Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [97]
Spalding was by nature a wanderer. Acolytes believed him when he said he had traveled to the most exotic places on earth. Beginning in the year 1894, so went his story, he set off with a party of eleven to probe hidden truths in the still-mythical regions of Tibet, India, China, and Persia. He was, he initially said, working as a researcher in the employ of Columbia University (a claim to which Columbia authorities quickly put an end). Closer to the truth was that, aside from an ill-conceived tour of India that his publisher sent him on with a handful of credulous pilgrims in 1935, Spalding may never have traveled farther than the upstate New York town where he was born and the Western and Pacific states where his mining activities took him.
At least one member of the 1935 India tour wrote back home that, strangely, faculty members at Calcutta University fondly remembered Spalding from his student days there. But most other eyewitnesses described the whole excursion as a disaster of comedic proportions. During the trip, Spalding was supposed to conduct his party of California pilgrims to the locales where he’d encountered the “Elder Brothers”—maybe even snagging a meeting with one in the process. The composite of stories from returning participants had Spalding disappearing for days at a time, tossing off a few tall tales, spuriously reporting that washed-out roads and earthquakes precluded their visiting sites from his books, and then finally ditching the tour group altogether, cashing in his ticket, and returning home aboard a freighter.
The few authentic Hindu worshippers who did cross paths with the Spalding party regarded its leader as a curious, likable, though off-balance man. The British mystical scholar and writer Paul Brunton, at the time a student of Hindu teacher Ramana Maharshi, encountered Spalding knocking about with his fourteen pilgrims in southern India and spent a little time with them. Brunton wrote in his notebooks that Spalding “finally admitted” to him that his Far East travelogues “dealt with visits made in his astral body, not in his physical body as readers were led to believe.” Another disciple of Ramana Maharshi, a British army major named A. W. Chadwick, spent more time with Spalding and his travelers. In his memoirs, Chadwick recalled a “showdown” in which members of the party “turned on Spaulding [sic] and accused him of having swindled them, that the story about the Masters was nothing but an invention and that he had never been in India before. However, he seemed quite equal to the occasion and held his own in spite of the odds.”
Chadwick discovered some “very nice and sincere people” among the Spalding party. While he agreed they had been snookered, he took a more philosophical tack on the whole affair, noting that it did bring some of these hapless tourists into contact with at least one genuine Hindu swami, Ramana Maharshi. One woman in the group, a Mrs. Taylor—who traveled with her husband, a retired postmaster—came into Ramana Maharshi’s presence. In the bombastic style once infamous among traveling Americans, Mrs. Taylor insisted to the Hindu ascetic that she wanted “self-realization”—and wanted the swami to be quick about it. “Wait,” replied the teacher, “it will come in due time.” Mrs. Taylor wasn’t budging. “No,” she replied, “that’s no good. I want it here and now.” After Mrs. Taylor repeatedly refused the teacher’s entreaties for patience, Chadwick recalled, the Hindu master stopped speaking, “but gazed steadily in her eyes for some five minutes or so. She suddenly burst into tears and rushed out of the room, but would never tell anybody what had happened.”
As for Spalding himself, Chadwick recalled him as “a decent sort of person who obviously suffered from delusions. He told me some fantastic tales which he certainly believed himself.… For, surely, he would never have had the courage to lead such an expedition