Great White Brothers P ,179
a very old and noble family. His eyes are large and brown, filled with
tenderness and humor, though with a glint of power. The splendor of
his presence impels one to make obeisance. His face is olive-tanned, his
close-cut brown hair parted in the center and brushed back from the
forehead. He wears a short pointed beard and is often seen in a mag-
nificent red military cloak or in a dark uniform with facings of gold
lace. Usually he resides in an ancient castle in Eastern Europe that has
belonged to his family for many centuries."
In her autobiography Annie Besant recounts how, visiting Madame
Blavatsky in Fontainebleau in 1890, she woke suddenly to find "the air
of the room thrown into pulsating waves, and then appeared the radi-
ant astral figure of the Master [Morya] visible to my physical eyes."
As an explanation for the comings and goings of the Masters
Rakoczy, Morya, and Koot Hoonli in and out of physical bodies,
Leadbeater says that when withdrawn "they are aware and active on
the Buddhic and Atnlic levels." When asked how they had attained
such an exalted level, the masters told him that not so long ago they,
too, had stood where we now stand but had risen out of the ranks of
ordinary humanity. In due time, they said, the rest of humanity would
become as they are now, the whole system being a graded evolution of
life extending up and up, to the Godhead itself.
In his book The Masters Revealed, K. Paul Johnson goes to some
length to try to show that Morya and Koot Hoomi were not disem-
bodied spirits but well-known historical characters, the former a
Kashmiri maharaja, Ranbir Singh, the latter a Punjabi Sikh, Thakar
Singh. However, Johnson clouds his industrious scholarship by reveal-
ing his prejudice in the subtitle, Madame Blavatsky and the Myth ofthe
Great White Lodge. If not quite denying, he at least strongly suspects,
the reality of the Great White Brotherhood. On the other hand,
Richard Leviton, who spent several years in England undergoing a
lengthy initiation under the auspices of what he calls "several familiar
angels, and a variety of disincarnate former friends and inner plane
spiritual teachers," is more convincing. In the course of his probing
analysis of Steiner's philosophy, he asserts that Steiner never disputed
the reality of the hierarchy of mahatma adepts but "had direct contact