Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  Would it be possible for him to do a demonstration? Could he actually call forth an elemental? He announced that he could, if they were willing to finance the operation and to pay for his time.

  “Of course,” Henry wrote in Old Diary Leaves, “we passed an informal vote of hearty thanks for his highly interesting lecture, and an animated discussion followed.” While people were chatting, it occurred to Henry “that it would be a good thing to form a society to pursue and promote such occult research.” On a scrap of paper he scribbled, “Would it not be a good thing to form a Society for this kind of study”112 and handed it to William Judge to pass over to H.P.B., who read it and nodded her head. Olcott got up and presented his idea to enthusiastic murmurs, and George Felt promised he would teach them to evoke and control “elementals.” Thus it was unanimously agreed that Olcott’s society should be formed; Judge made a motion that Olcott be elected chairman, while Henry nominated Judge as secretary. Since it had grown late, Henry suggested they adjourn to return the following evening with sympathetic friends who might be potential members.

  Years later H.P.B. would tell disciple Annie Besant that her Master ordered her to found the Theosophical Society. She claimed it was she, not Olcott, who had written down the suggestion and passed it by Judge to the colonel, but this was clearly not the case.113 However, the true version painted H.P.B. as little more than an interested bystander, and assigns her virtually no role in subsequent events. The following Wednesday, sixteen people showed up to hear Felt deliver a second lecture, after which there was general discussion about the formation of Henry’s society. Having given some thought to the matter since the previous evening, he now described the society as a study group to collect and disseminate ancient philosophies, such as the Cabbala. He also suggested founding an occult library.

  It was not until the third meeting on the following Monday, that they discussed names for the new society. Among the suggestions were Egyptological, Hermetic and Rosicrucian, but none seemed appropriate. Finally Charles Sotheran picked up a dictionary and began skimming its pages until he came to the word “theosophy.” Henry recalled that “after discussion, we unanimously agreed that was the best of all, since it both expressed the esoteric truth we wished to reach and covered the ground of Felt’s methods of occult scientific research.”114 The group began tackling the question of bylaws, Mrs. Britten offered her home as the next meeting place, and they adjourned.

  During all this activity, Helena was conspicuous by her lack of prominence. Given her fondness for the limelight, she must have been hard put to restrain herself; on the other hand, organizational details bored her, and she may have been relieved to leave them to Olcott. In her only known letter from this period, she noted matter-of-factly, to Aksakov, that “Olcott is now organizing the Theosophical Society in New York.”115 Nevertheless, it seems odd that at this critical moment she should suddenly succumb to an urge to travel; on Tuesday the fourteenth, the day after the Society’s name had been selected, she left New York.

  As a consequence of her writings Helena had made friends with Hiram Corson, professor of Anglo-Saxon and English literature at Cornell University, and his French wife Caroline, also a scholar. In the summer of 1874, the Corsons’ only daughter died. Caroline was able to accept the loss, but Hiram had found no comfort in orthodox religion, turning instead to Spiritualism for assurance of the continued existence of his child. The couple had been begging Helena to visit Ithaca, and now she decided to accept, naturally without bothering to inform them of her decision. At the last moment Henry wrote: “I requested her to write to you herself and she promised to do so, but she is so absorbed with the things of the other world that with good intentions she may forget her duty.”116 Unfortunately, the Corsons did not catch the tactful warning hidden between the lines of Olcott’s note. Since they were expecting a witty, erudite Russian woman to show off to their academic friends, H.P.B. came as a rude shock.

  The city of Ithaca, New York, lies in a picturesque valley at the foot of Lake Cayuga; three hundred feet above the valley, on the east hill stood Corson’s home on Huestis Street. Nearby was Cornell University with its imposing array of lecture halls, libraries and faculty homes. When H.P.B. arrived on September 17, Indian summer was in full bloom. The mornings and nights were crisp and frosty, with middays pleasantly warm; the lake was bathed in autumn haze, the hills dotted with goldenrod, the vineyards full of ripening grapes. To the Corsons’ chagrin, their beautiful scenery interested Helena even less than they did. From early morning until midnight she sat in her room, frequently not even bothering to descend for meals.

