Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  Helena was petrified. There were a half-dozen people who knew enough about her to really ruin her and Emma Coulomb was one of them. Steeling herself, she took her cue from Emma and composed a newsy reply bringing her life up to date since they last had met: Paris, New York, the Theosophical Society, Isis Unveiled. She mentioned that in 1872 she had spend eight months in India. “My lodge in India, of which I may have spoken to you, had decided that as the Society established by myself and old Sebire was a failure, I had to go to America and establish one on a larger scale.”

  Emma had never heard Helena speak of any lodge, nor of India for that matter. Madame’s letter “was all very fine, but did not open my way to get out of trouble. So sometime after I wrote to her again, and explained to her clearly our situation, and asked her to send us some money.”

  Although Helena had been expecting this all along, she was probably unsure whether Emma actually wanted back the money loaned in Cairo, or whether she was making a veiled blackmail threat. Was it better to ignore Emma and run the risk of her blabbing about Metrovitch and Yuri? Or would pacification be safer? In the end, H.P.B. amicably wrote to Emma that she herself, as poor as a church rat, had no money of her own and lived in a commune. From the last of her father’s legacy, she received about a hundred rupees a month “but this belongs to the community, money which none of us can touch, for it is for the expenses of the house, and it is not much, I can assure you.” However, if Emma and her husband should ever come to Bombay and join the Theosophical Society, employment might be found for them. It all depended on Colonel Olcott who would “take off his skin for a Fellow, but do nothing for an outsider.”32

  Mentioning jobs to the Coulombs was rash, but Helena felt that she would never be called upon to make good the offer. From Emma’s doleful descriptions of their poverty, she doubted if they could raise the passage money for the journey from Galle to Bombay. At least, she prayed they could not.

  In the summer of 1879, as the rains came, India slowly became aware that within it were two white foreigners who believed its culture to be supremely admirable. Indian patriotism in the 1870s was virtually comatose. The British had come here pledging to respect the native traditions, but at the same time had quickly admitted the Christian missionaries to convert the “heathen.” Whatever social reforms British rule had brought were offset by the very presence of the white “sahib,” and educated Hindus generally felt that Asian India was doomed to inferiority at the hands of the “Raj.” Only a few Hindus, such as Swami Dayananda, were attempting to revive national pride in India’s ancient heritage. It would take many years of bitter struggle before India fully awoke, but a tiny beginning had been made and Madame Blavatsky and Henry Olcott would be contributors to the awakening. As would one Annie Besant, although she did not yet know it. Helena had come to India in search of her Masters, but once there, found that mastering Hindi was no overnight project. Prohibited by language from the knowledge she sought, she was nonetheless a hopeful presence to Hindu intellectuals: if a foreign woman of importance, a countess it was rumored, came all the way to their poor country to seek the truth, Indians must be more than mere slaves of the British Empire; perhaps, in fact, East Indians actually were heirs to an esoteric body of learning.

  Both H.P.B. and Olcott were aware that summer of some small spark of interest they had struck. Memberships in the Society continued to climb, as did the inquiries, and some nights Henry labored over the piles of mail until 2 or 3 a.m. Their friends now included several rich, influential Hindus, including Shishir Babu, editor of Calcutta’s Amrita Bazaar Patrika and Prince Harisinghji Rupsinghji of Bhavnagar; while Helena would vehemently deny that the Society profited materially from these connections, the undeniable fact was that it did. True, H.P.B. never asked for gifts or favors from the wealthy; on the contrary, it sometimes seemed that she went out of her way to offend them. Once, when the aged Sardar of Dekhan introduced her to his ten-year-old wife, H.P.B. tactlessly shouted at him, “Your WIFE? You old beast! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”33 That child marriage was customary Helena saw as an invalid reason for disguising her disgust of it. On the other hand, the abominable position of Indian women did not appear to disturb her, nor was she visibly concerned that no native women had joined the Theosophical Society.34

