“As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of “devil-worship”, as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the “miracles” of the apostolic ages.
And what do we see this French author, notwithstanding his incorrigible rationalism, forced to admit, after having narrated the greatest wonders? Watch the fakirs as he would, he is compelled to bear the strongest testimony to their perfect honesty in the matter of their miraculous phenomena. “Never”, he says, “have we succeeded in detecting a single one in the act of deceit.” One fact should be noted by all who, without having been in India, still fancy they are clever enough to expose the fraud of pretended magicians.
This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, “We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!”
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. “All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors, (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little.”
And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it “falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate”, etc.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 