by Marion Meade
Michael must have thought himself the only sane person in a madhouse, for the following Wednesday a package of money and a letter addressed to Gerry Brown dropped on his head, along with orders from John King to take them immediately to the telegraph office. Michael protested he didn’t have time to run the errand, but John refused to take no for an answer.
While the séances, materializations and deathlike trances continued as before, Helena grew increasingly morose. Racking her brain for a way to share her panic with someone, she arranged for Master Serapis to send Henry Olcott a grim letter describing Sister Helen’s “bitter hours of mental agony and sorrow” over “this crafty youth” whom she had married. While Serapis admitted to feeling pity for Betanelly, he had no compunction about calling him a “weak and silly wretch.” The letter continued:
His love for her is gone, the sacred flame has died out for want of fuel, he heeded not her warning voice; he hates John and worships the Dweller who holds with him communication. Finding himself on the brink of bankruptcy, his secret design is to sail for Europe, and leave her unprovided and alone. Unless we help him for the sake of her, our Sister, her life is doomed and for her her future will be poverty and sickness.95
The situation was hardly so black as Serapis painted because Helena knew that she would soon be receiving a substantial sum from the Gerebko judgment; surely Master Serapis, who seemed to know everything about her, must have been aware of her court victory. Nevertheless, he went on to inform Olcott that Michael’s business had unfilled orders from foreign governments and that were he able to ship them, “there are millions in the future in store for him.” Unfortunately, he added, the man “has no money and his brains are weak. Will my brother try to find him a partner?” Apparently distrusting Henry’s own powers of ingenuity, Serapis suggested that Olcott approach a distant relative of his ex-wife’s. “Let the transaction be executed at your discretion and pleasure. Does my good brother Henry understand me, does he realize what I mean?”96
Henry did. He was able to get Michael about fifteen hundred dollars from a man named Everman, but whether this person was a member of his former wife’s family is unknown. By this time, Olcott had become exceedingly suggestible. On the advice of a man he had never met, whose very existence was questionable, he arranged a loan for another man whom he disliked. Judging by the letters Serapis wrote over the next weeks, Olcott did not agree straight off, and Serapis was obliged to suggest that his failure to comply would result in the loss of future occult powers: “You must not part with Helena.... Try to help the poor broken-hearted woman.... Watch over her, Brother-mine—forgive her outburstings of passion, be patient, merciful, and charity bestowed on another will return to thee a hundred fold nobly.”97
But Henry was not without his pride. A few months earlier, in a fit of suspicion, he had visited the Russian Consulate to check the information Helena had given him at Chittenden about her Dolgorukov ancestors. Now he demanded from her further information about her mysterious brotherhood, flatly insisting that he communicate with them directly. “I want all my messages from them verbatim et literatim,”98 he told her.
She replied sweetly: “You want too many things at once, my dear.”
Of course she would be happy to comply, but, she reminded him, he would be unable to read the orders without her translation. “Now my advice to you, Henry, a friendly one: don’t you fly too high, and poke your nose on the forbidden paths of the Golden Gate without some one to pilot you.” With totalitarian aplomb, she advised “patience, faith, no questioning, thorough obedience and Silence.”99
In early July, Helena, on two good legs, walked out of her marriage with Michael Betanelly. Immediately, she ran to join Henry in Boston, where, at Aksakov’s request, Olcott was auditioning mediums to go to Russia, all expenses paid. After six miserable months of trauma, Helena was delighted to be among people again. She and Henry stayed at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Houghton in Roxbury and made forays into Boston for seances.
H.P.B. spent two days in Springfield at the home of Louisa Andrews, the Spiritualist author with whom she had been corresponding. Judging Madame Blavatsky on the basis of her vivacious letters, both Louisa and her sister Em felt greatly attracted to Madame and were eagerly looking forward to meeting her. The first day went beautifully, for the sisters wanted nothing more than to be friends, but at the initial seance, John King threw a pencil at Louisa, who did not have the foresight to dodge. Although he tried to make up the next day by writing her a letter, Louisa and Em were resistant to his pleas. They considered the letter an example of “very poor trickery,” and even though they smiled politely, Madame “read our feelings like an open book” and indignantly accused them of thinking her a fraud.
