It is the Right Time
Already to Cease the
Adoration of
Fake Portraits and Imaginary Masters
Carlos Cardoso Aveline
Carlos Cardoso Aveline
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Editorial Note:
An initial version of the following
article was published in June 2012 by
“The Aquarian Theosophist”, under the
title of “An Awakening in the Adyar Society”.[1]
(CCA)
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“In the second semester of 2013, while already
consciously approaching physical death, Mrs.
Radha Burnier decided she would not nominate any
successor as the Outer Head of the Esoteric School,
and so she didn’t. (...) It constitutes one more solid
evidence that Mrs. Burnier was an honest theosophist.
(….) It was a
silent and partial, but effective, way to
admit that Annie Besant’s Esoteric School is a fraud.”
Some
members of the Theosophical Society (Adyar) think the delusions created in the 1900-1934
period are healthy and good for the theosophical movement, and therefore should
be preserved from any possible criticism.
Other
members, however, can see the implications of the fact that the entire “esoteric”
basis of the Adyar Society, rather fragile since 2007-2008, rests upon the
imaginary clairvoyance developed by Bishop Leadbeater and Mrs. Annie Besant.
The decisive importance of this fact for the theosophical movement as a
whole can be realized if one remembers that the Adyar TS has within it some
85 or 90 per cent of the theosophical movement worldwide. It means nine out of ten.
The
now faltering ritualistic structures fabricated between 1900 and 1934 include
the Egyptian Rite, the Co-Masonry, the Liberal Catholic Church and the Besantian
form of the Esoteric School.
Fancy “Egyptian”
Ceremonies
The
Egyptian Rite (E.R.) aims at being a completely occult body, id est, a body whose very existence is
unknown to all, except its own members.
This
makes a sharp contrast with the existence of the Esoteric School of Theosophy
(E.S.T.), which was from the very start publicly announced by H. P. Blavatsky
and discussed in her work “The Key to Theosophy”.
The
E.R. takes its name from the Egyptian Rite created by Alessandro Cagliostro in
Lyon, France, in the 18th century. Its contents have nothing to do with the
Cagliostrian Masonry, which taught ethics and true wisdom. With its procedures dedicated to the “King of
the World”, a personage fabricated by Mrs. Besant and her associates, the E.R.
is secretly situated above the third and highest degree of pledged
members in the Adyar Esoteric School.
It
exists in a limited number of national sections, including the USA, Australia,
India, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Brazil and several others. One motto of the
E.R. and its secret rituals is “Omnia vincit Amor”, or “Love wins All”. The phrase belongs to Virgil (Ecloga X, 69).
Unfortunately, the E.R. leaders seem not to realize that there can be no real
Love without Truth. A “loving” sentimentality, devoid of common sense and not
based on discernment and truthfulness, can only lead to confusion and sorrow.
The E.R. has been a blind political instrument, unconsciously used for
perpetuating a top-down, “absolute” and popish control of the whole Adyar
movement.
Fake Portraits and
Imaginary Masters
Lower
in the Adyar “occult ranking”, we find its impoverished Esoteric School. Here
the very texts written by H.P. Blavatsky to her School are not studied, for
pseudo-theosophical texts are considered far more important, being adopted in
the study lists which must be followed by the various groups.
The
School is divided in two main groups, Candidates and Pledged members. Each of
them has three degrees. There are
therefore six degrees in the School, and the E.R. is the seventh “unknown and
invisible” degree, the “occult” degree that “knows it all”.
In
the weekly meetings of the E.S., thousands of honest, sincere students from
around the world get together to solemnly study a few paragraphs before the
portraits of seven Masters. In smaller groups, there are usually
but two portraits.
Five
of the seven portraits are fake. At the beginning and end of each meeting, the
E.S. students make reverence to the false portraits of these personages: (1)
the “Manu”; (2) the “Maha-Chohan”; (3) the “Master
St-Germain”; (4) the “Christ-Maitreya”; and (5) the
so-called “Master Jesus”.
In
the first decades of the 20th century, Mrs. Annie Besant and her associates
used to have imaginary talks with fiction characters to whom they ascribed
these names, which are however in themselves worthy of deep respect.
C.
