Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  Bright’s disease is a kidney disorder characterized by large amounts of fluid in the intercellular spaces of the body (edema) and by albumin in the urine. H.P.B.’s description of edemic kangaroo bags seems to suggest the hemorrhagic type of Bright’s disease, which is essentially an inflammation of the capillary blood vessels in the filtering units of the kidney and is believed caused by poisons that have been formed by a bacterial infection elsewhere in the body. Or, possibly it was another variety of kidney disorder in which waste products accumulating in the blood cause swelling; but, without medical records, one can only speculate.

  On top of this affliction, she told Sinnett, “I have become so stupidly nervous that the unexpected tread of Babula’s naked foot near me makes me start with the most violent palpitations of the heart.” Reading between the lines, it seems clear that Dr. Dudley recognized her anxiety and advised rest in less hectic surroundings. Perhaps he did say, as she wrote Sinnett, that she “can kick the bucket at any time in consequence of an emotion” as well as suggest she take a vacation, for that seems to be the point of the letter. “Boss [Master Morya] wants me to prepare and go somewhere for a month or so toward the end of September.” He had sent a chela who would escort her somewhere, “where I don’t know, but of course somewhere in the Himalayas.”191

  Toward the end of September H.P.B. left Bombay for north India. No special escort arrived to squire her to the Himalayas, but she was accompanied, or perhaps trailed, by a half-dozen Hindu Theosophists who had heard of Upasika’s plans and tagged along in the hope of glimpsing a Mahatma.

  For years she had dreamed of visiting Tibet, but even she was well aware of the impossibility of crossing the border. It is interesting to notice that now an element of reality creeps into her fantasies. She saw pictures of herself getting only as far north as Sikkim and being refused a visa by the British Foreign Office, then walking to the frontier between Bhutan and Sikkim, “a fast-flowing stream with a swinging bamboo bridge,”192 where guards would turn her back. In her fantasy she waited until the lama from a Sikkim monastery arrived to salute her, offer buttered tea and gifts, and personally conduct her across the border to the monastery.

  I lived in a small house at the foot of the monastery walls... and I spent hours in their library where no woman is allowed to enter—a touching testimony to my beauty and my perfect innocence—and the Superior publicly recognized in me one of the feminine incarnations of the Bodhisattva, of which I am very proud.193

  Three days later, she said, the monks carried her back to the border. This account is actually found in a letter to Prince Alexander, dated October 1, and written from Ghum, a town near Darjeeling, which she told him was in Sikkim.

  In a letter written to Vera from Darjeeling, Helena makes no mention of lamas recognizing her as an incarnation of Buddha, but only relates that she was half dead when Master Morya carried her unconscious body to the mountains where he cured her in no time by means of mesmeric passes.194

  Her romances took a slightly different twist in an October 9 letter to Alfred where she claimed that both M. and K.H. had met her in their physical bodies and whisked her away to a hideout in Sikkim:

  Oh the blessed two days! It was like the old times... The same kind of wooden hut, a box divided into three compartments for rooms, and standing in a jungle on four pelican’s legs; the same yellow chelas gliding noiselessly; the same eternal ‘gul-gul-gul’ sound of my Boss’s inextinguishable chelum pipe; the old familiar sweet voice of your K.H. (whose voice is still sweeter and face still thinner and more transparent), the same entourage for furniture—skins, and yak-tail stuffed pillows and dishes for salt, tea, etc.195

  From available evidence, it seems that H.P.B. actually spent about six weeks in the vicinity of Darjeeling. The mountain town, seven thousand feet above sea level, was built in a series of steps hanging precariously on to the sides of the lower Himalayas, and on clear days it was possible to see Mount Everest, some a hundred fifty miles away. The bracing mountain air apparently had an invigorating effect on Madame’s health, though her Indian entourage was not properly dressed for the mountains and most of them caught colds. She wrote eight or ten Koot Hoomi letters, some of them quite lengthy, but containing less occultism than personal gossip, warnings and ill-humored comments on Hume, Massey and other enemies. Constantly she was keeping one eye peeled for furniture, carpets and brocades for Prince Alexander. Passing through Allahabad, she had already sent on to him a box of bronze trinkets. Still, haggling over bargains was exasperating and she complained that “those pigs of Parsees, Banias, vendors, etc., have simply worn me out.”196

  She had followed her doctor’s advice to get away, but it does not appear that she allowed herself much rest. On the contrary, in addition to the Mahatma letters, she was masterminding phenomena simultaneously in Darjeeling, Simla and Bombay, using several Hindus she had recently recruited as her assistants. For the miracles back home she had to depend on Emma, who apparently needed a good deal of encouragement.

