Sticking Note

HPB, writing to the editor of Light (which would have been Stainton Moses at the time) in July of 1889:

[W]hy should Spiritualists feel so interested in my travels, studies, and their supposed dates? Why should they be so eager to unravel imagined mysteries, denounce alleged (or even possible) mistakes, in order to pick holes in everything Theosophical? To even my best friends I have never given but very fragmentary and superficial accounts of the said travels, nor do I propose to gratify anyone’s curiosity, least of all that of my enemies. The latter are quite welcome to believe in and spread as many cock-and-bull stories about me as they choose, and to invent new ones as time rolls on and the old stories wear out. Why, again, should they not, since they disbelieve in Theosophical adepts, turn their attention to Spiritual adepts, who perform far more curious and astonishing feats than were ever claimed by the Theosophists? Witness the Adept of Mrs. E. Hardinge Britten, “Louis,” in Art Magic, and Ghost Land. Which of the Tibetan Mahatmas has ever looked through Lord Rosse’s telescope, at Greenwich (England), when the said telescope was built and has never been moved from Parsonstown, Ireland? And if Mrs. Hardinge Britten’s “Louis” could see the mysterious “Spirit-heads” in the sky (presumably with his legs at Greenwich and his face and eyes in Ireland), and that such superhuman feat, though often talked about, was never questioned in print by the Theosophists, more polite and discreet in this than the Spiritualists, why should the latter go out of the way to cast mud at us?