Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  Subba Row could not have been more gracious, delegating himself to bring out to the ship a party of Madras dignitaries and a large crowd of sightseers. Then they drove along the beach road to the suburb of Mylapore, where H.P.B. and Olcott were grandly installed in a private house. To Henry the visit seemed nothing less than a total success: some of the city’s leading men rushed to join the Society on “a wave of enthusiasm,”170 as he called it. Unfortunately H.P.B. had less success, even though she presented her most charming side to Subba Row, to the extent of having him initiated into membership in a private ceremony. Still, he did not reveal anything useful. Toward the end of the week, feeling more than a little exasperated, Helena invited him and sixteen other newly admitted members on a jaunt to the nearby holy city of Tiruvellum, the site of one of Southern India’s oldest temples. It was said that great sages had once dwelled in the town and perhaps some still did, and possibly H.P.B. counted on meeting one of them lurking around. Her party was greeted at the station with music and flowers, but H.P.B. could barely restrain herself and rushed off to see the temple. She got as far as the inner sanctuary only to be stopped by Brahmin priests who demanded a surcharge of twenty-five rupees per head. “We felt so disgusted,” said Olcott, “that we refused to go into the polluted shrine, and returned the same day to Madras.”171

  On May 3, Helena and Henry left Madras and embarked on an idyllic four-week journey by houseboat up the Buckingham Canal to Nellore and Guntur. For the first time in years they were alone together, with only Babula and the boat crew for company, and Henry remembered that they “had never been so closely drawn together.” For Helena it was a time of comfortable seclusion, when the chaos of her ordinary existence could be put aside; K.H. did not pick up his pen, nor did Master M., and blessedly she was beyond the reach of her enemies. It did not matter that the boat was cramped or that in the tiny cabin there was barely room for their camp cots, two lockers, a lavatory, and a portable table that folded up and hung from the ceiling. At night as they glided along, the only sounds they heard were the occasional yelp of a jackal and the lapping of the water, and they smelled nothing but the wet rice fields. In the mornings when they scudded up to the bank, the coolies would build a fire to cook curry and rice, while Babula prepared “a capital breakfast” for Helena and Henry, after which Henry would go for a swim.

  The days passed in euphoric quiet, with H.P.B. in a shabby wrapper sitting on the locker opposite Henry, smoking and daydreaming. “She was in good health and spirits,” Olcott remembered, “and there was nothing to mar the charm of our companionship.” At Nellore they disembarked to organize a branch society, climbed back on the boat, and went on to Padaganjam where they had to abandon their floating haven and take jampan chairs for the thirty-five-mile trip through dense forests to Guntur. The journey was tedious, the thermometer read a blazing-hot ninety-eight degrees in the shade, and the coolies kept up a staccato refrain that eventually jarred the nerves. Fording a river, their bearers stripped naked to their breech cloths; the water turned out to be so deep that the chairs had to be held over the bearers’ heads. Henry recalled: “H.P.B. began shouting at me that these men would surely upset her. I shouted back that it didn’t matter, as she was too fat to sink and I should fish her out.”172 To take her mind off her predicament, she continuously cursed Olcott and the coolies who could not understand a word she said. Reaching the opposite bank at last, she puffed furiously on a succession of cigarettes until she had recovered her amiability. Life was good then.

  At Guntur, where the whole town population greeted them, they plunged into a roistering welcome. It was one of the few times in her life when reality matched Helena’s fantasies. Writing to Prince Alexander, she could have described the scene unembroidered and it would have seemed extraordinary. But habit dies hard, and, with her customary exuberance, she transformed her jampan chair into “a golden palanquin,” and added a few nautch girls and banners reading “Welcome revered Madame Blavatsky.”173 Everyone loved her, but in the midst of her exhilaration she suffered from an acute spasm of depression and wondered, “What is the good of all these triumphs?” Suddenly, for no obvious reason, she was engulfed by homesickness and shared it with the Prince. “Oh, my dear Prince,” she lamented, “if I were 20 or 25 years younger... I would have made the conquest of India without spilling a drop of blood and I would have given it to the motherland.” The torchlight parades and the crowds of cheering Hindus meant, after all, little to her; it was Russia she longed for but would never see again. “I will die here and my sinful flesh and bones will be burned on a funeral pyre and my ashes scattered to the breadth of the Aryavartas.” Then, ashamed of her morbid self-pity, she added impishly, “Shall I send you a pinch?”174

