by Hugh
Shearman
The Theosophist
1968
IT would seem
fair to summarize the “occult” view of things by saying that all material existence is but a garment worn by
an unseen reality, only a phenomenon whose real purpose and direction of development
are provided by the values and forces of an unseen world within it. We can
study something of this thrust of the inner, in and through the outer, in the
psychological constitution of the individual human being; and indeed in our
everyday world it is usually people who seem to make things happen. But in
ancient tradition there are also certain places on the surface of the earth
which play a critical part in the inner economy of life and provide channels
through which inner forces emerge into effective manifestation in the outer
world, and through which, also, the outer world can bring itself gradually
into closer contact and alignment with the more real inner world.
Sometimes these
places are simply the sites of temple or shrine or the dwelling place of some
saint or holy person. In the history of the Theosophical Society, however,
several deliberate efforts have been made to establish occult centres which
could serve to distribute the forces of inner worlds and provide access to
those forces for those living with their attention normally focuses on the
outer world. There also developed an idea that these centres might serve in
some way in the inner economy of the world and be used in connection with such
an event as the coming of a World Teacher.
The location of
most of these centres appears to have been quite fortuitous. The property at
Adyar, surely the most important of these centres, was acquired in 1882 as
the result
of a property “tip” given to Colonel Olcott. The Manor at Sydney was bought in 1922 simply as a
matter of convenience, to facilitate the work undertaken by Bishop Leadbeater
there. The Ojai property was acquired about the same time because it appealed
strongly to Krishnamurti, and was soon extended. The Ommen estate was offered
to Krishnamurti in 1923 by its owner, to provide a headquarters for his work
in Europe. The Wheaton property of the Theosophical Society in the United States
of America was acquired as a matter of convenience. These are the centres that
come into our present story; but it may be added that Mrs. Besant and Bishop
Leadbeater forecast the acquisition by occultists several centuries hence of
an extensive property in Lower California as a centre for the establishment of
the first nucleus of the sixth Root Race.
There has always
been certain scepticism about these various centres and other similar ones,
apart from the use of some of them as administrative headquarters for the Theosophical
Society; and, while some have claimed that the “occult” character and purpose of such centres has been a matter of direct experience
and knowledge to them, others have seen in their basic intention something
of a delusion. The difficulty is that no external evidence can be offered as
to the value of an occult centre. The intuition of the individual responds
to it or does not respond to it, and in this there can be nothing evidential
beyond,
perhaps, a consensus among a certain type of person.
But forty years
ago something strikingly and externally evidential was discovered with regard
to some of these centres. It was found that, with several other great historic
centres and cities, they formed certain distinct patterns on the surface of
the globe which seemed to suggest that they were part of a design and not just
the product of chance.
It must here be
noted that to trace out these patterns it is necessary to look at a terrestrial
globe and not at a flat map in an atlas. All the widely used map projections
which represent the whole world on a flat surface distort shapes and areas
very much. Mercator’s projection makes Greenland as big as North America and extends the polar regions
to infinity; and
the widely popular Flamsteed’s sinusoidal projection, though much more accurate, cannot, for much the same
reason, serve in the present connection. That the occult centres make a pattern
on the globe was first discovered by Bishop Irving S. Cooper. Rather naïvely he let himself be impressed by the fact that the centres at Sydney, Adyar
and Ommen seemed to make a straight line on the globe. To treat this as a discovery
was naïve because any three points on a globe can be seen as forming a straight line
if looked at from a suitable position. However, he at once began to consider
whether Ojai could be on a continuation of the same line, and it was. This was
certainly rather remarkable. The four centres were all on the same line of cleavage.
That is to say, one could cut a globe through with a straight knife-edge so that
all four places would be exactly on the cut.
Points on the
surface of a globe, unlike points on a plane surface, can be cut or joined
by
a variety of straight lines—that is, lines of cleavage. Cooper next noticed that if Adyar and Ojai were joined
by the shortest possible line and if Sydney and Ommen were similarly joined,
the two lines would intersect in the Gobi Desert.
Anxious to make
sure about this, Cooper submitted his discovery to another member, Hervey Gulick,
who was with him at Ojai. Gulick located the point in the Gobi Desert, at which
the line making the shortest surface distance on the globe between Adyar and
Ojai and the line similarly joining Sydney and Ommen cut one another, at N.