Jinarajadasa, who succeeded Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater as Outer Head of
the School, started to abandon the
pseudo-clairvoyant nonsense during the 1930s. He took more steps than are
usually acknowledged towards the recovery of common sense.
From
1953, Mr. N. Sri Ram took over the leadership of the Esoteric School upon the
death of Mr. Jinarajadasa and completely stopped the old practice of imaginary
“channeling”. N. Sri Ram did not have the political courage, however - or did
not find the political conditions - necessary to take the fake portraits out of
the E.S. meeting-rooms, and those relics of the “clairvoyant age” resisted up
to the end of his life in 1973. Then came Mr. I. K. Taimni, who tried to reinvigorate
the School with his own and profound texts on Hinduism. Yet Dr. Taimni did not
value the original teachings and kept the false portraits in the walls of the
meeting-rooms.
Mrs. Radha
Burnier (1923-2013) became the Outer Head of the School in 1978. In spite of
her being a student of Krishnamurti’s, the fake portraits of those imaginary
Masters continued to be used under her leadership. Up to her death on
October 31, 2013, the forgeries still appeared side by side with the portraits
of the two true Mahatmas who indeed created and founded the
theosophical movement.
One
of these two portraits has been itself the object of a partial adulteration
made under the orders of the false clairvoyant who presented himself as a
Christian priest. The portrait of HPB’s Master, however, seems to have been
preserved.
The honesty, the ethics,
and the goodwill of every leader of the Adyar E.S. from 1934 on cannot be
questioned. There are no elements to
justify too radical criticisms regarding their actions, for Compassion is not
opposed to Justice.
In one way or another, these
leaders have promoted a transition, and prepared the movement for its next phase. Under their
influence, the Adyar Society published classical theosophy works like the “Collected Writings” of H.P. Blavatsky, the “Mahatma Letters”, the correct edition of “The Secret Doctrine” (prepared by Boris de Zirkoff), the volume “Damodar and the Pioneers of the
Theosophical Movement”, by Sven Eek, and several other volumes of authentic
literature. Abandoning the edition of “The Secret Doctrine” that had been
adulterated by Mrs. Besant was one of their major accomplishments.
The limitation of these
leaders regarding the Esoteric School is expressed in part in the conventional
interpretation of Virgil’s phrase “Omnia vincit Amor”. Their love for Adyar as a corporation and their
loyalty to their own predecessors was greater than their love for impersonal
truth. Gratitude to persons made it
impossible for them to be loyal to truth. They did
what they thought was the best thing to do, and this is good. They all were
mainly the victims of a clever successorship trap created in the
1900-1934 period. They suffered from the magnetism of a mayavic ideation which they
did not create. Their period makes an intermediary phase in History, and it was
closed in 2013.
Mrs. Radha Burnier - as anyone who
knew her could see - was an admirable woman of great idealism and personal
integrity. She took a few steps in the right direction, and it is
everyone’s duty to look further ahead. As time passes, more E.S. members
may want to examine whether mixing in the E.S. rooms five forged portraits of
imaginary Masters with portraits of two real Mahatmas (one
of these portraits also adulterated) constitutes a
severe lack of respect for the true Teachers.
The
mixture of truths and lies is no legitimate action in Theosophy, and Mrs.
Burnier’s father, N. Sri Ram, acknowledged in 1971:
“Suppose
there is a wonderful elixir in a bottle, but there is mixed with it some foreign
matter which does not have the same properties as the elixir itself. Then it
would not be absolutely pure; its potency would be affected by the
adulteration.” [2]
Although
N. Sri Ram was unable to solve the problem, he had a clear understanding of
what the word “adulteration” means. On the other hand, it is certain that even
authentic portraits can’t replace the love for truth which is a
condition for lay discipleship. H.P. Blavatsky said in April 1890 that the
spirit of the Masters was far away from the shrine in Adyar already. In an open
letter to the Indian theosophists, the founder of the movement wrote:
“…. Nor can I, if I would be true to my
life-pledge and vows, now live at the (Adyar) Headquarters from which the Masters and Their spirit
are virtually banished. The presence of Their portraits will not help; they are
a dead letter.” [3]
Things have not improved since then.
