Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  Rostislav had immediately sent her the affidavit and the prince also responded warmly that he had recognized her handwriting. Both of these letters she exhibited to Hume, who by now avoided the subject of the Mahatmas, “except to sneer at them once or twice,”147 but it was humiliating to know that at age fifty, she had to prove her identity.

  Toward the end of October she took her leave, but whether out of disgust, spite, or simple exhaustion she decided to withdraw Master Koot Hoomi from the postal service. Announcing that he would be taking a “long, very long journey,” he thanked Sinnett for his past kindnesses and asked him to extend Allan Hume “my most friendly regards.”148 In his absence, Master Morya would take over the correspondence, a switch that would relieve Helena because as Morya she could be ruder to Hume.

  The thought of returning to Bombay had little appeal and there was actually no pressing reason to do so, since Olcott would remain in Ceylon until December and Damodar was perfectly capable of handling the Society’s business affairs. Informing Sinnett that she had business to conduct for the Brothers, and alerting Emma that several people had invited her to visit them, she roamed around northern India accepting their hospitality. After a few days in Lahore, she made her leisurely way to Saharanpur, where two English couples who had expressed interest in joining the Society were honored to entertain her. She stayed up talking her head off until 1 a.m. Joined by Ross Scott, who was to marry Minnie Hume in a few weeks, she swept on to Dehra Dun where she had a grand time with the local Anglo-Indians and was particularly delighted to meet a Mrs. Church, whose vocabulary of off-color words excelled her own. Merrily she wrote to Sinnett in Allahabad, “Speak of me, occasionally uttering improper things owing to my natural innocence and improper knowledge of English. She tells things that made the root of my hair turn red and burn with shame!”149 Judging by the tone of her letters at this time, many of them gleefully signed “Yours in Jesus,” she seemed to be in high spirits; of course she was deliberately tantalizing Sinnett, who was dying to meet a Mahatma, when she told him that she had met Master M. at Lahore. “He is very cross,”150 she cautioned, pointedly adding that M. “said something about going to see Damodar.”151

  There were new members to initiate in Meerut and a branch to establish at Bareilly. At last, Helena was in her element, which always bolstered her spirits, so it is curious that she should write to Vera of a serious illness. Without going into details, she reeled off a fantastic tale of being carried unconscious into the jungles of “Deo-Bund” where she was cured by a famous lama and later revived in a room full of carved stone statues of Buddha. “Around me were some kind of smoking chemicals, boiling in pots, and standing over me the Lama Debodurgai was making magnetic passes.”152 Helena, as has been said, was fond of hashish, which was far easier to obtain in India than in New York City, and this experience may simply have been a hashish dream. Since at this time there is no indication of her having suffered any special illness, she was probably trying to elicit sympathy from Vera, with whom she was justifiably annoyed: without asking permission, her sister had taken it upon herself to write an article, “The Truth about H. P. Blavatsky,” and published it in Russia’s parapsychological journal, the Rebus. H.P.B. had a horror of anyone writing the truth about her, especially the sister who knew too much. The article, of course, had displeased her, and she was feeling slightly huffy about Vera.

  Toward the end of November she spent ten days with Alfred Sinnett at Allahabad, and despite the myriad opportunities for slipping letters under pillows, the Mahatmas, to Sinnett’s great disappointment, were conspicuous by their absence. By the first of December, H.P.B. was back at the “Crow’s Nest” and by the nineteenth, when Olcott was to return from Ceylon, she was eager to see him. The Ceylon junket had been their longest separation since they had met, and she must have missed him. At pains to show her affection, she prepared a special homecoming gift, making sure the Mahatmas would leave him a congratulatory note for the good work he had accomplished in Ceylon. Apparently both she and the Masters had forgotten last winter’s angry threats to cast him into outer darkness. To Henry, the message came as a shock. How, he wondered, could the Mahatmas have forgotten? Certainly he had not. After that, he no longer trusted Helena: “Thenceforward, I did not love or prize her less as a friend and a teacher, but the idea of her infallibility, if I had ever entertained it more than approximately, was gone forever.”153 Once he had entertained it more than approximately, but that was too painful to reflect upon.

