Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  Left quaking outside on the doorstep, Alice could hear Madame dressing down Bert for bringing a total stranger to call at such an inopportune moment. She would not see anyone, she barked. When he reminded her that she herself had made the appointment and added that Alice had made a long journey up from the country to keep it, H.P.B. refused to listen. A greatly disappointed Alice returned to Eastbourne without her savings, blaming herself for her unworthiness to meet H.P.B.

  Another visitor during those first weeks in London was twenty-year-old Charles Johnston, the son of a Protestant member of Parliament from Ulster, who had planned to become a missionary until he read Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism. Converted instantly, he rounded up a few of his school friends who were also interested in Eastern religion and, with William Butler Yeats and Claude Wright, founded the Dublin Hermetic Society in 1885. Yeats, the chairman, had read a paper on whether or not the Mahatmas really existed, but apparently had offered no definite conclusion because Johnston had come to “Maycot” to get the answer from H.P.B.’s own lips.

  Arriving at twilight one evening, he was advised that Madame had not yet finished her day’s work and was sent upstairs to wait. When finally ushered into her presence, he received an initial impression of rippled hair, a dark blue dressing gown, and “marvellously potent eyes.” All graciousness, she gave him a hearty handshake and quickly invited him to stay for tea. After bellowing for Louise, she snuggled in her armchair, rolled him a cigarette made of Turkish tobacco and proceeded to interrogate him. Had he read the S.P.R. Report, or as she called the psychists, The Spookical Research Society? Did he know that she was a Russian spy and champion impostor of the century? What impression had Richard Hodgson, “the frisky lambkin from Australia,” made upon him?

  Perhaps intuiting exactly how to please her, Johnston answered that if he had not already been a member of the Theosophical Society, he should have joined merely on the strength of Hodgson’s report. In his opinion, there was not a shred of real evidence in it.

  Helena beamed. “I am so glad you think so, my dear, for now I can offer you tea with a good conscience.”

  After Louise had spread a white cloth and lit the lamp, she brought in a tray of tea, toast and eggs. When Bert joined them, Helena began to criticize the S.P.R. and then turned on Bert, whom she branded as “greedy, idle, untidy, unmethodical and generally worthless.” When he ventured a mild defense, she flared up anew, declaring he was “born a flapdoodle, lived a flapdoodle, and would die a flapdoodle.” Johnston recalled that Bert got so rattled he lost his grip on the cutlery, which left a wake of egg yolk in its path across the white tablecloth. A few minutes later he bolted the room.

  For several hours Helena regaled Johnston with stories of the Mahatmas, answered his questions with the patience of a true guru, and finally dismissed him smoothly by saying that it was late and she felt sleepy. As Johnston stepped out into the spring night, he ruminated that Madame, “the most perfect aristocrat I have ever known,” had not performed a single miracle for him but nevertheless “conveyed the sense of the miraculous.” Something in her personality suggested a bigger world, deeper powers, unseen might. “Her mere presence testified to the vigour of the soul,”14 he decided.

  Back in Ireland, Charley founded the Dublin Lodge of the Theosophical . Society and continued his studies at the university, planning after graduation to relocate in India.

  Johnston and Cleather were not the only ones attracted to “Maycot”; indeed, once Helena’s presence in London became known, there were others who hastened to beat a path to her door. Of course her neighbor Allan Hume was not among them and curiously enough neither was Alfred Sinnett, whose London Lodge was by now largely defunct. Barely three weeks after her arrival those who assembled one evening in her rooms were all young, eager, and quick to dismiss Sinnett and his Lodge as “altogether hopelessly asleep, if not dead”;15 they, on the other hand, wanted to do something active to publicize Theosophy and proposed as a first step the forming of their own group. Out of respect for H.P.B. they wanted to call it “The Blavatsky Lodge of the Theosophical Society.” Helena offered no objections but pointed out that although the rules of the Society demanded the signatures of seven members when applying for a charter, there were only six of them. When Mabel suggested that Madame herself sign the application, she roared with laughter and finally agreed. Secretly terribly flattered, she dashed off a note to Vera the next morning: “Just fancy that—they unanimously called it ‘The Blavatsky Lodge of the T.S.’ This I call hitting the Psychical Research Society straight in the face; let them learn of what stuff we are made!”16

