Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  On the rare occasions when visitors sought them out, Helena found the audiences provided her with small pleasure. Mohini Chatterji’s two-week stay, for instance, left her coiled with rage; she had been slow to recognize and even slower to admit that Mohini had sprouted into another Babaji, but now she could not help noticing the transformation. The real mahatmas, he had come to believe, were unreachable beings who neither communicated by writing letters nor concerned themselves with worldly matters; therefore it followed that Madame’s Masters could not be mahatmas. Of course “Mr. Mohini Babu,” as she now scornfully referred to him, did not have the courage to announce these heresies to her face, but she knew that elsewhere he spoke of them openly and that he had persuaded Francesca Arundale and others. With Helena, his manner was dignified and reserved, as no doubt befitted “a Jesus on wheels & a Saint”147 and for a moment he made her appreciate Olcott who “is a conceited ass, but there is no one more faithful and true than he is to the Masters.”148 When Mohini told her of his plans to visit America, she trembled at the thought of the trouble he would cause there and suspected it could mean the end of the Society in the United States.

  H.P.B. invited other guests that fall: Dr. Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland. It occurred to Madame that Anna might like to return to the Theosophic fold, perhaps even as president of the London Lodge now that Sinnett had allowed the group to wither. So when Anna and Edward arrived in Ostend on the third of October and registered at a nearby hotel, Helena overwhelmed them with reproaches and insisted they check out and move at once into her apartment. Recently Anna had been suffering from severe asthma as well as facial neuralgia, and Maitland, who was currently taking her to southern Italy for the winter, hesitated to leave the privacy of the hotel, where Anna could quietly take her whiffs of chloroform as she needed them. Maitland also objected to the move on the grounds that Anna required a vegetarian diet and that she might be molested by Madame’s powerful and hostile “occult influences.” He did not, of course, mention that final reservation to H.P.B.

  In the end, however, Helena prevailed by assuring Anna that the diet was no problem because, while she herself required meat, Countess Wachtmeister was a vegetarian; and besides, she would introduce her to Mahatma Koot Hoomi. This promise Anna found irresistible, and she packed her belongings immediately. In his biography of Anna, Maitland recalled their three-day stay as enjoyable because “the hospitality and geniality of our hostesses was unbounded.” Eager to show herself in the most favorable light, Helena laid out her patience in the evenings and disarmed them with her usual candor, admitting, for example, that her troubles with the Society for Psychical Research had partially resulted from her own foolishness and lack of discretion. If only she had had someone to coddle her, as Anna had Maitland, she would never have done the things that had landed her in trouble; of course there was Henry Olcott, but he had never been of the slightest use as a protector. Now she could not take a step without opposition, and the public prejudice had spilled over onto the Theosophical Society. But if Anna would consider assuming the presidency of the London branch, they would be able to disarm the opposition and create a movement that would be universally accepted. Maitland vetoed the idea on the grounds that their missions were totally different: he and Anna sought to restore the true esoteric Christianity to mankind while Madame’s goal was the total subversion of the Christian ideal.

  Helena took the rejection quietly, perhaps because she realized that Anna was an extremely sick woman who had not much longer to live. In fact, on their second evening with Helena, Anna was stricken with a particularly severe asthma attack and begged Maitland for chloroform. Immediately she began to hallucinate, first complaining that the ceiling was too low, then shifting to her favorite subject, anti-vivisection. H.P.B. must have listened in horror while Anna described how she used her psychic ability to “project” killing thoughts against certain doctors and scientists who used animals in their experiments. One of the men against whom she had directed her projections was Claude Bernard, and he had obliged her by dying. If she lived long enough, Anna planned to kill several others, including Louis Pasteur. She suggested that H.P.B. join forces with her.

