The daughter of a mixed German-Russian aristocrat family, Blavatsky was born several weeks premature in Russia on July 31, 1831. A baptism was hurriedly arranged lest she succumb to the cholera epidemic that was raging through the region. She avoided the outbreak and grew into a ‘lumpish little girl who, all her life, would be struggling—not terribly hard at times—against obesity’.1 The young Blavatsky eventually matured into a masculine-looking woman with a chain-smoker’s habit of scattering herself and her listeners with cigarette ash. But her most striking feature was her enormous bulging eyes. They observed her surroundings with an intensity that was hypnotic to many and frightening to others. ‘Nobody who ever met HPB forgot her eyes,’ wrote one of her biographers.2
Blavatsky and those around her were convinced from early on that she had magical powers. Her sister used to call her ‘crazy Helena’ because she used to ‘dream aloud and later tell every one of her visions’.3 She later claimed she had been exorcized by enough priests and drenched in enough holy water to sink a ship.
At the age of just seventeen, Helena married forty-four-year-old Nikifor Blavatsky, the vice governor of Yerevan in the Caucasus. The union lasted only a few weeks. What she did from the time of her brief marriage in 1848 to her arrival in America nearly twenty-five years later is the subject of considerable speculation. Blavatsky boasted of having ridden bareback in a circus, toured Siberia as a concert pianist, traversed Europe with an opera troupe, opened an ink factory in Odessa, traded as an importer of ostrich feathers in Paris, and worked as an interior decorator to the Empress Eugénie. There is evidence that during these years she studied Sufism, Kabbalah, the Druze religion and Coptic Christianity.
Blavatsky’s most controversial claim was that she had travelled alone in the deserts of Tibet for more than seven years. This seems highly improbable as Tibet was closed to outsiders until the early part of the twentieth century. As Peter Washington puts it succinctly in Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon, ‘the thought of a breathless, tactless and massively stout Blavatsky managing to climb steep mountains in brutal weather while concealing herself from trained observers is just too difficult to imagine’.4
When Blavatsky arrived in New York on July 5, 1873, she was so short of cash she took lodgings in a women’s commune on Madison Street before finding work on a chicken farm. At the time, Henry Olcott, a lawyer with the municipal corporation of New York, was being drawn to spiritualism by newspaper reports of ghost sightings, astral projections, and contacts with the dead. Olcott was sending accounts of occult phenomena to the New York Graphic, when he stumbled upon Blavatsky who had established a reputation as a clairvoyant.
She told Olcott that in her childhood, she had been a powerful medium, but had since learned to control the ‘spirits’ instead of being controlled by them. On her alleged travels in Tibet, she had discovered the existence of a secret Brotherhood of Adepts, whose knowledge of natural forces and of the latent powers of man far transcended that of the most advanced scientists of the West. Blavatsky believed she was the chosen instrument for awakening the Western world to ‘the starry light of psychic evolution which the great souls or Mahatmas of the East were at last willing to reveal’.5
On November 17, 1875, she formed the Theosophical Society with Olcott as President-Founder and herself as Corresponding Secretary. The statement of the general objects of the society was somewhat vague. What began as an intention ‘to keep alive in man his belief that he has a soul, and the universe, a God’, evolved into keeping ‘alive in man his spiritual intuitions’ which, in turn, became absorbed in the exploration of ‘the latent psychological powers of man’.6
The Society proved an instant hit. Blavatsky moved into an apartment on 47th West Street which rapidly became a mecca for spiritualists. Her activities, however, did not escape the notice of the authorities who suspected that the Russian-born mystic might be a spy. She was, it was noted, the niece of Rostislav de Fadayev, a much-decorated Russian general and author of Armed Forces of Russia and Opinion on the Eastern Question. The latter preached ‘permanent national vigilance, an unrelenting struggle against any foreign opposition and internal dissent, war and expansion leading to a worldwide supremacy’.7
In May 1879, E.M. Archibald, the British consul-general in New York reported that Blavatsky’s apartment had become ‘the resort not only of leading members of the spiritualist persuasion, but of extremists and other beliefs, as well as of infidel writers, artists, actors, journalists, freemasons & others—among the latter, some persons of position in New York Society.’ Archibald described Theosophy as a ‘creed or plan’ that was bitterly opposed to Christianity and nearly in accord with Buddhism. Her rooms were fitted out with Tibetan ornaments and were called a Lamasery ‘to heighten the effects of her performances.’8
Blavatsky’s supporters saw things differently. According to an article in the Theosophist mouthpiece The World, those who gathered in the Lamasery were none other than ‘a brilliant crowd of Bohemians’9 who drank tea from Madame’s samovar and indulged in ‘a feast of reason and a flow of soul’.9
One of those ‘Society’ members who came under Blavatsky’s spell in the late 1870s was Sam Ward. Though he didn’t join the Theosophical Society until 1883, those evenings at the Lamasery convinced him that Blavatsky was genuine. When Francis Marion Crawford sat down to write Mr Isaacs, Ward watered down his nephew’s scepticism towards Theosophy and even speculated that one of the Masters or Mahatmas had guided the writer’s hand. If the first part of Crawford’s novel was inspired by his meeting with Jacob, the rest might well have been projected on to paper by one of Blavatsky’s disciples.
