Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  As Isis neared publication, Helena began to turn her attention back to old, unpleasant matters. For the past two years, Michael Betanelly had lurked in the background of her life as a potential threat, not only because of the bigamous marriage but also because the existence of any husband would have publicly embarrassed Helena. She must have been hoping he would divorce her, but this had not happened, and now she was obliged to bring up the subject. Her feelings about Michael had been intensely exacerbated by a report that, on a recent visit to Russia, Betanelly had contacted her relatives with the expressed purpose of slandering her. In fact, everywhere she turned, she heard nightmarish gossip about herself and her relationship with Olcott, and once again she suspected Michael to be the source. To her further embarrassment, Olcott told her that Michael had never bothered to repay the loan that he had arranged from Everman.

  At the beginning of May, H.P.B. wrote to Michael about these troublesome matters and brought up the subject of divorce. Several days later she received a bitter reply in which he complained of being almost destitute and revealed that “unless I pay Everman at least part of the money, he will take his revenge and have me arrested soon.” If this happened, it would be her fault and Olcott’s. He denied having gossiped about her by stating, “In the Caucasus I merely listened silently when you were scolded by your relatives and all who knew you.”184 He had never mentioned her name to Everman or to anyone else in America, and if people were talking about her, she had only herself to blame:

  You created for yourself scandal and notoriety. First you practised Spiritualism—you did not succeed. Now you have turned to Buddhism—you will succeed still less. Here you cannot play with the public as easily as you think. And by these experiments you are ruining other people, just as you ruined me by your Spiritualistic operations. If you had only kept quiet in your old age—nobody would have said anything.

  After several pages of recriminations and threats, he declared that he had no intention of contesting a divorce, which he wanted “by any means.” But that she must bear the expense because “I cannot pay; I have not money enough even to live. The cheaper you can arrange it the better. Only get it.”185 Finally, for unknown reasons, she dropped the idea. Scarcely an evening passed now that Helena and Henry did not entertain. Among the most frequent visitors to the “Lamasery,” as she now called the apartment, were William Quan Judge and his seventeen-year-old brother John, the latter having offered to copy Isis in a neat hand for the printer. Now that William Judge was sharing office space with Henry, he returned to H.P.B.’s life as abruptly as he had departed, spending more time at the Lamasery than at his own home. When Helena told him that she had been experimenting with astral travel and could leave her body at will, Judge, fascinated, kept pestering for her secrets. If he wanted to become a holy arhat, H.P.B. finally told him, he must fast and give up alcohol. This advice must have gone to Judge’s head, because a few days later he was experiencing visions and claimed that he left his body every night to roam in space. Helena, amused, wrote Aksakov on June 15 that she would ring a bell in her apartment and Judge, eight miles away in Brooklyn, “starts off at once and in two hours appears at my call.” Her last comment was: “See what fools they are, and how I lead them by the nose!”186

  Her sister, however, proved less of a fool. When Helena offered to visit her in Tiflis “in the flash of an eye,” Vera told her to cancel the flight—it might be dangerous. There was nothing to fear, Helena replied. Her physical body would be lying in bed at New York “in the state of a harmless idiot,” while her astral body, attached by a thread, would be with Vera in Tiflis. Naturally, if Vera began to “shriek like mad,” the thread would probably tear and then of course “I should die instantly.”187 Vera, now with three daughters by her second husband, had named her youngest Helena but that was as far as family loyalty went. There was not much about Helena Petrovna that she really liked, less that she took seriously.

  In August, Helena and Henry had a letter from Emily Kislingbury, the secretary of the British National Association of Spiritualists, who was spending her holiday in the United States and wanted to meet them. Her routine request is of less interest than the letter itself. Addressed to Olcott from Niagara Falls, it contained a brief postscript obviously not penned by Miss Kislingbury: “She is a sweet, truthful, sincere nature. Would the heavenly powers there were a few more like her in London. Teach her and take care of her.” The signature was written in a queer script Henry could not decipher until Helena explained that the message had been added phenomenally in transit by an adept whom she identified as “the old gentleman Narayan.”188 Narayan, she added, was one of the entities who had taken over her body during the writing of Isis. Olcott nodded solemnly, never suspecting that Helena herself might have intercepted the postman and steamed open the envelope.