  Henry still received letters from his sister and also from Judge, the most recent from Venezuela where he was trying to develop a silver mine he hoped would make “a good deal of money. Whether the Brothers help me or not I cannot know but trust they now and then look my way.”154 Mary Olcott had remarried recently, and Henry’s sons appeared to have forgotten him. Since there was no going back to his old life, he had no choice but to make the best of his present lot. After his return from Ceylon, he resolutely closed his eyes to those things he did not wish to see.

  In 1882 H.P.B. was laboring over a synopsized history of the universe for Alfred Sinnett, compacted in sixty-nine Mahatma letters running to over one hundred thousand words. In a sense it was a repetition of what she had done during the writing of Isis Unveiled, but at the same time, it was a dry run for her great opus The Secret Doctrine. Much of the theoretical and philosophical teachings she was now passing along to Sinnett emerged as a result of his specific questions; however, since she did not always have ready answers, she frequently found herself in the position of a teacher only one page ahead of her pupils. The text in this case was Buddhist and Hindu scriptures, and H.P.B. had never been able to decide which of the two religions she preferred; this indecisiveness now led to serious problems.

  Even though the Mahatmas described themselves as Buddhists, calling Gautama their “Lord” and acknowledging the Dalai Lama as their priestly king, they seemed to be teaching Buddhism in Vedantist terms. The confusion increased, even to Sinnett, who knew little about either religion, when Koot Hoomi began discussing the Hindu atman (individual soul) as being part of Brahman (universal oversoul), both of which Buddha had denied. On the other hand, Koot Hoomi told Sinnett that as philosophers and Buddhists, the Brotherhood denied there was any such thing as God, either personal or impersonal. God, “not an innate but an acquired notion,” was a delusion based on ignorance. Then, Sinnett demanded, what did they believe in? “MATTER alone,” replied K.H. The existence of matter was a fact, as was the existence of motion, but the idea of pure spirit as Being or Existence “is a chimera, a gigantic absurdity.”155 Sinnett, the ever-inquiring newspaperman, interrogated, dug, and whirled in bewildered circles at the hybrid philosophy being tossed his way in pamphlet-sized letters that became, as time went on, increasingly sloppy and sometimes very nearly illegible. When Patience remarked that the messiness made K.H. seem more human, H.P.B. paid even less attention to her penmanship.

  Helena clearly developed her system as she went along, but, not being an omniscient Mahatma, she frequently stumbled into contradictions, then had to exercise great ingenuity to account for them. Even the name she devised for her system, Esoteric Buddhism, got her in trouble. Later she would claim that she had used the word buddhist as buddhi, wisdom or enlightenment, not in the generally accepted meaning of the word. Using English translations by scholars such as Rhys Davids, whom she professed to despise, she busily ransacked Buddhist scriptures and then went on to riffle the Puranas and the Upanishads with the wanton determination of a shopper hunting for unbruised fruit. No religion was truly sacred to her, certainly not Christianity with its heaven and hell, nor Hinduism, whose practitioners Mahatma M. once disparaged as “fools and babus, etc.,” not even Buddhism, whose founder had disdained the supernatural, saying that “by this ye shall know that a man is not my disciple, that he tries to work a miracle” and who on his deathbed reputedly said, “I have not kept anything back.”156 Helena Blavatsky’s emerging esoteric doctrines leaned
heavily on knowledge she insisted the Buddha had kept back, and as for miracles, she had never been able to resist them.

  To Henry, the opening weeks of 1882 were memorable for the number of phenomena that took place at the “Crow’s Nest,” but he preferred not to describe or even enumerate them in his memoirs, because he thought them obviously fraudulent and added touchingly, “I try to be honest.”157 But they were not done for his benefit. On December 28, Ross Scott and Minnie Hume had been married at Simla with the blessing of both H.P.B. and the Mahatmas, and had come to honeymoon at Theosophical headquarters. Helena had entertained great hopes for Scott, even promising that the Masters would repair his lame leg and perhaps take him on as an apprentice, and Koot Hoomi had endorsed the union in the hope of bringing Minnie’s father into the Theosophic fold. Of course the Mahatmic matchmaking had taken place before H.P.B.’s less than pleasurable experiences with Allan at Simla. Now she discovered that Minnie was her father’s daughter.

