by Marion Meade
“Listen: try to disconnect the L.L. [London Lodge] as much as you can from H.Q. You may be at heart—one. Try to become two in the management.”48 Adyar was full of traitors and Judases who hated Europeans. Even Subba Row, she said, had called her “a shell deserted and abandoned by the Masters” because she had committed the most terrible of crimes by revealing occult secrets to whites. Henry, “a wind-bag full of vanity,”49 had fallen under Subba Row’s influence.
Thus she planted the seeds of schism, suspecting that the Londoners would not be so quick to abandon her if they believed she still had tantalizing tidbits to solve the riddle of the universe. The public could never get enough of two things: phenomena and occult secrets. With the first she could no longer oblige them, but if they liked, they should have secrets such as they had never dreamed of. Long ago she had learned that human nature could be repulsive; now she vowed to use that insight for her own ends. And it might just be possible to save herself.
At the end of July, accompanied by Babaji and Mary Flynn, Madame Blavatsky bid farewell to Vesuvius, taking with her as a momento a cold she had caught in their last hours before departing. After a week’s stopover in Rome, she started north to join Vsevolod Solovyov and Emile de Morsier at the fashionable Swiss resort of St. Cergues. One afternoon at about 3 p.m. she arrived on the Geneva diligence that stopped at the front door of Solovyov’s hotel, the Pension Delaigue. The journey had exhausted Helena; worse, she had grown so maddened by the ineptness of her two companions that she wanted to throttle them. Solovyov, standing outside the pension, found himself mortified at the sight of H.P.B. and her entourage, which must have presented a bizarre spectacle in the provincial town. Nevertheless, his description of her arrival, more vicious than amusing, is best described as racist, sexist, and generally insensitive:
Suddenly there sprang from the diligence a strange creature, something half way between a great ape and a tiny black man. Its leanness was amazing. A poor half-European sort of dress dangled on it, as though there were nothing but bones beneath, a face the size of a fist, of a dark cinnamon colour and without any signs of vegetation; on the head a dense cap of long black curling hair; huge eyes, also perfectly black, of course, with a frightened and suspicious expression.50
Babaji repelled the Russian. Mary Flynn merely embarrassed him. She was “a clumsy young person, with a red, disconcerted and not particularly intelligent face...”
The public gazed open-mouthed at the black man. But the most interesting was yet to come. The black man and the clumsy young woman, and then I and Madame de Morsier, succeeded with great difficulty in extracting from the diligence something that was shut up in it. This something was “Madame” herself, all swollen, tired out with travelling, grumbling; with a huge dark-grey face, and wide open eyes, like two round discoloured turquoises. On her head was set a very high grey felt fireman’s helmet with ventilators and a veil. Her globular figure seemed yet more globular from an incredible sort of sacque in which she was draped.51
After embracing her friends, Helena aimed a stream of invective at Mary, “Mashka” she called her, and at Babaji, until the two of them stood distraught in the road. “This idiot of a girl,” Helena declared, was so stupid that she disbelieved a bigger fool had ever appeared on earth, and she cursed the day she had agreed to bring her along. Babaji, she fumed, “spins like a top and never stirs from his place.”52 Having got that out of her system, H.P.B. was further annoyed to learn that the pension had not given her three adjoining rooms as she had requested, and she stormed off to another hostel down the road.
By evening she had not yet calmed down. At dinner Solovyov and Madame de Morsier listened while Helena picked at her food and continued to grumble that Mashka was driving her to madness. And yet it was amazing that even a fool like her could see the Masters every day.
“Mary,” she called. “Come here. Tell the truth. Do you see the Master?”
“Oh yes,” Mary agreed. “I see him.”
