Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  So she used to get cross, despise everything, and hate everybody; and as we could not understand what she really wanted, she vented her rage on us by forbidding that a sufficient quantity of bread be brought into the house, saying that if we wanted more we were to buy it with our own money—and this, after we had worked like slaves for her!102

  During the winter and spring of 1881, Helena could not truly enjoy her new home, or her existence, which now focused exclusively on her writing table. Her output at this period included articles and a translation of passages from The Brothers Karamazov for the Theosophist, unsigned articles for the Pioneer, and most often, pieces for Russian newspapers. In addition to these enterprises, she continued to toil over Koot Hoomi’s lengthy letters. However strenuous her schedule, H.P.B. never missed an opportunity to counter the plentiful attacks from critics, not only from the general press but especially missionary publications. Despite her now professed indifference to journalistic condemnation, she was tremendously disturbed. Much of the criticism was personal, as well as malicious. The kinder slurs aimed at her included: “unscrupulous,” “untruthful,” “ridiculous,” and “discreditable”; her avowals of universal love and brotherhood were labeled pretentious and hypocritical. Helena always managed to get in a few licks of her own but was careful to take a lofty, even sardonic tone. “The Methodist organs are very fond of me,” she wrote the Bombay Gazette. “So foolishly fond, I am afraid, that rarely a month passes away but my Scytho-Sarmatian heathen name appears on their columns like a fly in a communion cup.”103 She excoriated the papers either as small barking curs or “so many Indian sewers” filled with filth and “public literary garbage.” By spring, she was reduced to falling back on her sex, branding the editors cowards who were “ever ready to attack defenceless women.”104

  H.P.B. was going through a bad time in her personal relationships. Although Damodar’s father had presented her with a horse and carriage, the extent of her hold on his son was only now occurring to him. Damodar, still living at the “Crow’s Nest,” refused to go home to his wife and parents and even relinquished his share in the family estate. As a result of this unpleasant breach, Damodar’s brother joined Wimbridge and Bates in issuing a circular saying that the Theosophical Society picked the pockets of its members. In the end, the Society had to get an auditor’s verification of their receipts and disbursements, which showed, incidentally, that they were about twelve thousand rupees in the red.

  Before this upheaval was over, Helena clashed furiously with Olcott. When the Ceylon Buddhists invited him to make a return visit, he happily consented, because he derived the most pleasure from lecturing and raising money for schools. Suddenly H.P.B. decided she could not edit the Theosophist alone and demanded that he cancel the trip. When Henry said no, she cloistered herself in her room for one solid week and refused to see him, occasionally using Damodar or Emma to deliver notes threatening that the Mahatmas would have nothing more to do with him if he insisted on going to Ceylon.

  This time, Uncharacteristically, Henry did not kowtow; his tour had been approved by the Brothers and if they were so vacillating, he preferred to work without them. Moreover, he was dead set on going to Ceylon “even though I never saw the face of a Master again.”105

  A few days later, her ire burned out, she made the conciliatory gesture of inviting him for a ride in her carriage. Henry made clear that he wanted to reconstruct the Society on a different basis, putting public service and universal brotherhood in the forefront and, he added, “keeping occultism in the background.”106 At Simla, he had suddenly begun to feel uncomfortable with the miracles. After all, they were H.P.B.’s show, and he now wanted no part of them, maintaining he could best serve the interests of the Society in an administrative capacity. Helena had no choice but to acquiesce.

  H.P.B., nearing her fiftieth birthday, was probably going through menopause, which may account for some of her extreme emotional fluctuations at this time. After seven years Henry had grown accustomed to her choleric aspect; even on those days when she went off screaming that “there were no Mahatmas, no psychical powers, and that she had simply deceived us from first to last,”107 his deep affection for her had enabled him to take it. Emma Coulomb, however, was less understanding of Madame’s jags.