  For some time now, H.P.B. and Olcott had been talking about buying a permanent headquarters for the Theosophical Society at some place other than Bombay, whose heat and dampness Helena had come to dislike. Their Cingalese friends had made liberal offers of rent-free houses, but she agreed with Henry that Ceylon was too far removed from the mainstream and too backward for their purposes. Now, returning to Madras on May 30, she found several of their members urging her to come there. She could not have been more pleased, for it was of consummate importance to be within consulting distance of the elusive Subba Row. Still, she was guarded in her response and replied that she would only consider the idea if a suitable house could be found. Henry also reacted cautiously: they were low enough on money so that he was loathe to embark on the move without a financial commitment, by contribution or loan, from local members. Luckily, three members pledged two hundred and fifty rupees apiece.

  Early the next day, in a whirlwind of enthusiasm, the two sons of Judge Muttuswamy Chetty began to scout available real estate and by afternoon had come up with a property that was going cheap in the suburb of Adyar. That very evening the brothers drove Helena and Henry out along the Bay of Bengal to Huddleston Gardens, a twenty-one-acre estate on the banks of the sluggish Adyar River. Entering the gate and starting up the long avenue of mango and banyan trees, H.P.B. was already enchanted. From a distance the graceful pillared mansion appeared to be made of white marble, and although it was really brick plastered white, its elegance could not be denied. In addition to the main house, the grounds also afforded two small riverside bungalows, a brick stable and coachhouse, storage buildings and a swimming pool. It was like a small village. Soobiah Chetty told her that the modest asking price of nine thousand rupees (about three thousand dollars at that time) was due to the recent opening of the railway between Madras and the foot of the Nilgiri Hills, which made the summer resort of Ootacamund only a day’s ride away. Fashionable people who had once made their homes at Adyar were migrating to Ooty, as it was nicknamed, and were throwing their opulent estates on a bidderless market.

  When the carriage pulled up to the house, H.P.B. clambered down and went straight inside, while the Chetty boys and Olcott inspected the riverside bungalows and the outbuildings. After tramping about the lower floor, she climbed up to a large tower-like room on the flat roof. From there she could see on the opposite bank of the river a little island connected to the mainland by a pink bridge. The air was alive with the beating wings of large flying foxes who swooped out from the city at sunset and sat feeding among the branches of the mango trees. Here she felt was a place she could be happy in, especially here in the roof room, which of course would be hers. Descending the stairs, she sent for the Chettys. “Soobiah,” she smiled, “Master says buy this.”175

  Master did not show the way to find nine thousand rupees, however, and it was Olcott and the Madras Theosophical Society who had to mastermind the transaction. Not until November would the purchase be completed.

  Back in Bombay just in time for monsoon season, Helena was greeted by a plethora of calamities. The least of them was a letter from Vera with the wholly unexpected news that their brother Leonid had been involved in a scandal and dismissed from his judgeship at Stavropol. Fortunately he had been
acquitted at his trial but now could find no other position; according to Vera, he and his family were impoverished. In no way did Helena enjoy playing the supplicant, especially for the always distant Leonid, but she swallowed her pride and wrote immediately to Prince Alexander asking him for help. “Do this good deed and I will die in peace, blessing you and your family, and I will be ever your servant here and after death,” a rash promise from one who did not believe in an afterlife. Three months later, horribly embarrassed when she learned that Vera had exaggerated the whole thing, she reported to Alexander that her brother was “a weathercock of the family of weathercocks! Don’t bother about him.”176

  Of greater concern during the next three months were catastrophes affecting what she had come to regard as her family in India. Her biggest solace and promoter in the past two years had been Alfred Sinnett, not merely as her friend and Koot Hoomi’s star pupil, but in his capacity as editor of the Pioneer. While every other English paper in India exhibited rabid hostility toward her, she could always count on the Pioneer for vindication. And if Sinnett sometimes balked, Koot Hoomi would step in to explain why such and such an article had to be published. However, Sinnett’s zealous propagandizing on behalf of the Theosophical Society was growing offensive to the paper’s owners, who warned him to exercise restraint; he was making the Pioneer look ridiculous, and consequently the circulation was beginning to drop. Against his own better judgment but on the advice of the Mahatmas, Sinnett ignored the warnings, and in August he was notified that when his contract expired in 1883, it would not be renewed.