  Sinnett, by the way, greeted this rival group with a notable lack of enthusiasm; in fact, he immediately issued an announcement that any Theosophist who wished to join the Old Lady’s Lodge would no longer be welcome at his. According to Alice Cleather, “quite half the members, including myself, promptly left. How could we hesitate for a moment between H.P.B. and Mr. Sinnett?”17

  Alfred and Patience must surely have called on H.P.B. in Norwood, but the relationship had nonetheless disintegrated into icy politeness. Around the tenth of May, H.P.B. sent what appears to be her last letter to the Sinnetts, informing Patience of an unexpected and disagreeable visit from Isabel Cooper-Oakley, whom Madame now loathed. Apparently she had expressly forbidden Patience to give Isabel her address, and even though Isabel had told a wild tale of having taken the train to Norwood in a trance and been led to “Maycot” by a mysterious power, Helena believed that Patience had supplied the address and wanted her to know that she was aware of her disloyalty.

  All the old friends were slowly falling away from her: Subba Row made no secret of his loss of faith and was on the verge of resigning;18 had she read the New York papers she would have known that Mohini Chatterji, while still calling himself a member of the Society, did not like to call himself a Theosophist. But Mohini had begun his subtle denigration of her long ago. What did take her back, although she should have expected it, was the attitude of Alfred and Patience, both of whom had ceased to believe in her and who displayed no compunction about saying so.

  H.P.B. made it her business to keep abreast of what transpired at Patience’s Tuesday afternoon receptions; and she knew that Alfred disliked her being in London and thought the Blavatsky Lodge a mistake. He also had the audacity to insist that everything the Old Lady knew about Theosophical teachings had been picked up from the letters the Mahatmas had sent him. Of course she had been able to expand the information, but nevertheless he felt convinced that she herself received no teachings from the Masters.

  H.P.B. could afford to smile at Sinnett’s egomania. It had been two years since she had discontinued his Mahatmic mail service and she had no intention of resuming it. Let him continue his pathetic attempts to communicate with the Mahatmas by hypnotizing Laura Holloway and later Alice Cleather and even his own wife. Madame alone could state with absolutely no fear of contradiction that Sinnett would never reach the Masters.

  Henry Olcott had recently informed Helena that his budget could no longer cover her allowance and that unless she returned to Adyar and “shared my crusts,”19 as he put it, she would have to find another means of support. While it was true that H.P.B. did not have to pay for room and board, she nevertheless refused to accept so much as a shilling in cash from either the Keightleys or Mabel, supplying herself with pocket money for tobacco and small personal items by writing for Russian papers. Aside from the annoying hours spent producing these articles, she devoted her time to The Secret Doctrine on which she was again working. Arch and Bert had gone to the expense of having the manuscript professionally typed; then, reading it through a second time, they devised a plan for dividing the material into two volumes, cosmogenesis and anthropogenesis. Each of these was to be based on the Stanzas of Dzyan and would consist of three parts: first the Stanzas with H.P.B.’s commentary; second symbolism; and finally various appendixes and addenda. This still left some material that seemed to fit nowhere; Helena
set it aside for an intended third and fourth volumes.

  As soon as the Keightleys had arranged the material for Volume One, they gave it back to H.P.B. with detailed notes pointing out gaps and omissions. Next, she went to work on the typescript with scissors, paste and pen, after which it had to be retyped once more. Apparently it was not until the retyping that they realized Madame’s commentary on the Stanzas amounted to a measly twenty pages; this brevity would not do for what, in her preface, she promised to be a full explanation.