  Some times when awake in bed, I used to torture my brain to find out what I could do to please her—for, bad as the place was, yet it was better than none; and although she was unjust, yet at times she used to have a good fit for two or three days, at which times she was more tractable, which made up for the past, and we pushed on.108

  Helena paid little attention to Emma’s piddling grievances, and eventually that mistake would catch up with her. She felt ill again, this time with back pains, and her doctor recommended cauterization. “Oh God!” she wrote despondently to Vera, “what a misery it is to live and to feel. Oh, if it were only possible to plunge into Nirvana. What an irresistible fascination there is in the idea of eternal rest!”’109 Talk of suicide humiliated her, and she did not speak of it again to Vera; what she longed for was not death, but rest and release from pain. Even though she had written a scant twenty Mahatma letters between mid-October, 1880, and the end of February, 1881, the assignment was beginning to take its toll. She failed to link the letters to her physical maladies, and yet the corollary is unquestionably there.

  By April, however, circumstances conspired to give her a few months’ sabbatical. Olcott had left for Ceylon, not to reappear for seven months. Alfred Sinnett and his pregnant Patience had gone to England for a holiday and were not due back until July. At last, H.P.B. was suddenly liberated from the necessity of impersonating a Mahatma and had an opportunity to catch her second wind. From Koot Hoomi, Sinnett had requested and received permission to publish extracts from the letters in a book that he planned to title Occult World. He completed the entire manuscript at sea, gave it to a publisher when he arrived, and the first edition was issued in June. If he had hoped for a respectful hearing, he must have been disappointed. While the English reviewers roasted not only him but Madame and the Theosophical Society, they reserved their most scathing jibes for Mahatma Koot Hoomi’s letters. “They are written,” the British publication Saturday Review announced scornfully, “in very choice American, and the Oriental lore which they contain is exclusively derived from a perusal of Lord Lytton’s novels and of a mystical jumble entitled Isis Unveiled, published some years ago by Madame Blavatsky.”110 Madame’s miracles at Simla, chronicled in detail in Occult World, were dismissed as dull, and Alfred Sinnett’s “mental faculties are so obscured that he cannot perceive the tricks of which he is the victim.”111

  In late June, Sinnett returned to India alone; complications had arisen during Patience’s pregnancy, and on July 14 she would give birth to a stillborn child. Since his steamer had docked in Bombay, he spent a few days at the “Crow’s Nest” before continuing up-country to Allahabad. Helena did not spare herself in providing an enthusiastic reception, and even before his arrival, had asked Alexis Coulomb to prepare a trap in the attic floorboards above the room Sinnett would occupy. Just after breakfast on the morning following his arrival, Sinnett was sitting in his room when a letter dropped among the china and cutlery. Koot Hoomi, seemingly unaware of the miserable reception given Occult World, could not have been more solicitous or supportive:

  Welcome good friend and brilliant author, welcome back! Your letter at hand, and I am happy to see your personal experiences with the “Elect” of London proved so successful.112

  There followed thirteen pages that alternated between a scholarly metaphysical treatise and a ragbag of gossip about various London occultists such as Stainton Moses, Anna B. Kingsford, and Charles Massey, who was inaccurately described as “the hapless parent of about half a dozen illegitimate brats.”113 In passing, K.H. warned Sinnett not to expect too much from Madame Blavatsky for “our old lady is weak and her nerves worked to a fiddle string; so is her jaded brain.”114

  At a recepti
on that evening hosted by the Bombay Theosophical Society, Sinnett talked about his book and positively affirmed his conviction that Madame Blavatsky could not be the author of the Mahatma letters. It was, he assured his audience, “physically impossible”115 and as proof he cited the telegram he had received from Jhelum. He went on to point out that K.H.’s handwriting and literary style were completely different from Madame’s and that, for the most part, she knew nothing about the contents of the letters. As if all this were not sufficiently reassuring, he had received proof positive that very morning when a letter had suddenly fallen out of nowhere onto the table before him. Since Madame had been with him at the time, the mere hypothesis of fraud was, in his opinion, “contemptibly absurd.”116 Helena, sitting in the audience, must have breathed an imperceptible sigh of relief.