  My dear friend,

  Be good enough, O sorceress of a thousand resources, to ask Christofolo when you see him to transmit the letter herewith enclosed by an aerial or astral way, or it makes no matter how. It is very important. My love to you my dear. I embrace you.

  Yours faithfully,

  LUNA MELANCONICA

  I beg you DO IT WELL.197

  Sometimes Emma did not do it well, and occasionally she did not do it at all. Although H.P.B. poured on the flattery, Emma had fallen into the distressing habit of making irreverent remarks about the Mahatmas to people around town, including a few Christian clergymen in the city. From Ceylon, Henry had to caution her politely against discussing religion with outsiders, no matter whom, “for it looks bad that one so intimately connected with us as yourself should be thought to be so totally at variance with the views and objects of the Society’s founders. Pardon the plain-speaking of a friend.”198

  H.P.B. was contending with even more aggravation from the young men in her party, most of whom turned out to be totally undesirable as agents. But, in no position to be choosy, she was still obliged to use whoever came to hand. Usually her recruitment methods worked like this: the prospect would receive a letter from Koot Hoomi asking if he would like to serve the Brotherhood as a lay chela. Next would follow a description of the assignment: “The task is easy and there will not be much to do for either but be silent, and successfully play their parts. If the mission is accomplished, in return I will permit some of our secrets to be taught... 199

  From Darjeeling, H.P.B. dispatched to Simla two particularly inept young men, Keshava Pillai, a police inspector whom she had enlisted while passing through Nellore the previous May, and Darbhagiri (“Babaji”) Nath, a clerk in the Collector’s office at Nellore. Babaji, whose real name was S. Krishnamachari or Krishnaswami, was a tiny man with a fondness for aliases. For a while he called himself Gwala K. Deb; apparently homeless, he attached himself to the “Crow’s Nest” and called H.P.B. his guru, but also boasted that he had previously spent ten years with Master Koot Hoomi. As for Keshava Pillai, his ignorance made her laugh.

  “What is your idea of the Masters?”200 she had demanded of him.

  They were, he replied, ancient Rishis who had never died and were now some seven-hundred-thousand years old; they had long green hair and lived in trees. On hearing this, Helena conscripted him at once.

  Babaji and Pillai were to dress themselves in yellow robes and caps and hand-deliver letters from Master Morya to Sinnett, taking care to go nowhere near Allan Hume and Rothney Castle. That Sinnett did not see through this farce is truly remarkable. Babaji, having lost the money Helena gave him for traveling, had to borrow thirty rupees from Sinnett, and when an embarrassed K.H. returned the loan he lowered his Mahatmic dignity to call Babaji “a little wretch.”201 No doubt Helena called him a far stronger name. Of course Babaji and Pillai were hopelessly lost when Sinnett demanded they transmit an astral letter to K.H. in his presence. Havi
ng no talent for improvisation, they fled back to Darjeeling.

  As compensation for these partly botched maneuvers, H.P.B. received the unexpected boon of a phenomenon she had not engineered. Traveling among her party was an unstable young clerk from Tinevelly who had taken a leave of absence after suffering a nervous breakdown; now S. Ramabadra Ramaswamier announced dramatically that he was going to “find the Mahatmas, or—DIE.”202 Thoroughly annoyed, Helena told him frankly she did not appreciate his following her and wished he would tend to his own business. On October 5, wearing a yellow pilgrim’s robe and carrying an umbrella, Rama-swamier set off for Tibet. According to him, he managed to go farther than H.P.B. in her fantasy, ferrying across the Sikkim border by boat and continuing about twenty miles into the kingdom on foot.