To make matters worse, Helena exploded with a burst of true confession that further alienated her hostesses. As Louisa recalled, Madame seemed “half wild with anxiety, even terror,” and blurted out “something which had occurred and which, if not miraculous, was criminal and would, if discovered, have put her into the penitentiary” Whether or not Helena’s secret admission was of her bigamy, it forced Louisa to conclude that her guest “was a very unprincipled woman.”
H.P.B., on the other hand, deciding that Louisa and Em were being altogether hateful, refused to spend another night under their roof. After Madame left, Em suffered from nightmares during which she felt “as if she had been having her blood sucked by a vampire,” and Louisa took the double precaution of destroying both John King’s pencil and Madame’s letters “because I felt their magnetism to be evil.”100
Back with Olcott in Boston, Helena had to face the problem of her uncertain future. What she really wanted was to live in New York with someone else paying her bills and looking after her. The “someone” was of course Henry, but she could not bring herself to broach the subject with him. Helena had been indirectly manipulating people since childhood by claiming that roussalkas and invisible beings under her power were protecting her from harm. At the same time, she would deny responsibility for any mischief by laying off blame on the spirits. Accordingly, she now appointed Serapis to act as her intermediary in persuading Henry Olcott to undertake the support of a dumpy, middle-aged woman for whom he had no sexual attraction. Serapis tackled the problem by using a tone at once conspiratorial and man-toman:
She may in her despair and present straightened [sic] circumstances be tempted to return to Philadelphia and her spouse. Do not allow her to do this, Brother mine. Tell her you are both going to Philadelphia and instead of that take the tickets to New York City, NOT FURTHER. Once arrived... find her a suitable apartment and do not let one day pass without seeing her [there]... for if she finds herself once for a few hours with that polluted mortal, her powers will suffer greatly... and your own progress might be impeded...101
Naturally all this required money and also might entail some temporary hardship for Olcott’s sons, whom he had promised to support, but
if you succeed to bring her out before the world in her true light, not of an adept but of intellectual writer and devote yourself both to work together the articles dictated to her, your fortune will be made... She must have the best intellects of the country introduced to her... She will make you acquire knowledge and fame through herself.
And, Serapis cautioned: “Try to have her settled by Tuesday Eve.”102
III
The Theosophical Society
Back in Irving Place, Helena at last began to feel solid ground under her feet. With Olcott down the street at the Lotos Club and a stream of guests dropping by in the evenings, she was seldom alone. Thanks to Henry’s contacts, the company was not limited to Spiritualists, mediums and crackpots, but included, as Henry modestly described them, New York’s “bright, clever people of occult leanings.”103 They were scientists, philologists, authors, journalists, lawyers, doctors and broad-minded clergymen who made fascinating conversation in English, French, and Russian. The salon could always be relied upon to be lively, sometim
es instructive, even extraordinarily bizarre. According to Reverend Doctor J. H. Wiggin, editor of The Liberal Christian, some of the subjects discussed on the night of his visit were the possibility of flowers having souls, the phallic element in religion, gravitation, jugglery and chemistry. While Madame impressed him as “a most original and interesting woman,”104 he could not help sympathizing with those guests who complained about her cigarettes.
If Helena happened to be in the proper mood, visitors found their secret thoughts being read and their most intimate affairs discreetly referred to. Enthroned on the sofa, she filled the room with gusts of cigarette smoke and talked extravagantly. Only a few weeks earlier, she had lamented to Aksakov from Boston that she was “ready to sell my soul for spiritualism, but nobody will buy it.”105 Overnight, people were buying it and paying close attention. Among the most ardent of the devotees was a gangling twenty-four-year-old Irishman named William Quan Judge.
