Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  Since his remark had been made in French, Helena mistakenly assumed that he was fluent in the language, which he was not, and answered in kind. She asked him how long he had been there and what he thought of the phenomena. She described herself as “greatly interested in such things” and confided that she had read about the Eddys in the Daily Graphic, which had been swept off the newsstands within an hour of publication; she had been obliged to pay $1 for a copy.

  From flattery she made a swift detour to archness. “I hesitated before coming here, because I was afraid of meeting that Colonel Olcott.”

  “Why should you be afraid of him, Madame?” Olcott asked.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, and one may be sure she was enjoying every minute of the game, “because I fear he might write about me in his paper.”

  She needn’t worry, Henry replied, because he felt quite certain that Colonel Olcott would not mention her in his articles unless she wished it, “and I introduced myself.” Twenty years later, writing his memoirs, it seemed ironic to him that their first meeting should have been so “very prosaic,” but he added that even though “our acquaintance began in smoke... it stirred up a great and permanent fire.”

  That afternoon, as H.P.B. and Henry strolled about the farm getting acquainted, she spoke of her travels, hinted at occult marvels she had witnessed, and complained mildly about the tendency of American Spiritualists to emphasize materialistic phenomena at the expense of spiritual philosophy. “She did not give me any hint as to the existence of Himalayan Sages or of her own powers,” Henry recalled. Of course it was scarcely likely that she would have mentioned Tibetan gurus, since they had not yet occurred to her. What she did do was undertake to charm Henry Olcott and, despite her sartorial nonconformity, this was accomplished in no time. As Henry related:

  Her manner was gracious and captivating, her criticisms upon men and things original and witty. She was particularly interested in drawing me out as to my own ideas about spiritual things and expressed pleasure in finding that I had instinctively thought along the occult lines which she herself had pursued. It was not as an Eastern mystic, but rather as a refined Spiritualist that she talked. For my part I knew nothing then, or next to nothing, about Eastern philosophy, and at first she kept silent on that subject.21

  While the chemistry on both sides was immediate, Olcott failed to respond to her as a woman, indeed would claim that he found her androgynous. “Neither then, at the commencement, nor ever afterwards had either of us the sense of the other being of the opposite sex.” Of course, “some base people from time to time dared to suggest that a closer tie bound us together” but these were unimaginative folks who could not understand that there might be “the attraction of soul to soul, not that of sex to sex.” Another of Olcott’s remarks about Helena, that “her every look, word and action proclaimed her sexlessness,”22 seems to defy rational interpretation. She may have been overweight at the time, but she was far from unattractive, and possessed a lush femininity, a sort of earthy sensuality, that was remarked upon by others who encountered her. That she herself was still interested in sex is evident from her relationship with Michael Betanelly and perhaps it was because of this involvement that she felt no need to project her womanly side with Olcott— suspected, in fact, that it might threaten their budding friendship.

  It was one of H.P.B.’s less admirable qualities that she used men (and women to a lesser degree) to gain her objectives, and already she had become adept at manipulation. Meeting Henry she understood at once—may have, actually, sensed it from his articles—that here was an ideal candidate for management if one knew how to go about it properly. At Chittenden, moving cautiously, she carefully refrained from scaring off a person who was, as far as she knew, a married family man. It may be asked what she wanted from Olcott that Helena had to tread so gingerly, and the answer seems to be that she herself was not completely sure. On the most mundane level, she wanted to get her name mentioned in the Daily Graphic because she understood the value of publicity and knew this would be a route to recognition in the Spiritualist movement. Earlier she had tried something similar with Hannah Wolff and the spirit paintings of Helena’s old photographs, but the effort had failed to result in newspaper coverage. To want her name before the public was not such a despicable ambition; on the contrary, it was a means of establishing herself as an authority so that she might get her writings published and thereby support herself. Later it would be hard for some to realize that Madame Blavatsky, despite her insistence that she lived under the protection of august beings, still had to eat like everyone else.