Turning to Solovyov and de Morsier, Helena crowed, “There now, you see! Why should she lie. And she is such a fool that she could not even make up a lie. She does see, and there is an end of it.”53
When she switched the subject abruptly to the Coulombs and Hodgson, Solovyov reported, “there poured from her lips such contradictory assertions, and such choice abuse, that Madame de Morsier and I quite lost heart, and almost stopped her mouth and quieted her by force.”54
Helena spent eight days at St. Cergues. The pleasant weather turned cold and rainy, and her gout grew worse. When Mary Flynn dressed up and wandered off without permission to a nearby country fair where she sang, danced, and delivered an impromptu sermon on Buddhism, Helena reached the end of her patience. Posthaste, she packed Mary off to an uncle in England, having first made other arrangements for a servant. In the pension she found a Swiss maid, Louise, who spoke French and German, and was willing to go to Wurzburg, and who did not appear to be a fool.
II
Wurzburg
By August 12 Helena was installed in a suite of spacious rooms at No. 6 Ludwigstrasse, one of the best addresses in town. Despite her comfortable new apartment, or perhaps because of it, her finances were perilous. Two weeks later she wrote Francesca that the colonel had left her to starve; in Italy she had been obliged to wipe her face “with towels made out of an old chemise of mine and I ate only one meal a day.” It was the little money she had received from her Russian articles that had made possible the move to Wurzburg, but now even that was nearly gone, and she expected to be penniless in no time. On Henry’s allowance of 400 francs a month “it is next to impossible for me to live decently.”55 Her complaint to Francesca, forwarded to Adyar, produced a sarcastic reply from Henry; if anyone was starving, he snapped, it was the people left at Headquarters, all of whom were subsisting on less than he sent her each month. However, her similar complaint to the Gebhards at Elberfeld brought in response a large, comfortable arm chair, which Helena installed at her writing table.
Wurzburg, on the Main River, was a picturesque town of cafes, medieval towers and baroque palaces surrounded by vineyards and rolling farmland. Helena saw none of it. Still suffering severely from gout, she was able to hobble about a little in her rooms but did not feel up to venturing out of doors. She spent the days at her desk, finishing an article for Russky Vyestnik and contemplating the new book, The Secret Doctrine.
For more than two years she had been talking about her rewriting Isis Unveiled. She was no longer proud of it; in fact, it had embarrassed her as far back as August, 1882, when Master Koot Hoomi had casually remarked to Sinnett that Isis “really ought to be rewritten for the sake of the family honour.”56 In January, 1884, just before H.P.B. left for Europe, the Theosophist had carried an announcement of The Secret Doctrine, “A New Version of ‘Isis Unveiled,’”57 which would be written in collaboration with Subba Row and issued in monthly installments over a period of two years. Subscriptions were invited. From time to time, Helena had declared that she was at work on the book, or that she had “received” an outline from Master Morya, but if the Mahatma gave her editorial suggestions, they must have been of little use. The truth of the matter was that ever since the trouble at Adyar and the S.P.R. investigation, Helena had been unable to concentrate on anything but her personal problems. The Theosophist had been obliged to announce several postponements and assure subscribers that their remittances were being kept untouched in a special bank account.
In recent months, however, it occurred to Helena that The Secret Doctrine might offer an ideal means of vindicating herself. Instead of rewriting Isis, she could use the fragmentary teachings in the Mahatma letters as a foundation on which to build a system. With the help of her Masters, she would produce a masterwork twenty times more learned that either Isis or Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism. It would be a magnum opus unveiling to the nineteenth century certain portions of the hidden knowledge and proving that occult doctrine is the foundation of all religions, including Christiani
ty. “I will show what a Russian spy can do, an alleged forger-plagiarist.”58 Hodgson, she thought, was a clever man but not “clever enough for truth, and it shall triumph, after which I can die peacefully.”59 But before she could produce truth, she needed comfortable surroundings where, undistracted, she might settle down to the same intense routine she had developed at the Lamasery while writing Isis.
Unfortunately, Wiirzburg was not New York, and she could no longer avail herself of the emotional support and editorial assistance of Olcott and Alexander Wilder. She did not even have the help of Subba Row, who aside from the fact of his being in Madras, had recently exhibited signs of hostility. During those first floundering weeks at Wiirzburg, she must have been overwhelmed by the dimensions of the task she had set for herself. Her forte had always been short pieces, such as essays, fiction and letters; longer works required careful organization and precise conception, two properties which were not native to her character. When an idea struck her, she would grab her pen and reel off twenty or thirty pages at a sitting, but, since she peregrinated from one idea to another, she consistently wound up with unrelated short essays that did not add up to a book.