  Among the sensitive young Hindus drawn to Girgaum Back Road was Damodar K. Mavalankar, the twenty-one-year-old son of a wealthy Brahmin who, unknown to his parents, was full of notions about becoming an adept, perhaps even in some future life a mahatma. “It was the rainy season,” Henry recalled in his memoirs, “and the dear boy used to come to see us of evenings, clad in a white rubber waterproof and leggings, a cap with flaps to match, a lantern in his hand, and the water streaming from the end of his long nose. He was as thin as Sarah Bernhardt, with lantern jaws, and legs—as H.P.B. used to say—like two lead pencils.”35 A serious, religious-minded young man with considerable intellectual gifts and an excellent English education, he had suffered two near-fatal illnesses during childhood and during each had seen visions of “a certain personage—whom I then considered to be a Deva, i.e., God—who gave me a peculiar medicine.”36 According to the dramatic account given by Damodar’s biographer, the frail youth walked into 108 Girgaum Back Road to be greeted by a picture of his childhood savior whose name was Master Koot Hoomi and whose agent was none other than Madame Blavatsky. That Master Koot Hoomi would not even be born until September, 1880, over a year later, did little to diminish Damodar’s immediate regard for H.P.B.

  “About a month after I joined the Society,” he recalled, “I felt as it were a voice within myself whispering to me that Madame Blavatsky is not what she represented herself to be.” Rather, he intuited that she must be “some great Indian Adept,”37 and so he confessed to her his dream of retiring from the world into some lonely jungle and giving himself up to God. That was a foolish idea, H.P.B. told him: if he really wanted to become an adept, he must struggle for the Theosophical Society and, someday, would be rewarded when the adepts summoned him to their sides. When Damodar implored her for the Brothers’ names and addresses, Helena put him off by solemnly announcing she was sworn to secrecy. Apparently Damodar bowed to her wisdom and stopped nagging.

  “No child was ever more obedient to a parent, than he to H.P.B.,” Olcott wrote. “Her slightest word was to him law; her most fanciful wish an imperative command, to obey which he was ready to sacrifice life itself.”38 This fanatical devotion to Madame, which included fanning her to sleep on the hot nights when she suffered from insomnia, was scarcely an exaggeration on Henry’s part; indeed, as will be seen, he was understating the situation.

  On the Fourth of July, distressed by the stacks of unopened mail, all of which had to be answered, Helena and Henry hit on a solution to their communications lag: a Theosophist magazine. Any publishing venture required capital or credit, neither of which they had, but this problem could be circumvented by selling advance subscriptions. Two days later Henry wrote a prospectus for the periodical, which he distributed to the newspapers, while members of the Society were drumming up subscriptions. On July 16, Helena wrote to General Abner Doubleday, urging him to find New York subscribers for her “child, our sweet and holy virgin.” That she had largely ignored her New York friends since coming to India seemed an irrelevancy to Madame. “Look here, dear General,” she went on, “our paper is not to be an organ of Spiritualists and such flapdoodle, but a serious philosophical organ....”39 There was no reason why even a New York Brahmin like William Whitney should not be happy to subscribe.

  During the next three months, Helena found herself as busy as she had been during the writing of Isis Unveiled. Night after night she worked on articles for the magazine’s flagship issue; according to Olcott, Master Morya himself visited one evening in his physical body to talk over the journal and give editorial suggestions. As the Theosophists advertised widely and wrote to every potential reader they knew or knew of, the subscriptions began to trickle in. Wimbri
dge contributed a handsome cover design for the journal, which they were now calling the Theosophist, and Damodar became business manager and staff writer. Sometimes the young man sat up so late working that Olcott, concerned about the health of the frail disciple, took it upon himself to drive him home to bed. By now, they had overgrown the bungalow and were forced to rent the house next door as office space.