  In no way was Helena a normal guest. Always uncorseted, she walked about in a loose wrapper under an embroidered jacket with pockets for her cigarette papers and tobacco. Corson, who smoked himself, thought her tobacco cheap and was horrified to discover she smoked upwards of two hundred cigarettes a day. Caroline would not have cared how many cigarettes Madame smoked, if only she had used an ashtray instead of the carpets and the flowerpots.

  As Corson later told his son Eugene, he had never encountered anyone so intense as Madame Blavatsky: “Nothing around her mattered; though the heavens fall she would keep on her way.”117 Nevertheless, still eager to be a good host, he suggested for the hundredth time that she might enjoy a drive around the Cornell campus. Grumbling, Helena let herself be persuaded, and also reluctantly acceded to Corson’s request that she refrain from smoking in public. Ithacans looked askance at a woman smoking and such an act was sure to stir up trouble for him. Halfway through the ride, she could bear it no longer and ordered the coachman to stop so that she could get out for a smoke.

  On the roadside? Corson sputtered.

  Why not? she retorted. If people wanted to take her for a gypsy, let them. Leaving Corson in the carriage, she hunkered down on a rock and puffed several cigarettes in rapid succession before returning to the carriage.

  At Ithaca, Helena began the book that eventually would become Isis Unveiled. “I am now writing a big book,” she informed Aksakov on September 20, “which I call, by John’s advice, Skeleton Key to Mysterious Gates.”’118 She was deliberately unclear about the subject, only vaguely alluding to her plans for lambasting scientists, Papists, Jesuits and other half-baked fools. She spent the rest of the letter enthusing about Egypt and the Hermetic philosophers.

  Wearily Corson wrote to his son on October 2, “Mme. B. is still with us. She gives us a good deal of trouble, and we get very little from her in return, for she is occupied wholly with her own work. I had expected we should have some ‘sittings’ together; but she is not only not disposed, but is decidedly opposed to anything of the kind.” He had come to the conclusion that “she is a smart woman, but ignorant of all the graces and amenities of life. She is a great Russian bear.”119 Aware of their disappointment, Helena relented, graciously produced a few raps, and once caused a heavy table to rise without touching it. Always on these occasions, she cautioned Corson that these phenomena were energized by her own willpower and should not be classified as ordinary mediumistic phenomena. On an evening when frost had been predicted, Caroline decided to bring in her potted plants from the porch, but H.P.B. told her not to bother because she would get “John” to carry them in. The next morning Caroline found the plants inside the house.

  During her three weeks in Ithaca, Helena had emerged from the house only for the carriage ride and for an elaborate sitting with a local photographer. Pleased with the results, she ordered three dozen pictures, at a total cost of thirteen dollars. By this time she must have known the Corsons were dying to get rid of her, but as she was not yet ready to depart, she realized she had to stage a major event in order to pacify them. One morning Hiram Corson awoke to find on the table next to his bed a striking likeness of his dead daughter wearing a wreath of flowers in her hair and with gnome faces crowding the background. Most startling to Corson was the fact that the portrait had been drawn on a sheet of the expensive stationery he had noticed the pre
vious evening while visiting the home of Andrew D. White, president of the University. Corson had admired the stationery in White’s study, had even touched it during their conversation, but had not taken any away with him. Positive that the portrait had been sketched on White’s stationery, he did not, evidently, stop to consider that similar notepaper might be available in local stores. Greatly excited, he rushed to his wife who took one look at the picture and screamed, “This is the work of the devil.”120 She burst into tears and threw the picture into the fire. Feeling horribly unappreciated, H.P.B. departed for New York the next day.

