Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  The baron had a distinguished manner and an impressive list of titles including Grand Cross Commander of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre and Knight of Saint John of Malta. He talked a great deal about his Spanish castles and mining properties in the Western United States, but, unfortunately, was temporarily short of funds. Since he was also obviously ill and alone, Henry brought him home and called a physician, who diagnosed nephritis and pneumonia. In gratitude, Palm decided to make a will in which he named Henry executor of his estate and designated the Theosophical Society as the beneficiary of his silver mines and real estate. In return, he asked that no clergyman officiate at his funeral and that his body be cremated. Henry agreed.

  Both H.P.B. and Olcott must have calculated Palm’s fortune as an eventual lifesaver of the Theosophical Society, but this pleasant prospect did not alleviate Helena’s chief difficulties. For one thing, after some three months of arduous labor and eight hundred and seventy pages of manuscript, she decided the book was dreadful, threw it out, and began it over a third time. In part, this decision may have been prompted by the publication of Emma Britten’s Art Magic, which received atrocious reviews. H.P.B. was horrified to see that reviewers were linking Emma and her foolish book to the Theosophical Society, described by the Religio-Philosophical Journal as “the so-called Theosophical Society, an outgrowth of the absurd religious dogmas of ancient priestcraft.”152 Even though Emma hotly denied all such connections, people continued to treat Art Magic as a Society publication and the T.S. (Theosophical Society) itself as a public joke. God forbid that Helena should produce something similar to Art Magic, especially since she knew that both Emma and herself used many of the same occult books as source material.

  Personally H.P.B. was faring no better than the Society. In the Banner of Light, Hiram Corson, whom she considered a true friend, had called her an “imposter.” This attack was not unexpected since the Spiritualists now had nothing but harsh words for her. Still, Corson’s betrayal hurt; newspaper articles insinuating that she was immoral and anonymous letters accusing her of prostitution devastated her. But her biggest shock came from Daniel Dunglas Home. Home had not appreciated being called a fraud in Olcott’s book People from the Other World, and retaliated by writing to the Boston Herald that Madame Blavatsky was the most notorious cheating medium he knew of. He went on to attack her private life by including a letter from Nicholas Meyendorff, who declared that he had known Madame intimately.153 Enraged, H.P.B. wrote to Alexander Aksakov, one of whose cousins was married to Home,

  How on earth do I interfere with Home? I am not a medium, I never was and never will be a professional one. I have devoted my life to the study of the ancient cabbala and occultism. My position is very cheerless; simply helpless. There is nothing left but to start for Australia and change my name forever.154

  She begged Aksakov to make Home hold his tongue by conveying her warning that if he persisted she would spread frightful stories about him. Despite her spirited self-defense, she felt sickened at Home’s treachery.

  On May 20, Baron de Palm died in Roosevelt Hospital. Olcott, already overworked and exhausted, was obliged to carry out the dead man’s last wishes in regard to a funeral. Instead of arranging for the modest non-sectarian service, which Palm had requested, Henry saw an opportunity to grab publicity for the Theosophical Society, and engaged the two-thousand-seat Masonic Temple at Twenty-third Street and Sixth Avenue.

  The New York papers had a field day ridiculing in advance Henry’s “pagan funeral.” Colonel Olcott, jeered the World, would appear as high priest wearing a leopard skin and carrying a roll of papyrus; Madame Blavatsky would play an ancient Egyptian instrument called a sistrum; George Felt would bear an asp purchased at a toy store on Eighth Avenue; and the procession would also include slaves carrying offerings of “early potatoes, asparagus, roast beef, French pancakes, bock-beer, and New Jersey cider.” Naturally, more than a few New Yorkers turned out to see this spectacle.

  That afternoon, when Helena and Henry arrived at the Masonic Temple, the police were struggling to keep order among a mob of Sunday idlers looking for amusement. Inside, where every seat was filled and the aisles jammed, nobody paid much attention to the baron’s embalmed body lying in a rosewood casket on the stage.