  On Monday, September 29, Helena and Henry rose at 5:30 a.m. and rushed to the printer to make the last-minute corrections suggested by the Mahatma; two days later, they received the first run of four hundred copies and spent the entire morning addressing the mailing wrappers. There was nothing shoddy or amateurish about the thirty-two-page journal whose masthead read: “OM, THE THEOSOPHIST, a Monthly Journal devoted to Oriental Philosophy, Art, Literature and Occultism. Conducted by H.P.BLAVATSKY under the auspices of the Theosophical Society.” The contents included extremely well-written articles on Buddhism, ancient China, trigonometry, a laudatory piece about Swami Dayananda, and of course low-key propaganda for the Theosophical Society. The periodical was nothing short of tasteful, and highly literate. Clearly non-political, it should have reassured the Bombay police, who still kept Helena under observation. Her sole intention for the journal, as she wrote in her first editorial, was that it, “should be read with as much interest by those who are not deep philosophers as by those who are,” adding that “our pages will be like the many viands at a feast, where each appetite may be satisfied and none are sent away hungry.”40

  The Theosophist was an immediate success and the print run for the November order climbed to seven hundred and fifty copies. The monsoon was over and the sun began to shine in more ways than one. In October, no less a personage than the viceroy of India, Lord Edward Robert Lytton, ordered that the Theosophical Society was to be caused no further harassment, at which news H.P.B. bubbled happily in the Theosophist of her gratitude “to the son of the author of Zanoni.” Quite content to be swamped by piles of work, Helena put in endless hours editing the magazine as well as grinding out her own Radda Bai articles for Michael Katkov. For the first time since her arrival, she felt confident that she and Henry would be able to remain in India and in this halcyon time of relaxation and expansion she celebrated by buying herself another canary. Understandably disposed to ignore unpleasantness, she only glanced at the letters from William Judge, complaining rather shrilly that he had never seen an adept, and threatening to submit his resignation to the Society. She turned over the letters to Damodar, who replied coolly, “My dear Mr. Judge: I am very sorry to hear you write so disparagingly to Madame Blavatsky... You must neither despair, nor think there are no adepts simply because you have as yet seen none. If you have not met with any, you should know it is because you have not properly performed your duties,...”41 And with that rebuke, Judge was forced to be content.

  That H.P.B.’s mood during this period seems to have been almost playful, is borne out in a letter Henry received from the usually somber Master Morya: “If you want to oblige me personally,” he wrote, “then will you hurry as quick as you can and put H.P.B.’s room in order. I have pressing business in the room tomorrow early morning and I would smother there were it left in that state of chaos.”42 Had Helena’s relationship with Rosa Bates not grown spectacularly strained, Madame would certainly have asked “the maid” to tidy her room.

  During this hectic period, Helena had been in constant correspondence with Alfred and Patience Sinnett, and the couple repeatedly urged Helena and Henry to visit them in Allahabad. Now the time seemed ripe, and Madame was eager to travel. “Thank God,” she wrote Nadyezhda Fadeyev, “I am going away at the beginning of December to Allahabad, with a deputation of Rao-Bahadurs, which means ‘Great Warriors.’ “ The deputation consisted only of Olcott, Damodar and Babula but apparently Helena did not feel those three sufficiently colorful. She went on to speak of the “prospect of calls, dinners, and balls in ‘high life.’

  My hair stands on end at the very thought of it, but it must be done. I have warned Mrs. Sinnett that I, though not a Russian spy but an American citizen, will not listen to a single word of disrespect to Russia or to our Emperor. Just let them try, and how I will abuse their England! So let them be warned.43

  Unable to afford first-class railway tickets, they had to suffer sleepless nights on the hard wooden seats in second class, although this time H.P.B. had the foresight to bring along a camp bed for herself. In any case, the benches would not have held her bulk; ever since New York, her weight had been inching upward again. The traveling inconveniences were forgotten, however, when they reached Allahabad in the early morning of December 5 and were met by an elegant barouche with coachman and two splendidly liveried footmen. Sinnett would never forget his first encounter with Madame Blavatsky:

  The train from Bombay used to come into Allahabad in those days at an early hour in the morning, and it was still, but just, time for chota ha-zree, or early breakfast, when I brought our guests home. She had evidently been apprehensive, to judge from her latest letters, lest we might have formed some ideal conception of her that the reality would shatter, and had recklessly painted herself as a rough, old, ‘hippopotamus’ of a woman, unfit for civilized society; but she did this with so lively a humor that the betrayal of her bright intelligence this involved more than undid the effect of her warnings. Her rough manners, of which we had been told so much, did not prove very alarming, though I remember going into fits of laughter at the time when Colonel Olcott, after the visit had lasted a week or two, gravely informed us that Madame was under ‘great self-restraint’ so far. This had not been the impression my wife and I had formed about her, though we had learned already to find her conversation more than interesting.44

  H.P.B.’s six-week visit, Sinnett wrote, meant “a great and momentous change in my life.” He does not state if the change was for better or worse.