‘I have a long letter from Madame Blavatsky about Mr Isaacs which has astonished her, because Marion went to India a sworn enemy of Theosophy and its adherents,’ Ward wrote.10 ‘She says the book must have been inspired. She little imagines what an atmosphere of occultism pervaded my rooms (where the book was written) and still surrounds me.’ He added, ‘I am tempted to believe that Koot Hoomi helped project it upon paper.’10
Feeling that she had outstayed her usefulness in New York, Blavatsky was now eager to spread her faith in India. Alerted to her planned departure for Bombay, an official in the British Foreign Office sent a secret telegram to the British embassy in Constantinople: ‘She pretended to be able to communicate with Lassa by means of the Astral fluid, whatever that may be, and stated that she had resided for many years in Thibet [sic!], where she had become a Buddhist. Mr L. Oliphant might be asked by the F.O. to report on the subject—but my belief is that she will turn out to be a mere spiritual fanatic.’11
Blavatsky and Olcott’s arrival in India got off to an inauspicious start. Their first host Hurrychund Chintamon turned out to be a liar and fraud. Instead of the lavish quarters he had promised, he put them up in his own nondescript bungalow. He organized a reception attended by 300 people and a picnic at Elephanta Island, only to then hit them with an exorbitant bill for everything he had provided, including their welcoming telegram.
Things began looking up after they started publishing the Theosophist which quickly gained a respectable circulation. The pair also came to the notice of Alfred Sinnett, who edited one of the most influential newspapers in India, the Pioneer. Sinnett counted among his friends Allan Octavian Hume who became the first chairman of the Indian National Congress, and Lockwood Kipling, whose son Rudyard was a rising star on the staff of the Civil and Military Gazette.
Sinnett and his wife Patience were enthusiastic spiritualists and invited Blavatsky and Olcott to spend a few weeks in Allahabad. Sinnett had read Blavatsky’s monumental treatise on Theosophy, Isis Unveiled, and was convinced of her powers. His attempts to introduce her to Anglo-Indian society, however, did not always meet with success. ‘Mme. Blavatsky was too violent a departure from accepted standards in a great variety of ways to be assimilated in Anglo-Indian circles with readiness,’ he wrote later.12
In August 1880, Blavatsky and Olcott accepted the Sinnetts’ i
nvitation to stay with them in Simla, an offer they eagerly accepted. For the 273-pound Blavatsky, it was an opportunity to escape the sticky humidity of the plains. It was also a chance to mix with the most important personages of the Raj.
For Jacob, Blavatsky’s presence was much more than an unwanted distraction. His business was expanding rapidly and he had recently moved out of the cramped confines of Lawries Hotel into his mansion Belvedere. Meanwhile, his newly opened shop on Simla’s fashionable Mall with its vast collection of curios and jewellery was attracting customers from all over India. Jacob knew that the success of his business depended on monopolizing not only the trade in gems and antiquities, but also in meeting with the metaphysical desires of his customers.
Bogged down on a bureaucratic treadmill for six months of the year, Simla society lusted after the ethereal. ‘Polite occultism’, wrote one citizen, was the primer for ‘dinner-table small talk’.13 No summer fair was complete without attractions like Sybil the beautiful White Witch ‘who dived into the future, and recalled the past, with the aid of cards, palmistry and dice’. People paid a rupee to ‘see the greatest marvel of its age’.14 The device was an Electrophone ‘by which you not only heard through the phonograph across the breadth of the hall any people speaking, but also saw their faces shown in a glass’.