  Olcott, wearing a disappointingly conventional black robe, attempted to get the service under way with an Orphic hymn, but there was so great a commotion in the audience that he had to remind people repeatedly they were in the presence of death. Not until Emma Britten appeared to give a ten-minute oration and sprinkle the coffin with rose petals did the hecklers quiet down, but once Henry appeared the yelling and whistling started up once more. Helena, sitting quietly in the audience, was torn between laughter and tears, but when a particularly noisy spectator called Henry names, and was removed by a policeman, she stood up, pointed to the heckler, and shouted, “He’s a bigot, that’s what he is.”155 Her outburst drew from the audience a huge laugh in which she herself joined.

  After the funeral, Henry rushed to Palm’s trunk and found two of his own shirts with the name-tags ripped out, old love letters from obscure actresses, and a heap of shabby clothing. There was no money, jewelry, and certainly no manuscript of Isis Unveiled, as Helena’s traducers would claim. There remained only the will.

  Still hopeful, Helena told Aksakov that Palm owned rich silver mines and 17,000 acres of land and went on to announce that “eight of us are preparing to set off for Thibet, Siam and Cambodia”156 after first making a side trip to Yucatan where they planned to investigate certain ruins. This, of course, was wishful thinking on a grand scale. In reality, as they learned several months later, Baron de Palm’s property had been sold for taxes years earlier. “The mining shares,” Olcott reported, “were good Only for papering walls, and the Swiss castles proved castles in the air.”157 The baron’s assets did not even reimburse Henry for the costs of the funeral and the probate. And as if that were not bad enough, they were stuck with Palm’s corpse because there were no facilities for cremation in the United States. Storing Palm in carbolized clay, Henry investigated the possibilities of open-air burning only to learn that the city’s sanitary laws forbade it. Not until midsummer would he read in the newspaper about a Dr. F. Julius Le Moyne who was building a crematorium for his own personal use in Washington, Pennsylvania.

  Soon after Palm’s funeral, H.P.B. and Olcott took an apartment together at the corner of Forty-seventh Street and Eighth Avenue. This time there was no pretense of separate quarters. Those who had come to regard them as a couple did not find this daring step hard to accept, but it served to outrage others.

  The new neighborhood was too far uptown to be regarded as fashionable, but the flat itself perfectly suited H.P.B.’s needs. A sunny suite of rooms on the second-floor corner, the place boasted a large parlor, dining room, three bedrooms, kitchen and bath. In the main room Helena arranged an office for herself by using her desk and bookshelves to fence off a three-sided enclosure. Seated inside this pen, she had only to reach out an arm to get any book or paper she needed.

  At the outset, she made it clear that she would not involve herself in housekeeping. After Henry saw her trying to boil an egg by laying it on the live coals, he promptly concluded that she lacked the vaguest notion of cooking. A series of maids-of-all-work were hired, but stayed only until they got a taste of Madame’s temper. Rather than complicated meals, Helena required large quantities of fried foods, endless cups of coffee, and of course her cigarettes, but her eating habits were extremely capricious. One day she would ignore lunch altogether, the next day she would demand to be served an hour ahead of time, then complain over the half-boiled vegetables and underdone meat.

  Her habits horrified Olcott. Not only did she overeat relentlessly, but she poured melted butter on her fried eggs and devoured the boxes of caviar, sweet cakes and other Russian delicacies that Nadyezhda thoughtfully provided. “Her only exercise,” Henry recalled, “was to go to the dining room or bathroom and back
again to her table.”158

  When the maid had either gone home or quit, Henry cooked while Helena sat at her desk writing and smoking; if she did come into the kitchen, it was only to pester him. When guests were present, she would grandly offer tea, ignoring Henry’s desperate signals that the pantry was empty. Often at 1 a.m. he would set out to scour the neighborhood for milk and sugar. If his foray was successful, he would rush back to prepare the tea. In disgust he finally solved the problem by posting a sign:

  TEA

  Guests will find boiling water and tea

  Iin the kitchen, perhaps milk and sugar,

  and will kindly help themselves.159

  Since self-service fit the bohemian atmosphere of the apartment, nobody seemed to object, and a procession of learned professors and elegantly dressed women could be seen quietly slipping into the kitchen to put on the kettle.