  Alfred Percy Sinnett, a slender, balding man with a well-trimmed mustache, was an unlikely candidate for a counter-cultural religious movement. At thirty-nine, he was one of the most influential men in India by virtue of his editorship of the Pioneer, but for many years he had been a person of no visible achievements and small hope for such. Born in London, his entire childhood had been marked by an unbroken series of deprivations; his father had died penniless when Alfred was only five and his widowed mother provided for her six children by newspaper articles and translations. Alfred did poorly in school and left without finishing his studies. Taking up mechanical drawing, he became a skilled draftsman, which enabled him to support himself and contribute to the meager earnings of his mother. Eventually, however, he was able to move into the newspaper field when he got a job as assistant editor of the London Globe, but this was short-lived; he was fired for neglect of his duties after being rejected by a German woman.

  Next, he moved around aimlessly from one London paper to another until, in 1865, he was offered the editorship of the Hong Kong Daily Press. After three successful years in Hong Kong, he returned to England with eight hundred pounds and an excellent poker game and got a good job as an editorial writer on the Evening Standard. By 1870 he had met and married Patience Edensor, a rather frail, soft-spoken young woman who was later described by her friend Isabelle de Steiger as a person “whose patience and unvarying kindness never failed.” She was extremely intelligent, rather more intelligent in fact than her husband but “too loving and lovable a woman actively to oppose him, and her devotion was too intuitive ever to irritate him with opposition,” which Isabelle regarded as “unfortunate.”45

  In 1872, Alfred was presented with his biggest opportunity, to date, when George Allen, owner of the Pioneer, offered him the chance to go out to India as editor. The years since then had been the happiest of Sinnett’s life. At last, he had an excellent income, a luxurious home, social position, servants, and professional recognition. For him and Patience and their son, Denny, it was a life of incredible ease. There were winters in Allahabad, summers at Simla, the government
’s hot-weather capital in the cool foothills of the Himalayas, mint juleps on verandas, games of tennis to work off the rich meals, and periodic, all-expense-paid trips home to England.

  Several years prior to meeting H.P.B., Sinnett had attended a séance at the London home of the well-known medium Mrs. Guppy and was immediately intrigued, declaring the phenomena he had witnessed to be “overwhelming and precluded any conceivable theory of imposture.”46 He had read Isis Unveiled, which impressed him tremendously despite his assumption that Madame Blavatsky was a Spiritualist, and when the author and Colonel Olcott appeared in Bombay, he did not hesitate to contact them. “We thought they would be interesting people,”47 he wrote blandly in his unpublished memoirs.

  The Sinnetts outdid themselves to entertain Helena and Henry with dinner parties and introductions to prominent persons, among them Allan Octavian Hume, who would become the first chairman of the Indian National Congress. Sinnett had to admit that Helena failed to make a favorable impression on all his friends. “Anglo-Indian society is strongly coloured with conventional views, and 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.”48 That, perhaps, was to be expected. At the same time, the guests who appreciated bright, intelligent dinner-table conversation “were loud in her praises and eager of her society,”49 and forbore to overlook her militant teetotaling and her bullying attacks on people who were merely sipping table wine. Alfred, who jokingly called her “Old Lady,”50 took her idiosyncrasies about alcohol with equanimity, but he was secretly shocked by the way she nagged and abused Colonel Olcott. Once, after Henry had delivered a lecture that had not met with her approval, she “opened fire on him with exceeding bitterness.”51 The savagery of her outburst made Sinnett wonder why Olcott bore it so mildly, and after that could never think of Henry as anything other than spineless.