  Declining gently, Helena pointed out that Anna would do better to attack the principle of vivisection rather than personalities, because she did injury to herself and her victims “without much benefitting the poor animals.”149

  After experiencing Anna’s psychic mad song, H.P.B. was content to spend her time with the countess. During the remainder of the year and through the first months of 1887, the world heard little of Madame Blavatsky; there were no furious letters to magazine and newspaper editors, no disputes with her enemies; what few personal letters she did write were mainly progress reports on The Secret Doctrine. By this time she had completed what she believed to be a first volume and was starting on a second in which she planned to deal with Hindu esoteric doctrines; so far she felt enormously pleased with her results. About a year earlier, in a moment of inspiration, she had taken a giant leap forward by devising a unifying theme for the work, and after that everything seemed to have fallen into place.

  The device was not only both ingenious and simple but extremely provocative as well: somewhere in this wide, wide world, as she would explain in the introduction to The Secret Doctrine, there exists an archaic manuscript known as the Stanzas of Dzyan. These fragments of Tibetan sacred writings comprise the oldest book in the world; in fact, an ancient Hebrew document on occultism, the Siphra Dzeniuta, had been compiled from them. “A collection of palm leaves made impermeable to water, fire and air, by some specific unknown process,”150 the Stanzas were written in “Senzar,” a language unknown to philology, and were buried along with similar priceless manuscripts in the secret crypts that formed the library system of the Brotherhood. At one time, according to H.P.B., the human race had been granted a primeval revelation in which the principles of civilization were set forth; and even though this root knowledge basic to all religion, science and philosophy had gradually disappeared from view, it had not been lost. H.P.B.’s stated intention in The Secret Doctrine was to translate and reveal that portion of the revelation contained in the Stanzas of Dzyan, “that can be given out to the world in this century.”151

  In an obvious effort to forestall objections, she warned in advance that her book would doubtless be regarded by a large section of the public as the wildest sort of romance, “for who has ever even heard of the book of Dzyan”;152 still, she was prepared to face the charge of having invented it. To her judges, she had nothing to say, nor would she condescend to notice “those crack-brained slanderers”153 who maintained she had invented the Mahatmas and plagiarized her previous writings from Eliphas Levi and Paracelsus. To open-minded readers, she repeated the words of Montaigne: “I have here made only a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the string that ties them,” to which she added, “Pull the ‘string’ to pieces, if you will. As for the nosegay of FACTS—you will never be able to make away with these. You can only ignore them, and no more.”154

  It would be charged, subsequently, that Madame Blavatsky had plagiarized the Stanzas of Dzyan from a combination of sources. According to William Emmette Coleman, the sources were mainly from H. H. Wilson’s Vishnu Purana and Alexander Winchell’s World Life, Other plagiarized works included: Donnelly’s Atlantis, Dowson’s Hindu Classical Dictionary, Oliver’s Pythagorean Triangle, Decharme’s Mythologie de la Grece Antique, and Myer’s Qabbala, plus some sixteen other works. Reported Coleman, “I find in this ‘oldest book in the world’ statements copied from nineteenth century books and in the usual blundering manner of Madame Blavatsky.”155

  In comparing The Secret Doctrine with the works mentioned by Coleman, it is immediately clear that H.P.B. did in fact use them as references and in many cases lifted sizable chunks of material, with or without accreditation, just as she did in Isis Unveiled. But Coleman may have erred in limiting her source material to nineteenth-cent
ury writers. As pointed out by Gershom Scholem, today’s greatest living scholar of Jewish mysticism, the Stanzas “owe something, both in title and content, to the pompous pages of the Zoharic writing called Sifra Di-Tseniutha.” Madame Blavatsky, he goes on to add, “has drawn heavily upon Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata (1677-1684), which contains (vol. II, pp. 347-385) a Latin translation of the Sifra Di-Tseniutha. The solemn and magniloquent style of these pages may well have impressed her susceptible mind.”156

  Whether Helena actually did gain access to this obscure seventeenth century translation is impossible to know for certain; she herself is the last person to consult for enlightenment because from the outset she surrounded the writing of The Secret Doctrine with the kind of mystery she adored. She announced in almost every letter she wrote that she would use no reference material whatsoever. To Alfred Sinnett: “Now I am here alone with the Countess for witness. I have no books, no one to help me. And I tell you that the Secret Doctrine will be 20 times as learned, philosophical, and better than Isis...”157 To Henry Olcott: “... I am here quite alone with no books around me...”158

