Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  PHOTOS

  The most well-known portrait of H.P.B., taken by Enrico Resta, January 8, 1889, in London. New York Public Library picture collection.

  Henry Steel Olcott, co-founder and first president of the Theosophical Society. An expatriate American, he lived his last three decades in India. New York Library Picture Collection.

  William Quan Judge, New York attorney and leading figure in Theosophy from its inception to 1875. After H.P.B.'s death, he broke with the parent society and founded the independent Theosophical Society in America. New York Public Library picture collection.

  Daniel Dunglas Home, one of the most notable nineteenth-century mediums. His intense aversion to Madame Blavatsky resulted in a twenty-year feud. New York Public Library picture collection.

  Artist's sketch of "Katie King," the spirit that supposedly materialized at a Philadelphia seance, August 1874. A few months later "Katie" was revealed to be a living woman. New York Public Library picture collection.

  William Butler Yeats in 1903. After meeting Madame Blavatsky at the age of twenty-two, he became one of her students. American Weekly magazine.

  Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, about 1898 when she was having an unconsum-mated "spiritual marriage" with William Butler Yeats. Her association with the Society, encouraged by Yeats, turned out to be brief. New York Public Library picture collection.

  Irish poet George Russell, 1930. "A.E.'s" work was deeply influenced by H.P.B.'s philosophy, particularly by The Secret Doctrine, robert h davis, photographer. New York Public Library picture collection.

  Mohandas K. Ghandi as a young lawyer in East Africa. Earlier, while a student in London, the future Mahatma first read the Bhagavad Gita at the suggestion of two of H.P.B.’s disciples. New York Public Library Picture Collection.

  Annie Besant in about 1897, age fifty. H.P.B.’s chosen successor, she became president of the Theosophical Society after Colonel Olcott’s death. New York Public Library Picture Collection.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti and Annie Besant in the 1920s. Mrs. Besant hailed him as the avatar of the New Messiah. UPI

  Garlanded Jiddu Krishnamurti and Annie Besant returning to India in 1927 after a long tour abroad. “I have seen Buddha, I have communed with Buddha, I am Buddha,” he said then. Two years later he resigned from the Society. Wide World Photos.

  H.P.B. in London, 1889. New York Public Library picture collection.

  EUROPE

  1884

  I

  Paris

  The sea voyage seemed exceptionally calm and pleasant to Helena, even though the first day out Mohini and Babula “brought up their dinners for the whole year 1883,”1 while she suffered not a single minute of seasickness. In fact, her health improved so drastically once they left Bombay that Henry remarked on her miraculous recovery. They had day after day of fine weather, but Helena sat cloistered in the captain’s quarters, working on a French translation of Isis Unveiled. By the time they reached Suez, she had almost finished the first volume. She would have been completely relaxed if not for Olcott’s angry nagging about her extravagance; specifically, one particular bill of which he had learned shortly before leaving Bombay: apparently she had taken seven hundred rupees from the communal account and spent it on her personal suite. At Suez, Henry wrote to Alexis Coulomb that he was “tired of this haphazard, unsystematic and compromising way in which our whole financial affairs have been conducted,”2 and that Madame Blavatsky had promised to assume total financial responsibility for her own quarters in the future. His continued harping on money bored Helena, and when he told her of his reticence about accepting St. George Lane-Fox’s offer to endow the Society “lest... in becoming rich... it... should become vicious and proud,”3 she tossed her head in furious frustration.

  Arriving at Marseilles on the twelfth of March, she was greatly exasperated at being quarantined for twenty-four hours because of, as Henry called it, “the sanitary sins of Bombay.”4 Not until the following day were they able to continue on to Nice where they were met by Lady Marie Caithness, Countess of Caithness, and Duchess de Pomar. A year older than H.P.B., Lady Marie was a Spaniard who had survived two husbands to become an extremely wealthy widow with palaces in Paris and Nice. Now she had begun to use her fortune to finance her interest in occultism. Both a Spiritualist and a Theosophist, she believed herself to be a medium for the spirit of Mary, Queen of Scotland, who “came through” in automatic writing and at the weekly seances Marie hosted at her Paris palace, appropriately called Holy-rood. Lady Caithness was a singularly charming woman renowned for her kindness and boundless hospitality, and when H.P.B. arrived in France, Lady Caithness was so pleased to meet her that she insisted upon underwriting many of her expenses.