  If Minnie had ever believed in Madame’s phenomena, she certainly turned into a skeptic once she learned that the brooch she had given Scott found its way into her parents’ flower beds. So when a Mahatma letter dropped on her husband’s head in the dining room of the “Crow’s Nest,” neither of them took it seriously. They were not brash enough to call their hostess a fraud, but after their departure they apparently had no hesitation in telling all, H.P.B. professed to have not the slightest idea why the couple had turned against her and rationalized it by saying that Minnie was jealous of the hold she had over Scott. “She owes her husband to the Brothers and me,” she too confidently declared to Sinnett. “What more natural than that she should traduce both the ‘Brothers’ and myself!”158

  Her mood was not improved when she received a denigrating letter from Allan Hume in which he described the pamphlet he was preparing on Theosophy. His plan was first to denounce the Society as a sham and then, having demolished it, to answer all the objections he had raised in regard to the Brothers, adding slyly to H.P.B., “if there are Brothers.”159 She had no illusions about the form his answers would take, not when he could write caustic statements like the following:

  You, you dear old sinner (and wouldn’t you have been a reprobate under normal conditions?) are the worst breach of all—your entire want of control of temper—your utterly un-Buddha and un-Christlike manner of speaking of all who offend you—your reckless statements form together an indictment that it is hard to meet—I have I think got round it. But though I may stop others’ mouths, I personally am not satisfied.160

  The more he investigated her theories, he went on, “the less they seem to hold water. The more they bear the look of contrivances thrown out on the spur of the moment to meet an immediate difficulty.”161 Nobody saw Helena more clearly than Hume, and it must have chilled her. Certainly, she did not want “friends” like Hume defending her. At the end of January she was temporarily diverted by a short journey with Olcott to Poona but on her return she again panicked over Hume and felt the need to exhume Master Koot Hoomi. “My Brother,” he wrote Sinnett, “I have been on a long journey after supreme knowledge, I took a long time to rest.”162 However, he was pained to learn that fearful developments had taken place in his absence. “A cloud does lower over your path—it gathers about the hill of Jakko,” in the person of none other than Allan Hume, who “is under a baleful influence and may become your enemy.”163

  Having covered herself for the coming storm with this prophetic warning, H.P.B. allowed herself to be sidetracked, this time into the antique furniture and art business. As a result of her Simla letter to Prince Alexander Dondoukoff-Korsakoff, the two of them had started a flirtatious correspondence, even exchanging photographs. Giving way to nostalgia that she usually managed to hide, possibly because she knew that she would never see Alexander again, Helena retraced for him the largely fictional story of her life since she had fled Russia. Then she went on to describe her present circumstances in terms that Olcott and the other residents of the “Crow’s Nest” would not have recognized. She told Alexander that she lived in a Chinese pagoda equipped with “halls for meetings, libraries, laboratories for chemical and psychological experiments, etc.” The reception hall of her personal quarters was usually thronged with “some fifty fools of all races”164 waiting to speak with her. In spite of this hectic schedule, she was delighted to put herself at Alexander’s service and when he asked for Indian furniture and curios, she promptly replied: “Write to me exactly what you want, what kind of furniture, and for what price,”165 and proceeded to compose a two-page description of her own bookcases and tables, including the prices she had paid.