  That evening, filing upstairs to the shadowy seance hall, Helena must have felt that she had to do something startling to attract attention, much less a mention in the Daily Graphic, because among the twenty-five visitors were some prominent people: the Spiritualist writer and lecturer James Peebles, a Hartford music professor named Lenzburg who was with his medium wife, the Michigan medium Mr. H. A. Phillips, and a Chicago medium Mrs. M. B. Carey, who was preparing an article on the Eddys for the Religio -Philosophical Journal.

  The room was dimly lit by a shaded kerosene lamp in the back; on the platform at the front end of the hall stood a curtained cabinet. Everyone took a seat on one of the uncomfortable straight chairs and waited until William Eddy shambled up to the platform, settled on a chair inside the cabinet and pulled a blanket across the doorway. The first thing Helena heard were sounds—faint music and a low babble of voices. Then, in the dimness, luminous hands began to flutter slowly, the disembodied fingers extending and retreating with clutching movements and seeming to reach out to touch the hair of a woman in the first row. After the hands had vanished, the shrouded figure of a crone-like woman next slithered from the cabinet and began muttering incoherently before suddenly warbling a folk ballad in a cracked voice. Backing toward the cabinet, she began to dissolve, and in her place there strutted a tiny Indian maiden who unbraided her hair and shook it over her shoulders.

  As the lineup of American Indians continued, Mrs. Phillips identified one of the forms as her spirit guide Awanola, and Mrs. Carey, not to be outdone, confided aloud that she could see her guide, Wassa. The next person to speak up was H.P.B.’s traveling companion Madame Magnon, who pointed to what she said was her father, Zephrin Boudreau from Three Rivers, Canada. He had been about sixty when he died, she said. “Is that you, Papa?” she called out.

  “Oui,” the figure squeaked.23

  When Madame Magnon began asking questions in French, the phantom would respond by rapping its hand against the frame of the cabinet. “This gentleman,” Olcott remembered, “stood so that I saw him in profile against the white wall. He had an aquiline nose, rather hollow cheeks, prominent cheek-bones and an iron-gray beard upon his chin.” Certain that Boudreau must be “a gentleman,”24 Olcott could not quite make up his mind if the spirit was merely rapping or if it were replying in French. Before he could reach a conclusion, Magnon’s father had disappeared, upstaged by a phantom woman holding a child and Mrs. Dunbar in the front row began to shriek, “Oh, my baby! My Charlie!”25 The child was held over the railing so that the sobbing Mrs. Dunbar could get a better look.

  So far, the spectacle had been relatively routine—American Indians and babies—and Olcott who had been watching them for the past month was feeling a bit bored with the whole business. But the next visitor made him sit up and gasp in amazement.

  He was a person of middle height, well-shaped, dressed in a Georgian (Caucasian) jacket, with loose sleeves and long pointed oversleeves, an outer long coat, baggy trousers, leggings of yellow leather, and white skull-cap, or fez, with tassel.

  To Olcott, who had never seen such a strange costume, here was a potentially newsworthy spook whom he hoped someone would identify. Naturally it was Helena who obliged. “She recognized him at once as Michalko Guegidze, late of Kutais, Georgia, a servant of Madame Witte, a relative, and who waited upon Mme. de Blavatsky in Kutais.”26

  Kutais, it will be rem
embered, was a town through which Helena passed in 1861 or 1862 when she was extremely ill after the birth of Yuri and had to be transported back to Tiflis. It is curious that images from this traumatic episode should suddenly emerge in a Vermont farmhouse among strangers (and what is more curious was that some time later she would discover Michalko to be alive).27 Still, that evening she felt sure that the spirit must be her Aunt Katherine’s servant.

  When William Eddy finished, his brother Horatio turned up the lamp wick and conducted a seance in the light. Among the phenomena was a spirit-hand that wrote Helena’s name on a calling card in Russian script and another disembodied hand that she swiftly identified as that of Michalko’s because a string of amber beads was wound around the wrist, a custom among Georgian peasants, she explained. Whispering in French, Olcott told her to ask the spirit if he would play a song on the guitar lying on a nearby table. “She first asked him, in Georgian and Russian, if he were really Michalko, and certain other questions; to which he responded by sweeping the guitar strings once, or thrice, as he wished to indicate ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ “

  “Ilaparakey sheni tscheerimy” [sic] (Speak to me, my good fellow).

