Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  Helena dedicated herself to working with Alexis on the design of the shrine itself, a cedarwood cupboard lacquered black to look like ebony. About four feet in width and height and twelve to fifteen inches in depth, it was to be made with three sliding panels at the back, which would be invisible to the casual observer. Not until much later did Helena, under pressure, concede the existence of the panels and even then claimed that their sole purpose was to facilitate dismantling for traveling purposes. However, since the rest of the shrine was of solid construction, it is difficult to understand the advantages in merely removing portions of the back. In any event, once the drawing was completed, she gave it to the Madras cabinetmaking firm of Duchamps.

  By late February or early March, the finished cabinet was delivered and hung against the former north window of Helena’s bedroom. The window was no longer visible because part of it had been filled in with brick and plaster and the small opening that remained was hidden by the shrine on one side of the wall, and by a wardrobe on Helena’s side. If anyone wondered about the window, they were supposed to assume it had been boarded up.

  Later, up until as recently as 1963, interested parties would attempt to reconstruct the relative positions of the shrine and wardrobe. Floor plans would be drawn, secret passageways hypothesized, wall thicknesses estimated, theories and counter-theories advanced in such dizzying profusion that one quickly becomes mired in a quicksand of so-called evidence. The Theosophists’ explanation that the hidden opening eventually discovered between the two rooms was made after Madame Blavatsky went to Europe is possible, of course, but unpersuasive, since it violates common sense by implying that the shrine apports were genuine. Granted, common sense is not always an appropriate yardstick in psychical matters but it is the preferred solution. “The common sense rule of presumption in scientific logic,” William James once stated, “is never to assume an unknown agent where there is a known one, and never to choose a rarer cause for a phenomenon when a commoner one will account for it. The usual is always more probable.”209 There is no good reason for supposing that the sole purpose of the shrine was anything other than a means of facilitating H.P.B.’s phenomena, mainly as a mailbox for Mahatma letters, although other gifts from the Masters were also slipped in through the back door.

  Once the shrine arrived from Duchamps, Alexis personally undertook its installation; it rested on a shelf, but its chief support consisted of two thick iron wires attached to hooks near the ceiling. The wall behind the shrine was covered with white glazed calico while the other three walls of the room were tacked with red-and-white striped calico; the space around the shrine was enclosed by muslin curtains that could be drawn aside when anyone came to worship. The decor, Helena’s creation, seems to have been immensely charming, and the feeling in the room was one of gaiety instead of the usual religious sobriety.

  As the winter wore on, Helena busied herself with the Theosophist and her Mahatma correspondence, which was changing almost imperceptibly in its character and tone. Rarely did Koot Hoomi bother with the metaphysical treatises that had reflected H.P.B.’s higher self. Now the letters were chiefly notable for their observations of persons and events, the commentary frequently malicious, especially so coming from a Buddhist supposedly following the noble eight-fold path and practicing right speech. Sinnett had plans to incorporate the Mahatma’s more recent teachings into a book and call it Esoteric Buddhism, which K.H. thought an excellent idea; but when Alfred suggested going to Darjeeling or Sikkim and meeting the Master face to face, he was gently dissuaded and his plan rejected as being “simply impracticable. The time has not yet come.”210

  Alfred’s request reflected the ups and downs in his life then. His position at the Pioneer had grown intolerable and his prospects for establishing a new paper, to be called the Phoenix were bleak, since not one rupee of capital had thus far been raised. In February, months before his contract with the Pioneer was due to expire, he suddenly resigned, notifying Helena that he and his family would be visiting England; he had every intention of returning and promised to take no other position for a year. En route to London, they stopped for several weeks at Adyar where Alfred began the writing of Esoteric Buddhism. It seemed to him the perfect situation, since whenever he had questions for the Mahatmas, he could easily drop a request into the shrine and receive a reply almost immediately.

  By the time Colonel Olcott returned from Bengal on May 25, it appeared that the shrine was in good working order: already it had processed Alfred’s letters, a gift for Patience, and a string of encouraging notes for the Hindus who came to prostrate themselves before the curtained cupboard. Eager to show off her contrivance, Helena decided to arrange a special event for Henry’s homecoming and sent Emma into town to purchase four Chinese vases, two small and two large. M. Faciole and Co. did not, evidently, have the vases in stock but offered to obtain them from Assam and Co. The shop gave Emma a receipt, dated May 25, for thirteen rupees (seven rupees for the larger pair of vases, six for the smaller).

