Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  By the end of the first week of January, Hodgson, having little more to do at Headquarters, moved back to Madras and on the ninth he paid a call on Emma and Alexis who were living at Saint-Thome with a missionary family, the Dyers. In the course of a general conversation, about premonitions, Hodgson was just admitting he had no theory to account for them, when

  something white appeared, touching my hair, and fell on the floor. It was a letter. I picked it up. It was addressed to myself. M. and Madame Coulomb were sitting near me and in front of me. I had observed no motion on their part which could account for the appearance of the letter. Examining the ceiling as I stood I could detect no flaw; it appeared intact. On opening the letter, I found it referred to the conversation which had just taken place.6

  There is no doubt that the Coulombs’ demonstration of a Mahatmic mail delivery was more impressive than any verbal description they might have supplied. The ceiling, Alexis explained to Hodgson, was supported by main beams and cross beams, the spaces filled in by blocks of wood and mortar. He had scraped out the mortar from one of the interstices, inserted the letter with a piece of thread wrapped around it, and given the end of the thread to an accomplice who, upon hearing him call the dog, caused the letter to take a nose dive. Their discussion of premonitions had been adroitly led up to without Hodgson’s realizing it. While Hodgson would assert that he did not regard as evidence any unsupported statement of the Coulombs because he regarded them as unscrupulous persons, one must assume that the demonstration had an effect on the investigation. It would be almost unimaginable had it not.

  Throughout this period Helena was keeping a careful watch on Hodgson’s movements. He appeared frequently at Adyar for dinner and talked freely about his work; and there was little that he did or said elsewhere that did not find its way back to her. Once she realized that he was interviewing people she regarded as her enemies, she grew uneasy. On January 3 she had written almost gaily to Solovyov that unquestionably she was the victim of a conspiracy and that Hodgson “too finds that it is a huge plot.”7 As for herself, “I am worn out and harassed, but still living, like an old cat with nine lives.”8 By the end of the month it was a different story. Olcott had gone off again, this time to Burma with Leadbeater, but even though they had nothing but angry words for each other now, she felt intensely alone without him.

  Evenings were the worst. Insisting that everyone who worked at Adyar come to her room, she would gather them around her for what she called a family party. One or two of the Hindus would be requested to sit on her bed and massage her aching legs. “My child,” she would say, “mesmerize my legs.”9 Later, when sleep refused to come to her, one of the Indians would remain all night on the sofa in her room but she would gruffly warn that snoring was not tolerated.

  By the end of January, her formal black company gown sat in her wardrobe, for she almost never left her bed. Within the space of three days she instructed Damodar to cable Henry at Rangoon, “Return at once. Upasika dangerously ill”;10 and then summoned Maj.-Gen. Henry Rhodes Morgan, Subba Row, and two other Hindus to witness the signing of her will. Her books and furniture she left to Henry, as well as two pairs of candlesticks that Nadyezhda had given her. Candlesticks were also bequeathed to Dr. Hartmann; silver mugs to Damodar, Ananda and Babaji; and her clothing to Vera’s daughters in Russia. She instructed that her body was to be burned and the ashes buried at Adyar, “and that none who are not Theosophists shall be present at the burning.” And finally, “I desire that yearly, on the anniversary of my death, some of my friends should assemble at the Headquarters of the Theosophical Society and read a chapter of Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia and Bhagavad Gita.”11

  Having put her affairs in order, she lay down and prepared herself for death, only to discover that her body refused to cooperate.

  During the previous four years, Helena had been afflicted from time to time with a number of mysterious ailments. Generally she did not go into details when describing her symptoms to correspondents, but merely tossed out vague hints that she had been unconscious or at the point of death when the Mahatmas intervened to save her life. There is no question that many of her illnesses were psychosomatic; the insomnia, pounding of the heart, and sensations of suffocation were all symptoms of severe anxiety complicated by depression. As for the symptoms diagnosed as Bright’s disease in 1882, these may have gone into remission because the several doctors who subsequently examined her in 1884 and ‘85 failed to mention it. At no time, however, did she seem to have been totally incapacitated: at those very moments when she claimed to be bedridden, she was generally rushing about to arrange some phenomenon. However, during her nine months in Europe a second identifiable disease began to emerge and from that time forward she speaks frequently of rheumatism and gout. Many who knew her corroborated the fact that she had trouble walking on her painfully swollen legs.

