by Sax Rohmer
But yet another phenomenon was in store for the sceptic. At “the house of the merchant Gebhard,” Elberfeld, M. Solovyoff and his companion visited Madame Blavatsky, and found her “all swollen with dropsy, and almost without movement, in an enormous arm-chair,” surrounded by Olcott; the chela Mohini, and some nine or ten others. In the course of the evening M. Solovyoff’s attention was directed to a recess, or portion of the large drawing-room, before which hung heavy draperies.
The curtains being suddenly drawn back, “two wonderful figures, illuminated with a brilliant, bluish light, concentrated and strengthened by mirrors,” arose before them. At the first moment M. Solovyoff thought that he looked upon living men, but in reality these were two great draped portraits of the Mahatmas Morya and Koot Hoomi, painted in oils by Schmiechen, an artist related to the Gebhard family.
“Mahatma Root Hoomi, clad in a graceful sort of robe, trimmed with fur, had a tender, almost feminine face, and gazed sweetly with a pair of charming light eyes.
“But as soon as one looked at the ‘ Master,’ Root Hoomi, for all his tender beauty, was at once forgotten. The fiery black eyes of the tall Morya fixed themselves sternly and piercingly upon one, and it was impossible to tear oneself away from them. The f Master’ was represented... crowned with a white turban and in a white garment. All the power of the reflectors was turned upon this sombrely beautiful face, and the whiteness of the turban and dress completed the brilliance and lifelikeness of the effect.... One had to force oneself to remember that it was not a living man. I could not turn my eyes away.”
Reaching his room at the Hotel Victoria, M. Solovyoff locked the door, undressed, and retired to bed.
“Suddenly,” he says, “I woke up, or, what is more probable, I dreamt, I imagined that I was awoke by a warm breath. I found myself in the same room, and before me, in the half-darkness, there stood a tall human figure in white. I felt a voice, without knowing how or in what language, bidding me light the candle. I was not in the least alarmed, and was not surprised. I lighted the candle, and it appeared to me that it was two o’clock by my watch. The vision did not vanish. There was a living man before me, and this man was clearly none other than the original of the wonderful portrait — an exact repetition of it. He placed himself in a chair beside me, and told me in an unknown but intelligible language various matters of interest to myself. Among other things he told me that in order to see him in his astral body I had had to go through much preparation, and that the last lesson had been given me that morning, when I saw with closed eyes the landscapes through which I was to pass on the way to Elberfeld; and that I possessed a great and growing magnetic force. I asked how I was to employ it; but he vanished in silence. I thought that I sprang after him; but the door was closed. The idea came upon me that it was an hallucination, and that I was going out of my mind. But there was Mahatma Morya back again in his place, without movement, with his gaze fixed upon me, the same, exactly the same, as he was imprinted on my brain. He began to shake his head, smiled, and said, still in the voiceless, imaginary language of dreams, ‘Be assured that I am not an hallucination and that your reason is not deserting you...
“He vanished; I looked at my watch, and saw that it was about three o’clock; I put out the candle, and went to sleep at once.
“I woke at ten o’clock and remembered everything quite clearly. The door was locked; it was impossible to tell from the candle if it had been lighted during the night, and if it had been long burning, as I had lighted it on my first arrival before the visit to Madame Blavatsky.”
I have only to add that M. Solovyoff regarded this vision, in some way, as a new proof of the falsity of Madame’s claims! Frankly, I cannot see his point of view. The phenomenon of his seeing a panorama of Belgian scenery prior to visiting Belgium was distinctly supersensual, and some of the circumstances attendant upon the vision of Morya mark it as wholly different from any normal dream.
Let me say at once that the former experience (even if we disregard the latter) cannot be explained by any generally accepted natural law. Yet we find a man fresh from such phenomena writing:
“Then she was there, this old, sick woman, suffering tortures from her deep-seated maladies, looking death full in the face, and then looking full in the face at me, as a man looks whose conscience is clear, who feels his own innocence and fears no reproach!”
