Old Diary Leaves – Volume V 1893 – 1896

By Henry Steel Olcott (1832 - 1907).

507 Pages | First edition 1932, reprint 1975 | Hardcover | Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar | ISBN: 0835674878.

The year 1893 now opens up before us, and its events will be found to be very important. As previously shown, the rumblings of the coming tempest about Mr. William Quan Judge (1851 - 1896) were beginning to be heard. Towards the end of the year the arrival of Mr. Walter G. Old of the London staff, with the budget of notes and memoranda, which he had taken, enabled me by comparing documents to see the depth and fullness of treachery, which Mr. Judge had long been planning. I find from my Diary of 1893 that the greater part of the first day was spent by Messrs, Keightley, Old and myself in summarising the evidence in the case; and needless to say, all our hearts were filled with sorrow, for this was almost if not the very first case of downright perfidy in our Society's history.

From Chapter IX 1894 - 'Mrs. Besant's Tour in the United Provences' (p. 111):

" It was almost as though they were wading through a stream of human beings. On every side, to great distances, stretched the swarthy multitude; the river banks were crowded with bathers; streams of people moved hither and thither to visit the camps of notabilities - rajahs and maharajahs, zemindars and talukdars, declaiming teachers of various sects, hatha yogis by the score, making a public show of their austere practices, some smeared with ashes and streaked with saffron caste-marks, some with their long dishevelled locks, supplemented with chignons or vegetable fibre built up into high dusty cones, like exaggerated rats'nests, on top of their heads, some lying on beds of spikes, some sitting in the different 'asans' prescribed by Patanjali, some decorating their bodies after their baths, some with eyes closed as if in meditation, etc. - but with very few exceptions, each having spread on the ground before him a cloth on which the pious pilgrims could cast their alms of copper coin: pious humbugs in short. "