  The next day Helena escorted Olcott up to the Occult Room and opened the door to the shrine. Inside, draped with yellow silk, lay framed portraits of Morya and Koot Hoomi, and a silver bowl. The pungent aroma of incense filled the room. She would not be surprised, she told him, if the Mahatmas had left a token of their affection for him, as well as a welcoming note. The shrine doors closed, then reopened, and of course Henry found his note with a Chinese vase.211 According to Emma Coulomb, it was Henry who then wondered if the vase could be “doubled.” “Madame asked ‘mentally’ the permission of the Mahatma on duty,” Emma said, and after obtaining it, the colonel was allowed to make a few mesmeric passes. When the cupboard was opened, “Lo! another vase was there.”212 That night Henry wrote in his diary, “May 26th. Fine phenomenon. Got pair of tortoise-shell and lacquer vases with flowers in a cabinet a moment before empty.”213 It felt good to be appreciated.

  Madras in the summer was not so pleasant as Madras in winter. Toward the end of June, when the thermometer in the compound read a hundred twenty-eight degrees in the shade, the west wind began to blow at sunrise and howled incessantly until late afternoon; Helena was told that it kept right on blowing until the end of August. Protective measures had to be taken: all the doors and windows facing the wind were covered with thick tattis or mats, the chinks stopped up and even the most minuscule openings stuffed with cotton wool. But still the wind managed to infiltrate the books and manuscripts until the papers on Helena’s desk rolled themselves up into tiny tubes. If the sofas and chairs in her room were not beaten every hour, they were soon covered with a layer of dust three-quarters of an inch thick.

  For this reason, fashionable people began leaving in March for Ootacamund, the hill station in the Nilgiri Mountains. “I also decided to leave,” Helena wrote, “but not in the spring; it was already the middle of July and the West-wind had had enough time to dry me to the marrow of my bones.” More to the point, it was not until early July that she received a welcome invitation from Maj.-Gen. and Mrs. Henry Rhodes Morgan and their eight children to summer at Ooty on their tea-and-coffee plantation. The Morgans had become Theosophists and Helena liked them very much, especially Mrs. Morgan, a cultivated and intelligent woman who ran the plantation and also had written a book, Witchcraft on the Nilgiri. On the seventh of July, “half dead with heat, I rapidly packed my bags.” Keys to the Occult Room were entrusted to Emma, instructions for the magazine given to Damodar, farewells made to Babaji, Ananda Charloo and a dozen other Indians now making their home in the compound. Despite Babula’s protestations that he wanted to stay behind with his wife, the two of them boarded a train at 6 p.m., arrived the next noon at Metopolam in the foothills of the Nilgiris, and from there began the trip up to Ooty in “an abominable box on two wheels covered with a linen roof.” The tongas on the road to Simla, Helena thought, were like royal compartments compared to her carriage, which reminded her of “a kennel where the dogs are kept during a voyage,” nor was she reassured at
the sight of “two miserable worn-out nags” pulling the conveyance.

  The journey was not without incident: a half hour after they departed, one of the horses fell and the carriage tumbled into a ditch, the single casualty being Helena’s dress, which was ripped in the accident. To make matters worse it began to rain. “My cab was soon transformed into a bathtub with shower,” she recalled, adding that the temperatures soon began to plunge and “I was freezing in my fur coat.” But she was not seriously grumbling, for the brisk air, impregnated with the perfume of violets and pine, was delicious after the swelter of Madras. She arrived in Ooty on a Sunday evening, just as people were returning from evening church service, emerging shaken and disheveled from her carriage with her trunks “half broken and soiled with mud.” That night, “I trembled with cold under my blankets and had to have a fire during the whole night.”214

  But Ooty was worth the climb; it had all Simla’s benefits with one special advantage: this time she was a bonafide celebrity. Although she was embarrassed by the Morgans’ unrelenting concern for her comfort, she could not help wallowing in the plethora of invitations to receptions, dinner parties and balls, savoring the delight of being “lioness of the day.” To Sinnett in London, she could not resist the urge to brag:

  My graceful, stately person, clad in half Tibetan half night-dress fashion, sitting in all the glory of her Calmuck beauty at the Governor’s and Carmichael’s dinner parties; H.P.B. positively courted by the aide-decamps! Old ‘Upasika’ hanging like a gigantic nightmare on the gracefully rounded elbows of members of the Council, in pumps and swallow tail evening dress and silk stockings smelling brandy and soda enough to kill a Tibetan Yak!!215

  To Sinnett’s rather forlorn but insistent queries about the status of the Phoenix, she showed her impatience by replying airily, “You ask me, dear,... And how can I know!”216 Even Koot Hoomi, she added, had given up in disgust and despair. She knew that the paper would never become a reality and regretted ever mentioning the idea. In Ooty, she wanted to relax, banish cares and enjoy herself for a change.

  It took Helena only a few days to settle into a routine. In the mornings, when puddles in the road were covered with thin ice, she wrapped herself in her fur coat, settled in near a blazing wood fire and began to write articles about the Blue Mountains and its native tribes. The series would appear in Russia first as a series of newspaper articles and later as the book The People of the Blue Mountains; it would be probably her finest descriptive writing. Later in the day, when it had warmed up, she would drive around the lake or up into the hills famous for their lilies, heliotrope, masses of forget-me-nots, and cabbage roses that climbed up to the roofs of the houses. “Lord, what flowers!” she wrote her family in Russia. “I have not seen anything like them in my life... And all the hills are covered with raspberries and strawberries, blackberries also, each as big as your cherries.” Everything about Ooty enchanted her; the mushrooms were “delicious” and even the boa constrictors “also are beautiful.”217

  Each morning the European residents gathered at the post office for the daily ritual of mail distribution. “When the post has come in,” observed one sharp-tongued Englishwoman, “the excitement of the day is over for most people in Ootacamund.”218 For Helena, the suspense was just beginning, since it was by mail that she kept tabs on Emma and made sure the shrine continued to produce phenomena while she was three hundred seventy miles away. “It’s just post time my dear,” she scribbled to Madame Coulomb, “I have only an instant... Yes, let Srinavas Rao prostrate himself before the shrine and whether he asks anything or not I beg you to send him this reply by K.H. for he expects something. / know what he wants” Srinavas Rao was a judge of the Court of Small Causes in Madras.

  When another gentleman was expected to call at Adyar bearing a letter for K.H., she made sure he would not leave without a suitable reply. “In case he should do so here is Christofolo’s answer. For God’s sake arrange this and we are triumphant. I embrace and salute you.” It was Emma she had come to trust and depend upon, but, naturally, the woman could not be expected to think of everything. H.P.B. is constantly reminding her of details: tell Damodar not to skimp on incense for the shrine because “it is very damp and it ought to be well-incensed”; try to see that phenomena occur before a larger audience “than our domestic imbeciles only.” Helena saw little point in wasting perfectly good phenomena on the already converted.

  At the beginning of August, when General Morgan informed her he was going to Madras for a few days on business, H.P.B. urged him to stay at Adyar; he thought it too far from town but said he would certainly go out to see the famous shrine. There was not the slightest doubt in her mind that the General would expect a phenomenon, “for he told me so,” she wrote Emma. Probably he would put a question in the shrine, although he might be content merely to look at it. Either way, she wanted to make sure he left satisfied and impressed upon Emma that he “is worth his weight in gold. For the love of God, or of any one you please, do not miss this opportunity for we shall never have another.”219 The opportunity was, of course, her absence from the scene of the phenomenon.

  Arriving in Adyar on the thirteenth, General Morgan was ushered into the locked Occult Room by Madame Coulomb, who opened the double doors of the shrine so clumsily that a china saucer sitting inside crashed to the floor. He remembered Emma reacting with horror, murmuring that Madame would be angry, as it was one of her favorite pieces, then scooping up the shards into a cloth and placing them in the shrine in a silver bowl. When the general helpfully tried to suggest that the saucer might be glued back together, Alexis Coulomb went off to find mastic, and someone, probably Morgan himself, remarked that the Mahatma might be willing to repair the dish. “Hardly had I uttered this,” he recalled, “when Damodar said, There is a message.’ “ Inside the shrine, they found a letter from Koot Hoomi, reading “the mischief is easily repaired,”220 accompanied by the broken saucer miraculously made whole. According to General Morgan, the entire episode took less than five minutes.

