note made me search in my writing-room for a fragment of a plaster bas-relief that M_____ had just transported instantaneously from Bombay. Instinct took me at once to the place where I felt that it was most likely I should find the thing which had been brought—the drawer of my writing-table exclusively devoted to occult correspondence; and there, accordingly, I found a broken corner from a plaster slab, with M_____'s signature marked upon it. I telegraphed at once to Bombay to ask whether anything special had just happened, and next day received back word that M_____ had smashed a certain plaster portrait and had carried off a piece. In due course of time I received a minute statement from Bombay, attested by the signatures of seven persons in all as regards all essential points."

Briefly, the statement was to the effect that several persons were seated at the dining-table at tea in H.P.B.’s verandah. They all heard a knock, as of something falling and breaking, behind the door of H.P.B.’s writing room, which was unoccupied. This was followed by a still louder noise and all rushed into the writing room. There, just behind the door, they found on the floor a Paris plaster mould of a portrait broken into several pieces. The iron wire loop of the portrait was intact, and not even bent. The pieces of the plaster were spread on the table and it was found that one piece was missing. It was searched for but not found. Shortly afterward, H.P.B. went into the room and a minute or so later showed them a note in the handwriting of the Mahatma M. and with his signature, stating that the missing piece was taken by him to Allahabad and that she should collect and carefully preserve the remaining pieces.

Sinnett goes on to say that the fact that the piece received by him in Allahabad was "veritably the actual piece missing from the cast broken at Bombay" was proved a few days later, "for all remaining pieces at Bombay were carefully packed up and sent to me, and the fractured edges of my fragment fitted exactly into those of the defective corner, so that I was enabled to arrange the pieces altogether again and complete the cast."

Physical description of letter

The original is in the British Library, Folio 3. According to George Linton and Virginia Hanson, the letter was written:

In dark blue ink on a single folded sheet of white paper about 5" X 8" [12.7 X 20.3 cm]. The signature is slightly smeared.