(15)
the psychic awareness of other dimensions parallel to our own.
Hinduism
and Buddhism influenced her. She condemned Man's materialism and
wanted Humanity to stay connected too its soul. By the 1890's, during
Fawcett's formative years, much of the intelligentsia of Europe and the
United States became ardent followers. For some reason Blavatski liked
to be known to close friends as "Jack". I believe Fawcett called his son
after her and not as an abbreviation of John. Fawcett's brother Douglas
while very young, was close to Blavatski, acting as her sort of 'house boy'
in India and Tibet
where she was in communication, she claims, with the
earth guardians, The Great White Brotherhood. The Secret Papers include
hundreds of pages of her works copied out by Fawcett using red
typewriter ribbon.
"Exploration Fawcett" omits the mention of Fawcett's closest friend,
Harold Large. In the Secret Papers, Large is mentioned a lot. According
to Fawcett's daughter Joan, he was a member
of the Hermetic Order of
the Golden Dawn. Joan told me that she believed her father had met him
through that organization, though I do not believe Fawcett was actually a
member of it. Later Joan recalls having tea with Aleister Crowley (the
Golden Dawn's most infamous representative) with her mother in Cannes,
after the disappearance of the expedition. Joan was about eighteen and
looking for an eligible husband and found Crowley rather frightening.
Large was a major influence on Fawcett's view of reality. It was an
unconventional one but not out of keeping with thousands of Europeans
and Americans who had joined Madame Blavatski's Theosophical
Society. They all rebelled against growing capitalism, materialism and
nationalistic world governments. The Art
Nouveau Movement of the time
reflected the yearning for something ancient and forgotten to be restored
and demanded that humanity retains and cultivates a soul. Seances and
the paranormal experienced a huge revival (in reaction and defiance to
the mind-numbing capitalist industrialization that was spreading
everywhere). Joan showed me a few folders crammed with letters from
mediums advising her father on everything from what route to take in the
Mato Grosso, to the location of the Earth Guardians and even whether
Humans can have sexual relations with Elementals. One of these
mediums was Helen Bary or Bari, from California
who ran the Order of
the Unknown. She had read articles by Fawcett in the Occult Review and
opened a correspondence with him on the very eve of his final and fatal
expedition.
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I found in the Secret Papers that Large and Fawcett seemed to contact
scores if not hundreds of mediums between 1908 and 1924; some by post,
some were invited to the Fawcett home for séances (which the quite
young and impressionable Joan, Jack and Brian apparently attended) and
some Large and Fawcett met by appointment in hotel rooms in London.
(1st May 1919. Large to Fawcett) "On receipt of your telegram I rang up
the Park View Hotel. The room is a double one and may be a little more
expensive. Meanwhile Mrs Elliot has rung up to ask what we want her to
do." These psychic threesomes have an almost sexual frisson about them.
Though Brian writes that some of the
female mediums would have
readily surrendered to Daddy, "He obviously did exert some fascination
on women, but in our time he was obviously immune to their charms
himself. I know Mrs Andrew was potty on him and so was Mrs Hubbard
(two young mediums whose letters remain among the Secret Papers). He
could have had them both for the taking had he been unscrupulous
enough but he was fully master of himself."
Did Large bring about Fawcett's death? Large certainly convinced
Fawcett of the existence of the Great White Brotherhood and the certainty
that a council of them could be found in Amazonia. He claimed to be in
touch with them personally (as some people do today,
incredible as that
may seem). Large referred to them as "GHQ" and only did in life what
"They" dictated. Fawcett was the risk taker, the pioneer of their Great
Scheme, while Large sat in an armchair in New Zealand giving
instructions. It was Large who sent a copy of a certain vital document to
Fawcett in 1919. It was a copy of the vividly written description in Sao
Paolo archives of an Amazonian lost city found by early explorers in
1753 and then lost again. Fawcett replies in a letter of 15 May 1919, " Oh
Mysterious Man. Where did you gather your information of the enclosed
from? Of course it is
the city, or one of them.
The curiously Greek letters
described ought to be sufficient hint of its Atlantian origins". Fawcett
seems to have been under Large's spell and so grateful that someone
should give help and encouragement in this hostile world of cynics,
materialists and dreary rationalists at the RGS.
All those who have written about Fawcett from Peter Fleming, Colin
Wilson and many other quite big names have assumed that his aim in
1925 was to find an undiscovered civilization. The media have assumed
that the party were killed by the Kalapalos North-East of Cuiaba and
(17)
Internet theosophists have speculated (without any proof) that Fawcett
descended a cave into an underground city,
millions of years old called
Ibez where UFOs abound .
In the Secret Papers it is evident that by 1924 archaeology was no
longer his primary objective and may have been a ploy to get some
sponsorship.
He had two secret objectives that have never been revealed to the
public until now:
1. To found a colony in Amazonia for people wanting to escape
materialism and develop mystic consciousness; The Great Scheme.
2. To deliver his son Jack to the Earth Guardians in Amazonia as an
initiate and, after his training and transformation into another soul,
to install him as the founder and leader of a similar mystic colony in
Ceylon (Jack's birthplace).
The Cast of Characters
NINA
Nina was born in 1870 at Kalutara,
sixty miles South of Colombo,
Ceylon. Her father was Judge George Watson Paterson. The Judge's
house was on the shores of the Indian Ocean. Brian writes that "through
babyhood, the breaking waves sang their nocturne to her, till as a young
child she went to her father's native Scotland to be educated."