Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  As for herself, she had never liked alcohol. Sex was another matter, but after Michael, she had relinquished it with less regret than difficulty. Once she had even exclaimed to a friend, “To Hades with this sex love! It is a beastly appetite that should be starved into submission.”134 She had considerably less success in taming her excessive passions for tobacco and rich food. Shamed by Henry’s new regime, she fasted for nine days on salad, stopped smoking, and slept on the floor. She suffered from nightmares. On the ninth night, she felt herself leaving her body, “looking at it with repulsion while it was walking, talking, getting puffed up with fat and sinning. Pheugh, how I hated myself.” It was, she decided, “one of the most disgusting scenes”135 she had ever witnessed and she resolved to change.

  In spite of her good intentions, she soon slipped back into her customary excesses, although she was again making another attempt to begin her book. She remained at her desk for seventeen or eighteen hours a day, to Henry’s boundless admiration, and he claimed to know of no managing editor or reporter with her “dogged endurance and tireless working capacity... it was seldom that either of us got to bed before two o’clock a.m.” Later, he would brag that Helena did not go out of the house for six months. In any case, Henry spent his days at his law office and had no real idea what she did in his absence. When he returned after work, they would have an early dinner before settling down to their big writing table “and work, as if for dear life, until bodily fatigue would compel us to stop. What an experience!”136

  IV

  Isis Unveiled

  There has been considerable controversy over how—and by whom—Isis Unveiled was actually written. During Madame Blavatsky’s lifetime, it would be said that she could not possibly have produced it herself, the book being far too complex to have issued from the mind of a woman; instead, she had found the completed manuscript, so the story went, among the effects of a man who had died while living in Olcott’s apartment. Other rumors attributed the work to Olcott himself, still others to a Platonist scholar named Alexander Wilder. Shortly after Helena’s death, William Emmette Coleman, a scathing critic of Madame, spent three years studying Isis and her other works for the express purpose of proving her a plagiarist. In Isis Unveiled, he claimed, there were some two thousand passages copied from other books without credit.

  By careful analysis, I found that in compiling Isis about 100 books were used. About 1400 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 1300. There are in Isis about 2100 quotations from and references to books that were copied, at second-hand, from books other than the originals; and of this number only about 140 are credited to the books from which Madame Blavatsky copied them at second-hand. The others are quoted in such a manner as to lead the reader to think that Madame Blavatsky had read and utilised the original works, and had quoted from them first-hand—the truth being that these originals had evidently never been read by Madame Blavatsky. [Readers of Isis, Coleman went on to insist] had been mislead into thinking Madame Blavatsky an enormous reader, possessed of vast erudition; while the fact is her reading was very limited, and her ignorance profound in all branches of learning.137

  While this particular conclusion may be challenged, Coleman seems to have done his homework thoroughly when he estimated that H.P.B. used about a hundred books. As Olcott admitted, “our whole working library scarcely comprised one hundred books of reference,”138 including Joseph Ennemoser’s History of Magic, Hargrave Jennings’ Rosicrucians, J. S. Forsyth’s Demonologia, and works by Eliphas Levi, S. F, Dunlap, Louis Jacolliot, Henry Roger Gougenot Des Mousseaux, and Max Muller. Occasionally H.P.B. would borrow books from friends, but most were purchased through Andrew Jackson Davis, or discovered in out-of-the-way bookshops.

  Even though Olcott acknowledged H.P.B.’s library, he believed it to be neither her only source, nor her main one. Looking at the hundreds of quotations in Isis, he was sure they could not all have emerged from the books on her shelf; had he not known better, he would have assumed Isis was written in an alcove in the British Museum. However, Olcott is not a good witness for H.P.B. because, unlike the arch-analyzer William Coleman, he had not read those hundred books, and in any case, always opted for romance over reality. It excited him to see Helena sparkling with unimaginable erudition. “Whence did she get this knowledge?”139 he wondered, dismissing the traditional childhood governesses, universities, libraries and travel experience. The answer was simple; she received her knowledge

  from the Astral Light, and, by her soul-senses, from her Teachers—the “Brothers,” “Adepts,” “Sages,” “Masters,” as they have been variously called. How do I know it? By working two years with her on Isis and many more years on other literary work.140

  More to the point, Henry knew not only because H.P.B. told him so but because every night as he sat opposite her, he could see she did not function in an ordinary manner. Her pen flying across the page, she would suddenly stop, stare vacantly into space, and adjust her vision as if looking at something which was invisible to him. Then she would copy down what she had just read in the astral light. The quotation complete, her eyes would resume their natural expression, and she would continue writing as before. Helena’s “astral light” was the universal fluid spoken of by Eliphas Levi; in the twentieth century, Edgar Cayce would call it “the Akashic record,” God’s book of life written upon the skein of time and space; and parapsychologists would hypothesize it as possibly some psychic collective memory that could be drawn upon by mediums. To Henry Olcott, who had never read Levi, the astral light was pure magic.