  At Nice, Mohini and Padshah were sent on to Paris while Helena and Olcott got a taste of fashionable Riviera society at Lady Marie’s Palais Tiranty. Marie did everything in her power to make them feel at home by arranging soirees for vaguely noble locals to meet Madame, but Helena found her energies sapped by a host of minor maladies. Upon landing at Marseilles, she had suffered an upset stomach and then, dragged to the theater one evening, she felt so exhausted that she slept through three acts and caught a cold that turned into bronchitis. As if that were not aggravating enough, she suddenly erupted with “gum boils, neuralgia, rheumatics and sciatica, with fever in my ears and diphtheria in my toes.”5

  Gum boils notwithstanding, she was immensely pleased to find a colony of Russian aristocrats wintering in Nice, among them a Dolgorukov cousin and a woman Helena had played with as a child at Saratov. “She knew me by name, having heard of my felicitous marriage with old father Blavatsky, and fell this morning into my arms weeping and wiping her nose on my sympathetic bosom,” wrote H.P.B, but she was clearly delighted to be carried off to their palaces for dinners and luncheons, “accepting my dressing gowns and evening deshabilles, cigarettes and compliments with a Christ-like forbearance doing great honour to their patriotic feelings.” Everyone invited her to visit them in Russia, to which she commented cynically in a letter to Alfred Sinnett, “I wish they may get it,”6 and they gushed over the picturesque Babula whom H.P.B. had dressed in flaming yellow livery and earrings. Helena jokingly remarked that before going to Paris she would have an extra earring put in his nose.

  In the meantime she was not surprised to see dribbling in a half-dozen invitations from London Theosophists: Francesca Arundale, Isabelle de Steiger, the Sinnetts, and others whom she had never met were all urging her to visit. Since the letters were obviously sincere, she devised a standard reply saying that although she was deeply touched, they nonetheless must not expect her. She was crumbling into pieces like an old sea biscuit, she quipped, and “all that I hope to be able to do is mend my weighty person with medicines and will-power and then drag this ruin overland to Paris.” Besides, she was not fit to meet civilized people, for “in seven minutes and a quarter I should become perfectly unbearable to you English people if I were to transport to London my huge, ugly person. I assure you that distance adds to my beauty...”7

  Nobody agreed more emphatically with those last words than Alfred Sinnett, who was privately bewailing the appearance in Europe of both H.P.B. and Olcott. After his departure from India, Sinnett had hurried back to London, where he had established a Theosophical Society to his own taste and proclaimed himself the only true bearer of the Mahatmic message. Having been hobnobbing with a fashionable circle of wealthy intellectuals whom he had drawn into the T.S., he regarded the arrival of the founders as a mammoth embarrassment. Still, he was left with no alternative but to make the best of it.

  Helena, despite her protestations, had every intention of appearing in London, but it would happen in her own newsworthy way. On the other hand, she felt sick and cross in Nice, partly from her cold and from other ailments she herself recognized as psychosomatic. Now that she had made the long trip from India, she began to dread facing the English Theosophists whose members had such small compunction about publicly insulting
her and the Mahatmas. For over six months, while writing civil replies to Anna Kingsford, she had “accumulated bile and secreted gall,”8 and now she was about to explode like a bombshell. “I cannot keep calm,”9 she warned Sinnett.