What reproach had she to fear from M. Solovyoff? If she employed trickery, then some of it was of a sort inimitable by any professional conjurer in Europe. If M. Solovyoff’s experience proved nothing beyond the existence of an unsuspected law of nature, then was he indebted to Madame Blavatsky; and an inquiring age would be eternally indebted to M. Solovyoff had he offered us a suitable explanation. But he does not even attempt the task; he says:
“There must have proceeded from this terrible and unhappy woman some sort of magnetic attraction, not to be translated into words, which so many calm, healthy, and judicious people experienced in their own persons. I was so sure of myself; and lo, she was making me waver!”
VI. “ISIS UNVEILED”
Shortly afterwards came Mr. F. Myers, of the London Society for Psychical Research, and the tragic downfall of Madame Blavatsky drew near. Those who are curious respecting the Report of the Committee on Theosophical Phenomena may profitably consult Vol. III. of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. If I have formed any opinion respecting the Report I shall not advance it here. Mr. Hodgson’s conclusion, that Madame Blavatsky was a Russian spy, does not concern us. Suffice it that she was found guilty of fraud, whilst Colonel Olcott was acquitted.
M. Solovyoff’s account of the exposure of the astralbell device is not entirely satisfactory; and Madame’s “confession” is the most tragic document in the dossier Blavatsky. The voluminous correspondence it will be impossible to deal with here, but a letter from M. Solovy off, dated December 22, 1884, has struck me as curious. In it he says:
“... I dined in the green dining-room... with V — . I ate with a good appetite. I drank very little, as always — in a word, I was quite myself. When dinner was over I went up to my room to have a cigar. I opened the door, lit a match, lighted the candle, and there was Helena Petrovna” (Madame Blavatsky) “standing before me in her black sacque. She greeted me, smiled, said, ‘Here I am,’ and vanished! What does this mean?... hallucination or not? How am I to tell? That it is enough to make one go out of one’s mind is certain...”
But, in truth, the history of this amazing woman is full of such occurrences, and I must abandon any further reference to this phase of the subject if we are to glance, even briefly, at the phenomenal Isis Unveiled.
According to the theosophists, Madame Blavatsky “set to work on Isis without knowing anything about the magnitude of the task she was undertaking. She began writing to dictation — the passages thus written not now standing first in the completed volumes — in compliance with the desire of her occult friends.... But on and on it grew... and, fairly launched on her task, she in turn contributed a good deal from her own natural brain.”
The Brothers were her unseen collaborators, not only controlling the brain of the writer, but “precipitating” actual manuscript whilst she slept. “In the morning she would sometimes get up and find as much as thirty slips added to the manuscript she had left on her table overnight.” No one but a professional penman, perhaps, can be expected fully to appreciate this delightful phenomenon.
In this way, then, Madame’s apologists explain the confusion of arrangement and absence of any continuous style which are the outstanding and irritating features of this really remarkable work. The following paragraph, from The Occult World, is curious:
“The book (Isis) was written — as regards its physical production — at New York, where Madame Blavatsky was utterly unprovided with books of reference. It teems, however, with references to books of all sorts, including many of a very unusual character, and with quotations the exactitude of which may easily be verified at the great European l
ibraries, as foot-notes supply the numbers of the pages from which the passages taken are quoted.”
But Mr. William Emmette Coleman says:
“In Isis Unveiled, published in 1877, I discovered some 2,000 passages copied from other books without proper credit. By careful analysis I found that in compiling Isis about 100 books were used. About 1,400 books are quoted from and referred to in this work; but, from the 100 books which its author possessed, she copied everything in Isis taken from and relating to the other 1,300.”
Of the Secret Doctrine — ostensibly based upon the Book of Dzyan, the oldest book in the world, and written in a language unknown to philology — the same critic says that it was entirely the work of Madame, being largely plagiarized from Wilson’s Vishnu Pur and and other modern sources. The Voice of the Silence, 1899, he condemns upon similar grounds.