38° and E. 92°. This is obviously very close to an area about which many occult statements
have been
made. It was not possible to learn the exact position of the “Sacred Island” in the ancient
Gobi Sea; but very rough maps were available in the Vade Mecum to ‘Man: Whence, How
and Whither’ compiled by Albert Schwarz. One of these maps, obviously very rough, inaccurately
drawn and on a small scale, based upon data provided by Bishop Leadbeater, had
represented the location of the “Sacred Island” as being about N. 40° and E. 94°. But Gulick made a further discovery about cleavage lines cutting through the
four occult centres and other centres. He traced two parallel circles, one cutting
through Adyar and Ojai and the other through Sydney and Ommen. The centre of
the two circles is at a
position N. 45° 30' and E. 150° 30' in the neighbourhood of the Kurile Islands lying in the
North Pacific.
The inner or Adyar-Ojai
circle runs through the following places. After leaving Adyar it cuts through
Quetta, crosses Afghanistan and south-western Siberia and cuts through the
cities of Moscow and Helsinki, passing the outskirts of Leningrad, crosses
Sweden and Norway, the North Atlantic, Greenland, Hudson Bay and central Canada,
exactly cutting Salt Lake City and Ojai, and passes on across the Pacific and
the Fiji and Loyalty Islands and across Australia
and the Indian Ocean.
The second or
Sydney-Ommen circle, cuts through a much greater number of well-known places.
It runs from Sydney across the Indian Ocean, across Iraq and Syria, cuts
through Ankara in Turkey, Bucharest in Rumania, Budapest in Hungary, Prague
in Czechoslovakia,
Weimar and Münster in Germany, Ommen in the Netherlands, Newcastle-on-Tyne in England, Glasgow
in Scotland.
After crossing
the Atlantic and a portion of Canada, it cuts exactly through Wheaton, Illinois,
the headquarters of the Theosophical Society in the United States of America,
through Kansas City, Oklahoma City and then across Mexico and Lower California,
where it cuts across the desolate area which is said to be the place where
a colony will be established to form the initial nucleus of the sixth Root
Race some centuries hence, and so over the Pacific Ocean
to Australia again.
The broad band
of territories between the two circles is about 800 miles wide or 11° on the surface of the globe. The distance in degrees from the centre of the
two circles in the neighbourhood of the Kuril Islands to the first of the
circles, the Adyar-Ojai one, is the same as the distance from the North Pole
to the
tropic of Cancer. The major cities which the lines cut have all very distinctive
qualities and histories. Naturally most of the places cut by the lines are
quite obscure or are uninhabited areas. All the occult centres involved in
the patterns are still functioning as such, with the exception of Ommen,
which ceased to be used by Krishnamurti as a centre for his work after it
had served
as a concentration
camp in the Second World War.
It requires some
careful examination of the factors involved, and perhaps some knowledge of
terrestrial geography, to appreciate what an extraordinary discovery this global
pattern or complex of patterns was. It is almost impossible to discover any
cleavage lines on the globe which cuts through places of any common or shared
significance. That it should be possible to find a group of centres or locations,
having quite a distinctive common significance and forming such a pattern of
cleavage lines, lies right outside the mathematics
of chance.
If such a remarkable
set of geographical relationships had been observed in the history of some
religious cult, it would be treated as something miraculous, a kind of endorsement “from on high,” and it would be very much publicized by the members of that cult. The Theosophical
Society, however, is not a cult, and the kind of motives that are found in
a religious cult are not present in it. Another reason why little further attention
was paid to the discovery after Cooper made it known in THE THEOSOPHIST of
March, 1929, is probably that nobody had the combination of interest and mathematical
capacity to explore the matter further. It seems very likely that if suitable
interest and talent were brought to bear upon the subject there could be further
discoveries of a similar nature or at least some elaboration or extension of
the discoveries then made. For example, it might be found that there is some
further global pattern in which St. Michael’s Centre in Huizen has
a distinctive place.
But the main reason
why little attention has been given to a discovery of this factual nature is
probably that there is a fairly wide diffusion within the Theosophical Society
of some measure of direct experience of the occult, rendering external indications
of this kind unnecessary or unimportant. Those who feel sure that they are
working on right lines do not need to have it demonstrated to them on the map.
Nevertheless there is some use in taking note of these evidences of occult
planning behind the outer activities of people in the world. These evidences
indicate the significant participation of the Theosophical Society and several
other associated movements in this planned activity and convey a strong impression
that Colonel Olcott, Mrs. Besant, Bishop Leadbeater, Mr J. Krishnamurti, and
others who made the effective choices in the establishment of these centres,
were by no means out of touch with certain underlying realities.