Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  Henry refused to bother the prince with a trifling matter. Everyone knew that Babaji was a “half-crazy”100 epileptic. Did Constance actually expect him to repeat Babaji’s deranged assertions and ask for a written document that the prince had not been swindled? Put yourself in my place, Olcott begged. The countess did not press him.

  Helena asked her friends at Elberfeld to hustle Babaji off to London but, she moaned to Sinnett, “Babaji has unsettled the Gebhards entirely. If he is permitted to return—say good-bye to the German branch and our mutual friends. Let this be a prophecy”101 The Gebhards did not resign but they began asking embarrassing questions about certain Mahatma letters received by them and their friends. H.P.B. was obliged to account for the general crudenesses of the series with a complicated and incomprehensible dissertation on the hazards of “precipitation” by inexperienced chelas. The Gebhards, still suspicious, remained in the Society, but Dr. Hubbe-Schleiden finally lost faith and submitted his resignation, taking with him his two personal Mahatma letters.

  Babaji’s dramatic defection, which H.P.B. called “the basest ingratitude from one I have loved as my son,”102 gave her pause for reflection. Vacillating between sorrow and “ice-cold indifference and callousness,” she opted for the tougher stance. She had been “a big, stupid, trusting fool,” who had allowed herself to be harassed by “a thick crowd of circling traitors, fiends and tigers in human shape.”103 Therefore, when Mary and Gustav Gebhard’s twenty-year-old son Walther shot and killed himself three months later, it was on Babaji that Helena laid the blame for the tragedy.104

  Neither of the two Hindu chelas she had transported to Europe, Babaji Nath and Mohini Chatterji, had turned out according to Helena’s expectations. Despite Babaji’s stupidity, she had felt affection for him, but now, since the betrayal, her feelings had turned to sadness. Mohini was another, more crucial matter. At some point in the past year when her attention had been directed on herself, Mohini had escaped Madame’s domination and aggressively carved out an independent career for himself as a Mahatmic messenger. This did not seem quite fair to Helena, who had snatched him from a boring lawyer’s job in Calcutta and, exercising to the hilt her flair for the dramatic, costumed him in a black-velvet tunic bordered with glossy black fur and high Russian boots. It was she who had arranged his debut on the glittering stage of Paris and London high-society drawing rooms, having heralded him as a chela of the superhuman Brotherhood and therefore one of the most privileged human beings in the world. Could she have forecast that Mohini’s remarkable beauty, his silent dignity, and his refusal to touch the hands of men or raise his eyes to women would make him an international sex object?

  “He pleased us all,” wrote Isabelle de Steiger, speaking for the London women. “He pleased me extremely.”105 Not until much later did Isabelle learn that Mohini Chatterji could not have been so chaste as everyone supposed because he had a wife in Madras, but at the time nobody could have imagined such a thing. Isabelle, an artist who appreciated beauty for its own sake, was content to view Mohini from a distance. Other English and French female Theosophists were bolder: a Miss Leonard, an Englishwoman living in Paris, made it her business to get acquainted with Mohini and found her interest very much reciprocated.

  It seems clear that Mohini and Leonard became lovers. Parisian Theosophists such as Emile de Morsier were usually tolerant of such affairs, but in this case, they raised their brows and passed the news along to Madame Blavatsky, who responded with a mixture of repugnance and jealousy. That Mohini might be a willing participant, even the aggressor, never occurred to her. “Cold marble with horror,”106 she immediately began conjuring historical panoramas of ancient Rome and Egypt in which Mohini was engulfed by bare-bosomed Messalinas and Potiphars. As Paris gossips continued to report further details, she learned that there was a whole covey of Anglo-French rapists “who burn with a scandalous ferocious passion for Mohini—with that craving of old gourmands for unnatural food, for rotten Limbourg cheese with worms in it to tickle their satiated palates—or of the ‘Pall Mall’ iniquitous old men for forbidden fruit—ten year old virgins! Oh, the filthy beasts!! the sacrilegious, hypocritical harlots!”107 Noticeable in this passage, aside from the startling comparison of Mohini to wormy Limburger, is Helena’s own thrill at imagining “a nut-meg Hindu” in the arms of a fair-skinned “too erotic spinster.”108 Her sexuality, rigidly repressed for a decade, could not help but reveal itself.