While H.P.B.’s new friends were, at the very least, comfortably off, William Judge had known both physical and financial hardship. Born in Ireland in 1851, he had suffered a sickly childhood and at the age of seven had even been pronounced dead. A few moments later, however, his bereft family saw him revive. During his year of convalescence he began reading books about magic and religion. He would later attribute the development of his life-long interest in mysticism to this period. When William was about thirteen, his mother died bearing her seventh child. Afterward the family emigrated to the United States and settled in Brooklyn, where Frederick Judge undertook the double responsibility of earning a living and caring for his family. In this he was aided by William, who secured a position clerking for an attorney and ended up by being admitted to the bar in 1872. By the time Helena met him, he worked in the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and was a married man with an infant daughter. His wife, Ella, was a strict Methodist, who disapproved when William, after reading Olcott’s articles in the Daily Graphic, wrote to the colonel for an introduction to Madame Blavatsky. When Olcott finally got around to issuing an invitation to 46 Irving Place, Ella did not accompany him.
Instead Judge brought with him a bachelor friend from the Sandwich Islands, who was studying law in New York, with the intention of remaining there and establishing a practice. Casually, H.P.B. informed the incredulous student that within six months he would return home with a wife. During this exchange, Judge hardly spoke, although the few remarks Madame had thrown his way indicated she could read his mind. The next day, determined to test her powers, Judge unearthed an old scarab from among his possessions and asked a friend’s clerk to wrap and mail it to Madame Blavatsky, making sure his own hand did not touch the package. Several days later, when he returned for a second visit to Irving Place, Helena majestically thanked him for the scarab.106
As people got to know H.P.B., they responded to her with awed admiration, like the captivated Judge, or dismissed her as an attention-hungry eccentric. Charles C. Massey, a friend of Henry’s and a well-to-do English barrister who had given up his practice to study psychic phenomena, during a stop in New York, was naturally trotted over to Madame’s salon by Olcott. During the evening, the question of whether spirits could materialize as butterflies came up for brief but zestful debate and then was dropped. Not fifteen minutes later, however, they noticed fluttering about the parlor a winged creature, which Helena and Olcott immediately hailed as a butterfly, but which Massey could see was nothing but a moth. When Helena waved toward the window and cried, “Let’s have another,” a second moth flew in. Pleased with herself, she asked the moths to leave; one obliged, but the other got stuck behind the draperies. Massey, unimpressed, noted in his diary that the moths “must be frequent visitors and no magic is required to account for them.”’107
Another guest who failed to find H.P.B. extraordinary was Emma Hardinge Britten, a well-known writer and lecturer of about Helena’s own age. Born in England, Emma, accompanied by her widowed mother, had come to the United States with a theatrical company and remained. Initially repelled by Spiritualism, Emma soon experienced conversion when she discovered that she was a powerful medium. She turned her psychic talents to writing and public speaking and, traveling the length and breadth of the country, the pugnacious Emma soon won a reputation as the great female proselytizer of the Spiritualist movement. She was so popular an orator that people were turned away from her already packed lectures and the texts of her speeches reprinted in full by the Spiritualist papers.
Emma was an attractive woman with a round face, prominent front teeth, and braids coiled around her head. Showing up at H.P.B.’s with her husband, William, a former Universalist minister, she was immediately surrounded by a group of admirers and although Helena welcomed celebrities into her drawing room, she did not take kindly to females who upstaged her. Eying her guest warily, Helena listened while Emma talked volubly about her work-in-progress. Five years earlier she had published a hefty history of the Spiritualist movement, Modern American Spiritualism, and now was working on a second book, which would deal with the ancient occult sciences, the existence of adepts, and the astral light. In short, she was poaching in what H.P.B. considered her exclusive province. But what most intrigued Helena was Emma’s vociferous insistence that she was not the author of Art Magic but only the amanuensis, or as she put it “translator,” for a Chevalier Louis, whom she would only identify as a learned French adept she had met in Europe.