  Once, when he questioned a quotation he believed she had miscopied, her eyes glazed over and she pointed to a shelf in the corner: “There, there; go look for it over there!”141 Finding two books that to his knowledge had not been in the house before, he corrected the quotation, returned the books to the shelf, and resumed his seat. However, when he looked over at the shelf a few minutes later, he was stupefied to see that the books had vanished. Of course, Helena explained serenely they were merely apports that had been “dematerialized,” i.e., transported through space and material obstacles such as walls, and then “rematerialized” in their original forms.

  The strongest evidence for Helena’s version was the marked variation in handwriting Henry saw in the manuscript. In addition to Helena’s own script, there were three or four others: one small and plain, another bold and free, still others whose queer a’s and e’s made the writing nearly illegible. There was also a great variation in the grammatical styles, for some were poor and required corrections in every line, while others were beautifully written. “Most perfect of all,” he recalled, “were the manuscripts which were written for her while she was sleeping.” On one particular evening, they had worked until 2 a.m. and, too exhausted for her final smoke, Helena had begun to doze off in her chair before Henry left. The next morning, at breakfast, she showed him thirty or forty pages that had been written for her by one of her Masters. “It was perfect in every respect,” Olcott reported, “and went to the printers without revision.”

  His testimony evidences the overwhelming probability that Madame Blavatsky often wrote while in a dissociated state. It is known that trance handwriting can vary sharply from a medium’s normal script and sometimes changes to approximate that of the purported entity communicating; in fact, Olcott states quite clearly that immediately prior to each change in handwriting, Helena would either fall into a trance or leave the room for a few minutes. When she returned to her desk, she would seem to be a different person with “different—very, very different command over her temper, which, at its sunniest was almost angelic, at its worst, the opposite.” Frequently she asked him to frame in good English some ideas she had been unable to express properly, and although Olcott always tried his best, he was hard-pressed to please her. Sometimes she let his failures pass with benevolent patience, sometimes no
t. “For the slightest of errors, she would seem ready to explode with rage and annihilate me on the spot!” Among her favorite epithets for Henry were “idiot”—which she pronounced “ee-jut,” as well as “ass” and “ass’s grandfather.”142

  Not that Henry liked being called names. He attributed both H.P.B.’s nasty temper and her genius to the fact of having undergone seven years of occult training; it would be unfair to expect her to comport herself as a normal person, or write books as an ordinary writer. Of course Helena was the one who had manufactured this further excuse for her outrageous behavior. What she always failed to see was that the myths she invented for Henry’s benefit were gradually turning into monsters that would turn to devour their creator. Worse yet, she gradually came to believe, or to half-believe, her own myths. About this time she wrote to her sister:

  Well, Vera, whether you believe me or not, something miraculous is happening to me. I am writing Isis; not writing, rather copying out and drawing that which She personally shows to me. Upon my word, sometimes it seems to me that the ancient Goddess of Beauty in person leads me through all the countries of past centuries which I have to describe.... I sit with my eyes open and to all appearances see and hear everything real and actual around me, and yet at the same time see and hear that which I write. I feel short of breath; I am afraid to make the slightest movement for fear the spell might be broken. Slowly century after century, image after image, float out of the distance and pass before me as if in a magic panorama; and meanwhile I put them together in my mind, fitting in epochs and dates, and I know for sure that there can be no mistake. Races and nations, countries and cities, which have for long disappeared in the darkness of the prehistoric past, emerge and then vanish, giving place to others... and then I am told the consecutive dates.143

  Although Helena began the letter attributing her sensations to the goddess Isis, she seemed confused about the real identity of her tour guide. Can it be, after all, the everyday Helena who is responsible? “Most assuredly it is not I,” although possibly it could be “my Ego, the highest principle which lives in me.” Finally she concluded that her information derived from “my Guru and teacher who helps me in everything. If I happen to forget something, I have just to address him” and the needed information passed before her eyes. Abruptly, however, the guru to whom she had just referred metamorphosed into a group. “They know everything. Without them, from whence could I gather my knowledge?”144

  Remembering Helena Petrovna’s vivid imagination, and her propensity for lying, Vera wrote back to say she feared for Helena’s sanity. H.P.B. replied plaintively:

  Do not be afraid that I am off my head. All that I can say is that someone positively inspires me—more than this, someone enters me. It is not I who talk and write: it is something within me, my higher and luminous Self, that thinks and writes for me. Do not ask me, my friend, what I experience, because I could not explain it to you clearly. I do not know myself!145

  To Olcott she could never confess these self-doubts without losing credibility, but with her sister she at least attempted honesty. Think of her, she suggested, as a sort of storehouse of somebody else’s knowledge.