  These statements had definite purpose, indeed were essential “to show whether Masters are or are not. If not—then / am the Mahatma…,”159 Conversely, if she could write the book without references, she was not the Mahatma, and Richard Hodgson was a liar. It will be remembered that she made similar claims for the writing of Isis, but it will also be recalled that she was working with a library of perhaps a hundred books in New York. Olcott, her only witness, did not believe that she could possibly have written Isis from her own library, and he felt sure that she did no outside library research because she never left the house. No matter what Henry believed, the fact remains that it was entirely possible, virtually certain, that she did compose Isis from those books plus a few others borrowed from friends, and it is also probable that she left the apartment. There was no reason why she could not have, for she was in good health.

  At Wurzburg and Ostend, however, immobilized as she was, it is unlikely that she went cavorting through book shops. That was one reason her friends believed she had no books; the other was that she brainwashed them so consistently on this point that even those closest to her, Countess Wachtmeister for one, would continue to insist that Madame spoke the truth. In fact, every person involved with Madame Blavatsky during the writing of The Secret Doctrine seems to have gone out of their way to mention the curious lack of reference works, until it sounds as if they were patterning their accounts on a central press release.

  The truth is, H.P.B. did own an unspecified number of books and did use them as source material. No one understood this better than the countess, who had packed those nine bulky pieces of luggage upon leaving Wurzburg and probably knew the exact number of books in Madame’s traveling library. At the beginning of her association with H.P.B., she must have entertained suspicions about Helena’s work methods because once, when a page had to be rewritten twelve times, she asked why the Mahatmas made mistakes. It was not their error, H.P.B. explained; pictures and astral counter-parts of books were passed before her eyes but reading them correctly required concentration on her part. If she was upset or distracted, she naturally made mistakes. After that, Constance asked no further questions and accepted the role of witness to Madame’s lack of reference material, while at the same time assuming the responsibility for ordering the volumes H.P.B. needed. On December 13, 1885, for instance, Constance asked Sinnett to get them a copy of Hargrave Jennings’ Phallicism, also to “beg Mohini to write out the esoteric meaning of some of Shakespeare’s plays. Madame wants it for the S.D. and will put it in Mohini’s name.”160 On October 13, 1886, she reminded Sinnett that H.P.B. wanted H. H. Wilson’s Vishnu Purana, the very work that William Coleman would find to be Helena’s chief source, but to make sure he bought the ten-shilling edition. As for the other book on Odin and Scandinavian mythology, he was to please cancel it because H.P.B. could not afford it. This particular letter is doubly interesting because it supplies a glimpse of the financial priorities in Helena’s life; instead of the mythology book, Sinnett was asked to stop at Mr. Wallace’s in Oxford Circus and purchase four bottles of No. 3 medicine.

  Unfortunately for H.P.B. there was no one in whom she could confide her fears and frustrations. Naturally nobody expected her to need books, not even Constance, who may have convinced herself by this time that Madame used them only to verify quotations she had received in the astral light. So H.P.B. had to keep her problems to herself. The fact was, in October of 1886, she was stuck. With little difficulty she had completed a first volume, mainly her interpretation of the Stanzas of Dzyan. Now that she was set to tear into a second volume dealing with Hindu cosmogony and theogony, the source, to her, of the true archaic doctrine, she was compelled to admit to herself that her knowledge in this area was sketchy. All along she had been counting on the help of Subba Row, to whom she had already sent the first volume for reading and revision; but to her enormous distress, she learned from Henry that Subba Row wanted nothing to do with The Secret Doctrine. After reading the material, he commented that it was so full of mistakes that if he touched it, he should have to rewrite it altogether, and he did not even want to look at a second volume.

  Forgetting that she was supposedly receiving help from the Mahatmas, she sent Henry an anguished reply. There were Sanskrit words and sentences she needed, not to mention the esoteric meanings of Hindu allegories. “Can you ask Srinavas Row and Bhavani Row to help me? Then I could send you the 2nd Vol. consisting of Books 1. 2. and 3. Unless someone helps me I do not know what to do. And who will make the glossary? I can’t and have no time, and Mohini hardly will. Please answer immediately.”161

  But Henry had no help to offer from his end.