  H.P.B.’s private turmoil remained well hidden from Lady Caithness and the Russian women, who continued to humor her extravagantly, urging her to remain in Nice until at least May. After two weeks, though, H.P.B. and Olcott moved on to Paris, where Lady Marie had put at their disposal, gratis, an apartment at 46 rue Notre Dame des Champs. With an eye to making an impressive arrival, H.P.B. had taken care to arrange a reception for herself; it was Koot Hoomi who had suggested the choreography in a letter to Mohini at Paris: “Appearances go a long way with the ‘Pelings.’ One has to impress them externally before a regular, lasting, interior impression is made. Remember, and try to understand why I expect you to do the following.”10 When Upasika arrived, Mohini was to salute her by throwing himself flat on the ground and bowing his head. As if anticipating that even Mohini might be reluctant to make a public fool of himself, K.H. advised him to ignore the stares of the French and of Olcott, who would surely want to know what was going on. This was a test, K.H. was at pains to warn; the Maha-Chohan himself would be watching.

  When Helena’s train pulled into Paris, she was greeted on the platform by Olcott, her old New York friend William Judge, and an embarrassed but obedient Mohini, who managed a stylish nosedive. At the age of thirty-two William Judge was finally burning his bridges. During the five-year radical separation from H.P.B. and Henry Olcott, Judge had continued to write plaintive letters to Olcott and then to Damodar, beefing that he was being left out and begging for crumbs of news about the Masters. Happiness had eluded him: he had few friends, a miserably unhappy relationship with his wife, and a seemingly small knack for earning a decent living, even though he had made several trips to Venezuela, where he had invested in a silver mine. In his letters to India, he constantly mentioned Ella Judge, whose antipathy toward the Theosophical Society had, if anything, grown with the years. He wanted desperately to leave her but, as she often reminded him, it was not fair for him “to run off leaving debts behind me unpaid and a woman unprovided for who through my solicitation left a good paying position as a teacher to marry me. She cannot recover it.” Feeling “truly in hell,”11 he thought of himself as living “in a little private hot-house of my own construction,” in which he could see the world passing but “the fear of being cut prevents me running through the glass windows.”12

  After their two-year-old daughter had died of diphtheria, he resisted Ella’s demands for another child. He studied Sanskrit and phantasized schemes in which he fled to India without actually committing the sin of marital abandonment. Convinced of Helena’s Masters, he felt that “M and the other are watching me—and maybe helping too—but they say nothing.” What he was waiting for, of course, was some sign from the Mahatmas, preferably a command, that would release him from Ella. Finally, in June 1883, on the back of a letter from Damodar, he had found a message in red pencil: “Better come. M.”13 But it was not until February of 1884 that he sailed for Europe. After the reunion with Helena and Olcott, he would go on to Adyar, where he intended to spend the rest of his life.

  Killing time while he waited for the arrivals from India, in London, he admitted to feeling “awful. Such an outside pressure on me to go back to the U.S.... suicide, anything,” The magnetic atmosphere of London, he decided, was causing him to suffer continual nightmares and waves of despair. From a tailor on Ludgate Hill, he ordered a pair of trousers for four dollars, at a saving of six dollars, and most evenings, he was invited to dine at Alfred Sinnett’s house where he picked at badly prepared vegetarian meals. Alfred regaled him with inside stories of the Mahatmas and showed him a picture of Koot Hoomi. It was quickly clear to Judge that Sinnett had no great love of Hindus, for when Olcott wrote from Nice that he was sending Sorab Padshah on ahead to London, Sinnett remarked that he couldn’t imagine what Olcott expected him to do with Padshah. Now he proposed that Judge be the one to look after the Indian and find him a place to stay. While Judge thought the idea of asking a stranger like himself to show Padshah around London was “ridiculous,”14 he agreed, but immediately after began shunning Sinnett’s dinner invitations.

  Lady Caithness’s free apartment turned out to be a disappointment. The rue Notre Dame des Champs was a long dreary street on the Left Bank; the building at No. 46 was far from imposing and, worst of all for someone as heavy-set as Helena, one had to climb a steep, dark staircase to get up to the apartment. A Frenchwoman came every day to cook and put the rooms in order, but Madame preferred her meals prepared by Babula. Knowing he slept on the floor outside her room made her feel more secure at night.