  Two days later, he returned to Darjeeling in a state of complete exhaustion, babbling a bizarre tale of having met Mahatma Morya, whom he had recognized at once, having seen him one evening in his astral body on the balcony of the “Crow’s Nest.” Helena knew it was really Christofolo, but Ramaswamier was convinced it was Morya in the flesh; after all, the encounter had taken place between nine and ten in the morning under a sky of bright sunshine. The Mahatma was wearing a fur-lined yellow robe, yellow Tibetan cap, short black beard and long black hair that flowed down over his shoulders; he spoke very little English and instead had addressed Ramaswamier in his native Tamil. The Master’s advice was fairly sage: Ramaswamier must return to Darjeeling and serve Upasika.

  According to Ramaswamier, Madame “scolded me for my rash and mad attempt”203 to find the Mahatmas, but one can imagine how secretly pleased she must have been. Soon afterward, totally convinced, he wrote an account of his adventures (“How a Chela Found His Guru”) for the Theosophist, adamantly proclaiming that “now that I have seen the Mahatma in the flesh, and heard his living voice, let no one dare say to me that the BROTHERS do not exist... I KNOW!”204

  Little wonder that Helena often thought of people as donkeys.

  IV

  Adyar

  Moving into the new headquarters at Adyar on December 19, 1882, Helena felt that she had reached the pinnacle of happiness and security. After the affluence of her childhood, circumstances had seen fit to plunge her into poverty and disgrace, but now, after some thirty-five years of wandering, she had clawed her way back up the heights. A few months earlier she had written to Prince Alexander, “I am now on the rise and by God I will remain there”;205 at the time it had not been true but now, unquestionably, it was. Like a maharanee she surveyed her little kingdom from the airy roof bedroom, sitting quietly, writing and gazing out at the sparkling Bay of Bengal. On rough days it roared and hurled itself about in wrath, “but when it is quiet and caressing there can be nothing in the world as fascinating as its beauty, especially on a moon lit night.” She never tired of looking at the moon, which seemed twice as big and ten times as bright as European moons. Adyar, she told Nadyezhda, “is simply delightful. What air we have here; What nights! And what marvellous quiet! No more city noises and street yells.”206

  Henry, who had taken one of the riverside bungalows for himself, wrote in his diary that their beautiful new home “seemed like a fairy-place to us. Happy days are in store for us here.”207 Still, the remaining days of 1882 were filled with the usual petty annoyances of moving: unpacking, buying furniture, hiring servants, and making necessary repairs around the place, about all of which Helena refused to cope. It was Emma who attended to these matters, also supervising the servants, buying food and arranging for meals. In the midst of the bustle, on December 29, H.P.B. called Henry up to her room and “made me promise that if she should die, no one but myself should be allowed to see her face.” He was instructed to sew her up in a cloth and have her cremated. Why she should suddenly have thought of death is a mystery; perhaps she was reacting to the past scare with Bright’s disease recurring now that life was serene. In the evenings Helena and Damodar would wander with Olcott down to the shallows in the river where he would give them swimming lessons. Helena paddled about happily, while Damodar exhibited a terror of water, to which Henry replied that a would-be adept should be able to vanquish fear.

  With the move into the new house, H.P.B. seems to have been on pleasant terms with everyone. When Babula asked permission to marry, Helena readily bestowed her blessing and added the girl to her household; she went out of her way to make the Coulombs feel content by giving them the other bungalow near the river. Realizing that she had been bad-tempered, even violent, toward Emma, she now felt a welling up of affection and went so far as to give her pocket money. About this time she also bought several small dogs, and Emma, who loved animals as much as Helena, was put in charge of them as well as of the stray curs that she collected and nursed.

  Attempting to banish a past in which she had appeared ungrateful, Helena began calling Emma and Alexis by the pet names, Marquis and Marquise. She had indeed owed Emma a debt from the Cairo days and she now felt that she had repaid it a thousandfold: without her could her old friend have ever hoped to live in an Adyar mansion?

