Laurel leaves-Apollo and the woman he pursued
Cloaked individual-reminds me of this account by an ex monk of the spiritual guides that contacted Blavatski."As Lopez notes, there is so much worth commenting on in Gechoe’s brief reflections. Perhaps most strikingly, the ex-monk gives Blavatsky the benefit of the doubt that her Mahatmas were in fact Tibetan lamas who appeared to her first in non-corporeal, visionary form and then in the flesh (fascinatingly, he naturalizes Blavatsky’s Masters’ names in Tibetan – ‘Morya’ becomes mu ra, which the Ives Waldo dictionary explains is the name of a Tibetan medicinal herb which increases digestive heat and helps with toothache, while Mahatma Koot Hoomi becomes sku thu med, which Lopez renders as ‘The Cloakless One’, since sku thu med can be literally read as ‘body without the lower parts of a robe’]. One wonders whether the Tibetan orthography of Morya and Koot Hoomi were Gendun Choepel’s own innovation, or whether these were presented to him by the Roerichs. There is probably little way of ever knowing. It is certainly possible that the Roerichs – students of Tibetan Buddhism with some decidedly off-the-wall Theosophical interpretations (see my note at the end of this post for more on this) had come up with and presented these etymologies to Gechoe since we don’t really know how curated his exposure to Theosophical material may have been. Then again, he lived a long time in India and Ceylon and engaged with all sorts of different people there and has his comments above show, was clearly aware of contrasting views on Blavatsky. One gets the feeling that these insights are very much a product of his own thinking and orientations."
