Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  when we come to examine what these depositories of primeval wisdom, the Mahatmas of Tibet and of the sacred Ganges, are supposed to have taught her, we find no mysteries, nothing very new, nothing very old, but simply a medley of well-known though generally misunderstood Brahmanic or Buddhistic doctrines. There is nothing that cannot be traced back to generally accessible Brahmanic or Buddhist sources, only everything is muddled or misunderstood. If I were asked what Madame Blavatsky’s Esoteric Buddhism really is, I should say it was Buddhism misunderstood, distorted, caricatured. There is nothing in it beyond what was known already, chiefly from books that are now antiquated. The most ordinary terms are misspelt and misinterpreted.100

  Between the Theosophists and the Coleman-Mullers, there were many who would agree with Maurice Maeterlinck when he wrote some years later that The Secret Doctrine was a “stupendous and ill-balanced monument” that combined “speculations which must rank with the most impressive ever conceived” with a colossal junkyard

  into which the highest wisdom, the widest and most exceptional scholarship, the most dubious odds and ends of science, legend and history, the most impressive and most unfounded hypotheses, the most precise and most improbable statements of fact, the most plausible and most chimerical ideas, the noblest dreams and the most incoherent fancies are poured pell-mell by inexhaustible truck-loads.101

  If only, Maeterlinck mused sadly, Madame Blavatsky had seen fit to give the world more information about the Book of Dzyan; if it were truly an authentic prehistoric document, her explanation of the evolution of the world and of human life would be “truly sensational.”

  II

  Sweet Mango

  With The Secret Doctrine out of the way, H.P.B. continued to maintain the same work schedule as before. Even if she had wished to slow down it seemed impossible, and at times she felt like “a poor weak donkey full of sores made to drag up hill a cart of heavy rocks.”102

  During the winter of 1888-1889, life was frequently so hectic that she could not find time to write Vera or Nadyezhda. When Vera demanded to know why she could not spare a minute to write, Helena answered with exasperation: “Friend and sister: Your thoughtless question, ‘What am I so busy with?’ has fallen amongst us like a bomb loaded with naive ignorance of the active life of a Theosophist... ‘What am I busy with?’ I, is it? I tell you, if there ever was in the world an overworked victim it is your long-suffering sister.”103 To begin with, the entire burden of editing Lucifer rested on her shoulders now that she had dismissed Mabel Collins, explaining away her absence as “a continuing severe illness.”104 Moreover, H.P.B. was helping to edit a new French Theosophical magazine, La Revue Theosophique, to be published by the Countess d’Adhemar; she was working sporadically on a third volume of The Secret Doctrine that would deal with the great occultists of all ages; preparing forty or fifty pages of monthly instructions for her Esoteric Section students; composing a question-and-answer-style manual, The Key to Theosophy, that would describe the fundamental principles of Theosophy; and “then I must also eat, like anyone else, which means supplying some other bread-winning articles”105 for her Russian newspapers.

  At the same time she was doing a prodigious amount of research for her presentations at the Thursday meetings of the Blavatsky Lodge. “The people who come here,” she told Vera, “are no ignoramuses from the street,” but intelligent people who demanded intelligent answers. She was particularly careful in what she said because the Lodge had hired a stenographer to record her words and was planning to publish them in a pamphlet, “Transactions of the Blavatsky Lodge.” So far as H.P.B. was concerned, they were spending “such a lot of money that my hair stands on end.”106 She felt secretly flattered, but it meant long hours at her desk wearing holes in the elbows of her sleeves and “sweating for everybody.” To maintain this taxing schedule, she drove herself mercilessly. Even for a healthy person, it would have been an immense strain, and to H.P.B. it was excruciating. As her renal disorder continued to worsen, Dr. Z. Mennell had been giving her six grains of strychnia daily, which provided some measure of relief.