  According to H.P.B.’s informants, the erotic Miss Leonard had sworn to seduce Mohini; she pursued him into his bedroom and when that failed, she finally stripped to the waist one afternoon in a public park. It was plain to Helena that poor Mohini had not understood at all what Miss Leonard wanted. “To show to her that I know all,”109 H.P.B. wrote Miss Leonard a long letter full of reprimands for tampering with the chastity of a holy man and bristling, one can only suppose, with Messalinas, Potiphars and other such epithets. In response, Leonard turned Helena’s letter over to her London lawyers along with the hundred-odd love letters Mohini had written her and instructed them to prosecute for defamation of character. Miss Leonard, no doubt in order to show Madame that she too knew all, ordered her lawyers to address the notice of legal action to “Mme. Metrovitch otherwise Mad. Blavatsky.”110

  Having fled India to avoid prosecution, Helena took this new threat with a surprisingly lighthearted attitude. “The Countess and I,” she wrote Alfred, “are sitting looking at each other and feel convulsed with laughter.” Trying to be helpful, Constance told her that if she did not appear in the London court on the date specified, she probably would be extradited. This information sobered H.P.B. “Is that so?” she demanded of Alfred. “Can they force me to go to London?... Please consult a lawyer and I will pay, it’s only a trifle.”111 By this time Sinnett was receiving several panicky letters a day from both Constance and Helena and must have dreaded the postman’s ring; he had no intention of allowing H.P.B. to get near a courtroom and in the end, due to the combined efforts of himself, the countess and Olcott, the case was settled out of court and H.P.B. wrote Miss Leonard an apology.

  Attributing the recent succession of unexpected blows to karma, Helena felt as if she were sitting “at the foot of a karmic Vesuvius covering me with uninterrupted eruptions of mud.”112 But by the beginning of February, 1886, just as she had convinced herself that nothing more could possibly happen, she was buffeted once again by a treachery more painful than anything she had yet faced. Attacks from outsiders and even disloyalty from her supporters and co-workers were no longer surprising. What did startle her was betrayal by her own relatives and by the people she regarded as her second family. Among those whom she genuinely cherished was Vsevolod Solovyov, her “little father.” From the day he had unexpectedly wandered into her life two years earlier, she had felt that he might almost be a younger brother, one who loved her as her own brother had not. After his last visit in September, Solovyov had gone to St. Petersburg, where Vera was now living, and Helena had been pleased to learn that they had become close friends. As a frequent visitor at Vera’s home, he had grown to know her daughters and now seemed virtually a part of the family.

  Throughout the fall Helena had continued to write him but eventually realized that there would be no reply. Hurt and bewildered, she temporarily stopped writing, and it was not until February that friends in Paris informed her of the stories about her past life which were making the rounds of the Theosophical salons. The source of the gossip was none other than Solovyov. Suddenly fifteen years of painful personal history that she had carried with her and so carefully suppressed seemed to be a subject of idle chitchat of people she had never laid eyes on. Now Helena understood how Miss Leonard had known of Agardi Metrovitch: all at once, family secrets twenty and thirty years old were no longer secrets, and it did not take her long to understand where Solovyov had got his information.

  Recently Vera’s letters had been “as cold and haughty as ice on Mont Blanc.” Helena’s initial reaction was a
nger. “She may go to grass,”113 she thought, and wrote Vera that she was murdering her. But it was difficult for Helena to remain furious with her sister and she wrote again to ask mildly where Solovyov could have heard about Metrovitch and Meyendorff. “I suppose there are people in St. Petersburg who know it; they might have told him, but not in such detail, Vera.”114 She was’not angry with her, only hurt.

  All these nightmares of my youth, which have worn me out, are now the property of Madame M[orsier]’s salon, and were written down by Solovyoff in your house. It is useless to hide the truth; neither the Coulombs nor the psychists, no one, has ever done me so much damage as this gossip of Solovyoff’s. For fifteen years I have worked unweariedly for the good of men; I have helped whom I could; I have tried by my actions to expiate my sins... and now I myself stand bespattered—nay, covered with a thick layer of filth, and by whom?115

  By Solovyov who had seduced Justine Glinka, his wife’s younger sister, when she had been thirteen years old. “He—with his own heavy sin on his soul—he is the first to cast a stone at me!”