  The first few days, the apartment was generally full of visitors, which provided Helena with the attention she adored. Judge, on the other hand, was depressed by the clutter of people coming and going, especially since he had hardly managed a private word with Helena since her arrival. Soon he had worked himself into “the most awful blues that ever were,” accompanied by uncontrollable fits of weeping. Recognizing his melancholia and worried that he might do something foolish, Helena told him that he was being attacked by “elementals” and lent him a ring inscribed with the Sanskrit word for life. That helped, as did her assurance that Master K.H. had promised “to do something with and for me.”15

  That Helena had the patience for soothing Judge is proof of the self-control she denied having: shortly after her arrival in Paris, the mail from Adyar caught up with her. H.P.B. was assaulted with a batch of frenzied letters from Damodar, Hartmann and Emma, all of which related similar stories adding up to impending disaster for Madame Blavatsky. It seemed she had hardly left Bombay when war had erupted between the Coulombs and the Board of Control. The incident that set off the battle was trivial indeed: Hartmann, Lane-Fox, William Brown and Damodar had wanted to hold a business meeting in H.P.B.’s room, but were annoyed to discover that Madame Coulomb was hewing to the letter of Madame’s instructions and refused to unlock the staircase door leading to the roof. This led to insults, which in turn infuriated Emma to the point where she forgot to be cautious. Madame Blavatsky was a fraud, she spat at them recklessly; Madame had forced her husband to build a trapdoor to deliver Mahatma letters and trick apparatus in the Occult Room. For a while Hartmann and Lane-Fox listened to the accusations in disbelief, then they responded in what they believed appropriate fashion by demanding that the Coulombs leave, with Lane-Fox promising Emma two thousand rupees if she would quietly disappear.

  To everyone’s surprise, Emma adamantly refused to budge, insisting that she had a home for life at Adyar. She could never be turned out because she knew too much about Madame Blavatsky. Madame had borrowed money from her in Cairo and never repaid it; Madame had once had a husband named Agardi Metrovitch; all of the English were dupes and idiots who had been taken in by H.P.B.’s invented Mahatmas; the real purpose of the Theosophical Society was to overthrow British rule in India. Revelation followed ugly revelation, but the only hard facts Hartmann and Lane-Fox gathered from her tirades were that she hated H.P.B. and that she seemed to be waging some sort of vendetta. They decided that Emma and Alexis must be expelled from the compound.

  Now it was Damodar who stepped in to save Emma and, he hoped, Madame as well. What, he must have asked himself in anguish, would Madame do if she were here? What would Master Koot Hoomi do? On March 11, Damodar arranged to receive a K.H. letter advising pacification of the rampaging Emma: the Board of Control, said Koot Hoomi, was to keep in mind that she was a sick medium who could not be held responsible for her behavior. All he could advise was charity and forgiveness. The Mahatmic peacemaking pleased no one, least of all Emma, and when Hartmann continued to call her a liar, she coolly informed him that she could substantiate every one of her accusations from Madame’s confidential letters.

  While Emma ranted in Adyar, Helena, in Paris, was demonstrating an unca
nny ability to face calamity with the serenity of a Mahatma. The result was a strangely compassionate letter to Emma and Alexis, studded with clever double entendres and sincere expressions of sorrow for Emma’s foolishness. She began by addressing herself to both the Coulombs because she wanted them to put their heads together and give her words serious thought. Still, as her pen raced over page after page, the savagery of her feelings conquered her epistolary style, leaving only a desperate Helena Petrovna to speak her piece.

  Oh Madame Coulomb! what then have I done to you that you should try to ruin me in this way!

  What purpose have you in going and vilifying me secretly to those who love me and who believe in me? What [cause of vengeance] have you against me? What you do will never ruin the Society, only me alone, at the most in the estimation of my friends. The public has always looked upon me as a fraud and an imposter. By talking and acting as you do you will only gain one end, that is, people will say that you also are “a fraud “; and worse than that, that you have done for your own interests, what I have not done for myself, since I give all that I have to the Society, for I spend my life for it. They will say that you and M. Coulomb have helped me not for the sake of friendship... but in the hopes of “blackmailing”... But that is dreadful! You are truly sick. You must be so to do as foolishly as you are doing! Understand then that you cannot at this hour of day injure anyone. That it is too late.