  During her absence from the city, Henry had been busy alienating the Spiritualists, and in a lecture on September 24 he had “waved the sacred banner of the Lodge in their faces,” and been generally insulting. “Things are red hot here, I tell you,” he wrote Helena the next day. “Thank God I have lived long enough to sound the trumpet once for the holy Lodge.” He could hardly contain his delight when, after the lecture, a woman friend of Andrew Jackson Davis’s had moaned that he had just “given spiritualism its death-blow tonight.” To Helena, he chortled, “It was enough to make you die of laughter.”121

  As a result of his ill-advised effervescence and her unusual comportment, H.P.B. lost the friendship of some people she valued, Corson for one. A few weeks after her return to New York she wrote plaintively, “This is the third letter I write you and not a word in response. Are you angry? Are you mad with me for anything?” She could not understand his fury over Olcott’s remarks, as little as she comprehended Caroline’s upset at the spirit picture of her deceased daughter. “ ‘Pon my word, I feel as if all was not right, as if she was kind of angry with me for something.” Feeling as innocent of wrongdoing “as an unborn kitten,” she enclosed fifty cents for the Corson’s maid whom she had forgotten to pay for doing her laundry. “Mary,” she said, “must think me mean.”122 Unwilling to offend even a servant, she was greatly disturbed when her generosity was unacknowledged and continued to send the Corsons disarming letters.

  Back on Irving Place, Helena was pleased to learn of Henry’s progress with the Theosophical Society. On October 16, and again on October 30, she attended meetings at Mrs. Britten’s home in West Thirty-eighth Street to discuss by-laws and elect officers. William Judge and H.P.B.’s Philadelphia physician, Dr. Seth Pancoast, were present, as well as her attorneys William Ivins and William Fales with several lawyer friends, all of whom failed to take the occasion as seriously as she would have wished. One of them, James C. Robinson, who had come expecting an extremely odd crowd, was not disappointed; the Theosophists, he wrote a friend, are “the most ‘pecolliar’ people I have seen for many a day.” He remembered that Fales took mischievous pleasure in feeding Henry irrelevant clauses and amendments, all phrased in silly but fancy jargon. Poor Olcott “loved those fine phrases, those mysterious and meaningless clauses, but the boys were pitiless... We had lots of sport.”123

  H.P.B. relegated herself to rolling cigarettes without commenting on the frivolity. As the evening progressed, Henry managed to draw up a constitution stating simply that the object of the Society was to collect and diffuse a knowledge of the laws which govern the universe. The Society was not a Spiritualistic schism, nor would it offer any dogma or creed, unless it be devotion to the truth. Members would be accepted without regard to race, sex, color, country or creed and were permitted to hold any religious belief they liked. Interestingly enough, there was no mention of the universal brotherhood which would eventually become the most publicized objective of the Theosophical Society.

  The evening closed with the election of Olcott as president, Pancoast and Felt as vice-presidents, and Judge as counsel. Helena consented to accept the modest position of corresponding secretary.

  Even though the Society was only a discreet whisper away from Spiritualism, Henry took great pains to inform the public that Theosophy was no Spiritualist offshoot. His about-face made Helena uncomfortable, enough so that she assured Aksakov that the Society “is the same spiritualism but under another name.” She went on to boast that “the rules of the society are so strict that it is impossible for a man who has been in the least mixed up in any dirty matter to become a member. No free lovers or atheists or positivists are admitted....”124 Aksakov, who knew something of Madame’s own past, must have puzzled over how she herself had passed the Society’s strict admission requirements.

  To Olcott, the Society was a serious business worthy of his time and money; accordingly, he hired a room in Mott Memorial Hall at 64 Madison Avenue where, on November 17, 1875, he delivered his presidential address. Used regularly by another club, the dim, book-lined chamber boasted a platform at one end. It was small but adequate to their needs since only a handful of “fellows” turned up. H.P.B. listened from the audience, while Henry grandiosely predicted the Theosophical Society would earn a place in history as the first group to communicate with races of unseen beings. Helena thought these were rash predictions and wrote in her scrapbook that Henry was “counting the price of the bear’s skin before the beast is slain.”125 The colonel himself, rereading the speech seventeen years later, admitted that it sounded “a bit foolish.”126

  In spite of Olcott’s efforts to put the Society on a dignified footing, difficulties arose immediately. George Felt failed to produce a single “elemental,” not even “the tip end of the tail of the tiniest Nature-spirit.”127 Assured by Helena that he would come through eventually, Henry authorized the Society’s treasurer to give Felt a hundred dollars for his experiments, but as the months passed and Felt did not even bother to turn up for scheduled lectures, he was mortified. Felt had exposed them to the mockery of every skeptic in New York. It was bad enough that the general press ridiculed the new Society while, worse yet, the Spiritualist papers ignored it, but after a few months the membership began to drop. When Charles Sotheran, one of the founders, noisily resigned, he warned people, in a letter to the Banner of Light, to stay away from the Theosophists. Henry tried to bolster interest by hiring clairvoyants and mesmerizers, paid for out of his own pocket, but, by the following spring, even Helena no longer bothered to attend meetings.