  While no medical records are available, it seems safe to conclude that from 1884 to the time of her death she did in fact suffer from gout, a serious and potentially crippling form of arthritis. The disease, known from antiquity as an affliction of the upper classes, was commonly attributed to gluttony. We know today that most cases of gout are caused by an inherited metabolic defect resulting from an overaccumulation of uric acid in the blood. The onset of an attack is generally related to a particular event: infection, overindulgence in food or alcohol, ill-fitting shoes, fatigue or emotional stress. At least two of these precipitating factors seem to be present in H.P.B.’s case, overeating and prolonged stress.

  Despite its reputation as a status symbol, gout is an extraordinarily painful inflammation that can flare up suddenly, often in the night. The affected joint becomes swollen and tender, the surrounding skin tightens and turns red or purplish. Other symptoms include fever, rapid heartbeats, chills and malaise, and some sufferers develop deposits of tophi, a chalky white derivative of uric acid. It is not known what, if any, treatment H.P.B.’s doctors advised since gout symptoms dissipate without treatment in a week or two. There is no cure for gout, but today anti-inflammatory drugs are used to treat acute attacks and prevent future incidents. In the nineteenth century, attacks of gout tended to become more severe and frequent, often leading to eventual kidney damage from deposits of urate, to the formation of kidney stones, and finally to permanent damage to the joints.

  If Helena had lived a hundred years later, she would have been advised to prevent recurrent attacks by avoiding stress and losing weight. But even had she known about rest cures, she could not at this time afford the luxury of quiet. On the contrary, Hodgson’s investigation had pushed her to the point of nervous collapse, which in turn aggravated her arthritic condition. Even if she had understood the ways in which her illnesses were interrelated, she would have been incapable of dealing with the situation. To her, the only relief was death.

  Although in no danger of dying, she felt as if she were, and these feelings must be viewed against a backdrop of the events taking place at Adyar aside from Hodgson’s activities. As she now realized, it had been a mistake to bring the Cooper-Oakleys to India because their marital difficulties had apparently come to a head and their domestic rows reverberated throughout the compound. Furthermore, Isabel was unable to handle the responsibility of caring for a woman she believed to be mortally ill. Night after night she sat beside Helena’s bed or paced the roof trying to get a breath of cool air. Later it would be said that the Indian climate did not agree with her, but since she had grown up in India this seems unlikely. Most probably it was the strain of round-the-clock nursing duty that caused her to break down. By the end of February her own strength would be gone, and by March she would not be able to stand without crutches.

  If H.P.B. could derive no comfort from Isabel, neither did she find solace in Franz Hartmann or in St. George Lane-Fox, who had recently returned from London. While she remained cloistered in her rooftop suite, the two men put their heads together and decided to reorganize the management of the Society; Olcott woul
d be relieved of his position as president and the executive authority transferred to a committee, composed mainly of themselves. A document to this effect was drawn up and brought upstairs for H.P.B.’s signature. Even allowing for her hostility toward Henry at that time, it seems incredible that she agreed to sign it, but she did, although immediately afterward she panicked.

  On February 5, the mail brought a copy of the S.P.R.’s preliminary report, which sent her into a towering rage. As has been noted, the report was really a private and confidential memorandum to members, based on evidence taken from Olcott and Mohini months before Hodgson had reached India. On the whole, it treated Madame Blavatsky rather gently, but Helena could not avoid detecting the sly contempt for Olcott, revealed for all the world to see as a childish purveyor of fairy tales. All Helena could think of while reading his testimony was the absurd toy Buddha, and her fury at him and the S.P.R. mounted. In the margin of the report, she scrawled in blue pencil:

  Madame Blavatsky, who will soon be dead and gone, for she is doomed, says this to her friends of the P.R.S.: ‘After my death these phenomena, which are the direct cause of my premature death, will take place better than ever... Never, throughout my long and sad life, never was there so much of uncalled for, contemptuous suspicion and contempt lavished upon an innocent woman as I find here in these few pages published by so-called friends.12

  In a pitiful postscript she added, “On my death-bed.”

