Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  Thus did revelation appear in a nutshell. The mysteries were not mysteries after all; miracles did not exist. The caretakers of the secret doctrine, members of the Indian Brotherhood incarnated at intervals in history to reveal mysteries of the divine wisdom, understood the secrets of atomic energy, gravitation, transmutation of metals, extraterrestrial communication and travel, in fact had more scientific knowledge than all modern physics, chemistry and metallurgy combined. Their books were written in an alphabet known only to themselves; and not only did they comprehend the principles of evolution and the decline of societies, but also possessed the most exhaustive cosmogony ever known to humanity. Undeniably, the idea was exhilarating. But it was hardly original to H.P.B., for as mentioned earlier, the concept of a secret brotherhood has always permeated occult tradition.

  This is the place to emphasize the two main influences on Madame Blavatsky’s philosophical vision. The first was Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who in his 1842 Rosicrucian novel Zanoni had written of a secret fraternity concealing themselves behind “the veil that hides the Isis of their wisdom from the world,” and of the mysterious Indian Zanoni, who is rich, handsome, ageless, and a member of the Brotherhood, As we shall see, Helena’s Mahatmas, Morya and Koot Hoomi, are fleshed out copies of Zanoni. H.P.B. herself is in several important respects reminiscent of Lytton’s heroine Viola, who has seen her invisible protector in dreams since childhood but meets Zanoni in fleshly manifestation only as an adult. Bulwer-Lytton was of course writing fiction, but Helena believed quite seriously that he purveyed fact without knowing it.

  Her second inspiration was Louis Jacolliot, a contemporary who had been French consul at Calcutta before writing works such as The Bible in India and Occult Science in India. Jacolliot stated categorically that the legendary society of unknown men actually existed. Deliberately concealed from public view, these ideal men scanned the world from their watchtower somewhere in India, forever observing civilizations born, destroyed, reborn, always prepared to come to the rescue of the race.

  Reality or magnificent legend? Like Jacolliot, Helena believed it all to be reality. Making Jacolliot’s concepts her own, she began to quote extensively from his works, all the while resenting having to share these unknown Indians with Jacolliot. By the time she neared the end of Isis, she was calling his books “a curious conglomeration of truth and fiction,” and Jacolliot little more than “a sensual French romancer”173 who had worn out his spiritual welcome.

  Slowly, the men who dictated to Helena had been transmogrified into Indians. To Vera she confided,

  I see this Hindu every day, just as I might see any other living person, with the only difference that he looks to me more ethereal and transparent. Formerly I kept silent about these appearances, thinking they were hallucinations. But now they have become visible to other people as well.174

  One evening when work on Isis had been finished for the day, Henry said goodnight to H.P.B., went to his room, and sat down in a chair to smoke and read; he remembered, later, that it was not a ghost story he had opened but a travel book about Yucatan. Suddenly, from the corner of his right eye, he noticed towering above him a tall Indian dressed in white robes and a turban of amber stripes embroidered with yellow silk. Dropping his book, Henry stared in astonishment at the man’s black beard, which was parted on the chin and twisted up over the ears in Rajput fashion, and at his unusual eyes. They were alive with soul-fire, he thought, piercing yet benign, the eyes of a loving father gazing on a son. Without thinking, Henry fell to his knees “as one does before a god or a god-like personage.”

  Bading Henry to rise, the visitor sat down beside him and began to talk: a great work could be done for humanity and Henry had the right to share in it, if he wished. He and Helena were bound by a mysterious tie which might be strained but could never be broken.

  Would he see his visitor again?

  Often, if he became a co-worker for the good of mankind.

  As the Indian rose to leave, Olcott recalled thinking, “What if this be hallucination; what if H.P.B. has cast a hypnotic glamour over me?”175 and he wished for some tangible object to prove that the Indian had really been there. Looking up, he saw the Indian smile as he saluted him farewell; then the room was empty and Henry was alone once more.

  But not quite alone. On the table lay the man’s embroidered turban. Clutching it, Henry ran to Helena’s door and pounded.

  Several possible explanations of the phenomenon present themselves, the most obvious being that Helena hired a man to dress up like an Indian. There is sufficient reason to believe she was capable of such a trick.

