Henry Kiddle
Henry Kiddle (15 January 1824 Bath, England - 1891) was a United States educator and had an interest in spiritualism. In 1846-'56 he was principal of a grammar-school, and he was then appointed deputy superintendent of common schools in New York city. He was made superintendent in 1870, but resigned in 1879, owing to an adverse public sentiment created by his avowal of a belief in spiritualism.[1] at Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography.
In Dec. 1880 certain passages from one of his talks appeared in one of the Mahatma Letters. This lead Mr. Kiddle to accuse Mahatma K.H. of plagiarism, in what is known as "The Kiddle Incident".
The Kiddle Incident
According to Readers Guide to The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett:
Kiddle, Henry, an American spiritualist who gave a lecture at Lake Pleasant, New York convention on August 15, 1886,entitled "The Present Outlook of Spiritualism," which speech was published in The Banner of Light magazine in Boston the same month. Certain passages from this talk appeared in ML-6 (11) from KH to APS. APS published much of this letter verbatim in his book, The Occult World, and this resulted in a claim of plagiarism by Mr. Kiddle. The incident became known in TS circles as "The Kiddle Incident." KH did not give APS an explanation of the matter until almost two years later (ML, p. 415 et seq.) See Appendix E [of Readers Guide to The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett]. [2]
Alvin Boyd described the incident in this way:
When a Mr. Henry Kiddle, an American lecturer on Spiritualism, accused the writer of the Mahatma Letters of having plagiarized whole passages from his lecture delivered at Mt. Pleasant, New York, in 1880, a year prior to the publication of The Occult World, the Master K.H. explained in a letter to Mr. Sinnett that the apparent forgery of words and ideas came about through a bit of carelessness on his part in the precipitation of his ideas through a chela. While dictating the letter to the latter, he had caught himself "listening in" on Mr. Kiddle's address being delivered at the moment in America; and as a consequence the chela took down portions of the actual lecture as reflected from the mind of K.H.[3]
Online resources
Articles
- Have we to Lower the Flag of Truce? by H. P. Blavatsky
- "Himalayan and Other Mahatmas" by Rama Sourindro Gargya Deva
Notes
- ↑ [http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Appletons%27_Cyclop%C3%A6dia_of_American_Biography/Kiddle,_Henry# Henry Kiddle
- ↑ George E. Linton and Virginia Hanson, eds., Readers Guide to The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett (Adyar, Chennai, India: Theosophical Publishing House, 1972), 236.
- ↑ Alvin Boyd Kuhn, "The Mahatmas and Their Letters" available at Blavatsky Archives. It was originally published as Chapter VI of Theosophy: A Modern Revival of Ancient Wisdom which is available at Internet Archive.