Tourists at Pompeii are shown a temple of Isis. The impartial cinders have preserved for us there, not only the temple, but the secret passage which the priests used in the production of what are nowadays called “phenomena.”

The following pages are designed to show the secret passage in the temple of the Theosophic Isis, the goddess of Madame Blavatsky’s “Isis Unveiled.”

Instead of having to wait on the pleasure of Vesuvius, I am enabled to act as cicerone while the temple is still (for the present) a going concern.

The important difference between the exposure of Madame Blavatsky’s box of tricks by the Society for Psychical Research, and the present exposure of her successors is, that in this case we have the high-priesthood giving evidence against itself. My own part in the business is merely the humble one of seeing that they shall all satisfactorily “get at” one another. In redacting, out of the mass of various testimony which has fallen into my hands as clear and readable a story as I could present, my main care has been to tone down the mutual insinuations. Talk about augur meeting augur with a smile! It is the snarl which these augurs cannot disguise.

As for myself, I have tried to render a service to truth; but I cannot see, with some good people, that a sense of truth necessarily excludes a sense of humour.

Mrs. Besant is a lady whose character I have often defended in the press though I have not always been able to accept the extremer estimates of her intellectual power. She is about the only one of my dramatis personÆ in whom the public at large (like myself) feel any personal interest whatever. She is, therefore, the strongest buttress of a fabric which she has now for some time known to be rotten at the base. That is why I have dealt more seriously with her than with these Olcotts and Judges. The President is too flabby to be worth fighting; the Vice-President is already thrown over by all the shrewder and honester members; even Mrs. Besant herself has now cabled her refusal to accept his latest revelation, and discovered that his Mahatma is indeed a fraud—when he “deposes” Mrs. Besant.

My pity is saved for those humbler dupes of the rank-and-file who have trusted these others not wisely but too well. From some of them I have seen pathetic letters; and if any gall has got upon my pen, it is the gall of the bitterness of their disillusion. They are more widely spread, and more worth saving from the quagmire of shams than most people suspect.

I need hardly remark that I was never a Theosophist myself. But my Theosophical sources of information, referred to in the course of the story, have been growing within the Society week by week ever since the exposure began.

There are no signs at present of any intention on the part of the three Theosophic chiefs to return from the various continents to which they departed last July—departed simultaneously with the issue of that “Report of an Inquiry” (so-called) which is the starting-point of these chapters. Mrs. Besant has left Australia to join Colonel Olcott in India; Mr. Judge remains just five days hence at New York. And so, taking a cue from Mahomet and the Mountain, “Isis Very much Unveiled” will now, in booklet form, go out to them.