Aside from her literary frustration, she discovered that the isolation she had sought in Wiirzburg was depressing her, and almost immediately she began inviting friends up for a visit. The first two guests to arrive were Vsevolod Solovyov and Justine Glinka, who stayed nearby at Rugmer’s Hotel. Solovyov seems to have spent most of his time with Helena; she could not do without him a single day and would send Babaji to the hotel to say that Madame was feeling very bad, that her doctor was alarmed and that Solovyov must come at once. From behind these transparent ruses, there emerges the picture of a sick, lonely woman desperate for company. To keep Solovyov in constant attendance, she would attempt to reward him with some minor phenomenon: on one such occasion, she rehearsed Babaji to write in Russian “Blessed are they that believe,” then tried to persuade Solovyov that the Hindu had received the words in a paranormal manner. Solovyov shook with laughter when he saw that Babaji had mistakenly written, “Blessed are they that lie,”60 but Helena did not find it amusing. Clearly her heart was not in performing; her swollen limbs made the slightest movement difficult, and because of her clumsiness, she even dropped her “astral bell” machine. When Solovyov hurried to pick it up, she snatched it from his hands while he politely changed the subject. On another occasion, after Solovyov had asked for some Indian attar of roses, she produced “phenomenally” a flask of oil of orange, no doubt supposing that he would not notice the difference. When he pointed out that her Master had made a mistake, Helena exclaimed, “Eh, devil take it!”61
Writing to Vera at this time, she claimed to be beleaguered by invitations. The Hindus were demanding that she return to India while her faithful London Theosophists simply “won’t leave me alone.” She was ignoring them, preferring to sit quietly in Wurzburg, “waiting for Nadya’s promised visit and won’t stir from here. I am writing a new book which will be worth two such as Isis.”62 Around the first of September, the guests whom she had begged to visit finally began to trickle in: Francesca and Mohini from London, her aunt from Odessa, Patience and Alfred who were vacationing in Belgium, and a little later, the Hermann Schmiechens, Franz Hartmann, and Dr. William Hubbe-Schleiden. During the next weeks she could not complain of loneliness since visitors were constantly in and out of her flat. During the Sinnetts’ stay there, they began to discuss his idea of writing her biography. He had broached the subject several years earlier but, understandably, she had laughed it off as ridiculous; never, she had told him, would she consider such a project. Now, Alfred strongly urged her to reconsider. Since Emma Coulomb and others on all sides seemed to be making false accusations about her, it might be good public relations for the Society if she published the true story of her life. Of course the last thing H.P.B. wished to do was publish the truth about herself, but she could appreciate the wisdom of Alfred’s plan and vaguely promised to cooperate.
Now Helena breakfasted, lunched, dined, and talked non-stop all day long. At night she stayed up with the treasured Nadyezhda, because her aunt was in the habit of sleeping during the day. By the time the last of her guests went home in early October, Helena was completely exhausted, and on the night of the ninth she had to send for the doctor at 11 p.m. to administer morphine and digitalis. “Such palpitations and cramps in the heart that I thought they were the last!” she reported to Sinnett. “I am now ordered to hold my tongue, hence I have more time to hold my pen...”63
Alone again, it was easy to hold her tongue; holding her pen proved more difficult. Even though she wrote Olcott that she was in the middle of Part One, The Secret Doctrine still remained little more than a nebulous idea in her head. According to Sinnett, the book was untouched when he saw her in September; Dr. Hubbe-Schleiden said that “when I visited her in October, 1885, she had just begun to write it, and in January, 1886, she had finished about a dozen chapters...”64 In November, to Henry again, she offered a clue to her problems when she boasted:
Ah, you think I cannot write the S.D. without you or anyone sitting near me and helping? Well you shall soon find out your mistake. I have three Chap, ready, the fourth nearly finished and the S.D. shall be another, quite another kind of a hair-pin than Isis. It is a song from quite another opera, dear.65
From these various statements one gathers she had made a start of some kind, and that she was sufficiently satisfied to brag about functioning without a collaborator.
