Some of the information she gives us about
the Maharishi in Call No Man Master reminds me of what I have written about
various fictional characters, including St. John Rivers from Jane Eyre.
Some of it may be small stuff, but the devil
is in the details.
The red, white and black connection
These colours of interest have been mentioned
in various articles about witches, including one about Emma Cobley from Linnets and Valerians, who was wearing these colours and knitting a red scarf when
the children first saw her.
By coincidence, when Joyce Collin-Smith first
saw the Maharishi, he was wearing white silk robes and carrying a sheaf of red
gladioli. He had long black curling hair.
He had exchanged the gladioli for a red rose when
she went to meet him personally.
More Linnets and Valerians connections
When the children first went into Emma
Cobley’s shop, the light was very dim.
When Joyce Collin-Smith first saw the
Maharishi Yogi, it was in a dimly-lit lecture room. He did not like bright lights.
This could be attributed - for a while - to his previous life in the solitude
and darkness of caves in the Himalayas, but it seems symbolic to me.
In Linnets and Valerians, Emma Cobley’s cat, her
follower’s bulldog and even her followers grew, or appeared to the children to
grow, to giant size before coming close and attacking. They then receded to
normal size.
Joyce Collin-Smith tells us that she saw the
Maharishi’s eyes as huge and luminous; they appeared to come very close to her
even though she was sitting in a far corner of the lecture room. This was when
she convulsed in shock because he mentioned the double-headed arrow that she
had just been thinking about.
She closed her eyes; when she looked again,
the Maharishi’s eyes were ordinary and distant.
This is weird, both as a phenomenon and a
coincidence.
Joyce Collin-Smith was just reporting what
she saw or believed she saw, but where did Elizabeth Goudge get her ideas from?
The Shadow of a Sorcerer connection
The Maharishi Yogi has some attributes In
common with Esmé Scarron, the villain in Stella Gibbons’s novel The Shadow of a
Sorcerer.
Scarron goes without sleep almost
indefinitely; Joyce Collin-Smith tells us on more than one occasion that the
Maharishi Yogi was tireless and needed very little sleep. This seems sinister
to me.
Scarron’s power to affect and influence
people remotely is similar to the Maharishi’s. People did not think clearly
around these men or see what was going on.
This is from one of my articles about Esmé Scarron:
“Energy vampires, witches and black magic
practitioners can affect what the people around them see, hear, feel, think,
say, do and understand.”
A while later, I found independent
confirmation of my ideas in something Joyce Collin-Smith says about the Maharishi:
“… I realised later that we always saw only
what he wanted us to see, heard what he wanted us to hear, neither more nor
less.”
More Shadow of a Sorcerer connections
Scarron caused misfortunes to his enemies and
took revenge when thwarted, defied, betrayed, attacked or insulted.
When one of Scarron’s most fervent disciples
eventually found enough strength of character to decide to forget him, it made
him very angry; from then on he hated both her and the man who later became
her husband.
Joyce Collin-Smith tells us how the Maharishi
bent the leader of a group that was studying Ouspensky’s teachings to his will
- for a while. Maharishi did not like this man but needed his and his followers’
expertise and resources. The Maharishi actively
discouraged his disciples from seeing other Indian masters - maybe he was afraid
that they would expose him - but this man found a better Indian guru for
himself and his group to study with.
There was a big split and a final showdown. Joyce
Collin-Smith says this:
“Maharishi... made a vigorous attempt to turn the powerful Englishman with all the resources and money, back his way. For all his skill, his undoubted hypnotic and telepathic power, he could not do so. Those who were there reported seeing an expression of naked anger on the face of Maharishi when he finally realised he had failed to impose his will on a man whom he clearly regarded as being in all ways his inferior.
“Maharishi... made a vigorous attempt to turn the powerful Englishman with all the resources and money, back his way. For all his skill, his undoubted hypnotic and telepathic power, he could not do so. Those who were there reported seeing an expression of naked anger on the face of Maharishi when he finally realised he had failed to impose his will on a man whom he clearly regarded as being in all ways his inferior.
‘He looked frighteningly human, not like a holy
man at all’, someone told me.”
This speaks for itself. It is not the
reaction of a highly-evolved, genuinely spiritual person. It could have been a description of Esmé Scarron
and his behaviour. Such people have the same attitude: “How dare these inferior people defy
the great me.”
They give it out but don’t like it when they
get it back. They ruthlessly ignore, cut out, cast off and throw out people who
are no longer of any use to them or have offended them in some way, but hate it
when people do the same to them.
This battle of wills, this use of mind-power
to force obedience, also reminds me of a similar battle between Emma Cobley
the witch and Uncle Ambrose the vicar in Linnets and Valerians.
The Jane Eyre connection
The Maharishi had huge, unrealistic goals and
was a hard taskmaster where some of his disciples were concerned.
He estimated that the entire world could be
regenerated in three years by the spread of Transcendental Meditation, and said
that world peace would follow.
The Maharishi told his supporters to go to
Buckingham Palace to see the Queen and 10 Downing Street to see the Prime
Minister and arrange for TM cells to be set up!
All this reminds me of St. John Rivers in Jane Eyre. He travelled in the opposite direction to the
Maharishi: he went to India to convert the Hindus!
Same old, same old. Many cult leaders have
unlimited ambition and a mission. They plan to save the world or huge numbers
of people. They set their followers impossible tasks.
Just as the Maharishi immediately sensed that
Joyce Collin-Smith would be of great use to him and took her on as his
assistant, St. John Rivers soon realised how useful Jane Eyre could be to him
for his work in India.
The Maharishi dismissed Joyce Collin-Smith’s requests
to take on more helpers when she was overloaded and swamped with tasks: he told
her twice that she would manage very well by herself and that it was not
necessary to have anyone else.
She did not persist, although this would have
been a reasonable thing to do: just reading about all the jobs she had to take
on with no assistance is tiring!
St. John Rivers too was a hard taskmaster. Jane
Eyre had trouble meeting the inordinate demands that he made on her, including
learning what was then an outlandish language - Hindustani.
St. John Rivers dismissed the idea that Jane
Eyre couldn’t cope with the demands he made on her, although in her case it was
going out in bad weather that she found most difficult.
St. John Rivers was not at all happy when
Jane Eyre defied him by refusing to accompany him to India. Just as the
Maharishi tried to convince that former disciple to stay with him, Rivers tried
very hard to impose his will on Jane, insisting that it was also the will of
God.
More to come about the Maharishi
I noticed one or two more fictional connections that now seem more suitable for a forthcoming article about the Maharishi Yogi. There is still more to be said about him, his techniques and his behaviour towards his devotees.
I noticed one or two more fictional connections that now seem more suitable for a forthcoming article about the Maharishi Yogi. There is still more to be said about him, his techniques and his behaviour towards his devotees.
The black-haired Maharishi Yogi in white, with
some red gladioli in the background:
