Meanwhile I had not got any nearer to proving that Ahasuerus dwells in a sea?cavern mid the Demonesi, but one conclusion I certainly did come to, which I find written out in an old diary and dated 1887. Madame Blavatskys masters were trance personalities, but by trance personalities I meant something almost as exciting as Ahasuerus himself. Years before I had found, on a table in the Royal Irish Academy, a pamphlet on Japanese art, and read there of an animal painter so remarkable that horses he had painted upon a temple wall had stepped down after and trampled the neighbouring fields of rice. Somebody had come to the temple in the early morning, been startled by a shower of water drops, looked up and seen a painted horse, still wet from the dew?covered fields, but now trembling into stillness. I thought that her masters were imaginary forms created by suggestion, but whether that suggestion came from Madame Blavatskys own mind or from some mind, perhaps at a great distance, I did not know; and I believed that these forms could pass from Madame Blavatskys mind to the minds of others, and even acquire external reality, and that it was even possible that they talked and wrote. They were born in the imagination, where Blake had declared that all men live after death, and where every man is king or priest in his own house. Certainly the house at Holland Park was a romantic place, where one heard of constant apparitions and exchanged speculations like those of the middle ages, and I did not separate myself from it by my own will. The Secretary, an intelligent and friendly man, asked me to come and see him, and when I did, complained that I was causing discussion and disturbance, a certainfanatical hungry face had been noticed red and tearful, & it was quite plain that I was not in full agreement with their method or their philosophy. I know, he said, that all these people become dogmatic and fanatical because they believe what they can never prove; that their withdrawal from family life is to them a great misfortune; but what are we to do? We have been told that all spiritual influx into the society will come to an end in 1897 for exactly one hundred years. Before that date our fundamental ideas must be spread through the world. I knew the doctrine and it had made me wonder why that old woman, or rather the trance personalities who directed her and were her genius, insisted upon it, for influx of some kind there must always be. Did they dread heresy after the death of Madame Blavatsky, or had they no purpose but the greatest possible immediate effort?