It would be impossible to attempt to summarize the teachings of Isis Unveiled; but the following passage has been selected by Mr. A. P. Sinnett as illuminating the final purpose of occult philosophy:
“That which survives as an individuality, after the death of the body, is the actual soul, which Plato, in the Timceus and Gorgias, calls the mortal soul; for, according to the hermetic doctrine, it throws off the more material particles at every progressive change into a higher sphere... the divine, the highest immortal spirit, can be neither punished nor rewarded. To maintain such a doctrine would be at the same time absurd and blasphemous; for it is not merely a flame lit at the central and unextinguishable fountain of light, but actually a portion of it and of identical essence. It assures immortality to the individual astral being in proportion to the willingness of the latter to receive it. So long as the double man — i.e.. the man of flesh and spirit — keeps within the limits of the law of spiritual continuity; so long as the divine spark lingers in him, however faintly, he is on the road to an immortality in the future state. But those who resign themselves to a materialistic existence, shutting out the divine radiance shed by their spirit, at the beginning of their earthly pilgrimage, and stifling the warning voice of that faithful sentry the conscience, which serves as a focus for the light in the soul — such beings as these, having left behind conscience and spirit, and crossed the boundaries of matter, will, of necessity, have to follow its laws.”
VII. IMPRESSIONS
To follow in detail the travels of Madame Blavatsky, Colonel Olcott, and Mohini the chela, would be impossible within the limits of the present account; furthermore, it would be profitless, since it could result in little else than a chronicle of the occasional successes and frequent failures of this tragic old woman, in her giant endeavour to close the Book of Creeds with the seal of theosophy.
We have glanced, if hastily, at her tenets; we have witnessed, with M. Solovyoff and others, cases of phenomena performed by her; witnesses for the prosecution and witnesses for the defence have been heard. Yet I cannot disguise from myself that the portrait remains incomplete. I had hoped to round it off with the aid of Colonel Olcott’s Old Diary Leaves, but I was disappointed. One casts one’s net into the deep sea of Old Diary Leaves, and, as the Arabian fishermen brought up the ginn, brings up Colonel Olcott. This may be as it should be; and I concede with pleasure that my perusal of the lengthy work has increased my knowledge — of Colonel Olcott.
But Madame Blavatsky, although her activities were so recent, remains a more elusive personality than Apollonius of Tyana himself. A rather illuminating sketch of her appeared some time ago in The Vahan, over the signature E. J. Dunn. Some of the writer’s impressions struck me as particularly clear-cut, showing us Madame as she was in 1889.
Mr. Dunn states that he had thrown aside the report of the Society for Psychical Research as a stupid and inane production. The press was full of Blavatsky stories, and it seemed “that the eyes of the whole world were upon her.” He determined to see her; but Fate willed that he should first hear her.
“Well do I remember,” he says, “walking up Lansdowne Road, wondering which house it was, when — hark! what was that I heard? Through an open window of an upper room, I could hear a voice talking in stentorian tones at express speed, and I knew that only Madame Blavatsky could possess a voice like it. There was no need to look for the number of the house. That was Madame Blavatsky and no other! But there was something about the voice which made me pause; I had not reckoned on anything quite so sensational. I walked up and down the street, passed and repassed the house, gradually mustering up courage, for, barely out of my teens, born and bred in a secluded country district, here I was alone in the great city of London, within a stone’s throw of this world-wide celebrity, philosopher, magician — who possessed a voice like that!”
But having come thus far, he mastered hesitancy, handed in his card, and was shown upstairs.
He found Madame Blavatsky seated in an arm-chair with a circle of inquiring people around her — among others, the two Keightleys, G. R. S. Mead, Walter Old, and Countess Wachtmeister. Before he quitted the house that day, Mr. Dunn assures us, every question or problem which he had had in his mind, consciously or subconsciously, was dealt with and answered by “H. P. B.” without his asking a single question personally.