  Longing for emotional tranquillity, she wrote William Judge that “I am with perhaps a few years or a few months only (Master knoweth) to remain on this earth,” and went on to add that she was disgusted with almost everyone she knew. When she looked around at the London Theosophists, she felt sick at heart because all she saw was selfishness, personal vanity, and petty ambitions. Since it was against the Society’s rules “to live like cats and dogs,” was it any wonder that the Masters had retired into the background where they observed across “an ocean deep of sad disgust, contempt and sorrow?”107

  As a matter of fact, much of the infighting and enmity was Helena’s own fault. After Henry had returned to Adyar, her letters to him were so hostile that he began finding them tiresome and wrote back vowing that if he received more “I should neither read nor answer them.”108 Their battle for control had broadened into a three-way struggle between Adyar, London and New York, and by now Olcott had wised up to William Judge’s two-faced politicking: Judge had sent the Theosophist a laudatory article about H.P.B., in which he declared that the Society’s real center of authority was wherever Madame Blavatsky might be; an irate Henry refused to print it in its entirety, but did hasten to set Judge straight by saying that, begging his pardon, the center of power was wherever he happened to be domiciled. Judge, he snapped, was suffering from “mayavic delusions.”109

  As Judge was well aware, he had nothing to gain by supporting Olcott in his duel with H.P.B., while he could gain considerably from sticking with Helena. Indeed, she had made quite clear that the reward he might expect was to be named her successor when she died. Addressing him as “my only friend” she assured him that “you are going to replace me, or take my place in America.”110 Actually she had promised the succession to a number of people, always in order to achieve some immediate end, and had no intention of naming anyone to take her place, but Judge was happily unaware of this. On the other hand, she probably did feel more kindly disposed toward Judge than anyone else, and it is possible that he truly may have headed her list.

  During the past five years she had slowly come to appreciate Judge for the qualities that had once drawn her to Henry, obedience and willingness to work hard. She knew that when he had returned to New York after Adyar, he had thrown himself into reviving interest in the defunct Society by holding regular meetings to study the Bhagavad-Gita. He had founded a magazine, The Path, and had also published pseudo-translations of the Giia and of Patanjali’s Yoga Philosophy. By 1889, the American Section of the Society had thriving branches in half-a-dozen major cities and enough members to hold an annual convention. In December, when Judge visited Madame and she issued a special order appointing him her only American representative, some cynics at Adyar and in the U.S. began referring to him as “a sucking dove.”111 Judge did not care what people called him so long as he remained Helena’s favorite, and he continued to follow her instructions to the letter.

  Despite Helena’s apparent support, Judge had a rival for leadership in America, and it made him nervous: after lurking in the background for several years, Dr. Elliott Coues had suddenly thrust himself forward as a contender for Judge’s position. When they had first met in 1884 at Elberfeld, both she and Olcott had been impressed. An extreme radical and free thinker in religious matters and an eloquent champion of women’s rights, Coues was the sort of highly educated, articulate professional that the Society liked. Like Allan Hume, Coues was a respected ornithologist, best known for his Key to North American Birds and his association with the Smithsonian Institution. Interested in psychic research for many years, he was a member of the British Society for Psychical Research and later would be active in the formation of the American Society for Psychical Research. A tall man of distinguished bearing and engaging urbane manner, Coues had a jolly sense of humor that appealed to Helena. He was enough of an amateur psychologist to recognize the route to Madame’
s goodwill and, while a normally aggressive man, he had perfected the techniques of dove-sucking as well as Judge. “I think,” he once wrote her, “you are the greatest woman in the world, controlling today more destiny than any queen upon her throne.”112

  As a result of this flattery, and because H.P.B. and Olcott liked him, Coues found himself appointed Chairman of the American Board of Control. By 1889, both of the founders were writing him chummy, conspiratorial letters in which they used him as a convenient outlet for releasing their grievances against each other. Olcott warned Coues to ignore any order H.P.B. might issue outside the perimeters of the Esoteric Section; he would “stand no nonsense, nor shall I ratify a single order or promise of hers made independently of me... She seems a Bourbon as to memory and receptivity and fancies the old halcyon days are not gone.”113 For her part, Helena contented herself with sniping references to Olcott as a “psychologized baby.”114

  Apparently Coues could not resist taking advantage of the strained relations: he began sending H.P.B. mocking letters jeering at “Your ‘first-born,’ the meek Hibernian Judge” and at “your psychologized baby Olcott,” at the same time patronizing her as “the greatest woman of the age, who is born to redeem her times.”115 The point of this fulsome message was an almost threatening request, that she cable the American convention gathering shortly in Chicago and order the delegates to elect him president. H.P.B. did no such thing.