  There was no response.

  “If it is you, knock five times or five sweeps of the guitar.”

  Again there was silence.

  But when Helena commanded, “Play the Lezguinka,”28 the patriotic spirit overcame its shyness and obliged with a passable rendition; afterwards, it played two more Caucasian dances as an encore.

  Olcott could scarcely believe his ears. At last he had found something worth writing about, positive proof as far as he was concerned that the Eddys were genuine. It would be unlikely, he decided, that a Vermont farmer would know about the strings of amber beads on the wrists of Georgian peasants, or, for that matter, be familiar with the tunes of Russian folk songs. Besides, the Madame was “a lady of such social position, as to be incapable of entering into a vulgar conspiracy with any pair of tricksters, to deceive the public.”29

  Tremendously excited, the next morning he dashed off a short piece for the Sun about “Madame Blowtskey” whose spirit Michalko had rapped, “not being able to speak,” and whose music had been “applauded by the Madame, who is herself a musician.”30 In his semiweekly report for the Graphic, Olcott described the concert in considerably greater detail, and this time managed to spell H.P.B.’s name correctly.

  What happened on the night of October 14 is far from clear. According to Mrs. Carey, who was taking notes for her article, something took place but it was not musical. Madame’s spirit, she wrote in the Religio-Philosophical Journal, “was dressed as an Arab and proved to be an Arabian guide which she had known while traveling in that country. She asked him several questions in his native tongue and he replied in the same language.” After the talking, non-musical Arab, the Madame had been visited by a Turk and then by a Russian whom “she recognized as her father, but as he did not come out very distinctly she was not positive.”31 It should be pointed out that what people saw and heard at séances was quite subjective and depended on their will to believe, or as the case may be, disbelieve. At the Eddys’, for example, a skeptical visitor who had departed the day before Helena’s arrival observed that the séance room was so “very dark” that he found it “impossible to distinguish faces;”32 in his opinion the so-called spirits looked like nothing more than “three dollars’ worth of costumes.”

  During the ten days that Helena stayed at the farm, she told Olcott the story of her life —with a few deletions and additions. While she did not refer to the tragic loss of her son and lover, she did mention, for example, visits to Indian temples, her search for antiquities at the base of the Pyramids, and a particularly thrilling exploration into the interior of Africa with an armed escort. Henry thought that no biographer could have written a more romantic story than Helena had lived. “In the whole course of my experience, I never met so interesting and, if I may say it without offence, eccentric a character.”33 He could not deny being terribly impressed by both her Dolgorukov ancestors and the social position of the Fadeyevs, which doubtless encouraged Helena to embroider the lives of those relatives of a somewhat lesser status; for instance, she gave Captain von Hahn the rank of general and promoted Nikifor Blavatsky from vice-governor to governor of Erivan, but it was all the same to Olcott. However, for at least one brief moment he must have been bothered by a few doubts because he asked Madame to furnish documentary proof of her identity. Helena could not have been pleased at his request, but she acted the grand dame and responded serenely by handing him her passport, her father’s will, and personal letters on crested stationery from several noblemen, including Baron Nicholas Meyendorff. It seems incredible that she had carried halfway around the globe fifteen-year-old letters from a despised ex-lover, but apparently she believed they might come in handy someday. Certainly they impressed Olcott, as did her often-repeated account of having fought with Garibaldi’s army.

