Chapter 305: By Physical Processes

In October of 1874 a colonel went up-country to watch the dead: Henry Steel Olcott, a lawyer who had worn a Union coat, sat down In the Eddy brothers' farmhouse at Chittenden, and wrote what the mediums said; And in that house he met Helena Blavatsky, a Russian newly in town, In the country a year, come to the same séances. Neither held an office yet. The season around them was the American season of the talking dead, And what they carried out of the farmhouse was not a creed they could set Over an altar: it was a meeting, and a question the cabinets left unsaid. On the seventh of September, 1875, in her rooms in New York, seventeen came To hear George Henry Felt on a canon of proportion he said the ancients knew, Egypt, Greece and Rome: one measure hidden in the stone and in the frame. When the lecture ended, Olcott moved that a society be formed. The motion grew. The next evening Felt spoke again; Olcott took the chair; the minutes were kept By William Quan Judge, a young lawyer; sixteen handed in their names. On the thirteenth they chose a word already old, theosophy, divine wisdom, and stepped Under it as a letterhead. The wisdom was not new. The club was new, and its aims Were still being written. On the thirtieth of October the bylaws passed, And the preamble said the founders sought a knowledge of the Supreme Power And the higher spirits by the aid of physical processes: a method, made to last, A body, an instrument, a law of the world, and an hour. The society stood when the president gave his inaugural, on the seventeenth of November, At the Mott Memorial Hall in New York, number 64, Madison Avenue. He was president; she was corresponding secretary; Judge was counsel; and each member Of the vice-presidency, Felt and Seth Pancoast, a doctor, sat in view. A treasurer, a librarian, a recording secretary: a small machine, complete, Pointed at the occult and the cabala, at the laws behind the wonders shown. Not a pilgrimage, not a territory: a club in a hired hall. And yet the heat Of it was larger than its officers. They wanted one study to hold, as one, The old religions side by side, the texts of the East and the texts of the West, Read together, not a mission sent to clear the others from the field. That longing is real, and kin to this faith; not its forerunner, but a guest In the same house of many names. A sutra and a psalm, unsealed, Can be read by one person; the ancestors do not perish when a second book is open. In 1877 she published *Isis Unveiled*, two volumes, tradition set by tradition's side. In May of 1878 a circular carried the longing, and a harder charge was spoken: Teach the West the Eastern philosophies, and oppose the dogmatic theology, the pride Of the Christian above all, which the circular called pernicious. Brotherhood Stood in the same paragraphs. In February of 1879 they came ashore at Mumbai, And at Adyar, in Chennai, they made the headquarters where it stood And stands. And she said, in the years that followed, that the teaching was held by Masters elsewhere, and the members were to receive it. This book takes the masters at their word, And the wonders seriously: the voice she heard, the letters that came, the hands unseen. The masters were a reaching toward the ground, and the ground answered; what was heard Was heard. The processes and the wonders are one study, and the ground between Is where the minutes and the miracles meet. Felt's lost canon was the hope: One proportion, recovered, that would make the temples of three civilizations agree In a single measure. The hope is human and old; it is the scope Of every faith that reads the world as one. And this one, too, would see The temples in one measure, and the religions in one tree: not rough drafts of a book from New York, But branches, prayed in for centuries, each by its own people, each with its own word. A norito is a norito; a sutra is a sutra; and the work Of the reader is to keep each one, and keep them all, and keep them heard. The seventeenth of November, 1875: the president spoke in a hired hall. Divine wisdom, by physical processes: both halves of the phrase stand. The worth of the striving is in the wisdom; the processes are for all; And the masters, and the wonders, and the measure, are a reaching for the same land.