by Marion Meade
Somewhere between Tiflis and Cairo, Helena had blossomed into a highly attractive young woman. Having shed her extra weight, she described herself as “very thin then,”10 and Rawson commented admiringly on her “full, moon-shaped” face, a figure that was “supple, muscular and well rounded, fit to delight an artist,” and her small, delicately molded hands and feet. He declared that “she could win at a single interview the admiration of any man who had ever lived outside of himself long enough to discover that he was not three-quarters of the universe,” obviously including himself in this unchauvinistic group. He hurried to add, however, that male admiration of her womanliness meant little to Helena—it was for her mind that she wanted to be appreciated.
Helena took pains to create an interesting image of herself for Rawson. She told him that she was the widow of a Russian general and that she had come to Cairo with a friend to study the relics of an ancient civilization. Having “killed” Nikifor and widowed herself in one imaginative stroke, she proceeded to enjoy her visit. Rawson, an obliging tour guide, made no objection when she suggested taking lessons from a snake charmer, although he warned her that “persons in European dress would be sure to be molested as hated infidels, if not actually put in danger of life or limb by crazy fanatics.” Disguising themselves as Moslems, with H.P.B. in male attire, they visited the chief of the Cairo snakemen, Sheik Yusaf ben Makerzi, and learned how to handle the serpents without getting bitten. Back at Shepheard’s Hotel, where Helena was staying with the countess, she gleefully informed her employer that she had solved one of Egypt’s mysteries—and she proved it by loosing a snake from a bag she had hidden in the folds of her skirt.
Having mastered snake charming, Helena was ready for further challenges. She had heard of a Coptic magician, Paulos Mentamon, who was reputed to be a respository of astrological formulas and magical incantations. Rawson somehow wrangled an introduction and, once again in disguise, they set off for the native quarter. Rawson flatteringly told the Coptic: “We are students who have heard of your great learning and skill in magic, and wish to learn at your feet.” Mentamon did not beat around the bush: “I perceive that you are two Franks in disguise,” he snorted, “and I have no doubt you are in search of knowledge—of occult and magical lore. I look for coin.”11
While this callous demand for money was a big letdown, Rawson fortunately had ample funds that he was willing to part with, not without noting sarcastically that Mentamon had indeed discovered the secret whereby the philosophers’ stone could turn anything into gold. Later, H.P.B. would mention studying with Mentamon, but she dismissed his teachings as unimportant and inferior. To know how much of the magician’s repertory she actually mastered might help to throw important light on her later career, but this apparently was not information she wished to advertise.
In Cairo, as always, Helena had a recurrent need to get out of her body, and one way to do this, she had already discovered, was by smoking tobacco. There was nothing extraordinary about her adopting this habit; many fashionable Russian women now smoked. But apparently she found special advantages in it that others did not. It seemed to tranquilize her, to lift her up off the earth: “I close my eyes and float on and on, anywhere or wherever I wish,” she said.12 Less conventionally smoked among her social peers, but more commonly used as a means to out-of-body experiences, was hashish, to which she was then introduced by Rawson. Twenty-five years later, along with opium, she was still taking hashish, and there is some evidence that she was addicted to the drug.13 Among its varied physiological effects, hashish produces visions. Helena thought it “a wonderful drug” that enabled her to lift the veil and solve various “profound mysteries.” She told Rawson that her hashish dreams “are as real as if they were ordinary events of actual life.”14 The hypnotic states that she achieved artificially were not totally unlike those that she could induce naturally in herself without hashish, but undoubtedly they were far more spectacular with the drug.
Whatever else hashish did for her, it succeeded in bringing to consciousness ideas that may have seemed fanciful, even absurd, to others but completely plausible to her. One day she told Rawson and the countess that she had forty years to construct a more enduring fame than the builder of the Great Pyramid. “Who was he, anyway?” she demanded of them. “Only a name, an oppressor of his fellow men.” And she added cryptically, “I will bless mankind by freeing them from their mental bondage.” The megalomania of such statements evoked sarcasm from Countess Kiselev: “That is sublime, Helene, but how do you propose to go about this little task?”