  Seeking a way to retaliate, Coues hit upon the idea of joining forces with another dissatisfied Theosophist, Mabel Collins, and the two of them attacked in a way that H.P.B. could not have anticipated. Coues had never met Collins, although in 1885 he had written her after the publication of Light on the Path to inquire who might be the real author, and she had explained that he was an adept of Madame’s acquaintance. In the spring of 1889, however, he suddenly received another letter from Mabel confessing that Madame’s friends had nothing to do with Light on the Path; she was the sole author and the reason she had lied four years earlier was that H.P.B. “begged and implored me to”116 and that she had dutifully written the letter at her dictation. The fact of the matter was that Helena could not have begged Mabel because at that time she scarcely knew the woman and, moreover, was not even in England in 1885, when her book was published. Now, neither Collins nor Coues, bound by their mutual hatred for Madame Blavatsky, were paying strict attention to truthful details, and Coues made sure that Mabel’s letter was published in the Religio-Philosophical Journal.

  Mabel was feeling particularly resentful; not only had she been unceremoniously ousted from Lucifer, but H.P.B. had told people she was suffering from a mental breakdown. Then in April Madame expelled Mabel from the Society, an event which proved unnerving for Mabel, but entertaining for the rest of the Blavatsky Lodge. “There has been a great row,” Yeats wrote Katharine Tynan,

  Madame Blavatsky expelled Mrs. Cook (Miss Mabel Collins) and the president of the Lodge for flirtation, and Mrs. Alicia Cremers, an American, for gossiping about it. As a result, Madame Blavatsky is in high spirits. The society is like the “happy family” that used to be exhibited round Charing Cross Station—a cat in a cage full of canaries. The Russian cat is beginning to purr now and smoothen its fur again—the canary birds are less by three—the faithful will be more obedient than ever.117

  From Yeats’ sardonic description, it sounds like a Theosophical version of The Mikado, in which the punishment for flirting is decapitation; Madame merely exacted her most deadly penalty on the pretty Mabel, but to some in the Lodge, expulsion was on a par with beheading. Later Yeats would supplement this gossip with another tidbit and claim that Mable, who impressed him as a “handsome clever woman of the world,” had actually been involved with two of H.P.B.’s young ascetics; when Helena got wind of the double affair, she allegedly lectured Mabel on the beauty of chastity and concluded with unexpected tolerance: “I cannot permit you more than one.”118 The story is probably apocryphal since H.P.B. was as adamantly anti-sex as she was anti-Mabel; she had been looking for an excuse to banish her, and flirtation seemed as good a pretext as any, but she had no illusions that the unrepentant Mabel would silently disappear. As Koot Hoomi warned her, “you have deprived her of a toy” and must now expect Mabel to retaliate because “she will not repent as you hope and death alone can save her from herself.”119 Once again Koot Hoomi proved a shrewd observer, for soon Mabel learned of uncomplimentary comments about her in Madame’s private correspondence and speared her with a libel suit. However, since Helena had somehow come into possession of even more unpleasant, indeed positively hateful, letters Mabel had written about her, she could afford to smile, sit back, and wait until the case came to trial.120

  Next, she decreed her standard penalty for Elliott Coues and ordered his expulsion from the Society in June, hoping vainly that he would not be heard from again.

  But by the time she got around to chastizing the combative bird-lover, there had come riding into her life a shining knight on a white horse to perform the classic last-minute rescue. Her name was Annie Besant, and it was she who would make it possible for Helena to die content.