The actuality was somewhat different: she may have been capable of writing without a collaborator, but she could do little without a person to function as her companion-caretaker-nurse-editorial assistant. But where was such a miracle worker to be found?
During the month of October, all Helena could manage was stumbling to her desk in the mornings. The midnight summonses to Dr. Leon Oppenheim became more frequent. It was on one of these visits that H.P.B. first conceived of the idea that Vera would later call her single largest folly. Given Helena’s fifty-year “folly” record, that estimate may sound excessive, but nonetheless it does seem rash for a twice-married woman of fifty-four suddenly to proclaim herself a virgin.
It happened in this way: apparently Helena was having problems with her bladder and Dr. Oppenheim, advising a gynecological examination, brought “his instruments, looking-glass or mirror to look inside and other horrors,” Helena wrote.
“Were you ever married?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she replied briefly, not wanting to go into details. Then she added, “But never had any children.”
“No, surely,” Dr. Oppenheim allegedly declared. “How could you since for all I can see, you must have never had connection with your husband.”66
Gasping at this unsolicited medical opinion, H.P.B. quickly relayed the news to Sinnett, who had heard Emma’s vague rumors about Agardi and Yuri; now he saw this odd new occurrence as a solution to one of Helena’s problems. “Have a certificate, Old Lady, have one!”67 he urged.
Dr. Oppenheim told her, as Helena revealed to Olcott, that “I have from birth the uterus crooked or hooked inside out, and that I could not, not only never have children, but that it is now the cause of my suffering with the bladder... and that if I had ever tried (thanks!) to be immoral with anyone, I would have had each time an inflammation and great suffering. There! So much for the Coulombs’ three children, my marriage with Mitra, etc., etc.”68 She went on to say that once she had explained to the doctor about her enemies’ accusations of immorality, he had readily agreed to sign a certificate.
The certificate said:
The undersigned testifies as requested, that Mme Blavatsky of Bombay-New York, corresponding secretary of the Theosophical Society, is at the present time under the medical treatment of the undersigned. She suffers from Anteflexio Uteri, most probably from the day of her birth, as proved by minute examination; she has never borne a child, nor has she had any gynecological illness.
; (Signed) Dr. Leon Oppenheim
WURZBURG, 3 November, 1885.
The signature of Doctor Leon Oppenheim is
hereby officially attested. WURZBURG, 3rd November, 1885.
The Royal Medical Officer of the District
(Signed) Dr. Med. Roeder.69
Unfortunately Dr. Oppenheim’s certificate turned out to be less than satisfactory since it did not state that H.P.B. had never been pregnant, only that she had never borne a child and it did not mention virginity. At Helena’s request, he wrote a second certificate slightly more to the point: “I hereby certify that Mme. Blavatsky has never been pregnant with child and so consequently can never have had a child. Oppenheim.”70 Once again, however, there was missing even an implication of virginity. When H.P.B. forwarded a copy of the document to Sinnett, she was forced to enclose a note explaining that “gynecological illness” really meant intactness: “it is a delicate and scientific way of putting it, and very clear.”71 Actually it was far from clear; Dr. Oppenheim was not so foolish as to state in writing that Madame Blavatsky had never experienced intercourse, although later, probably under pressure, he did tell Constance Wachtmeister that while no doctor could positively certify virginity, to the best of his knowledge Madame had not had sexual relations.
Several of Madame Blavatsky’s biographers have advanced the theory that she herself forged the certificate. This seems unlikely because she circulated the document in Wurzburg while under Oppenheim’s regular care; surely he would have protested a forgery. Moreover, the fact that the certificate is worthless seems to indicate that it is genuine. As it happens, though, the paper was also worthless as proof that she never bore a child.