  Secondly, Olcott’s initial suspicion, that H.P.B. had hypnotized him, may have been essentially correct, in which case it would have been simple for her to have left the turban on his table.

  More intriguing is a third possibility, that Henry had somehow been tuned into Helena’s thought-form, in which case, he did actually see the Indian character she had created. While this may sound impossible, it is far from unheard of. For instance, “Seth,” the famous trance personality of the Elmira, New York, medium Jane Roberts, has been seen and talked to by sensitives other than Ms. Roberts. And such a concept would not seem remarkable in Tibet, where the word tulpas connotes a magic formation generated by powerful concentration of thought.

  Alexandra David-Neel, in Magic and Mystery in Tibet, tells how the tulpa, once endowed with enough vitality to be capable of impersonating a real being, tends to free itself from its maker’s control and appear to others; and she goes on to recount how she herself decided to try to visualize, then animate, a tulpa. Choosing for experiment a short, fat, jolly monk, “I shut myself in tsams [seclusion] and proceeded to perform the prescribed concentration of thought and other rites. After a few months the phantom monk was formed. His form grew gradually fixed and life-like looking. He became a kind of guest, living in my apartment.” Accompanying her on her travels, the monk walked, stopped and looked around him without speaking. Sometimes his hand actually seemed to touch her shoulder. “Once,” she recalled, “a herdsman who brought me a present of butter saw the tulpa in my tent and took it for a live lama.”

  Before long, however, David-Neel would have cause to regret having created the monk, for he escaped her control and became bold and troublesome. To dissolve her mind-creature required six months of difficult struggle. In retrospect, the most interesting aspect of the experience was that others shared her own hallucination. “Tibetans disagree in their explanations of such phenomena”; she went on to add: “some think a material form is really brought into being, others consider the apparition as a mere case of suggestion, the creator’s thought impressing others and causing them to see what he himself sees.”176

  In Madame Blavatsky’s case, still another explanation suggests itself, which should be mentioned only because some people believed it to be the true one: that the Indian who Olcott met was a member of a secret brotherhood for which Madame Blavatsky was the visible agent. Certainly Henry had no trouble in accepting him as such. Little by little, Helena had been weaning him first from John King and then from the Egyptian Brotherhood of Luxor. Now, Olcott reports, “I was transferred to the Indian section and a different group of Masters.”177 It was all very neat and made a good deal of sense.

  In August, Henry decided to scout a publisher for Helena’s book, and he approached J. W. Bouton, who had published other works of an esoteric nature. Once Bouton saw the size of the manuscript, his interest quickly faded; he was about to sail for England, he told Henry, and had no time for reading. Refusing to accept rejection, Olcott continued to rave about Helena until Bouton, to get rid of him, told him to see Alexander Wilder, the scholar and editor who occasionally served as a first-reader of manuscripts. If Wilder judged the manuscript worthy of publication, Bouton might consider it.

  Wilder, then fifty-three, was a tall, Lincolnesque man with a massive head of gray hair and speech full of quaint Saxon-Americanisms. Almost entirely self-educated, he was
knowledgeable in medicine, mathematics and the classics, and his area of special interest was Plato and metaphysics. Although he had a definite taste for esotericism, he disliked individuals who pretended to possess superior powers, and he lacked the slightest impulse to join organizations such as the Theosophical Society. So when Henry Olcott arrived unannounced one afternoon at Wilder’s home in Newark, New Jersey, and began to babble exuberantly about some manuscript by a crank, the editor reacted with extreme annoyance. He had never laid eyes on Olcott before, although they did have mutual acquaintances; and “I had barely heard of Madame Blavatsky,” but what he had heard had not attracted him.

  More than that, Wilder failed to understand why Bouton had sent Olcott to him, because he had talked to the publisher several times that week and Bouton had mentioned neither Madame Blavatsky nor her manuscript. Did Bouton seriously expect him to read the thousand pages? Suspecting that Bouton had foisted the pesky Olcott on him in order to avoid saying no himself, Wilder grumbled over the publisher’s inefficiency but consented to look at the work.