  III

  The Astral Post Office

  It is hardly surprising that Sinnett’s verdict should have been accepted at the time by a number of intelligent people, since despite the extracts published in Occult World and later in Esoteric Buddhism, almost no one concerned, except Sinnett and his wife, ever saw the letters in their entirety. Reading them today, there can be no reasonable doubt that Helena was their author.

  Toward the end of his life, Sinnett admitted that the letters “were not, in the beginning, what I imagined them to be—letters actually written by the Master and then forwarded by occult means either to Madame Blavatsky or deposited somewhere about the house where I should find them.”117 But even if they were not what he imagined, he by no means saw them as totally fraudulent; simply, he had invested too much in the Mahatmas to deny their existence. All the letters were inspired by Koot Hoomi, “but for the most part, if not always, were dictations to a competent amanuensis and Madame Blavatsky was generally the amanuensis in question.”118 After he was no longer on speaking terms with H.P.B., and had begun communicating with the Mahatma through mediums, it was explained to him that Madame had added her own views to the Master’s, generally tampering with the messages until they became a travesty of his meaning. (See Appendix B.)

  The one hundred twenty letters written between 1880 and 1884 are a remarkable achievement for which H.P.B. should be given the credit she was forced to deny herself. The correspondence became for her a vehicle by which she could disseminate an occult religious philosophy she dared not claim as her own and that, moreover, she felt impelled to filter to the world’s attention through two men, one of them fictional. From a distance of one hundred years, it is easy to criticize her methods, but Helena, by 1880, had already become a prisoner of her hallucinations. Having become entrapped by her own invention, forced to share her vision of the Brotherhood by proclaiming herself its messenger, she placed herself in an untenable position. Of necessity she was compelled to give her mythical Mahatmas credit for her philosophy and, as we shall see, to fashion ever more complicated lies so that the whole flimsy structure did not crash down upon her.

  Like every literary genius, Madame Blavatsky could beget characters so full-bodied and distinctive that they truly seemed to live. Perhaps this talent was inherited from her novelist mother. Perhaps her skill is due to the fact that she modeled her characters on certain living individuals, admittedly rare but nevertheless real. In her century, there did exist hermits in Tibet and northern India, most of them practicing Buddhist ascetics and Hindu yogis who were making serious efforts to tread the path to arhatship, or enlightenment, and in so doing were able to liberate themselves from ill will, desire, ignorance, lust and anger. In the 1920s, the distinguished Tibetan scholar W. Y. Evans-Wentz would pose an interesting question that is highly relevant to Madame Blavatsky’s life: are there members of the human race who have reached the heights of such spiritual and physical evolution as this planet permits, “and who being a species apart from other human beings, are possessed of mastery over natural forces as yet undiscovered, but probably suspected, by Western Science?”119

  Evans-Wentz hazarded a qualified yes, saying that as a result of his studies he had good reason to believe that among the Himalayan hermits “there are possibly some—if perchance there be but two or three”120 who have attained arhatship.

  Still, there are mahatmas and Mahatmas.121 Helena’s Mahatmas had been incarnated in embryo in New York in 1875 and fully perfected by 1880 in India. They should have ceased to exist by 1891, but lingered on remarkably, the product of Helena Blavatsky’s inward life during her previous fifty-nine years. Piecing together their biographies from the letters, one can summarize them as follows:

  Somewhere in Tibet live the few men who have reached sainthood and become members of the hierarchy that govern the world. Although the exact address of The Brotherhood of the Snowy Range is not divulged, it might well be Shigatse, a village south of Lhasa on the river Tsangpo, where Helena said she stayed in 1870 in the house of Master Koot Hoomi’s sister. The Mahatmas appear to live in a type of communal setting reminiscent of a lamasery. As masters and teachers, they supervise apprentices who have resolved to devote themselves to humanity, and K.H. speaks of the house as being “full of young and innocent chelas”122 preparing for initiation. The masters are not cloistered, indeed some of them travel a good deal; Koot Hoomi journeys to Bhutan and to the mountains of “Kouenlun” (K’uenlun) for business consultations, he writes letters from Kashmir and Amritsar and sends a telegram from Jhelum in the Punjab. On one occasion he mentions that he has just spent nine days on horseback. The Brothers go to Lhasa at the beginning of every lunar year to take part in the festivals, but ordinarily keep busy at home performing duties which are referred to but never described. Possibly much of their time is spent in study, since they seem to be curators of the largest and most complete library on earth.