  “What on earth am I to say?” H.P.B. wailed. “What do you want to know? Why, it’s all as plain as the nose on your face!”20

  Bruised, the Keightleys retired for a consultation, finally deciding that if they were not smart enough to understand Madame, neither were potential readers. It was many months, however, before they came up with a solution: each sloka of the Stanzas was slashed from the typescript and pasted at the head of a sheet of paper; below, the Keightleys and others listed all the questions they could think of upon that particular sloka. All Helena had to do was answer the queries.

  On June 21, Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of her reign; a massive pageant winding its way from Buckingham Palace to Westminister Abbey included the heads of Europe’s royal families riding in fifteen closed carriages. All over London people decorated their houses, hung out garlands, and slung their streets with banners reading “God Bless Our Queen.” For two days crowds thronged the streets until late at night, shouting, drinking and singing “Rule Britannia.” In suburban Norwood, where the hijinks were a good deal more sedate, H.P.B. did not permit the patriotic frenzy to interfere with her daily regimen. She was at her desk by seven but allowed no one to enter the room until she called for her midday meal. As always, this repast might be called for any time between noon and four, a disconcerting development to Mabel Collins’ cook. The rest of the afternoon Arch and Bert rushed in and out of her office, asking questions, sorting papers and consulting her on the manuscript. In the late afternoon, depending on her whim, she might or might not see the many callers who appeared, often with appointments. “But Maycot was a long way out of London,” Archibald Keightley would recall, “and we had to face the disappointed pilgrims!”21

  Finally at 6:30, Helena would join the rest of the household for the evening meal and later, when the table had been cleared, she would relax with tobacco and talk. Dipping into the Ceylon grass basket that held fine-cut Egyptian and Turkish tobacco, she would roll cigarettes and pass them around the table, then lay out her game of patience. At one of these nightly get-togethers, Helena had decided to lay her cards on the table in another sense because she stated politely, but emphatically, that she could not remain at “Maycot.” Not only was it too far from the center of London but, more important, it was obviously too small to use either as an office or a meeting place for the new Lodge. Sympathetic, the Keightleys agreed to look for a suitable house in London.

  A second source of her discontent, she told them, was Henry Olcott. For the past two years he had been editing the Theosophist and running the Society as he saw fit; lately Helena had been having difficulty getting her views expressed in the magazine, particularly when speaking of the Mahatmas. Henry’s attitude could not have been clearer: his sole concerns now were the Society and himself, or rather, for the Society as personified in himself. He credited the organization’s troubles not to his mistakes but solely to H.P.B.’s obsession with her Masters and occult phenomena. What he had been doing was publicly trying to unhitch Theosophy from supermen by avoiding references to the Masters in the magazine.

  Helena was furious, but could not afford to smear Olcott, since he was one of the founders. Luckily, she had to do little more than hint at this dreadful state of affairs before the Keightleys jumped to her support. Knowing little about Olcott’s untiring labor on behalf of the Society, they saw the colonel as an old fussbudget out in India who was trying to obstruct H.P.B.’s Cause; needless to say, Helena did not disabuse them of these notions. When they urged public propaganda for the Masters and talked about publishing their own magazine so that Madame might express her views, she smiled benignly. As it turned out, they were also talking about starting a Theosophical Publishing House22 that would issue not only the magazine, but The Secret Doctrine as well. Initially, the fourteen members of the Blavatsky Lodge contributed seven hundred pounds toward the publishing house, probably the bulk of which was furnished by the Keightleys.

  After much discussion of names for the magazine, they decided on Lucifer, or Light-Bringer. One or two members vehemently opposed the name as diabolical and unconventional, which naturally won the more avant-garde to its side. “Don’t allow yourself to be frightened,” H.P.B. assured Vera, “it is not the devil,” but merely the name of the Morning Star or “bringer of light”23 sacred to the ancient world.