Helena could not elaborate at that point, because she had no notion of what she wished to accomplish, much less how to go about it. While her private vision of herself as a religious teacher was still far from formed, she did have a fear of being inconsequential—she did not want to be a person whom posterity could ignore. She insisted to Rawson and Kiselev: “I know I was intended to do a great work.”15
After three months in Egypt, Helena followed the countess to Greece and “other parts of Eastern Europe.” At this point, Kiselev may have returned to Russia, or perhaps she simply had had enough of Helena’s role as her “gentleman student.” Helena would later speak vaguely of traveling with “an English lady of rank,”16 and also of visiting Paris in 1850 or early 1851 where, according to the account she gave to Alfred Sinnett, she met literary celebrities and her psychic gifts were brought to the attention of a famous mesmerist who expressed eagerness to use her as a sensitive. Also, while in Paris, she met another elderly Russian woman—Princess Bagration-Muhransky—whose family was among the oldest and most eminent in Georgia and who was also probably acquainted with the Fadeyevs. When the Princess and her retinue set off for London in the spring of 1851, Helena went with them.
London was offering at that time the most spectacular tourist attraction of the century: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. Referred to simply as the Great Exhibition, it was to be a showpiece for contemporary science and invention. To house the exhibit, there had been erected in Hyde Park a dazzling glass building measuring 1,848 feet in length. If the 13,000 exhibits—ranging from McCormick reapers to the enormous Koh-i-noor diamond— did not lure the visitors from all over the world, the Crystal Palace itself did. From May, when it was officially opened by Queen Victoria, until October, when the exhibit closed, some 6,009,948 visitors filed through the hall. They arrived in their best plaid silk bonnets and pot hats, drank Schweppes ginger beer and soda, ate nearly 2,000,000 buns, and bought untold millions of souvenirs—iron door stops, tortoise-shell glove boxes with the Crystal Palace painted on their lids, and little ladies’ handbags called reticules, which were just coming into style.
A visit to London, even in years when there was no Great Exhibition, always offered a diversity of entertainment. There were the churches, the Marble Arch, the Tower of London; there were theaters and concerts, and the fashionable Cremorne Gardens along the Embankment in Chelsea, where the smart set went to dance and drink and be amused after the theater. Just how much leisure time Helena had for sight-seeing is unclear, but she gave the impression that life with Princess Bagration was rigorously confining. Unlike Countess Kiselev, who did not mind snakes and probably enjoyed hearing about her companion’s jaunts to visit magicians, Princess Bagration demanded service from her employees and H.P.B. recalled that she “held me confined in Mivart’s Hotel, making me read the Chitaminyi and the Bible.”17 Reading aloud from Scripture was not Helena’s idea of freedom— or fun. On August 12, she celebrated her twentieth birthday by taking a seven-by-eleven-inch sketchbook she had recently purchased, plus pencils, pen and ink, and fleeing to Ramsgate, a new seaside resort that was rapidly becoming popular with pleasure-seeking Londoners.
On warm days, the beach at Ramsgate was so crowded that it was difficult to pick one’s way through the throng. Women lay on their backs at the water’s edge and let the waves fling their bathing dresses over their heads, “so that as far as decency is c
oncerned,” reported the London Observer, “they might as well be without any dresses at all.” More shocking to the Observer, gentlemen equipped themselves with opera glasses to better view the opposite sex and the women stared back “without so much as a blush or a giggle.”18
This was just the sort of atmosphere that a cooped-up young woman might adore on her birthday. Helena spent the day and evening there, sketching on the first page of her book a scene of water and sailboats, and after she returned to the hotel, she wrote under the picture in French:
Memorable night! On a certain night by the light of the moon that was setting at Ramsgate on August 12, 1851,* when I met the Master of my dreams!!