  Wilder read the manuscript with greater severity than he might have under other circumstances, and when he had finished there was no doubt in his mind that the book should be rejected. In his reader’s report, he admitted that extensive research had gone into the project and “that so far as related to current thinking, there was a revolution in it,” but in his opinion it was “too long for remunerative publishing.” To his amazement, Bouton ignored his advice, accepted the manuscript and returned it to Wilder “with instructions to shorten it as much as it would bear.”

  Without much enthusiasm, Wilder sped through it and hacked out everything he judged superfluous. In a tactful letter to H.P.B., he explained his cuts and pointed out her faults of style; he also emphasized the importance of explaining her sources of information. Far from offended, Helena replied that “there are many parts in my Book that / do not like either, but the trouble is I do not know how to get rid of them without touching facts which are important, as arguments.” Wilder of course was reading it objectively while her own “overworked brains and memory are all in a sad muddle.” Still, she was “very, very thankful” for his suggestions and wished he had made more. As for his complaint about her lack of documentation, she passed over that quickly and merely commented that she could not, unfortunately, oblige. “I am a Thibetan Buddhist, you know, and pledged myself to keep certain things secret.”

  During this period, Olcott persisted in agitating for a meeting between Wilder and Madame, and although the editor hesitated, eventually he succumbed.

  Having heard about the Madame’s habit of receiving guests in her night-clothes, Wilder was disappointed to find her fully dressed. “In no respect was she coarse, awkward or ill-bred,” and in fact he was obliged to admit that he found her courteous, cultured and extremely intelligent. “She expressed her opinions with boldness and decision, but not obtrusively.” As for the miracles over which Olcott had raved, Wilder recalled quite vividly that she “never made any such claim to me.” Of course she did mention her communications with mysterious persons whom she called “the Brothers,” but Wilder, who assumed she was talking about telepathy, was inclined to attach little significance to these claims. From what he knew of such matters, an important condition for telepathy was absence from artificial stimulants such as meat, alcohol and narcotics of any kind, “but Madame Blavatsky displayed no such asceticism.” It was obvious that she ate well and drugged herself with tobacco. Still, with Helena’s talent for instant intimacy, she put him at ease so that afterward it seemed they had “become acquainted at once.” She praised his abridgments, declared that what he had excised was “flapdoodle,” and set about assiduously cultivating his friendship.178

  By fall, 1876, the Theosophical Society had slowly withered and died, and after November even Henry no longer bothered to keep up the pretense. He canceled further meetings, suspended dues, and gave up the room in Mott Memorial Hall. Actually, the Society, despite its lofty objectives, had accomplished nothing, and its meetings had grown tiresome and silly. At one session, for example, Helena had announced that she now understood the process by which it was possible to rise from the earth and fly, and she was prepared to demonstrate. “With an electrical battery and powerful current we first ascertained by a well-known process what sort of magnetism there was in the carpet of the room; we electrified a cat, and it rose up several inches.” Unfortunately, someone turned up the power “and of course the poor cat suddenly expired.”179

  This sort of experiment had been instrumental in driving away members. For R. B. Westbrook, one of the founders, the final straw turned out to be even more embarrassing. One evening he and his wife invited to their home a small party including Helena, Olcott, Emma Britten, and Reverend W. R. Alger, an eminent Unitarian minister from Boston, who was visiting New York and wanted to meet H.P.B. The evening began well, even though Helena was not on her absolutely best behavior and insisted upon making sniping remarks about Emma’s mediumship. Toward the Reverend Alger, however, she was all charm. By 9 p.m. Emma’s patience had exhausted itself and she excused herself, saying that she had to look after her aging mother. After her departure, Helena could not have been more bewitching as a conversationalist, to Alger’s delight and the Westbrooks’ inward rejoicing “that we had been successful in engineering this wonderful meeting of these wonderful people.”

  Not an hour later, however, the evening’s amiability was abruptly shattered by the frantic ringing of the doorbell. Into the parlor dashed an outlandish figure draped from head to foot in rags and lengths of cloth and so disguised that Westbrook could not be certain whether a male or female lurked underneath; Alger likened the apparition to “the man in the iron mask.” Mrs. Westbrook, alarmed that some mad laundress had wandered into the house by mistake, tried to shove the figure toward the door but, like a whirling dervish, it bounded over to Madame Blavatsky, saluted, and delivered a letter. Mission evidently accomplished, he, she or it stalked from the room and slammed the street door, leaving the assembled company gaping.