  Emily, as sweet and gentle as Narayan had promised, took to H.P.B. with a ferocity that amounted to worship and must obviously have hungered for a miracle. One day when the two of them were alone reading in the parlor, Helena obliged by causing the reflection in a wall mirror to move up and down.

  “That’s an atmosphere effect,” H.P.B. yawned, and went back to reading her Russian newspaper.

  Emily, however, continued staring intently at the mirror. Before her very eyes unrolled scenes of a port or harbor and a crowd of men dressed as Hindus. When she described these pictures, Madame seemed unimpressed.

  “That is right,” she acknowledged. “That is what I wished you to see,”189 and she changed the subject.

  The autumn of 1877 was particularly glorious, the rich colors of the foliage so remarkable that several excursions were made to the woods to collect leaves. Someone, perhaps Emily Kislingbury, thought it would be novel to decorate the dining room, and the project grew increasingly elaborate until finally one entire wall was covered by a mural of dried leaves showing an elephant, tiger, monkey, and at the side a serpent coiled around the trunk of a palm tree. Pleased by the startling jungle effect, Helena immediately began embellishing the mural with dried grasses and stuffed animals. Olcott was dispatched to purchase a lion’s head, its jaws open and teeth menacing. Soon they added a few monkeys, an owl, several snakes and lizards, and finally a huge stuffed baboon which they dressed in white cravat and spectacles. To visitors, the Lamasery’s dining room had to be the most original room in all of New York City, but to Helena it was an unconscious attempt to re-create the happy part of her childhood when she had wandered through her grandmother’s museum and talked to the stuffed seals and flamingos.

  On September 29, Isis Unveiled was published at last. “My darling,” she announced joyfully to Aksakov, “was born last Saturday.”190 One of the first reviews, in the New York Herald, called Isis “one of the most remarkable productions of the century,” which almost made her swoon since “I was prepared for abuse of every sort.” Again to her surprise and enormous pleasure, the first edition of one thousand copies sold out within ten days of publication, even though Bouton had priced it at a steep $7.50. On the whole, the critics treated her kindly, although the New York Sun dismissed Isis as “discarded rubbish” and the Springfield Republican gleefully termed it “a large dish of hash.” Bouton tried to persuade the New York Times to review it, but the editor told him that they had “a holy horror of Mme. Blavatsky.”191

  Just as Helena thought she had made her reputation as a scholar, she was stung to learn that Daniel Dunglas Home had published an autobiography, Lights and Shadows of Spiritualism, in which he devoted an entire chapter to insulting Henry Steel Olcott and his book People from the Other World. Still apparently smarting over Henry’s unkind remarks about his mediumship, Home took it upon himself to destroy Henry’s credibility as a rational person. Never mentioning Helena by name, he waspishly remarked that when he first began to read Olcott’s book, he was sure it must have been written by a gushy woman of fifty under a nom de plume. People from the Other World, Home declared, was “beneath criticism,” and “as a display of reaso
ning, it is altogether beneath contempt.” The author of “this most worthless and dishonest book”192 was a pompous fool who had been bamboozled at the Eddy seances by a nameless person who had foisted junk jewelry upon him. Referring to Peter von Hahn’s buckle, he pointed out that in Russia “decorations are never buried with the dead. Until very recently, they were, without exception, returned to the government.”193 Of course the object that had “materialized” at Chittenden had been the buckle from her father’s decoration, but with characteristic exaggeration Helena had taken to calling it the decoration itself.

  Home, who did not believe for a minute that she received either a buckle or a decoration, could not let this opportunity for denunciation slip by. That he did not mention her name made no difference, for everyone knew who he was talking about.