* (“August 12 is July 31 in Russian style, the day of my birth—Twenty years!”)19
The identity of this man of her dreams is far from clear. Years later H.P.B. would revise the sketchbook and insist that it was the first fleshly manifestation of Mahatma Morya. However, since she also claimed to have first seen him in a London crowd, one gets confused. The person she actually saw may have been the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose Rosicrucian tale Zanoni would influence her own work.20 Perhaps, after all, the evening at Ramsgate had been topped off by a particularly vivid hallucination. Still, it is entirely possible that she met a real man who aroused romantic feelings in her. On the second page of the sketchbook she wrote of a man and woman, out of doors on a beautiful summer night, “flowers of fire strewn over the sky,” the man saying to the woman “I love you—words formed of a divine perfume of the soul.”21 But she added that he would later regret having uttered them.
Those sensuous lines would seem to indicate a romantic interlude with a living man, although later she altered some of the words to imply that she had been speaking of her Mahatma. Nonetheless, by the time she got around to writing on page three, the affair, if it was one, had proved disillusioning. Love, she wrote bitterly, “is a vile dream, a nightmare”22 and happiness lay only in the acquisition of supernatural powers. Page four contains a few scrawls and the address of a Captain Miller, Dragoon-guards, Aldershot, but whether Captain Miller had anything to do with her disillusionment is impossible to know because the pages are undated and by page five she was drawing a poodle sitting on a table.
Whatever emotional ordeals she was passing through that summer, life as a lady’s companion did not make them more endurable. Severely depressed, she was tired of the Princess and “sick of everything.” In two years away from Russia, she had learned a few conjuring tricks and the useless knack of calming snakes. She felt a failure. “I escaped on to Waterloo Bridge, for I was seized with a strong desire to die. I had long felt the temptation approaching. This time I did not seek to resist it and the muddy water of the Thames seemed to me a delicious bed.”23 At the last moment, however, she was turned back from suicide by the opportune appearance of her invisible protector who promised a great destiny lying in wait.
Princess Bagration left London, and for a short while Helena stayed on at Mivart’s with another woman who had also been in the Princess’s employ. After that, she moved about—to a hotel in the Strand and then to a furnished room in Cecil Street. London had nothing to offer her. There was virtually no interest in psychic phenomena in England, although unknown to her some young men at Cambridge had formed earlier that year a society to conduct “a serious and earnest enquiry into the nature of the phenomena vaguely called supernatural.”24 In 1852, an American medium, Mrs. Hayden, would visit London and charge a guinea a sitting, and by 1853 a craze for table-tilting would sweep in from the Continent, even Queen Victoria and Prince Albert having a go at it. But all that still lay in the future. Even if Helena had wished to support herself as a professional medium—which she definitely did not— no market for such wares then existed.
Afterward, those last weeks in London would become hazy. Having no money, no friends, and nothing to do, it was a melancholy time of her life, which she preferred to forget.25
II
Agardi Metrovitch
Since H.P.B. was hard put to account for the next seven years of her life, her description of this period sounded so far-fetched that even her biographer conceded “the obvious embarrassments of my task.”26 Sinnett excused himself, and his subject, by saying that Helena had kept no diary and had a poor memory. Actually, she did her best to be quite specific about her itinerary.27 In July, 1851, she allegedly went to Canada to study the Indians, moved on to the United States where she spent a year and bought land (but lost the title papers) and drifted around in Central and South America. Some time in 1852, then in the West Indies, she wrote to “a certain Englishman” whom she had known in Germany, asking him to join her on a trip to the Orient. With the Englishman and a Hindu, she sailed via the Cape to Ceylon and from there to Bombay, where the party split up. Determined to enter Tibet, Helena set out alone for Nepal but the British resident would not allow her to cross the border. She departed for Southern India, then on to Java and Singapore before returning to England.