  With the advent of Lucifer, to be co-edited by H.P.B. and Mabel Collins, Helena began feeling pressured. How was she to find time for a magazine, the book, and Thursday evening meetings of the Blavatsky Lodge? “I do not know myself!”24 Somehow she managed not only to find time, but also to feel healthier than she had in years. By summer’s end, the Keightleys had located a house at 17 Lansdowne Road in the Notting Hill section of London. This was a convenient location for the brothers because Arch owned a house nearby and Bert lived with his mother at the top of Notting Hill, at 30 Linden Gardens. While Helena had not gone personally to inspect her new quarters, she felt reassured by the Keightleys’ description of its good-sized dining room wth folding doors opening into a large airy drawing room. It was decided that the expenses would be shared by herself, the Keightleys, and Countess Wachtmeister, who was returning to London shortly, and that it would be used both as a residence and Society Headquarters.

  In September all the pieces of H.P.B.’s new life fell into place. On the fifteenth, the first issue of Lucifer was premiered, and the countess arrived at “Maycot” with two Swedish servants. For unknown reasons, H.P.B. at once dubbed them “the Swedish virgins,” although a more accurate term would have been “the Swedish saints” because they proved patience personified in ministering to her wants and whims. “After three days of packing, planning and arranging everything,” Constance recalled, “we one morning got into a carriage and drove up to London, to 17, Lansdowne Road.”25 According to Arch, the move was not so horrific as the transfer from Ostend “for the books and papers could be arranged, packed and unpacked, and rearranged the same day.”26 And Helena had only lost one day’s work.

  This time even Madame was hard put to complain. The house itself was a pleasant one in a quiet neighborhood: It backed a small private park and fronted on Holland Park. Helena’s ground-floor rooms, which consisted of a small bedroom leading into a large office plus a lavatory, could not have been more comfortable. Her desk faced a large bay window overlooking the luxuriant green of Holland Park; at her right and left were tables and book racks filled with the reference works she claimed not to need, and all around had been set out the Indian souvenirs she had been carting about for the past two-and-a-half years: Benares bronzes, Palghat mats, Adoni carpets, Moradabad platters, Kashmiri plaques, and Cingalese statues. On the wall she hung her Swiss cuckoo clock, still broken except on those unpredictable occasions when its little door would fly open and the bird would momentarily pop out. Visitors who witnessed this performance were dumbfounded, but H.P.B. would sternly glance up, utter a firm Damn you, and then go on with her conversation.

  Everything about the Lansdowne Road establishment was designed to accommodate Madame Blavatsky: Mabel Collins was no longer the consummate annoyance that she had been when they shared a roof; in Mabel’s place was the saintly Countess Wachtmeister, who ran with efficiency a household that now included Bert and Arch. While the cuisine was not so strictly vegetarian as to prohibit fish and eggs, meat as a rule was not served. One wonders how Helena greeted this innovation, since only the previous year she had insisted that
flesh food was necessary to her health, but apparently she went along with the new diet. She also instituted a rule of her own: everybody had to be in bed by twelve because she said, “Master goes His ‘rounds’ at midnight.”27 And if that were not sufficient reason for the curfew, she added that one hour’s sleep before midnight was worth four after, owing to magnetic changes that took place in the earth at that time. To carry the asceticism still further, she would soon recommend the even more controversial injunction: celibacy. While repression of the sexual urge would remain an option for Lodge members, it was nonetheless an ideal practiced by many, certainly by those who aspired to become one of Madame’s chelas. Celibacy, she told them, was merely basic training in the “occult hygiene of mind and body.”28

  Now that Madame was more accessible, the Thursday evening meetings rapidly increased in popularity: admission for non-members was strictly by invitation and these cards of entry were always in hot demand. Alice Cleather, for whom Thursday was the most important day of the week, recalled that “some crank” once obtained admission, asked permission to speak, and immediately launched on a windy exposition of some philosophical theory. “H.P.B. stood it for a few minutes, and then, to the consternation of the chairman—a very conventional person—raised her voice in a stinging and sarcastic rebuke to the effect that people were invited to the meetings of the Blavatsky Lodge to listen to her views—i.e., to Theosophical teaching—not to air their own.”29 The man slunk out of the room.