While Helena and Olcott might lift their brows in private, they had to admit that Mrs. Britten was a superb saleswoman for Chevalier Louis. She even distributed a handsome, printed prospectus, calculated in Olcott’s opinion, to push “the most jaded curiosity to the buying-point.”108 The author, announced Mrs. Britten, would permit the printing of only five hundred copies and reserved the right of refusing buyers whom he found undeserving. After the first edition was run, the plates were to be destroyed. Since the Brittens had found no publisher willing to go along with this arrangement, they planned to publish the work themselves at the exorbitant price of five dollars. Olcott, although committed for two copies, disdained the whole process as too precious for his taste.
Helena, keeping silent for once, began to construct personal possibilities based on the Brittens’ endeavor. There was no doubt in her mind that she was destined to write a book, had once even written a few pages. Showing them to Henry she had remarked, “I wrote this last night by order, but what the deuce it is to be I don’t know.”109 Since no further instructions had come from her superiors, she had thrown the writing into a drawer. Now it occurred to her that if Emma Britten could write a book, she could write a better one, and she could certainly improve on Emma’s ridiculous account of her “Chevalier Louis.” And didn’t Helena have the entire Brotherhood of Luxor behind her?
Actually, H.P.B. had little choice but to turn to books, since she had reached an impasse with articles. Nobody except Gerry Brown would print her work and even he bought with less regularity. Ironically, Helena’s English had greatly improved since the months in Philadelphia when she had been obliged to ask a neighbor to correct her copy. Despairing of finding her own editorial outlet, she began feeding ideas to Henry, who had less trouble in placing pieces. On August 30, in the New York Tribune, he stated that had he been familiar with the great occultists of the past such as Paracelsus, when he wrote People from the Other World, the book would have turned out very different. “I have looked in vain for these past twenty-five years in Spiritualist literature for anything worthy of the name of a philosophy,” he declared. As if those remarks were not sufficiently insulting, he added, “Together with all other sensible men, I have deplored their puerile, absurd and often repulsive characteristics, and been shocked at the disgusting fallacies of free love and individual sovereignty to which they have given birth.”110
Two weeks later, in the same paper, he repudiated all connection with American Spiritualism “in its present form.”111 Olcott’s repeated emphasis on “free l
ove” is amusing since, by his own admission, Henry had been having extramarital affairs and at that very moment was keeping H.P.B.
Helena and Henry’s blasts drew an immediate outcry from indignant Spiritualists who protested the free-love smear and demanded to know why Olcott did not revise his book if it was inaccurate. Moreover, they pointed out derisively, how did it happen he had found answers in the Dark Ages? It was widely accepted that no intelligent person could regard medieval alchemists and magicians as authorities.
Although her days were idle, H.P.B. found her evenings fully occupied. On Tuesday, September 7, a crowd of seventeen gathered in her parlor to hear George H. Felt, an engineer and architect, give an unusually dense lecture on “The Lost Canon of Proportion of the Egyptians.” This was not Felt’s first appearance at Madame’s, for he had been introduced by one of the regulars, Charles Sotheran, a rare book expert who was editor of the American Bibliopolist. Helena had found Felt interesting and asked him to give an informal lecture, which would offer her guests something out of the ordinary. Having brought with him some nicely done illustrations, Felt began somewhat ponderously by explaining his theory that the architectural proportion employed by the ancient Egyptians was actually preserved in temple hieroglyphics. The audience proceeded to yawn, but visibly perked up when Felt went on to remark that the Egyptians had been adepts in magical science and that some of their hieroglyphic figures were realistic drawings of “elementals,” the messenger-spirits who pop up at séances. He himself, he added modestly, had discovered an ancient formula for evoking elementals.