  In no time, rancorous letters were flying between Solovyov in Paris, Nadyezhda Fadeyev in Odessa, and Vera in St. Petersburg. Both women urged Solovyov to keep quiet lest Helena spread vicious stories about the skeletons in his own closet. If he valued his reputation, he would have nothing more to do with “unhappy, crazy Helena,” Vera warned. “Helena is dead; what has she to lose? She has long ago burnt her boats.”116 Ignoring Vera’s advice, he sent H.P.B. a venomous letter, railing at her to leave him alone before he blabbed still more of her secrets: not only was “old Blavatsky whom you have prematurely buried”117 still alive but Nicholas Meyendorff had personally told him all about their affair, as well as the birth of Yuri and about her other lover, Agardi. If she created trouble for him, he would not hesitate to smear her with a scandal so dirty that even her devilish Mahatmas would not be able to save her.

  A half-dozen years later, Solovyov would write a series of eight articles, published first in Russky Vyestnik and afterward as the book Modern Priestess of Isis, in which he represented himself as skeptical of Madame Blavatsky almost from their first meeting in 1884. However, judging from the letters he wrote, this assertion seems to have been far from true. While visiting Wurzburg, his faith in Madame’s powers began to wane, but it was not until he became intimate with Vera and learned about Helena’s earlier secret life, that he turned against her. His subsequent vilification of Helena seems to have been directly proportionate to the intensity of his disillusionment.

  Sickened that Solovyov had turned on her “like a mad dog,”118 Madame spilled out her pain in letter after letter to Alfred Sinnett, whom she had now come to regard as “my last, real male friend in Europe. If you were to despise me—I would commit suicide I think.”119 It is curious to note that in the midst of her present troubles, she made no mention of her Mahatmas, who, despite the psychic telegraph and the cuckoo clock, were hiding silently behind the Himalayas while their messenger was being crucified. It was to Sinnett, not to them, that she looked for help.

  During the first weeks of February, H.P.B. worked herself into a suicidal depression. She described herself to Sinnett as an innocent, harmless boar who asks only to be left quietly in her forest, when suddenly “a pack of hounds is let loose to get him out of that wood and tear him to pieces.”120 In this self-destructive mood she made up her mind no longer to permit the past to torture her; at last, she would reveal to the world exactly what Helena Petrovna Blavatsky really was. Accordingly, she wrote Solovyov a letter titled “My Confession.” By this time Countess Wachtmeister understood Madame’s maniacal compulsion for writing self-damaging letters and routinely censored all outgoing mail, but somehow the letter to Solovyov slipped through.

  As in her letter to Sinnett, she began with the allegorical allusion of a boar, a wild, ugly creature who grunts to himself while eating roots with his bestial friends. Hounds appear, followed by men who threaten to kill him and burn the forest. The boar begins to run but soon realizes the forest is on fire. “What is there for the boar to do? Why this; he stops, he turns his face to the furious pack of hounds and beasts, and shows himself wholly as he is, from top to bottom, and then falls upon his enemies in his turn and kills as many of them as his strength serves till he falls dead.”

  Like the boar, Helena resolved to “fly no more.” Instead, she vowed to write down the true history of her life for the world to read. Unsparing of herself, “I myself will set fire to the four quarters of my native wood... and I will perish, but I will perish with a huge following.” It was for the sake of the Theosophical Society that she had protected her reputation these past ten years. Having tortured herself with fear, “I was ready to go on my knees to those who helped me cast a veil over my past,” but now she was determined to torture herself no more. She would snatch the weapons from her enemies’ hands and write a book “which will make a noise through all Europe and Asia.” What had she to fear from Blavatsky, alive or dead? Or Meyendorff? “I do not care a straw about that egoist and hypocrite! He betrayed me, destroyed me by telling lies to the medium Home, who has been disgracing me for ten years already, so much the worse for him.” Her autobiography, she assured Solovyov, would be “a Saturnalia of the moral depravity of mankind,” a worthy epilogue for her stormy life. “I shall conceal nothing.”

  In her confession to Solovyov, however, she blotted out almost everything: she had hated Nikifor Blavatsky and left him, but she had not slept with him; she had loved one man deeply and “wandered with him here and there”; there had been only an adopted child; from the time she was eighteen, there had always been gossip about her “hundreds” of lovers, but she had encouraged people to talk about her. Suddenly her eyes had been opened and she had gone to America to expiate her sins. She would tell, too, “a great deal of which no one ever dreamed, and / will prove it”

  Face to face with herself at last, she tried not to lower her eyes, but ended by turning away in shame. She could admit to deserting Nikifor but was careful not to admit knowing he was alive; she could even own up to having had relationships with other men but could not tell the truth about her son. Nor could she repudiate the Mahatmas, though it is clear that she was tempted. She told Solovyov:

  I will say and publish it in the Times and in all the papers, that the “master” and “Mahatma K.H.” are only the product of my imagination; that I invented them, that the phenomenon were ail more or less spiritualistic apparitions, and I shall have twenty million spiritists at my back. I will say that in certain instances I fooled people; I will expose dozens of fools, des hallucines; I will say that I was making trial for my own satisfaction, for the sake of experiment.