  In the silence that followed, Olcott whispered gravely, “An elementary.”

  Helena, having torn open the envelope, expressed mild indignation that the Brothers should have troubled to send a special messenger on what she considered unimportant business; when Olcott asked what it all meant, she announced melodramatically that Dr. Seth Pancoast had just been refused admission to the Secret Brotherhood in India.

  Throughout the commotion, Dr. Alger had managed to preserve his clerical dignity but now, understandably offended, he hurried to take his leave. At the door, he was heard to mumble contemptuously, “A put up job!”180 Afterwards, Westbrook said, Madame Blavatsky professed to be hurt that Alger should have regarded her as a fraud.

  Investigating this mortifying incident, Westbrook learned that Dr. Pancoast knew nothing about any application to the Brotherhood and, more damning, that Madame had promised an Irish servantwoman five dollars if she would impersonate an “elementary,” but had failed to pay her. Furious over “this disgraceful attempt to impose upon the confidence of my distinguished clerical friend,” Westbrook disaffiliated himself from the Theosophical Society.

  What Helena hoped to accomplish by this absurd charade is impossible to determine. At this stage in her career she was lucky only with the phenomena she staged for Olcott; either she misjudged the credulity of her audience or she lacked the money to hire experienced actors.

  Still bristling over the failure of her “elementary” production, H.P.B. continued to work almost compulsively on her book, turning most frequently to Alexander Wilder for editorial advice. Wilder was in the habit of commuting into New York from Newark several times a week to deliver lectures at a medical college, so Helena encouraged him to drop by. One day in early December, having rung her bell in vain, he left a note and went away. H.P.B. wrote at once to say that he must have rung the wrong bell. “I do not go out of the house for the last two months,
and the servant is always in the kitchen until half-past nine or ten.” Why hadn’t he pulled all the bells? “Well, you must come Monday—as you have to come to town and stop over till Tuesday. You can attend your College and sleep here the same, can’t you?”181

  Olcott, having finally arranged to cremate Baron de Palm, had gone to Washington, Pennsylvania. As this first cremation in the United States was thought to be an historic event, he had had no trouble inducing a large party of friends and journalists to accompany him, but Helena made excuses to remain behind. “I could not go,” she confessed to Wilder. “To tell you the truth, I do not see the fun of spending $40.00 or $50.00 for the pleasure of seeing a man burnt”; the reason, she insisted, had nothing to do with squeamishness but rather “I have seen burnings of dead and living bodies in India sufficiently.”

  In all honesty, Palm’s corpse had ceased to interest her, and what is more to the point, she had better things to do. She may have applauded Wilder’s abridgments, but she wrote faster than he could cut. Throughout the winter and into the spring of 1877, even after the book had been set in type, she continued to make additions on the galleys and page proofs. Bouton complained to Henry that “the alterations have already cost $280.80, and at that rate, by the time the book appears it will be handicapped with such fearful expense”183 that he would make no profit.

  H.P.B. took no notice of Bouton. By the time Isis appeared on September 29,1877, he would spend over six hundred dollars for corrections and the two volumes would mushroom to some twelve hundred and seventy pages. Still happily unaware of this, his correspondence with Madame centered on an appropriate title. The original title, probably Helena’s choice although Wilder later attributed it to Bouton, was The Veil of Isis. However, when Bouton learned of an English book with the same title, he suggested changing to Isis Unveiled and Helena readily consented. Actually, both titles were misleading in that they gave the unmistakable impression the book dealt with Egypt, when in fact a large part of her material was devoted to India. But to Bouton, who had probably not read the book and who, in any case, had once published a treatise on ancient Greek art and added illustrations from Hindu mythology, the main consideration was a catchy title that might recoup his pyramiding investment. Helena, who favored the Isis concept, must have believed that the subtitle, “A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology,” would sufficiently indicate the scope of its contents.