  By the time she was forty, Annie Besant was known over half the world as one of the most remarkable women of her day. She was an agitator in radical political circles, a strike leader and union organizer, a champion of science and materialism working in partnership with the radical free thinker Charles Bradlaugh, an atheist, a feminist, a social and educational reformer, an early convert to Fabian Socialism by her friend Bernard Shaw, a prolific author as well as editor and publisher, the first prominent woman to wage open battle on behalf of birth control, and, not least, an orator of such power that her contemporaries unanimously acclaimed her as the greatest woman speaker of the nineteenth century.

  Born Annie Wood on October 1, 1847, in London, she was three-quarters Irish, a fact which she frequently mentioned with pride. Her mother’s Irish family, the Morrises, were said to have had royal blood in their veins, while her father’s people were a prosperous, highly respected clan who had done well for themselves in commerce and public life, one of them having even served as lord mayor of London and as a member of Parliament. However, William Wood, Annie’s father, was much too volatile to settle down and, despite a medical degree from Trinity College, Dublin, decided to accept a position with a London commercial firm rather than practice medicine. Annie and her two brothers grew up in the middle-class neighborhood of St. John’s Wood, and her recollections were of an uneventful but happy childhood.

  When she was five, her father died unexpectedly and left the family almost destitute; Emily Wood moved them to Harrow, where she enrolled her son Harry in the school and opened a sort of dormitory-boardinghouse catering to Harrow boys. When Annie was eight, she caught the notice of a local Lady Bountiful, the wealthy, unmarried Ellen Marryat who satisfied her maternal needs by taking on bright but genteelly impoverished children whom she reared and educated. Annie had spent most of her adolescence at Miss Marry at’s estate on the Devon border.

  A rather precocious bluestocking, Annie was also a pious girl whose adolescent daydreams centered, not on romance, but on the apostles and martyrs of the early Christian Church. She read St. Augustine, went to weekly communion, fasted herself into ecstatic meditations, and dreamed of the days when girls could become martyrs. In this mood of religious preoccupation, she met and married in 1867 the Rev. Frank Besant, a cold, domineering martinet of an Anglican minister. As her friend W. T. Stead put it in later years, “She could not be the bride of Heaven, and therefore became the bride of Mr. Frank Besant. He was hardly an adequate substitute.”121 The marriage was troubled from the beginning because Annie could not be so submissive as Frank thought proper and they quarreled fiercely, sometimes physically. Once, she asserted, he threw her bodily over a fence and later, threatened to shoot her with the loaded gun in his study. After a miserable six years in the provinces, and having had two children, Mabel and Digby, Annie could no longer endure her husband
and fled to London. Since divorce was out of the question, a separation agreement was drawn up by which four-year-old Digby would stay with his father and three-year-old Mabel would live with Annie, with summer visitation privilege.

  Faced with respectable starvation on the hundred ten pounds a year Besant gave her from his modest salary, Annie began to look for work and finally found a position as a governess. Soon afterward she met forty-year-old Charles Bradlaugh and began her career as a militant atheist, exhorting, organizing, writing, speaking and leading thousands for whom she would come to symbolize the triumph of science over the decaying old faiths. At the same time, she spent four years at London University trying unsuccessfully to earn a B.Sc. degree, despite having failed chemistry three times.

  In 1877 the crusading Besant and Bradlaugh published a forty-year-old American medical pamphlet advocating birth control and specifically describing several methods—Fruits of Philosophy; or, The Private Companion of Young Married Couples, by Charles Knowlton. Since distribution or advertisement of contraceptives was illegal, the police took swift action and Besant and Bradlaugh were prosecuted on the grounds that the pamphlet was “lewd, filthy, bawdy, and obscene.” Both of them suffered violent public abuse and social ostracism; worse still, Frank Besant sued to remove Mabel from Annie’s custody on the grounds that the child was in moral danger through association with an atheistic woman who published “indecent and obscene” writings. Despite Annie’s vehement defense, she was deprived of the right to see either of her children until they attained their majority; in the opinion of the Lord Chief Justice, she had violated “morality, decency, and womanly propriety,” both in her writings and in publication of a pamphlet “so repugnant, so abhorrent to the feelings of the majority of decent Englishmen and Englishwomen.”122