  Sickened, Helena began to think of him as a serpent endlessly spurting “venomous slime.” It was his malignity that had ruined her in Russia, where people still remembered her as a harlot. In fact, a recent editorial in a Tiflis paper had called her a physically deformed, shifty-eyed charlatan, the embodiment of all vices. It was Home, she thought, who continued to poison her life in America, all because he could not forgive her for sleeping with Nicholas Meyendorff twenty years earlier and for having given birth to crippled Yuri. She moaned to Aksakov, “I want to go where no one will know my name,”194 but she meant a place where Home’s name was unknown. That place, she was convinced, was India.

  During the writing of Isis, the idea of relocating in India had become increasingly attractive, and by this time Helena considered it imperative. It had begun as a lovely but impossible fantasy, but now H.P.B. determined to find a way, for in India waited the Secret Brotherhood and her Masters who would protect her from villains like Home.

  The Brothers were real to her, and to Henry as well, but not to the world, particularly not to her family. “You do not believe that I tell you God’s truth about my Masters,” she chided Vera. “You consider them to be mythical.”195 Actually Vera regarded them as deliberate lies, but was too polite to say so. Nadyezhda, more sympathetic, thought it strange that a male Hindu would have the audacity to inhabit Helena’s body, and she wanted to know if he wandered inside other people as well. “I’m sure I don’t know,” Helena replied stoutly. Perhaps it was not the man himself who possessed her, but only his power. “Through him alone I am strong; without him I am a mere nothing.”196 This answer had not satisfied Nadyezhda who could not conceive of her denying Christ for Buddhism or anything else. That was a sin. “Friend of my soul, Nadejinka,” Helena replied in great agitation.

  I have at last decided to write you the whole truth, such as it is. I shall lay before you my soul, my heart, my brain... I am but the reflection of an unknown bright light. However this may be, this light has gradually been incorporated into me, it has been filtered into me, it has, as it were, pierced through me; and therefore, I cannot help myself that all these ideas have come into my brain, into the depth of my soul; I am sincere although perhaps I am wrong.197

  Although Nadyezhda was not to know it, Helena no longer believed either in Christianity or a personal God. Hedging, she wrote, “I am not a Buddhist, but I am afraid also not a Christian in the ordinary church sense.”

  Then what did she believe? Nadyezhda demanded angrily.

  She answered, “I believe in an indivisible and universal God, in the abstract spirit of God and not in an anthropomorphical Divinity.” In letter after letter she flayed Nadyezhda with ideas, pausing now and then to wail, “I am so afraid Nadejda Andreevna, to upset you, for I love you so much, but still, I write the truth.” It was a truth that Nadyezhda refused to hear and she asked Helena never to mention religion to her again.198

  Throughout the fall of 1877 her obsession with India and a dark-skinned man she had begun to call Master M. continued to flourish. M., she told people, had a merry personality—he made jokes. “Sometimes he looks as if he were a living man... He will soon take us all to India, and there we shall see him in his body just like an ordinary person.”199 Precisely how this might come to pass she did not know, being forced to agree with Olcott that “our chances of getting to the Holy Land seemed very slight.”200

  The odds, however, climbed sharply one evening when James Peebles, recently returned from India, called at the Lamasery and noticed on the wall a photograph of two Indians, shipboard passengers with whom Henry had traveled to England in 1870. Coincidentally, Peebles had happened to meet one of them—Moolji Thackersey—while visiting Bombay. Taking Thackersey’s address, Olcott wrote him the next day describing the Theosophical Society and its founders’ interest in reviving the ancient knowledge of India. Thackersey, in turn, replied enthusiastically, raving to the colonel about his current interest in a reformer named Swami Dayananda Sarasvati who agitated for the abolition of the caste system and other Hindu abuses. Dayananda seemed to have been a Hindu version of the Reformation’s Martin Luther. Through his organization, the Arya Samaj, Dayananda was exhorting his countrymen to give up Western ideas and return to pure Vedic religion.