  Later that day, when Henry arrived at Adyar, Hartmann and Lane-Fox served him with papers divesting him of his presidency. Dazed, he lumbered up to Helena’s room with the dismissal notice in his hand. Was it fair, he asked mildly, that a person who had built up the Society from nothing “should be turned out on the road to go hang” without so much as a thank you or a character reference? Helena moaned that she had signed something Hartmann and Lane-Fox brought to her without reading carefully. She begged him to tear it up.

  As much as she often disliked Olcott, she realized that she could not do without him; accordingly Hartmann and Lane-Fox were put in their places by a timely message from Mahatma Morya, who said that Olcott was doing a fine job and that the Masters would not agree to the Hartmann-Lane-Fox reorganization scheme. Henry’s reappearance seems to have strengthened H.P.B. because he noted in his diary that she was “about again and so much better.”13 When he received a telegram from Leadbeater on February 10 asking when he planned to return to Burma, Henry saw no reason for not going back and Helena consented. When they said goodbye, she cried and called him her old chum.

  Perhaps Henry was relieved to flee Adyar, heavy with intrigue and sickness. If so, he was not the only one, because ten days later Damodar Mavalankar also made his exit. Having broken with his family, deserted his wife and sacrificed his fortune to follow the Mahatmas, he must have found it hard to admit it was not a Brotherhood for whom he had sacrificed himself, but a middle-aged Russian woman who wished to use him as a confederate. There is no doubt of Helena’s fondness for Damodar, or of her well-placed confidence in his loyalty. By the winter of 1885, however, he had grown too disillusioned to function productively. The months of strain during which he had fought a losing battle against Emma and Alexis, struggled to shore up the front-line defenses while Madame roamed about Europe, and lied hand over fist to Hodgson, all these must have taken their toll, emotionally and physically, because he began to experience a return of his previously arrested tuberculosis.

  Even with the Society crumbling and Madame dying, Damodar could not completely let go of his belief in the Mahatmas. For nearly six years he had served as their chela, but now, weary and frightened, he wished to retreat from the pain of this world; like Ramaswamier, who had taken his umbrella and walked north to find the Masters or die, Damodar decided that he too would journey into the unknown. Leaving Adyar on February 23, he traveled in slow stages toward the Tibetan border by way of Calcutta and Benares and finally reached Darjeeling, his last stop before crossing the border into Sikkim.

  Sometime in July, Henry Olcott would receive word that Damodar’s naked corpse, frozen stiff, had been found in the snow near Chumboi, Sikkim, with his clothing scattered a little distance away. Henry refused to believe that the body was Damodar’s. It was not until a year later that the Society officially acknowledged Damodar’s departure in its magazine, stating that he “has safely reached his destination, is alive, and under the guardianship of the friends whom he sought.”14 For several years, Henry kept a bag packed so that in case he heard from Damodar, he would be ready to entrain immediately for Darjeeling.

  At the time of Damodar’s going, Helena must have been too embroiled in her own troubles to object or even to warn him that his health made such a strenuous journey ill-advised. Certainly she sympathized with his need to escape from Adyar for a while, and she gave him her blessing. “Happy Damodar!” she wrote. “He went to the land of Bliss, to Tibet and must now be far away in the regions of our Masters.” But perhaps she did realize the dangers because she added a realistic postscript, “No one will ever see him now, I expect.”15

  Damodar had fled through the looking glass into Madame Blavatsky’s fantasy world, but for Helena there could be no such convenient escape. Her fears continued to build when Richard Hodgson returned to Adyar in the company of Allan Hume, who had been rendering him assistance as a kind of deputy-detective. By this time, Hodgson had taken a completely different view of Madame Blavatsky. He had visited Bombay, where he took pains to crawl around the dusty attic of the “Crow’s Nest” checking to see if letters could be slipped through the rafter cracks; he had visited Hormusji Seevai, the jeweler who had repaired Minnie Hume’s brooch; he had talked to Edward Wimbridge about his experiences at Girgaum Back Road; and he also chanced to meet Hurrychund Chintamon, recently returned from England and eager to testify against the Theosophists. Apparently Chintamon had saved the 1878 letters Madame had written him from New York, those in which she had characterized Olcott as a “psychologized baby.”16 The Yankees, she had written, thought themselves very smart; Colonel Olcott believed himself smart even for a Yankee, but he would have to get up much earlier in the morning to be as smart as she.