  After initially rebelling against shared domestic responsibilities with the maid, Henry eventually surrendered. By his own admission, he and Helena were pupil and teacher, although some of their friends saw them as slave and master. Olcott took Helena’s merciless bullying for granted, but it shocked others. Albert Rawson felt sincerely sorry for Henry who, despite his total devotion to Madame, was the object of her most vicious abuse.

  “Those scenes,” Rawson recalled, “were highly amusing, although somewhat hair-raising at the time.”160 R. B. Westbrook, an attorney friend of Henry’s, did not find it amusing that Helena called Henry a liar before a room full of company. Westbrook decided the colonel was so deeply influenced “as to be utterly incapable of judging correctly anything she might say or do. He was as crazy as a loon on anything relating to Blavatskyism, though perfectly sane on every other subject.” Nevertheless, her “contemptuous treatment of him was humiliating to behold.”161

  Henry always forgave Helena, for the truth was he had grown to love her. He adored her vitality, her cerebral playfulness, her brilliant conversation and epigrammatic wit, and he never failed to be enchanted by the clear, rollicking laugh that seemed to him the very essence of laughter.

  What did it matter if she “swore like the army in Flanders?” She meant no harm. Was it really important if she “put on her night-dress, went to bed, and received a mixed company of ladies and gentlemen”162 in her bedroom? Secretly he applauded her pranks to shock the prudish.

  Of course she knew nothing about fashion or grooming, and he had to admit that her general appearance was outrageously untidy. Around the house she wore a dressing gown or a baggy shift that looked like a potato sack; when they went out she would make a stab at elegance and get herself up in a plumed hat, satin dress dripping with trimmings, heavy gold chain attached to a blue-enameled watch with a monogram of cheap diamonds, and a dozen or fifteen rings on her nicotine-stained fingers. He learned not to cringe when people laughed at her, but still recalled that “I have gone to the theatre with her when I expected the house to rise at us.”163 Her indifference to feminine concerns merely reflected, he thought, both her high birth and her subsequent revolt against the commonplace conventions. He had never known, could not have even imagined, a woman like Helena Petrovna. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” he mused one winter evening about 1 a.m., “to have some hothouse grapes?”

  “So it would,” she agreed blandly, and asked him to dim the gaslight. A moment later, hanging from a nearby bookshelf, he saw two large bunches of ripe black grapes “which we proceeded to eat.”164

  What other woman, or man for that matter, could create fruit out of season, or a red clay Turkish pipe with a purple velvet stem, or sugar tongs that resembled a pickle fork? Who else could fling out her hand and “ping! ping! would come the silvery tones of a bell?” Of course some people might think she concealed the bell under her dress, but Henry sincerely believed that the range of notes precluded any such trickery. Still, that did not prevent him from pestering her for explanations. How did she do it? It was hard to explain, she told him, just as difficult as for him to describe how he produced a whistle. Only when he persisted did she reluctantly speak of working “the astral currents by my trained will.”165

  Those who said, like Westbrook, that Henry tolerated Madame Blavatsky only to achieve adeptship were wrong. To be sure, he was excited by her phenomena, but he genuinely loved her. She may have abused him in public, but alone with him she could be whimsical and utterly lovable, drawing comic caricatures of him and calling him “Maloney” in her funny Russian accent. They were not merely a couple, but a family, because Henry bought a mate for her canary; Jenny and Pip, Henry remembered, “came to be almost like children as it were.”166 Later they added a cat named Charles.