  It would be easy to make these admissions, but she would not do it because it would be “the greatest of lies.” All she wanted now was “that the world may know all the reality, all the truth, and learn the lesson. And then death, kindest of all.”121 Solovyov, she concluded, was free to reveal the contents of her confession, even to publish it in Russia if he liked, because she no longer cared.

  Solovyov did not publish the letter until after Helena’s death, but he did show it to members of the Paris Theosophical Society and before long its contents had crossed the Channel to Alfred Sinnett, who had been spending the past six months trying to extract autobiographical nuggets from Madame. Greatly agitated, he demanded to know what was going on. Why was she announcing that she would write the story of her life? Had she forgotten his project? His whole purpose was to vindicate her, but from what he had heard of her letter to Solovyov, it sounded as though she were hellbent on destroying both herself and the Society.

  Sinnett’s task as the biographer of H. P. Blavatsky was far from a snap: first, he had submitted a long list of questions and had also written Vera for a copy of her 1881 Rebus article, “The Truth about H. P. Blavatsky.” Unfortunately it was written in Russian and he had to ask H.P.B. for a translation, which gave her the opportunity to make whatever cha
nges she pleased. By March, Helena’s continued reticence to speak about the past was making him frantic.

  Her years in the United States? “Why goodness me I may as well try to tell you about a series of dreams I had in my childhood.”122

  Her experiences with Garibaldi? “Please do not speak of Mentana.”123

  The Agardi Metrovitch incident? “I WILL NOT WRITE ANYTHING about ‘the Metrovitch incident’...”124

  The adoption of a child? “Impossible even to touch upon the child. There’s the Baron Meyendorffs and all Russian aristocracy that would rise against me if... the Baron’s name should be mentioned.”125 And besides, if D. D. Home should see the book, he would cause trouble.

  By April a frustrated Sinnett began to complain. He had Helena’s version of Vera’s article, as well as some of Helena’s correspondence in which she explained that Metrovitch, her best friend’s husband, had met an untimely death at the hands of Papal agents and that Yuri was the illegitimate son of Nicholas Meyendorff and an unnamed woman. However, she would permit him to use none of this material as it was designated off-the-record information. When Sinnett pressed her for more details, warning her that the bookwas shaping up into an extremely dull work, she nodded sympathetically and promised to help enliven it “however disagreeable it may be for me personally.”126

  Reduced to pleading for her cooperation, Sinnett reminded her that her memoirs must be unexpurgated if she wished to refute Hodgson’s Report. Nothing of the kind, H.P.B. snapped; if she were to give him the whole truth, no doubt “all Europe would jump from its seat”127 but he knew quite well that the Masters would not permit such revelations. Therefore, she sighed, “What shall we, what can we, do?”128

  In Sinnett’s opinion, she was a public personality who had stimulated interest in herself and now she had an obligation to satisfy public curiosity; H.P.B. warily had to agree he had a point. If she were one of those women who had pursued her feminine duties, she replied, “sleeping with her husband, breeding children, wiping their noses, minding her kitchen, and consoling herself with matrimonial assistants on the sly and behind her husband’s back,”129 no one would care about her private life. Since she had chosen a career, she had to expect people poking their noses into her secrets. At the same time, she felt strongly that her life should be a matter of public record only since the founding of the Theosophical Society in 1875; anything that had happened prior to that date was nobody’s business. Sinnett may have been inexperienced as a biographer, but realized that eleven years out of fifty-five was not enough to make up a proper biography. Accepting the fact that he would never be able to coax a coherent narrative out of her, Sinnett looked at the hodgepodge of unrelated stories and decided to account for the fragments by titling the book Incidents in the Life of Madame Blavatsky. He ignored both the Mahatma letter supposedly received by Nadyezhda Fadeyev in 1870 as well as Dr. Leon Oppenheim’s “virginity” certificate.