  This first contact with India excited Helena and Henry immensely and before long, letters were flying between New York and Bombay. Initially Henry dealt with the president of the Bombay Arya Samaj Hurrychund Chintamon, then with the Swami himself, who read Henry’s letters in translation. When Chintamon pointed out that the purposes of the Arya Samaj and the Theosophical Society seemed identical and proposed amalgamation of the two groups, Henry did not wait for a second invitation. To form this union, he vowed dramatically, he was willing to sit at the Swami’s feet and “be his servant.”201 That would not be necessary, Helena happily assured him, because the reason all of this had come about was that an adept of the Brotherhood occupied the Swami’s body. As she had told him many times, the Masters were watching over them, drawing them closer to the land where they would do a great work for humanity. In her runaway enthusiasm, she wrote Chintamon a number of somewhat reckless letters in which she thoughtlessly described Olcott as a “psychologized baby” whom she led around by the nose.

  Even before the communication with India, the moribund Theosophical Society had shown signs of reviving. To Helena’s surprise, she had recently received overtures from the English Spiritualists Charles Massey, Stainton Moses, and her friend Emily Kislingbury about the forming of a London branch. Even though there had been disagreements over the T.S.’s opposition to Christianity, which seemed excessive to Massey, the kinks had been ironed out. By spring of 1878, the Society was a going concern, both in New York, where membership applications had been received from such well-known men as Thomas Edison and General Abner Doubleday, and abroad. In addition to the English group, Moolji Thackersey had founded a branch in Bombay, and now Olcott was preparing a circular for Lydia Paschkoff to take to Japan. By May, when the T.S. officially changed its name to “The Theosophical Society of the Arya Samaj,” he was happily envisioning a worldwide organization.

  While the union with the Arya Samaj seemed to bring India a step closer, practically it did nothing of the kind. Helena talked incessantly of the imminent departure, while to Henry the adventure remained, for the foreseeable future, a pipedream. He had responsibilities, he reminded her; as it was, his law practice barely provided for them and his ex-wife and sons. In India, where he would have no income whatsoever, they would all starve. Helena reproached him for his lack of faith in the Brotherhood; clearly, once they reached India, the Masters would take care of them. Henry was not persuaded.

  Desperate for money, H.P.B. began barraging Russian papers and magazines with articles on divorce, suicide, feminism, epidemics, the phonograph, indeed on any American subject she believed of interest to Russians. When Pravda, who had bought two of her ideas, proved slow in paying, Helena wrote to Nadyezhda that the editor was “a pig! I shall not write anymore for him.”202 She begged her aunt to find her other markets and, possibly through Nadyezhda’s efforts, she received a commission to write a series. It would be called
“From the Land on the Other Side of the Blue Ocean,” and would deal largely with such lurid American topics as abortion, sex crimes, grave-robbing and child abuse. When she chose to, Helena could churn out dozens of pages a day. Presumably she was doing it now because suddenly she had money. Lots of it. Once, when Henry took her shopping and grumbled about the cost of the dresses, she thrust fifty dollars into his hand; on another occasion he discovered that five hundred dollars had anonymously been deposited in his bank account. Obviously not privy to how much Helena had been writing, he could not understand where the money was coming from. Helena would explain that she had “materialized” it, or that Master M. had sent it. Knowing that the Brotherhood could provide hard cash reassured and enchanted Olcott, who made jokes about the Astral Bank for Savings.

  However, it took tremendous effort for Helena to keep afloat the Astral Bank for Savings, and by the first week of April, she had worked herself into a state of emotional and physical exhaustion. She kept to her bedroom and allowed Olcott and his sister Belle Mitchell, “both of them pale, sour, wrinkled, as if they had been boiled in a sauce-pan,”203 to fuss over her. Afterward she informed her sister that she had been unconscious for five days, but that “Master telegraphed from Bombay to Olcott: ‘Don’t be afraid. She is not ill but resting. She has overworked herself.’”204 That Olcott, in his memoirs, failed to mention either the illness or the receipt of what would have been his first message from a Mahatma, suggests that Helena’s version was grossly exaggerated.