  Back in Madras, with his dossier on Madame growing daily, Hodgson had inspected the receipt ledgers at M. Faciole and Co. and found entries for the saucers and vases that had subsequently appeared in the shrine as apports from Tibet; and he had finally wormed a confession from Franz Hartmann who told him the entire story of the shrine’s dismantling. After two-and-a-half months of painstaking legwork, Hodgson had arrived at five main conclusions: that no Brotherhood of Mahatmas existed, with or without occult powers; that Morya and Koot Hoomi were fictitious personages whose correspondence had been written by Madame Blavatsky, assisted on occasion by Damodar; that Madame had written letters to Emma Coulomb giving instructions for fraudulent phenomena; that no single phenomenon of the Madame’s could be regarded as genuine; and finally that the shrine had been nothing but a conjurer’s box designed to produce spurious miracles. The chief witnesses to the existence of the Brotherhood had been the Hindus at Adyar, but Hodgson felt convinced they had made false statements. The other witness of course was Henry Olcott, and while Hodgson suspected his testimony was often at variance with the facts, he did not think him guilty of willful dishonesty, only of stupidity and absurd credulity.

  As for Madame Blavatsky’s teachings, Hodgson would later write:

  Of those streams of superhuman knowledge I will only say I prefer to tap them at least one stage nearer the fountainhead. I lay claim to no vast erudition, but the sources which were good enough for Mme. Blavatsky were good enough for me and, so long as Bohn’s Classical Library and Trubner’s Oriental Library are within reach of a modest purse I prefer to draw on these useful repositories for my ideas of Platonic and Buddhist thought, even though I should be thus obliged to receive these ideas in bald, old-fashioned shape, unspiced with fraudulent marvels and uncorroborated by the forged correspondence of fictitious teachers of T
ruth.17

  While Hodgson had absolutely no doubt he had reached the proper conclusions, he continued to be baffled by Madame’s motives. It was true that the Theosophical Society had supported her for the past six years, but it had certainly not provided her with any great wealth. What satisfaction could she have gained from her chicanery? At a dinner party one evening, in the presence of Allan Hume and the Cooper-Oakleys, he reeled out a tentative theory that Madame must be a Russian spy. Even Hume burst out laughing at the idea of Helena, whose cover would be blown in five minutes, spying for anyone, but Hodgson was not so sure. Madame, he had come to believe, was a woman capable of every and any crime.

  When this dinner table diatribe was reported to Helena, presumably through the Cooper-Oakleys, she responded with an indignant letter to Hodgson: she cared very little whether or not he thought her a fraud, but he had no right to make public slanderous statements that she was an agent of the Russian government. She ought to have him arrested, she wrote, and would have but for the fact that he was a friend of the Cooper-Oakleys and a person for whom she herself had once had “affectionate regard.”18 Not only did she fail to take out a warrant for his arrest, she neglected even to mail the letter.

  Helena’s inability to handle large-scale catastrophe was never more evident than during the next weeks. On March 13, Hodgson and Hume strode boldly into the Adyar compound and made themselves at home while Helena foolishly hid upstairs. At a series of conferences with the leading Theosophists, Hodgson discussed the results of his investigation while Subba Row, Hartmann and the others sat around looking glum. The next day Hume chaired a meeting in which he candidly admitted having changed his mind about the authorship of the Coulomb letters. In the light of Hodgson’s findings, he now believed them genuine and of course had always assumed the phenomena to be fraudulent. However, since he believed the Society worth saving, he proposed that H.P.B., Olcott and a few others resign and the organization be reconstituted along scientific-philosophical lines; phenomena were to be prohibited. While his resolutions were thought far too radical to be carried out, the compound remained in a state of extreme tension. Helena, holed up in her bedroom, had been, invited to the meetings but sent word that she was too ill to attend.