  Probably she had not meant to make a point of mentioning Mentana but it proved convenient in accounting for her ill health at Chittenden. A few days after her arrival, her old chest wound reopened slightly and while fortunately this was not accompanied by the usual pain and convulsions, it began to cause her considerable discomfort. Olcott said that she “consulted” him about her problem and even showed him the scar. To display a scar below the heart, she would have had to partially disrobe but evidently Olcott chose not to be shocked by this immodest action. And when she solemnly explained that the scar was a stiletto wound from Mentana and made him feel the musket bullet still embedded in her right shoulder and another in her leg, he accepted her story as the truth. Of course he was aware that some of her adventures sounded not quite right and if they had come from another woman, he would have laughed in her face; but he did not imagine that a lady of such distinction as Madame Blavatsky would deliberately lie to him. Gazing into her hypnotic azure eyes and listening to her discourses with open-mouthed awe, he decided that he admired her inordinately and retired to his room where he filled his Graphic dispatches with accolades for the wonder woman he had chanced to discover.

  There was plenty to write about. Every evening at ten minutes to seven a procession of apparitions began to drift in and out of the Eddy cabinet at intervals of from one to five minutes, and although Honto and the Indians doggedly made their appearances, they were now unceremoniously pushed out of the limelight by Madame’s people: “Hassan Aga,” a wealthy Tiflis merchant dressed in a black Astrakhan cap and tasseled hood who said three times that he had a secret to reveal but never managed to spit it out; “Safar Ali Bek,” the man who had guarded Madame for Nikifor Blavatsky in Erivan, now transformed into a gigantic Kurd warrior carrying a feathered spear; a Circassian noukar who bowed, smiled and said, “Tchock yachtchi” (all right); a huge muscular black man in white-and-gold-horned headdress, a conjurer once met in Africa, Helena said. And there were less exotic phantoms as well: an old woman in a babushka, whom Helena recognized as Vera’s nurse, and a portly man in a black evening suit and frilled white shirt, around whose neck hung a Greek cross of St. Anne suspended by a red moire ribbon with two black stripes.

  “Are you my father?” Helena asked in English, later confessing that she had been trembling.

  The figure advanced toward her and stopped. “Djadja,”34 he answered reproachfully.

  He was, Helena informed the group, an uncle, her father’s brother Gustave von Hahn who had been president of the criminal court at Grodno for twelve years and who had died in 1861. The sitters’ eyes were popping. In terms of dramatic interest, Madame’s relatives and even her casual acquaintances certainly outclassed the grubby Indians usually encountered at the Eddy seances.

  To Henry Olcott and the others, Madame appeared to be enjoying herself enormously. According to Helena, who wrote about the Eddy seances in later years, the ectoplasmic shapes filled her with disgust; it made her skin crawl to watch the Spiritualists weeping and rejoicing in happines
s at the sight of those revolting phantoms. She wished that they could see what she saw, that the creatures were not papa and mama and baby Charlie, but the dregs of personalities that had once lived; all the passions, thoughts and vices that could not follow the liberated soul and spirit after physical death. More than once, she would recall, she had seen a phantom detach itself from William Eddy and pounce upon someone in the audience, “expanding so as to envelop him or her entirely, and slowly disappearing within the living body as though sucked in by its every pore.”35 It had been, she would insist, ghastly to watch. Perhaps so. It was true that she did leave the Eddys in a hurry, but more likely this sudden exit resulted from having paid the mediums eighty dollars for room and board and having little money left.

  In any case, she departed with a flourish because the séance on the eve of her leaving proved to be exceptional. As soon as the sitting began, a spirit called “George Dix” wasted no time in approaching Helena and getting right down to business:

  Madame, I am now about to give you a test of the genuineness of the manifestations in this circle, which I think will satisfy not only you, but a skeptical world beside. I shall place in your hands the buckle of a medal of honor worn in life by your brave father, and buried with his body in Russia. This has been brought to you by your uncle, whom you have seen materialized...

  When Helena began to scream, somebody hurriedly struck a light. “We all saw,” Olcott reported, “Mme. de Blavatsky holding in her hand a silver buckle of a most curious shape, which she regarded with speechless wonder.” After she had recovered, she affirmed that the buckle had indeed been attached to a medal worn by her father, that it had been granted by the late Czar Nicholas to his officers after the victorious Turkish campaign of 1828, and that it had been buried with von Hahn.