  Throughout the summer of 1876, work on Isis went steadily forward and in less than four months Helena had completed a second draft. The trouble with the earlier draft had been not merely a need for focus, but the utter lack of any structure. The ideas had come pouring out higgledy-piggledy, each paragraph complete in itself but bearing no relation to its neighbors. In desperation she had finally begun cutting apart the pages and trying to paste them back together into a coherent narrative. When this too proved a failure, Henry suggested dividing the material into two volumes, the first devoted only to science, the second to theology, then further subdividing each volume into chapters. To do this entailed the disheartening business of excising repetitions, transposing nearly every passage, and then interposing the transitions. As Helena’s English was still far from perfect, Henry would read aloud her nearly indecipherable handwriting and translate the sentences into proper English while Helena copied them down. Without him, it is safe to say there would have been no book.

  As poor as she knew the actual writing to be, H.P.B. felt lucky in one respect: no matter what the subject, whether it be philosophy, metaphysics or ancient religion, the words came easily. Writing was so simple, “the greatest pleasure,”167 she wrote Vera, that it did almost seem as if someone were dictating to her.

  It is interesting to note that the principles of what would later become Theosophy emerged in Isis only occasionally and in seminal form. She made no attempt to organize the whole field of human and divine knowledge, as she would a decade later when writing The Secret Doctrine. In 1876 she could only point to evidence for the existence of that knowledge, could only dimly suggest the outlines of a grand cosmic scheme. But if all she could manage was a panoramic survey of the literature from which she would eventually fashion the system of Theosophy, she would have done a great deal. To resuscitate archaic wisdom was an immense undertaking, even for one with extraordinary speed in absorbing material.

  From where did Madame Blavatsky draw the self-confidence for such a project? She was not really a scholar, her research sources were limited to New York City, and her command of English was imperfect. Little wonder that she felt compelled to toss in first-person narratives with beginnings such as: “A fearful fever contracted by the writer near Rangoon after a flood of the Irrawaddy River... ,”168 But why did she pretend access to uncommon sources by writing “we have at hand a treatise by a pious Catholic, Jilbert de Nogen, on the relics of saints,”169 when actually she copied Nogen’s text from J. S. Forsyth’s Demonologia. According to H.P.B., she had in her possession the single extant copies of many old manuscripts, photographs, drawings, and ancient tomes. Everything had been carefully skimmed from available sources in the course of careful research. Hence, there was no logical reason for not simply citing her real source. But she, who was not a scholar, had to make herself a super-scholar, and once again she went too far.

  In trying to appear more knowledgeable than she actually was, Helena left herself open to charges of plagiarism. It cannot be denied that she was extremely careless about quotation marks, and, having once given a source, she would continue to quote it elsewhere without citing it. Moreover, either from laziness or ignorance, she fell into the habit of lifting from contemporary books the words of ancient authors while giving the impression that she had actually read the originals. For exa
mple, when she quoted from Plato’s Timaeus and The Laws, she cited page numbers and even the original footnotes, but everything quoted can be found in Benjamin F. Cocker’s Christianity and Greek Philosophy and Edward Zeller’s Plato and the Older Academy. Strangely, H.P.B. failed to find anything wrong with this peculiar ethical procedure. Olcott, who might have set her straight, was not privy to her editorial shortcuts and believed in any case that she had read Plato in the astral light or received it from the Master’s dictation. It would take another twenty years before he could admit that she “has sinned an hundred times against the canons of literary usage” by using “other men’s writings as though they were her own.”170

  As the writing of Isis progressed, two central themes began to emerge: a venomous hatred of Christianity, which, Helena asserted, has copied most of its rites and dogmas from paganism; and her belief that the one source of all past wisdom was, not Egypt with its Isises and Brotherhoods of Luxor, but India. “When years ago, we first travelled to the East, exploring the penetralia of deserted sanctuaries, two [sic] saddening and ever-recurring questions oppressed our thoughts: Where, Who, What is GOD?”171 But now she knew the answers were to be found in Hinduism and Buddhism. This she felt sincerely to be the truth, although she may have been less positive about the following statement:

  It was while most anxious to solve these perplexing problems that we came into contact with certain men, endowed with such mysterious powers and such profound knowledge that we may truly designate them as sages of the Orient. To their instructions we lent a ready ear. They showed us that by combining science with religion, the existence of God and immortality of man’s spirit may be demonstrated like a problem of Euclid.172