Jacob liked to maintain a certain exclusivity. Entry to his shop was usually by appointment except for regular customers. Invitations to Belvedere were even harder to obtain. Now, Blavatsky threatened to break the spell he had cast over Simla. ‘The mystic nature of her teachings and surroundings has appealed in the most powerful manner to the impressionable nature of the Indian Princes and Rajahs, who are forever striving to attain the infinite ideal of perfect wisdom and consequent happiness,’ the New York Times observed.15
He would have read about Blavatsky’s teachings and probably felt an affinity with Theosophism and its tenants. According to Mary Walter Tibbits who met him in the early 1900s, Jacob indulged in his own peculiar brand of mysticism which she compared to the teachings of the Great White Lodge—a ritual form of magic associated with Theosophy. ‘Jacob lays great stress on abstinence from wine and beef and the purity of women,’ she wrote. ‘His school of occultism was a branch of it.’16
Jacob was highly sceptical about Blavatsky’s claims of performing miracles and considered her a dilettante. Producing mysterious raps and bell-sounds at will; making roses fall out of nowhere; filling an empty bottle with water by holding it under her dress, locating a lost brooch in a flower bed or a cup and saucer in the roots of a tree, were second-rate ‘tricks’. He dismissed her as a ‘clever conjuror’ and boasted he had taught her ‘more about occultism than she had ever dreamed of’.17
Blavatsky’s source of authority was her ability to communicate with the Brotherhood. Her signature trick was producing lengthy communications written (or precipitated) by the Masters of Ancient Wisdom from their retreat in the Himalayan hills. These arrived as enclosures inserted in envelopes after they had been supposedly sealed. All messages to the Masters—Morya and Koot Hoomi—had to go through her hands.
In one of these, Koot Hoomi instructed Sinnett to publish a review of Mr Isaacs in the Theosophist. ‘Do send it before you go. And, for the sake of old “Sam Ward” I would like to see it noticed in the Pioneer,’ the spiritual medium supposedly wrote from his astral Himalayan home.
The review was duly published in February 1883. Part critique of Crawford’s literary style and part defence of Theosophy, it called Mr Isaacs a ‘curious production’, though one worth noting since Sinnett, Olcott and Blavatsky appeared in the novel ‘and the rules and aspirations of their fraternity have a large share of the author’s attention.’ This was ‘proof of the fact that the Theosophical movement, like one of those subterranean streams which the traveller finds in districts of magnesian and calcareous formation, is running beneath the surface of contemporary thought, and bursting out at the most unexpected points with visible signs of its pent-up force’.
The reviewer was critical of Crawford for his portrayal of Isaacs. Making his hero a Persian was a ‘decided artistic blunder’. His three wives are ‘superfluous creatures … barely introduced by allusion’. Worse still, he ignores ‘their conjugal claims’ and shoves their personalities out of sight, ‘because the author makes Mr Isaacs love and be loved by a paragon of English maidens’. Westonhaugh knows about the wives, ‘yet treats her lover like an unencumbered bachelor, without a single blessed thought of the wrong she does to Mesdames—the aforesaid three married ladies. The utter superfluity of the latter as regards the interest of the tale causes the judicious reader to grieve that they should have ever been evolved from the author’s cerebral ganglia, even to be kept behind a distant purdah’.
The reviewer also took issue with the ‘monosexual consciousness’ of Isaacs existing ‘only on the lower levels of psychic development’ and of the ‘grey and loveless’ Ram Lal who has all the emotional warmth of ‘a stone or the salted herring’. Real Adepts, by contrast, ‘are the most happy of mankind, since their pleasures are connected with the higher existence, which is cloudless and pangless’. Crawford, however, succeeds in making the Mahatmas more lifelike: ‘Ram Lal walks, talks, eats, and—gracious heavens!––rolls and smokes cigarettes.’
The fact that Crawford wrote the book in thirty-five days ‘without erasures or corrections’ was testament to his comprehension of Adept powers. ‘Theosophists who can afford to buy books should not fail to possess this one and put it on the shelf beside Zanoni and A Strange Story. It is an intensely interesting fiction, based upon a few of the grandest occult truths.’18 The endorsement ensured that Mr Isaacs, and therefore Jacob, became known to thousands of Blavatsky’s adherents around the world. For decades, he received a steady stream of visitors carrying Isis Unveiled in one hand and Crawford’s best-seller in the other.