  Why Helena chose to present so few details about the daily lives of the Brothers is unclear. Granted, she was usually writing in a hurry, and the requisite religious research was sufficiently taxing to discourage research into details like life-style and diet. While she knew nothing of Tibet from personal experience, she might have checked more carefully into the works of Abbe Hue, William Rockville and other travelers, who painted a fairly accurate picture. As it is, there is nothing in the letters to indicate the Mahatmas were living in Tibet; for that matter, they could have been settled in Madras or London, even New York.

  Perhaps because of lack of this essential knowledge, the Brothers Koot Hoomi and Morya are not, as one might expect, Tibetans, but Indians. K.H. was born in the Punjab in the early nineteenth century and came from an old Kashmiri family of the Brahmin caste. In his youth he studied in Europe, probably in Germany because he makes playful references to Munich beer-hall beauties. He does not, however, speak or write German, Punjabi, Hindi or Tibetan; his Latin is faulty, his Sanskrit nonexistent, his French impeccable, his English queer. He also has a habit of overlining his m’s, a mannerism of Russians writing in English or French. Although his letters are written in English, it is not the English of an educated Indian and they sometimes falter in the use of punctuation, spelling and grammar. For example, he inserted commas between subject and predicate. Worse yet, K.H. is fond of American slang and his awkward sentence constructions lead one to believe he is thinking in French but translating his thoughts into English. “S.M. passes the two thirds (les deux tiers) of his life in Trance.” “I write but seldom letters.”123 (Je n’ecrit que rarement des lettres.)

  K.H. is in semi-command of Western literature, science, and philosophy; he quotes Shakespeare correctly, and Swift incorrectly, has a passing acquaintance with Thackeray, Tennyson and Dickens, and keeps au courant by reading current English novels. “My knowledge of your Western Sciences is very limited,”124 he insists, which does not prevent him from aiming barbs at Darwin, Edison, Tyndall, and some thirty others. In personality, he was alternately witty, stern, cheerful, spiteful, highly idealistic, petty, and downright bitchy. But he was always entertaining.

  When Alfred Sinnett first asked to be put in touch with a Mahatma, Helena responded wit
h Koot Hoomi, who would sign the majority of the letters. One wonders why she created a totally new personage when she might have used one already at hand, Master Morya (usually called M.), her childhood protector already known to Henry Olcott as the man who left his turban in New York. Obviously Helena did not wish to share her personal master with Sinnett, although when Koot Hoomi wearied of the correspondence, Morya was brought in as a relief writer. A Rajput of the Kshatriya caste, he is flinty, humorless, brusque and in most respects a totally different personality from K.H. M. is not fond of traveling, although he does make astral visits. He claims to know very little English and hates writing, which may account for the fact that his letters are concise and his comments snappish. Morya’s single sensual indulgence is pipe-smoking and once, writing to Sinnett from Lhasa, he thanks him for sending him a pipe to replace the one he had broken in an unmahatmic rage. The pipe was a nice touch, but a mistake on Helena’s part, for it was strictly forbidden to smoke in Tibet; one wonders how Morya escaped detection, or even where he managed to obtain tobacco. Helena, a tobacco addict, could not resist giving her favorite creation one of her own bad habits.

  In addition to K.H. and M., there are glimpses of several minor characters:

  Djual Khool (D.K.) was called “the Disinherited” because he had been disowned by his family when he became a chela. At the outset of the letters, D.K. was only a chela, but eventually he became a Master himself and K.H. refers to him as his alter ego. One of the Mahatma letters was written by D.K.