  Sinnett had not expected that his loyalty to the Masters would cost him his job and now, terribly distressed, rushed to H.P.B. demanding to know what the Mahatmas were going to do about his dismissal.

  Momentarily taken back, Helena rattled off soothing answers similar to those she had spoonfed Olcott in New York: not to worry, the Mahatmas were not ungrateful people who abandoned their own in time of trouble. On the contrary, Sinnett could expect to be taken care of; perhaps a way might even be found for him to remain in India. And now she was faced with having to devise a solution.

  After high-level decisions in Tibet and consultation with the generally inaccessible Chohan himself, Koot Hoomi advised Sinnett to found an English-language newspaper financed by Indian capital. Reminding him that he was no businessman, and the Brotherhood not a bank, he went on to conjecture that five lakhs of rupees (approximately $ 170,000) might be sufficient as a start. The money could be raised in no time from native princes and bankers, he suggested, then proceeded to tick off editorial suggestions.

  Helena needed Sinnett in India more than he needed the Mahatmas, and after her initial scare, she calmed down and came up with what seemed the ideal solution. A Sinnett-run paper would be the media outlet she needed to get the Mahatmas the respect they deserved. “Their names have been sufficiently dragged in the mud,” she wrote Alfred. “They have been misused and blasphemed against by all the penny-a-liners in India. Nowadays people call their dogs and cats by the name of ‘Koot-hoomi’...” That these sentences occurred in the middle of a letter protesting Alfred’s publicity efforts on behalf of the Masters only indicates how H.P.B.’s manipulation of Sinnett really worked. Even her capitalized proclamation, “I DO NOT CARE ABOUT PUBLIC OPINION,”177 merely camouflaged her fear of ridicule. She cared nothing about herself, she insisted, only about the Masters whose names must not be desecrated. Since she was the Masters, this protestation was both true and false.

  During that summer, rats ate her canary, and Helena was feeling particularly vulnerable, though one would not have suspected it from the restraint and lofty objectivity of the Theosophist. Any hope she had cherished of achieving respectability through the Arya Samaj was dead; Swami Dayananda had actually gone to the expense of printing handbills denouncing her and Henry as “atheists, liars and selfish persons”178 who knew the art of clever conjuring but nothing of the Yoga Vidya. In an editorial comment she gently chided him as an “eccentric,”179 but claimed she could take his brickbats philosophically for she had anticipated them.

  She also appeared to take lightly Allan Hume’s Hints on Esoteric Theosophy, in which her writings were termed crude, unenlightened, and beneath the criticism of real scholars; her Society was an excuse for talk instead of action; her personal motives amounted to “the love of notoriety—the desire to be known—to be somebody instead of nobody.”180 In Hume’s opinion, neither he nor any other Theosophist had learned one iota about psychic power or the hidden mysteries of nature as a result of his membership in the Society. Helena reserved her disgust for Sinnett’s ears: “Oh Jesus son of the nun and uncle of Moses!”181 she erupted. She had had enough of “the great Hume, the Mount Everest of intellect”182 and if he wished to leave the Society, she wished him a speedy farewell. Koot Hoomi did not go quite so far, merely attributing Hume’s barbs to jealousy. “Did I not warn you?” he reminded Alfred.183

  Dayananda and Hume had been anticipated. What Helena had not glimpsed in her crystal ball was trouble from Charles Massey, president of the British Theosophical Society. There were a few people she had taken real pains to win, and Massey was one of them. How could she know that rascal Hurrychund Chintamon would go to London, strike up an acquaintanceship with Massey, and squeal that Madame and her Mahatmas were frauds? It was a piece of bad luck. Nonetheless back in the summer of 1879 she had taken precautions to counteract Chintamon by appealing to her old friends and helpers Mary Hollis Billing and her spirit guide “Ski”:

  My dear Good Friend:

  Do you remember what Z [Ski] told or rather promised to me? That whenever there is need for it he will always be ready to carry any message, leave it either on Massey’s table, his pocket, or some other mysterious place. Well now, there is the most important need for such a show of his powers. Please ask him to take the enclosed letter and put it into M.’s pocket, or in some other still more mysterious place. But he must not know it is Z.184

  The enclosure was a Koot Hoomi letter that Massey eventually discovered tucked inside the pages of the Society’s minute book. Since no one could conceive of how it got there, Massey concluded it must have traveled from Tibet to London supernaturally, and he was thrilled—for the moment. Before long local skeptics, in the persons of Hurrychund and Mary’s husband, whispered that the Mahatma letter had arrived by steamer from India and had in fact been delivered by Mary herself. Pressed for the truth, she admitted her role and even showed Massey Madame’s letter of instruction.

  Apparently this experience had not totally disenchanted Massey, for he never confronted H.P.B. directly, but he was transformed from a believer into a needling critic. In the July 1882 issue of Light, a London Spiritualist weekly, he posed a question more embarrassing than anything Hume had come up with: Why did the Mahatmas teach the concept of reincarnation as one of the basic tenets of their philosophy when their messenger, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, had contemptuously denied reincarnation five years earlier in Isis Unveiled? To jog Madame’s memory, he quoted from page 351 of the first volume of Isis, in which she stated that reincarnation was not a natural rule but “an exception like the teratological phenomenon of a two-headed infant.”185 It happens, she had written, only in cases of abortion, infant death, or incurable idiocy, that is, when nature had not been able to produce a perfect human being. Massey mused whether Koot Hoomi was not, “as has been maliciously suggested, an alias for Madame Blavatsky.”186

  Until coming out to India Helena had displayed quite a vocal abhorrence of reincarnation, not only in Isis but in person and in letters to friends. But in India, where the idea was taken for granted and where no respectable Mahatma would have been caught denying it, she had quickly altered her opinion, suddenly finding reincarnation quite feasible. Unfortunately page 351 of Isis still had to be explained. In the first place, she replied to Massey in the Theosophist, Isis was not only incomplete and clumsy but teeming with errors; secondly, while writing Isis, she had not been permitted to te
ach reincarnation. Now she was. It was that simple.

  To her annoyance, this reply to Massey brought a snide letter from Allan Hume suggesting it was a pity that the Masters had not copyedited Isis more carefully, and further that it was “a sin on their part” to have withheld important information. In any case, the Mahatmas cared nothing about accuracy and “in one week I could teach any ordinarily intelligent man, all, that in eighteen months, we all of us have succeeded in extracting from them.”187

  By September Helena felt drained. Weeks earlier her exhaustion had taken the form of boredom with her charade; she felt that “inner suffering is drying up the marrow of my spine” and merely longed for death. It seemed to her that she had been “a hundred times happier in the days when I was hungry and lived in a garret.”188 Suddenly everything that she had worked for seemed insignificant, all the important people she had won to her cause only “stupid little donkeys.” Perhaps, she wrote Prince Alexander, “when I die and all the philosophy and miracles cease, then they will become more intelligent.”189

  Virtually all of the summer’s crises she had faced alone; Henry was now back in Ceylon and the overworked Damodar had collapsed and been sent away to recuperate. By autumn Helena’s psychic tensions were erupting in serious illness because when she consulted a physician she was given the unexpected news that she had Bright’s disease. Horribly discouraged and frightened, she sat down to compose a deathbed farewell to Patience and Alfred (and mailed an almost verbatim copy of the letter to her sister):

  I am afraid you will have soon to bid me goodbye... This time I have it well and good—Bright’s disease of the kidneys; and the whole blood turned into water with ulcers breaking out in the most unexpected and the less explored spots, blood or whatever it may be forming into bags a la Kangaroo and other pretty extras and etceteras.190