  Another recent pleasure was the publication of Mr. Isaacs, an American novel in which one of the leading characters, Ram Lai, an adept Brother, had obviously been modeled after Master Koot Hoomi. Set in Simla, the story was a florid, romantic sketch of Anglo-Indian life blended with Oriental mystery, and in its pages could be found references to Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott as mysterious but important figures in Simla society. The author, Francis Marion Crawford, was the stepson of the American painter Luther Terry and a nephew of Julia Ward Howe; once his family had been rich but had recently lost its fortune. In 1879 he came to India to study Sanskrit and ended by editing the Allahabad Indian Herald and writing his first novel. He had never met Madame Blavatsky, although he must have heard a great deal about her, especially from his uncle, Sam Ward, a member of the Theosophical Society and an intimate of H.P.B.’s. Ward told her that his nephew had miraculously written the book in less than four weeks, to which Helena replied that Koot Hoomi must have inspired him. Actually Crawford had deliberately turned to fiction as a means of supporting himself in his accustomed style; he would go on to write more than forty overstuffed romances that he produced at a breakneck rate of five thousand words a day.

  Reviewing Mr. Isaacs in the Theosophist, Helena, having forgotten K.H.’s encouragement of Minnie Hume and Ross Scott, pointed out that adepts do not normally function as matchmakers. Nor, she continued, do brokenhearted lovers drown their grief by running off to Tibet and joining the Brotherhood. Still, she felt extremely flattered: “We should nevertheless thank Mr. Crawford for one favour—he helps to make our Brothers conceivable human beings, instead of impossible creatures of the imagination. Ram Lai walks, talks, eats, and—gracious heavens!—rolls and smokes cigarettes.”208

  At the end of January, 1883, headquarters was honored by a royal visitor, the Thakur of Wudhwan, whom Henry had requested to bring only a few servants. When he arrived with nineteen in tow, Henry, stuck with more people than space in which to sleep them, could not help chastising the Maharajah, who expressed surprise and said he had brought only a small retinue. Usually he traveled with a hundred. When H.P.B. had last accepted the Tha-kur’s hospitality, the previous year, she had sustained a moment of real horror at the railway station at Wudhwan: one of her disciples, a blue-eyed Englishman who called himself Moorad Ali Beg, had snatched a sword from a Sepoy and tried to kill her, shrieking that she and her Mahatmas were devils. She realized that the incident was not the Thakur’s fault, for Godolphin Midford, alias Moorad Ali Beg, was most probably insane, and now she outdid herself to repay her guest in grand style.

  In February Henry left on a tour of Bengal, one of several long trips he had planned for the year. In his memoirs he would think back to 1883 with poignancy, recalling that he traveled more than seven thousand miles, established forty-three new branches, and became a vegetarian; he thought that it was probably the happiest and most successful tw
elve months of his life. Helena, for once, was content to remain in one spot, refusing to partake of Henry’s new diet; she still loved her eggs swimming in grease.

  At that time of the year the weather in Madras was sublime. At night, it was warm enough to sleep on the veranda or on the roof with only a thin covering, and during the day, the quality of the light made the compound inexpressibly beautiful. The dark green palms, the intense blue of sea and sky, the wide stretches of sandy beach where the Adyar flowed into the Bay of Bengal were a source of profound pleasure to H.P.B., while the house itself could not have been brighter or more cheerful. During the days the roof terrace rang with the sounds of hammering and sawing because a troop of masons and carpenters had been brought in to remodel H.P.B.’s quarters under Alexis Coulomb’s supervision. One corner of her large room was curtained off as sleeping quarters, and the rest turned into a sitting room; outside, on the northwest corner of the terrace, a kitchen had been installed so that she might have her meals prepared whenever the mood struck her. Olcott, grumbling about extravagance, complained that her personal expenses outran the maintenance of the entire compound. Resentful of his imputations, Helena felt that through her writings she contributed to the upkeep of the establishment and should be allowed a few luxuries. And there were certain expenses involved in arranging the phenomena that she could not disclose to him.

  Apart from the renovation of her suite, she was having Alexis build what she called an Occult Room. Ever since the first night at Huddleston Gardens, her disdain for the trappings of religion notwithstanding, she had envisioned a special chamber in which she might erect a shrine to the Mahatmas. The addition of the Occult Room, built against the west side of Helena’s room, was no small task, as it involved removing the north window and transforming the south one into the only door to the room.