The year was now 1853 and preparations were under way for the Crimean War, altogether an unfortunate time for a Russian to be living in England. Once again Helena crossed the Atlantic, visiting New York and Chicago before slogging across the Rocky Mountains in a covered wagon. At San Francisco, she boarded a ship bound for India via Japan and landed at Calcutta. In 1856, for a second time, she tried to get into Tibet. At Lahore she encountered the father of her old governess Antonya Kuhlwein and his two companions, the brothers N—-, all of whom planned to penetrate Tibet under various disguises. Accompanied by a Tartar shaman, they traveled through Kashmir to Leh, the chief city of Ladak, but the brothers were picked up and deported before they had walked sixteen miles into the forbidden territory: Mr. Kuhlwein came down with fever and had to return to Lahore. Helena, wearing a disguise provided by the shaman, successfully crossed the frontier and passed “far on into the generally inaccessible country.”28 After a number of supernatural experiences, some of a frightening nature, she was rescued by a party of twenty-five Lamaist horsemen and swooped back to the frontier.
In India once more, she was warned by her invisible protector that the Sepoy Rebellion would soon begin and she was advised to leave the country. Sailing aboard a Dutch vessel, she made her way from Madras to Java, arriving in Europe in 1858.
Unfortunately, hardly a word of this seems to be true. In order to credit H.P.B.’s version, it is necessary to believe that an unaccompanied young woman with no visible income was able to circumnavigate the earth twice in eight years. Forty years later, journalist Elizabeth Cochrane (“Nellie Bly”) would race around the globe in seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds, but her trip was a publicity stunt sponsored by the New York World. No matter how daring and resourceful a woman may have been, and certainly Madame Blavatsky possessed those qualities in abundance, it was still an impossible feat in the 1850s.
Especially implausible are H.P.B.’s visits to Tibet. Natural mountain barriers and a harsh climate had always made the “Roof of the World” inaccessible, and few Europeans were tempted to drop in. In 1792, however, harassed by Gurkha invasions and missionaries peddling Christianity, Tibet officially closed its doors to foreigners. You could not get a passport for Tibet, and if somehow you did, the Tibetans refused to honor it. Nevertheless, in 1846 two French priests, Abbe Evariste Hue and his friend Father Gabet, did manage to slip in, although not without difficulty. While Hue was not the first European to visit Tibet, he was the first to write a detailed account of the country and its people. In Recollections of Travel in Tartary, Tibet and China, a book with which H.P.B. incidentally was familiar, Hue painted a formidable picture of the hardships of travel: snow storms in June, avalanches, robbers, travelers freezing by the roadside and eaten by vultures. Any explorer setting out for Tibet would need to equip herself with baggage ponies, tents, stoves, an escort of native bearers, an interpreter, and—most crucial—food, water and fuel for the entire trek. Surviving without them, as H.P.B. im
plied she had done, would be not far from a miracle.
Finally, there is the matter of Madame Blavatsky’s sex. The Tibetans were inhospitable to all strangers, man or woman, but there is small likelihood that they would admit a white woman to their religious ceremonies, as H.P.B. claimed she had been admitted. In fairness, however, it should be pointed out that other women have succeeded in penetrating Tibet. From 1850 to 1852, a Mrs. Hervey (who delicately withheld her first name) traveled in Kashmir, Tibet and China, and wrote a three-volume description of her adventures. Mrs. Hervey’s travels, however, seem to have been confined to the frontier and to Balistan, known as Little Tibet, and she was accompanied by a sizable retinue of coolies and guides. Around the turn of the century another Englishwoman, Dr. Susie Carson Rijnhart, spent four years living on the border and claimed to have made a few trips over it, and in the twentieth century, the French explorer Alexandra David-Neel spent fourteen years there. A practicing Buddhist, David-Neel spoke and wrote fluently all the Tibetan dialects and eventually was made an honorary lama. So while the occurrence of women going to Tibet is not completely unknown, what we do know about such trips makes H.P.B.’s account seem all the more unpersuasive. There is no evidence, except her own word, that she ever stepped foot inside Tibet.29
H.P.B.’s account of how she spent her twenties obscures a large portion of the truth, or so the evidence suggests. Her deliberate falsification of the facts apparently represented an effort to cover up a mode of living that was not only unacceptable to her contemporaries, but totally objectionable in an ascetic who believed she had a mission to “save the world from despair.”30 There remains the interesting question: If she was not leaping continents, what was she doing?