  Helena spent New Year’s, 1887, by herself. It was the first time in her life that she had awoken on the first day of a new year and found herself alone, “as if in my tomb.”162 Shortly before Christmas the countess had gone to London on business and Helena missed her terribly. “Ever since you went away,” she wrote her, “I have felt as though either paralysis or a split in the heart would occur. I am as cold as ice and four doses of digitalis in one day could not quiet the heart.”163 She spent the first weeks of January scratching out passages of the manuscript, rewriting, and adding new material. With the exception of Louise, she did not talk to a single person for weeks, not even to her doctor, who was ill and could not pay his regular weekly calls.

  Toward the middle of the month she had a letter from one of the few remaining members of the London Theosophical Society, a journalist and subassistant editor of the Daily Telegraph named Edward Douglass Fawcett. Born in Brighton, educated at the Westminster School where he was Queen’s Scholar, a student of philosophy and metaphysics, and a passionate sportsman, Fawcett was not yet twenty-two years old. He wondered if Madame needed editorial assistance on her book; if so, he would be happy to come over to Ostend and lend a hand. At the moment H.P.B. needed all the help she could get and besides, she felt “nearly half crazy with solitude.”164 When he arrived, however, she decided to play the grandam and kept him at arm’s length by locking her door during the days and granting him brief audiences in the evening. Shortly afterward, Fawcett was joined by two more loyal London Theosophists, Bertram and Archibald Keightley, who also tendered their services. The three young men were handed stacks of manuscript three feet high, asked to correct the English and punctuation, and urged to give their opinion of the contents. There was no doubt in their minds that The Secret Doctrine was destined to become the most important contribution of the century to the literature of occultism, but they also must have realized that the manuscript in its present form was a confused muddle. What Archibald saw was a mass of materials with no definite form; to Bertram, it was “another Isis Unveiled, only far worse, so far as absence of plan and consecutiveness were concerned.”165 Topics were started, dropped capriciously, taken up again, and dropped a second time. It was clear to bo
th Keightleys that the manuscript needed drastic revision before it could be shaped into a publishable book.

  Probably it was just as well they kept these feelings to themselves because it would have been a devastating blow to Madame’s ego. Instead, they spent the evenings sitting with both her and the countess, who had returned from London. Helena played patience while the Keightleys talked about the real reason for their visit: they hoped to persuade her to move to England.

  Since Dr. Archibald Keightley and Bertram Keightley would soon undertake the responsibility of more or less supporting H.P.B., these two young men, who appeared almost as magically as Mahatmas from Tibet, are of special interest. Mohandas K. Gandhi, meeting them two years later, would take them for brothers. This was an easy mistake as they were about the same age and shared a physical resemblance. Archibald, a doctor, had a grave round face with full beard and glasses; Bertram, a lawyer who was more grave-looking, sported a mustache and wispy beard, and he too wore glasses. Actually, twenty-eight-year-old Archibald was the nephew of Bertram, his father’s youngest brother. To make the situation even more confusing, Bertram, while Archibald’s uncle, was a year younger than Archibald. They came from a wealthy Liverpool family in which the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg were greatly admired; both boys had their early education at Charterhouse and then went on to Cambridge where Bertram studied medieval mysticism and Archibald natural science before entering the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Attracted by Spiritualism and mystical philosophy in general, they saw an advertisement for Alfred Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism and, after reading it, obtained an introduction to the author. In early 1884, when H.P.B. was visiting Europe, the Keightleys joined the Theosophical Society around the same time as the Cooper-Oakleys, and during the remainder of Helena’s visit were among the entourage that Constance Wachtmeister mentioned as idolatrous flatterers. In the spring and summer, Bertram trailed Helena to Paris and Enghien, and later to Elberfeld; Archibald, busy with his medical studies, had no time for long trips but when H.P.B. returned to England in October, 1884, just prior to sailing for India, he accompanied her and the Cooper-Oakleys as far as Liverpool.