  Later that same day, a weary Emma made a full report to Madame Blavatsky on the success of the saucer phenomenon, but a note of disgust had crept into her letter: “My Dear Friend, I verily believe I shall go silly if I stay with you.”221 The Adyar Saucer Incident, as it came to be known in Theosophical history, is chiefly notable for two reasons: it marked a subtle turn in Emma’s readiness to cooperate with H.P.B., and it is also the first indication that Damodar had crossed from Mahatmic dupe to confederate.

  By late August, Henry Olcott had returned from a two-month visit in Ceylon sporting a newly grown beard “down to the seventh rib,”222 H.P.B. noted, and flowing hair to match, and he joined her at Ootacamund for a short holiday. It was clear, however, that he did not take to Ooty social life so zestfully as did Helena, for he continually harped on the work to be done at Adyar; annoyed, she contemplated staying on without him and even warned Emma to bury the key for the Occult Room since she knew he would examine the shrine if he returned alone. At the last minute she decided to accompany him. The weather had turned chilly and she caught “a most fearful cold,”223 necessitating hot water bottles for her feet at night and layers of shawls and blankets during the day. Probably she developed the infection as a result of the thirty-two-degree difference in temperature between Ooty and Coimbatore, their first stop on the way home, but it does not seem to have incapacitated her in any way. In a bubbly letter she announced that, unless she heard from Emma to the contrary, she was going to buy her a French silk dress at Pondicherry as well as a suit for Alexis. She also announced Alexis’s appointment as the Society’s Librarian. Emma was instructed to buy him a desk and bookcase at Faciole’s and, while she was there, to pick out two or three new sofas for the veranda, plus several other pieces of furniture. Altogether H.P.B. grandly authorized Emma to spend up to three hundred rupees; it was secondhand shopping binges like this that were dismaying Olcott.

  To be sure, Helena’s idea of making Alexis librarian
was absurd, although it was intended purely as a gesture. Always generous to her friends, she demonstrated her fondness by showering them with gifts and she ended the letter with a touching admission of her feelings for Emma: “Truly, I love you. You are a true friend.”224

  On Sunday, the twenty-third of September, she returned home to find Headquarters in a shambles. During her absence, Damodar had continued to put out the magazine but correspondence had gone unanswered and manuscripts submitted for publication lay unopened. Damodar, terribly overworked, was hardly to blame, but she felt disappointed that so little had been done. When Sinnett reproved her for poor management, she snapped self-righteously that, unlike some people she knew, Olcott and herself began their day “at five in the morning with candle light and end it sometimes at 2 a.m. We have no time for lawn tennis as you had, and clubs and theatres and social intercourse.”225 As she had just returned from three months of whirligig living, this was harshly unfair as well as inaccurate, but it no doubt reflected her general distress. On her return to Adyar she had been confronted by the annoying obligation to defend Master Koot Hoomi on a charge of plagiarism.

  While H.P.B. was being lionized at Ootacamund, the retired New York school superintendent named Henry Kiddle was deciding to pursue a matter that had been puzzling him for more than a year. The previous summer, while reading Alfred Sinnett’s Occult World, he had been greatly surprised to find in one of Koot Hoomi’s letters a passage taken almost verbatim from a speech he himself had made. The address was first presented at a Spiritualist camp meeting at Lake Pleasant, Massachusetts, in August, 1880, and was published the same month in the Banner of Light. Kiddle immediately wrote to Sinnett through his publishers, but after receiving no response, he decided to tell all in a letter to the English Spiritualist paper, Light. While a fairly well-known Spiritualist and president of the American Spiritualist Alliance, Kiddle does not seem to have been in the least anti-Theosophist; he was merely bewildered: “As Mr. Sinnett’s book did not appear till a considerable time afterwards (about a year, I think) it is certain that I did not quote, consciously or unconsciously, from its pages. How, then, did it get into Koot Hoomi’s mysterious letter?”226 How indeed.