  Filling Alexander’s shopping list occupied some of Helena’s spare time that year, but she soon came to regret her commitment, for he was exceedingly slow in reimbursing her. Still, the Prince was the tie to a lost past so precious, she would overlook even his scorn for the contact. When she came across a nasty item about herself in a St. Petersburg paper and realized the source had to be Alexander, she corrected him without rancor. She had not invented a new religion, as the paper claimed; on the contrary, she took credit for inventing nothing. “My belief is a complete lack of belief, even in myself... I believe ONLY in human stupidity.”166 But, in fact, human stupidity often failed her, witness Henry, whom she had come to regard as the most gullible of all. By now she must have intuited his changed feelings toward her because he was spending as little time as possible at the “Crow’s Nest” and, when he was home, their relationship seemed strained. On February 17, he set out on a tour of North India and his fully-detailed memoirs describe lectures, meetings, and assorted dignitaries whom he had inducted into the Society. Helena had usually been content to leave this sort of tiresome barnstorming to him but now must have needed a change of scenery. At the end of March she temporarily assuaged her restlessness with a short excursion to Allahabad where she persuaded Djual Khool to “precipitate” a portrait of Master Koot Hoomi. Alfred Sinnett, marveling, had no way of knowing how closely K.H. physically resembled Madame’s old spirit friend John King.

  A week later she joined Olcott in Calcutta where Henry described them “busy as working bees, writing, receiving visitors, holding discussions with outsiders, and meetings of the new local Branch.”167 On the fourteenth of April he recorded in his diary the election of new officers for the Bengal Theosophical Society; at the bottom of the page, Mohini Mohun Chatterji is listed as Assistant Secretary. At the time, Mohini was a twenty-four-year-old Brahmin attorney and poet, a descendant of the Hindu reformer Raja Rammohun Roy and a relation of Debendra Nath Tagore, father of the celebrated poet. He was a slender youth with thick blue-black hair falling in waves to his shoulders and magnificent velvety eyes that normally held a gentle expression. There was no mistaking his intelligence, nor overlooking the almost perfect beauty that two years hence would set aflutter the smart young women of Paris and London.

  H.P.B. had always collected promising young men as her disciples; some, like Ross Scott, failed her, but when she exercised her judgment carefully and selected more serious types like Damodar, she was amply rewarded. Nevertheless, at Calcutta she seems to have taken small note of Mohini Chatterji, no doubt because she was in hot pursuit of another young man whom she needed far more. For several months she had been eying a high-caste Telugu Brahmin, T. Subba Row, who had exhibited a lively initial interest in the Theosophical Society. In due course, they were corresponding regularly.

  Although Subba Row belonged to a family of distinction, his uncle being prime minister to the Rajah of Pithapuram, he had showed no unusual intelligence or a bent for mysticism as a child. After studying law at Madras Presidency College, he joined the legal firm of Grant and Laing and became a pleader in the Baroda High Court. By the time he met H.P.B. his practice had grown lucrative and he was on the threshold of becoming a prominent attorney, perhaps, in time, a statesman. Slowly his interests were being diverted to philosophy, and he now began to feel that a storehouse of occult knowled
ge and Sanskrit literature were suddenly opening to him; he felt that his familiarity with the Gita and Upanishads was perhaps a karmic carryover from a previous life. Hence by twenty-five, Subba Row had become a brilliant classical scholar, but how this had happened was a mystery even to his own mother. To her questions, he only answered that he dare not discuss these secret matters with her.

  Despite his reticence, H.P.B. managed to learn that he was a disciple of Shankaracharya, a south Indian sage. Subba Row was the perfect person to consult on the Mahatma letters, and she began to envision the youth as the gateway to deep secrets and genuine adepts she had not yet reached. Subba Row, however, was an extremely reserved young man and when she had pressed him for introductions, he backed off. “It is almost impossible, Madame, to induce any of these mystics to come before the public and clear the doubts which skeptics entertain as regards the reality of Yoga Vidya and the existence of Adepts.”168 H.P.B. rejoiced in finding someone to corroborate her stories of Indian adepts, and when Subba Row expressed a desire to meet her, she could hardly wait to take him on. For some time now, Henry had been intending to visit Madras Presidency and suddenly he found H.P.B., who had never shown much interest in organizing tours, most anxious to accompany him.

  They were to embark on the nineteenth of April from Calcutta, but the SS India, Olcott wrote, “lay at the wharf all night taking in cargo and what with this awful din, the scorching heat of the cabins and the mosquitoes, one may imagine the kind of night we spent and the kind of temper H.P.B. was in the next morning!”169 By this time Henry much preferred to travel without Helena, and for good reason.