“First one person asked one of my questions, and then another. One individual who sat just behind me persisted in asking a string of questions about which I had been previously thinking, until I could stand it no longer, and right-about-faced, to see whether this thought-reader was man, god, or devil. I thought he looked rather a stupid kind of man, and put him down as a medium, resigning myself to having my brains still more completely riddled, while reflecting that one really must not be surprised at anything happening in the atmosphere surrounding this miracle-worker, H. P. B.
“According to her, every one who asked a silly question or failed to grasp her explanation readily was a ‘flapdoodle.’ The afternoon and evening were mostly taken up with questions by the circle of neophytes and visitors, and answers by H. P. B.”
These questions and answers ranged from problems of abstruse metaphysics and occultism, to those of practical everyday life, and presented a most heterogeneous display of thought. Madame’s answers were ready, witty, and unequivocal. On the subject of marriage she let loose the vials of her wrath upon the multitudinous weaknesses of woman. When one of the ladies ventured upon a mild expostulation, the reply was: “My dear, I am a woman, and so I know.”
With a card-table before her, Madame Blavatsky would call for chalk and draw diagrams upon the table to illustrate her tenets. One question (on the reversed pentagram) drew forth a lengthy discourse on the various forces correlated to each of the five lines, and on the difference, when reversed, for Black Magic.
“I attained the object of my visit. No one could speak like H. P. B. without being true to the core. She had the courage to face, practically single-handed, the obloquy of the world, and this dauntless courage came out in the treatment of every subject which was discussed. Eyes that could look one through and through, steady as a rock, penetrating as the ether, intelligence incarnate, portrayed a reliable and heroic soul behind them. The contrast between this giant soul and the deceptions and pusillanimity attributed to her, was not worth a moment’s hesitation.”
Whilst Madame would speak at one moment “with a vehemence like that of a violent thunderstorm,” yet, if she found that unwillingly she had injured any one’s susceptibilities, she would instantly exhibit “the tenderness of a mother.”
I am indebted to Air. Dunn for his useful contribution to the history of a strange character; but in my quest of Madame Blavatsky’s finished written portrait, I find myself always thrown back upon M. Solovyoff, throughout the progress of whose internecine warring I meet with a lovable woman and another than she whom he so skilfully has limned as a Modern Priestess of Isis. No finer tribute has been paid to the founder of the Theosophical Society than this fierce onslaught which, posthumously, destroyed her.
Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky died in London, in 1891, and
her ashes are preserved in three urns.
SORCERY AND THE LAW
I. THE BLACK SABBATH
THE annals of sorcery contain some dark pages, but none so black as those that deal with the wholesale torturings, hangings, and burnings whereby it was proposed to stamp out witchcraft. To-day it is difficult, if not impossible, to appreciate the panic which at one period of European history prevailed throughout society; to understand the fear of bewitchment which ruled men’s hearts, from king to peasant.
When we remember that space was supposed to be peopled with demons, numbering, according to Wierus, 7,405,925, we perceive upon what this fear was founded; for the whole legion was at command of the witch! Indeed, in those days of universal witchcraft, one was fortunate who avoided possession. St. Gregory of Nice relates a story of a nun who forgot to say her benedicite before she sat down to supper, and who in consequence swallowed a demon concealed amongst the leaves of a lettuce.
Satan, of course, was lord of the unclean host, and he frequently manifested himself in person. For instance, in the reign of Philippe le Bel he appeared to a monk in the shape of a dark man riding a tall black horse, then as a friar, next as an ass, and finally as a coach-wheel. But he and his demons could also assume the forms of handsome youths, and instances are recorded of children born of unions between such demons and beautiful women of whom they had become enamoured. These demoniacal offspring were readily recognizable, however, by their ceaseless howling, by their requiring five nurses to suckle them, and by their never growing fat.
Periodically, Satan summoned a meeting of demons, wizards, and witches. It was termed the Sabbath, taking place (according to some accounts) immediately after Friday midnight. These Sabbaths were held, of course, in various districts, but once every year a grand Sabbath was held on the Brocken, attended by all the fiends of Christendom. Accounts of these Sabbaths are for the most part based upon the confessions of convicted witches. They correspond curiously.