Blavatsky had yet to meet Jacob. On her first morning in Simla, Sinnett implored her to take a holiday. Weighing heavily on his mind were allegations that she was a spy. He knew she was being watched by the Intelligence Branch. Desisting from Theosophy and performing her various tricks would be the best way to disarm suspicion and convince the Raj that she was harmless.
But Blavatsky hadn’t come to Simla to admire the views and Sinnett had little choice but to let her set her own agenda. Within days of her arrival she had met with numerous officials, socialites, and a few literati like Lockwood Kipling. Meanwhile, Olcott addressed a letter to the Foreign Department citing the lofty purposes of the Society. He also referred to his own contribution to the Civil War—both in the army and out of it—and showed letters of introduction from the President of the United States and the Secretary of State. This worked and with Sinnett vouching for them as well, the surveillance was called off and Blavatsky was free to indulge in her demagogy.
‘Caught up in Simla’s gay whirl, Madame, with sighs and groans, dressed in her best black satin night after night for dinners at home and abroad,’ wrote one of her early biographers. ‘At first, blasé Simla was delighted with the phenomena that accompanied almost every party. No dinner was complete without an exhibition of the Russian lady’s table-rapping and bell-ringing. She even made noises on the bald heads of the chiefs of state, and they seemed to like it.’19
On October 3, 1880, the Sinnetts arranged that most popular of Simla pastimes—a picnic. The attendees included Blavatsky and Olcott, Philip Henderson, head of the Intelligence Branch and, it seems, Jacob. At the last moment, an English judge joined the party.20 When the servants unpacked, they found they were short by one cup and saucer. Sweeping her great seal ring back and forth, Blavatsky pointed to a certain spot and said to Henderson: ‘Dig there!’ Picking up a table knife, Henderson dug into the hillock and unearthed an extra cup and saucer matching the pattern of those in the picnic basket. There were exclamations all around but, after lunch, Henderson and the judge examined the site and found that the items might have been deftly poked into the hillo
ck from the other side. They challenged Blavatsky to repeat the trick but she refused and made a furious exit claiming she had been insulted. The picnic party went home in a chastened mood.21
That night, while dining as guests of Allan Octavian Hume, the Secretary to the Government of India, at Rothney Castle, Olcott related the story of the materializing cup and saucer, omitting of course the unhappy ending. As the conversation turned to occult phenomena, Blavatsky asked Hume’s wife Mary if there was anything she would like to have. Mary mentioned losing a brooch set with pearls, with a lock of hair in the back. After ‘communing with herself’, Blavatsky said she had seen it ‘drop like a point of light’ into a flower bed. Under her direction, the men fumbled around in the earth until they found a little packet wrapped in cigarette papers. It was Mary Hume’s brooch.22
‘Simla was electrified,’ Blavatsky’s biographer Gertrude Williams wrote. ‘Momentarily, HPB had tamed the British lion. Over the women’s tea-cups, over the men’s chota pegs, everywhere, Madame Blavatsky was discussed. Olcott’s discreet account of the cup and saucer materialization was supplemented by Major Henderson’s story, which questioned HPB’s good faith. You chose the version you liked. But when it came to the brooch, that was a total triumph, inexplicable, a miracle!’23
Unfortunately, it was a trick, and a rather poor one at that. Mary Hume had given the brooch to a friend who had in turn sold it to a Bombay pawnbroker, Hormusji Seevai. Blavatsky had bought the brooch from Hormusji several months earlier. He spilled the beans after reading about the supposed miracle in the Bombay Gazette.
Boorish, ill-mannered and foul-mouthed, Blavatsky was the antithesis of the ultra-refined, suave and urbane Jacob. Apart from the picnic, there is only one other account of the two meeting again during the Russian’s six-week stay in Simla. According to Edmund Russell, who wrote extensively on Blavatsky and other occult-related subjects, Jacob was taken to her bungalow by a friend who placed a sapphire ring in her hand.24 After holding it a few minutes, she opened her hand to reveal two identical rings. This prompted Jacob to pick up a Madras-style box in silver, ebony and ivory lying on a table and to ask her to repeat the trick. She flew into a rage and, leaving a trail of cigarette ash, stormed out of the room. ‘Magicians do not like to have their powers questioned. They never met personally again,’ Russell wrote.
The Mysterious Mr Jacob: Diamond Merchant, Magician and Spy Page 11