It may take a longer or shorter time for the
Adyar Society to get finally rid of the illusions fabricated in the 1900-1934
period and recover the common sense. It
is clear by now that the gradual awakening from illusions which started
in the 1930s has been undergoing an acceleration process.
H.P.B. herself indicated to her future
students the main key to the liberation of the Adyar Society from the
present cloud of pseudo-esoteric delusions. She announced:
“There never was an Occult Society, however
open and sincere, that has not felt the hand of the Jesuit trying to pull it
down by every secret means. (.…) But all efforts of the greatest craft are
doomed the day they are discovered.” [4]
The first half of the present century is probably the
right time for abandoning the practice of adoring fake portraits and imaginary
Masters.
Radha Burnier Closes the E.S. Succession
In the second semester of 2013, while already
consciously approaching physical death, Mrs. Radha Burnier decided she would
not nominate any successor as the Outer Head of the Esoteric School, and so she
didn’t.
Since the E.S. fabricated by Annie Besant after the
death of H. P. Blavatsky rested upon the nominations running from one Outer
Head to the other, Mrs. Burnier took with this decision another important step
towards liberating the theosophical movement from such an occult fraud.
It constitutes one more solid evidence that Mrs.
Burnier was an honest theosophist. Although she could not find the strength or
political conditions necessary to officially close the false E.S. as long as
she lived, she thus clearly denied its legitimacy, from the moment of her
death.
It was a silent and partial, but effective, way to
admit that Annie Besant’s Esoteric School is a fraud, and that the way ahead
for Adyar is to close it.
Information confirmed by “The Aquarian Theosophist”
reveals that Mrs. Radha Burnier also did not appoint any successor for the
Egyptian Rite.
The “E.R.” is therefore on a limbo as well and loses
much of its ability to delude with pious
lies the honest theosophists who seek for truth.
NOTES:
[1] A few hours after this article was published under the present title (on June 9, 2013), Mr. Vic Hao Chin, Jr., an influential leader of the Adyar Society who lives in the Philippines, reacted to it. He said that it is unfair to call the esoteric delusions of the Adyar Society “fraud”. The reason for that would be that the word “fraud” implies intentional falsehood, and Mr. Hao Chin believes those falsehoods were created with noble motives, by self-deluded leaders. He forgets a basic fact. Regardless of the initial intentions in creating such delusions, and even if they had been honest (a matter that is subject to discussion), one thing is certain. Once the delusions are shown and known as such, it is a fraud to hide and protect them - and thus deceive the public. Even if such an action is done with pious motives like protecting deeply revered delusions and trying to preserve one’s own “saintly” lies, it constitutes a conscious disrespect for the public - and for truth - to protect ritualisms based on what one knows to be false clairvoyance. The long-standing process of pious fraud should cease as soon as possible in the theosophical movement. There seems to be no need to wait until the year 2075 for that to occur.
[2] N. Sri Ram, in the article “Receptivity to Truth”, published in “The Theosophist”, March 1971, pp. 351-359, see p. 355.
[3] H. P. Blavatsky, in her open letter “Why I Do Not Return to India”, which is available in our associated websites. This extraordinary open letter addressed to all Theosophists in India can also be seen at “Theosophical Articles”, H. P. Blavatsky, Theosophy Co., Los Angeles, volume I, pp. 106-114 (see especially p. 112). It is at the “Collected Writings” of H. P. B., TPH, Adyar, volume XII, pp. 156-167 (see especially p. 164).
[4] “The Collected Writings of H. P. Blavatsky”, TPH, volume XIV, p. 267. Her words are quoted also at p. 73 of “The Right Angle”, an 84 pp. compilation from H.P.B. writings on Masonry, made by Geoffrey Farthing and published by the Adyar TPH in London, in 2003.
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“The Fraud in the Adyar Esoteric School” is available as an independent article on the websites of the ILT, Independent Lodge of Theosophists, since June 2013.
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Read the text “To The Outer Head of the Adyar E.S.”, by Geoffrey Farthing.
On the E.R. and the E.S., see also the article “Searching for Truth”. It is a first-hand, frank testimony by Mexican theosophist José Ramón Sordo.
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Read more:
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Helena Blavatsky (photo) wrote these words: “Deserve, then desire”.
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