  Somebody comes and envelopes me as a misty cloud and all at once pushes me out of myself, and then I am not “I” anymore—Helena Petrovna Blavatsky—but someone else. Someone strong and powerful, born in a totally different region of the world; and as to myself it is almost as if I were asleep, or lying... not quite conscious—not in my own body but close by, held only by a thread which ties me to it... I am perfectly conscious of what my body is saying and doing— or at least its new possessor. I even understand and remember it all so well that afterwards I can repeat it and even write down his words.146

  These sensations were not, of course, new to her, since even in childhood she had felt the presence of a powerful male protector. Her sense of being pushed out of her body is similar to what she had experienced in Mingrelia after the birth of Yuri. But those past episodes had taken place during times of great psychic stress, while now she was living under conditions of relative well-being. For that matter, she had located a human male protector in the person of Henry Olcott; even though he was much too immature to resemble the man of her visions, nevertheless, he had rescued her from poverty and an unwanted husband and had made it possible for her to write. If she connected her earlier experiences with the intelligence who was currently “enveloping my body and using my brain,” she did not mention it to Vera, or to Nadyezhda to whom she described herself as “an enigma for future generations, a Sphinx!”147 She clearly fancied this mysterious image of herself and in letters to her aunt, who knew that she had been a brilliant student, could not resist boasting:

  Just fancy that I, who have never in my life studied anything, and possess nothing but the most superficial smattering of general information; I, who never had the slightest idea about physics or chemistry or zoology, or anything else—have now suddenly become able to write whole dissertations about them.148

  Nadyezhda must have sputtered in astonishment at those words, particularly the claim to know nothing about zoology, for had not all of them in the Fadeyev household imbibed botany and zoology from Princess Helena? Physics and chemistry? These subjects would have presented little difficulty for her niece. As if anticipating Nadyezhda’s reaction, Helena hurried to add:

  It’s not a joke; I am perfectly serious; I am really frightened because I do not understand how it all happens. It is true that for nearly three years past I have been studying night and day, reading and thinking. But whatever I happen to read, it all seems familiar to me.149

  It may be that her recent experiences did frighten her initially, but soon they began to intrigue, excite and flatter her. Actually, almost any creative writer would recognize her sensation of being inspired. Some writers might even admit to having sensed that another’s hand pounded the typewriter keys from time to time. By the same token, it is also a common experience to writers of both fiction and non-fiction, reading over what they have written, to marvel at insights of which they had not believed themselves capable. But H.P.B., despite having had a writer for a mother, knew so little of the creative process that she could only conclude she must be unique.

  For Helena these universal experiences were so intense as to push her into trance while writing. Or possibly the cause lay elsewhere. Among her friends during this period was her old companion from Cairo, Albert Rawson, who, now living in New York, felt delighted to see her and obligingly arranged for her to take hashish, he reported, “under the care of myself and Dr. Edward Sutton Smith.” To Rawson she said nothing about voices and invisible entities, but only raved about the hashish which “multiplies one’s life a thousandfold.”

  There were some men, and later one woman, whom H.P.B. made no attempt to impress with her occult powers, and Rawson was one of them. He was allowed to see the side of her she generally hid—the tireless, always dissatisfied worker—and accordingly he praised her as “an intellectual wonder, a reader of enormous capacity and retentive memory.” It was a pity, Rawson concluded, that her formal education had been neglected “for if she had been started aright who knows but she might have reincarnated Pythagoras or Bacon?”150

  The idea of reincarnation was repulsive to Helena, nor was she interested in being Bacon or Pythagoras. She preferred to invent a Helena Petrovna more marvelous than any man who had actually existed, but whether this was a conscious decision is hard to determine. It was impossible for her to open her mouth without over-dramatizing or embellishing, and now with Isis she was clearly exaggerating her sensations. Even so, it is hard to understand how she could have forgotten the one hundred books she had combed and digested with such thoroughness.

  Undoubtedly it pleased Helena to insist that she “received” much of her material, but she knew very well it was not an unprecedented claim. Aside from the silly Emma Hardinge Britten and her “Chevalier Louis,” more impressive writers had made similar claims. One was the her
o of her youth, Edward Bulwer-Lytton who, in Zanoni, stated that his story had come from an elderly Rosicrucian. In Helena’s immediate circle, Andrew Jackson Davis swore that the only book he had ever read was a romantic novel, a statement seemingly contradicted by his familiarity with Emanuel Swedenborg and the sociologist Charles Fourier. Supposedly Davis had “received” the material for his two dozen books while in trance; his supporters attributed his familiarity with Swedenborg to “clairvoyance for printed matter,” a term describing the ability of a sensitive to “read” word for word and cite page and line number in books hundreds of miles away. There was no doubt that Davis’s claim to virtual illiteracy made his books seem marvelous, and no one was more aware of this than Helena. She too claimed this rare type of clairvoyance, although it is extremely doubtful that she actually possessed it.151

  By the spring of 1876, work occupied Helena’s attention to the exclusion of all else. She paid no attention to the steadily declining membership of the Theosophical Society nor was she much concerned when, after a quarrel, William Judge no longer attended meetings or visited her.

  Although Judge and others had left, Henry refused to abandon the Society; he ordered engraved stationery, paid the rental of the meeting room out of his own pocket, and instituted a secret handshake for what were probably the handful of remaining members. Desperate to dredge up new recruits, Henry named to the Society’s Council an elderly Bavarian nobleman named Joseph Henry Louis Charles, the Baron de Palm.