  H.P.B. had more important concerns on her mind than the fading Theosophical Society. At the end of November, she and Henry moved together to 433 West Thirty-fourth Street, thereby relieving him of having to pay rent on two establishments. While his room was on the second floor and H.P.B.’s on the first, gossip still circulated. Olcott may have been divorced but Madame was still married and although she had tried to conceal her second marriage, too many people knew about Michael. She gave instructions to turn him away if he ever appeared at the door, but this order was gratuitous, for he desired a reconciliation no more than she. Still, her simultaneous intimacy with two men was shocking. Louisa Andrews, writing to Hiram Corson, called Madame’s treatment of Betanelly shameful. “What her relationship with Olcott is, I do not know, but if it be not criminal (and I believe it is not), it is not from principle.”128

  At Thirty-fourth Street, H.P.B. planned to get down to business on her book, but she found that good intentions were hardly enough. During her stay at Ithaca, she had galloped through twenty-five pages of foolscap each day and since she remained there nearly a month, must have accumulated roughly six hundred pages. Unfortunately, little was publishable, and she knew it. Unlike many fledgling writers, Helena understood her intention: to restate the entire occult doctrine and salvage the ancient world from the modern stigma of superstition and ignorance. To reveal the traces, in ancient and medieval history, of a secret science whose principles had been lost was a formidable task. First it meant foraging through science, religion and philosophy, then correlating the findings in a book with structural unity. An encyclopedia of legends and fables would not do; rather, H.P.B. planned to digest and codify the ancient myths, retelling them in terms intelligible to the modern devotee.

  So far, the bulk of her work was almost totally incoherent. Unable to admit this, she kept the manuscr
ipt hidden and made no comment on its progress. Although she had written that “I am nailed up like a slave to my chair writing all day,”129 Olcott, who knew better, found her “not very industrious.”130 Frustrated and more than a little guilty about her poor progress, Helena informed Professor Corson on January 8, 1876, that “my book is finished,”131 when actually she had yet to seriously begin.

  For a change, money was not a problem, since Henry took care of everything, including her debt to Andrew Jackson Davis. She had at last succeeded in selling two articles to the New York Sun, although “A Story of the Mystical” and “The Luminous Circle” can hardly be termed journalism. H.P.B.’s own distinctive blend of fact and fiction, they were first-person occult travelogues stuffed with vampires, dervishes, and Rumanian gypsies. She was delighted to get a more than respectable thirty dollars for each story.

  In fact, what she often tried to pass off in her writings as fact was so bizarre even Gerry Brown’s readers protested. That sort of niggling never failed to irritate Helena, who never bothered with personal responses to readers’ inquiries. Instead, Brown received a response from “Endreinek Agardi of Koloswar,”132 who swore that he could vouch for Madame Blavatsky as he had been an eyewitness to the events described in one of her articles.

  Where Helena got the name Endreinek is hard to say, but Agardi was obviously suggested by Metrovitch, and Koloswar was a pretty Hungarian town the two of them had visited on tour in 1867. It is amusing to note that “Endreinek Agardi’s” letter found its way into H.P.B.’s scrapbook.

  By early January, 1876, both Helena and Henry had begun to make changes in their daily routines. She was fond of pointing out lightly that a true ascetic did not indulge in sex, meat or alcohol. Now, to her astonishment, Henry began taking her seriously. No more was he seen at the Lotos Club bar and gave up meat and wine. Frequently he did not eat at all. Seeing him waste away, Helena regretted having nagged him; she had simply not expected him to turn into a fanatic. “I can do nothing with him,” she wrote Corson, adding pointedly that Olcott lived “to purify American Spiritualism of the dirt of free love.”133