Theos-Talk Archives (May 2006 Message tt00766)

Mrs. Holloway and Mr. Judge

[Excerpted from an unpublished manuscript]

In early April 1884, W.Q. Judge writes from Paris to Mrs. Laura 
Holloway:

"…For several days, until yesterday, I have had the most awful blues 
that ever were. So bad indeed that H. P. B. was very much worried. 
It seemed impossible to stave them off, and as they were accompanied 
with an uncontrollable desire to weep, I was in a bad way. 

"She said I had got into my past current, and also that in going 
about I HAD ABSORBED SOME OLD ELEMENTARIES which SHE SAW about me. 

"She gave me to wear all day her talisman ring, which is of great 
value and strength. It has a double triangle and the Sanscrit 
for `life' on it. THIS HELPED ME, but all the while I felt that 
something was to be done by me. . . . "  caps added.

H.P. Blavatsky elsewhere gives a graphic description of elementaries 
and what SHE COULD SEE:

"....It stands to reason that this mere earthly refuse, irresistibly 
drawn to the earth, cannot follow the soul and spirit — these 
highest principles of man's being. With horror and disgust I often 
observed how a reanimated shadow of this kind separated itself from 
the inside of the medium; how, separating itself from his astral 
body and clad in someone else's vesture, it pretended to be 
someone's relation, causing the person to go into ecstasies and 
making people open wide their hearts and their embraces to these 
shadows whom they sincerely believed to be their dear fathers and 
brothers, resuscitated to convince them of life eternal, as well as 
to see them... Oh, if they only knew the truth, if they only 
believed! If they saw, as I have often seen, a monstrous, bodiless 
creature seizing hold of someone present at these spiritistic 
sorceries! It wraps the man as if with a black shroud, and slowly 
disappears in him as if drawn into his body by each of his living 
pores." A letter to one of her relatives in Russia.

It should also be remembered that during the previous year (1883)  
Mr. Judge had been CLOSELY  associated with Mrs. Laura Holloway in 
Brooklyn, New York.

Laura Holloway revealed years later the following:

"For many years there was a small group of people who met each 
Sabbath evening in the home of one of their number for the purposes 
of social and spiritual recreation. They were people who earnestly 
desired to know aright, all that each could learn and whose right to 
receive wisdom was based upon their willingness to impart what of 
light they had already gained by persistent and well-directed 
effort."

"Into this friendly circle Mr. Judge was early admitted as one who 
was far ahead of his associates in philosophic and metaphysical 
studies. He was an addition to the group highly appreciated and he 
was often moved by gratitude to express his thanks for the ready 
sympathy and good fellowship he enjoyed. At the period to which 
allusion is now being made, he was not a robust man, but was 
suffering from the effects of a fever contracted while on a trip in 
South America; mentally he was at his best, and socially he was a 
witty, companionable person, sometimes gay, always agreeable, and 
ever eager to talk on the subject of Theosophy. . . . "

"Among the individuals that composed this group was a nature [Laura 
Holloway herself] that had some natural but untrained gifts of 
clairvoyance, and to this one Mr. Judge gave more of his confidence 
than to the others -- not thereby robbing them, but, NEEDING THE 
ASSISTANCE THIS PSYCHIC COULD SOMETIMES GIVE HIM, he revealed more 
of his mind to that one. But each and all shared alike in all 
the `visions' seen and reported, and between them all, there grew to 
be a STRONG MAGNETIC TIE, which united them in their investigations, 
and held them together in spirit, as long as they lived." The Word, 
November 1915. Caps added.

Here is what Master K.H. wrote about Mrs. Holloway and her 
connection with elementaries:

"You cannot acquire psychic power until the causes of psychic 
debility are removed. Your trouble is, that you "cannot take in" the 
doctrine of shells. You have scarcely learned the elements of self-
control in psychism; your vivid creative imagination evokes illusive 
creatures, coined the instant before in the mint of your mind; 
unknown to yourself. As yet you have not acquired the exact method 
of detecting the false from the true, since you have not yet 
comprehended the doctrine of shells. 

"Whether you sit for friends in America or London, or elsewhere as 
medium — though you now hate the word — or seeress, or revelator, 
since you have scarcely learned the elements of self-control, in 
psychism, you must suffer bad consequences. You draw to yourself the 
nearest and strongest influences — often evil — and absorb them, and 
are psychically stifled or narcotised by them. The airs become 
peopled with resuscitated phantoms."

"….How can you know the real from the unreal, the true from the 
false? Only by self-development. How get that? By first carefully 
guarding yourself against the causes of self-deception, and chief 
among them, the holding of intercourse with elementaries as before, 
whether to please friends (?), or gratify your own curiosity."  
Letter 17, 
http://www.blavatskyarchives.com/hollowayml.htm

In another STILL unpublished letter from Master K.H. to Madame 
Blavatsky, he writes the following concerning Mrs. Holloway: 

"She labors under the very kind but erroneous & injurious notion 
that since she has done it (consoling the elementaries) ALL HER 
LIFE – she cannot be doing wrong in continuing to do so.  Fatal 
error!  She has, she does wrong, a most serious one to herself:  for 
she has thereby been for years systematically destroying her health. 
This relationship during the course of which the unclean shells have 
been constantly absorbing a part of her vitality brought her to 
become the highly nervous & sickly sensitive.  The more they are 
encouraged the more serious it comes for her, & they may even kill 
her if she heeds us not.  

"And let her be impressed with the fact that whenever she thinks she 
sees a chela appearing with, or seeming to take an interest, or show 
any connection with those astral vampires – she yields simply to the 
cunning & crafty ways of the Shells.  No Gelukpa  chela ever meddles 
with the earth-bound remnants of humanity, nor will any of our chela
[s] – high or law – encourage such an intercourse by his 
presence. . . ." caps added.

In 1886, H.P. Blavatsky gives the following estimation of Mrs. 
Holloway in a letter to A.P. Sinnett:

"...The first bomb-shell from the Dugpa world came from America; you 
welcomed and warmed it in your own breast. . . . The Dugpa element 
triumphed fully at one time -- why? because you believed in one 
[Laura Holloway] who was sent by the opposing powers for the 
destruction of the [Theosophical] Society and permitted to act as 
she and others did by the 'higher powers,' as you call them, whose 
duty it was not to interfere in the great probation save at the last 
moment. To this day you are unable to say what was true, what 
false...." The Mahatma Letters, No. 141.