The Goddess Pose

by Michelle Goldberg

  Soon after, the Society for Psychical Research, a British group devoted to investigating supernatural phenomena, started looking into Theosophy. The SPR was a respected organization—members included Lord Tennyson, W. E. Gladstone, and William James—with a genuinely open-minded approach to spiritual matters. It even shared some members with the Theosophical Society. The report that emerged from its investigation was enormously damning, though it evinced a sort of respect for Blavatsky’s audacity: “For our own part, we regard her neither as the mouthpiece of hidden seers, nor as a mere vulgar adventuress; we think that she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting imposters in history.”

  Blavatsky’s reputation, particularly in India, was deeply damaged. Under pressure from Olcott, in March 1885 she resigned her official role as the Theosophical Society’s corresponding secretary and left for Europe.

  Her career, though, was far from over. In London, she settled on Landsdowne Road, supported by wealthy British Theosophists. She started a magazine, Lucifer, and as she had in New York, she attracted all sorts of fascinating guests to her home, including Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, and a young law student named Mohandas K. Gandhi. Gandhi read Blavatsky’s Key to Theosophy, which, he later wrote, “stimulated in me the desire to read books on Hinduism, and disabused me of the notion fostered by the missionaries that Hinduism was rife with superstition.”

  It was during this period that Blavatsky made her most important convert. In the 1880s, Annie Besant, famed through England and much of the world for her rejection of religion, her daring advocacy of birth control, her Irish republicanism, and her passionate socialism, was having a crisis of faith. Despite her flamboyant apostasy, she had always had a spiritual nature—she’d been an intensely religious child and had married a clergyman, though that union ended in disaster. Even as an atheist, she’d devised freethinking hymnals and replicated the rituals of worship for a secular audience. She threw herself into each new cause with the zeal of a salvation-seeking convert. When these movements failed to deliver the universal brotherhood she longed for, she turned, reluctantly but inexorably, to mysticism.

  Besant first encountered Blavatsky when she was asked to review Blavatsky’s 1888 opus, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy. Unexpectedly, Besant found that the book spoke to her submerged longings, and she asked a mutual acquaintance for an introduction to the notorious occultist. Blavatsky invited Besant to call on her. It was a fairly ordinary chat, but when Besant went to leave, Blavatsky, staring into her guest’s eyes, cried, “Oh, my dear Mrs. Besant, if you would only come among us!”

  After that, Blavatsky worked hard to lure Besant into her circle. High-level Theosophists received letters from the Masters about the importance of cultivating her. “Mme. Blavatsky, a skilled amateur psychologist, must have guessed that something of this nostalgia for a belief in the other world still hovered in Mrs. Besant’s soul,” writes one of Besant’s biographers. Besant, meanwhile, fought her attraction to Theosophy, knowing what it would do to her friendships and reputation. Still, the pull was strong, and at one point she heard a divine voice asking, “Are you willing to give up everything for the sake of the truth?” She was.

  Imagine if Richard Dawkins announced that he had become a Scientologist—that was the kind of shock Besant’s conversion occasioned in England. Her close friend George Bernard Shaw learned of it when he spotted the proofs for an article by Besant titled “Sic Itur ad Astra; or Why I Became a Theosophist,” in the offices of the Star, a London newspaper. “Staggered by this unprepared blow…I rushed round to her office in Fleet Street, and there delivered myself of an unbounded denunciation of Theosophy in general, of female inconstancy, and in particular of H. P. Blavatsky, one of whose books…had done all the mischief,” he wrote.

  Shaw’s remonstrance did no good; Besant’s mind, once made up, could not be changed. Theosophy, naturally, led her to India, and by the end of the 1890s, she was living most of the year in either Adyar or the home she’d built in Benares—now called Varanasi—a holy city on the banks of the Ganges. Once again, she threw herself into social reform, establishing the Central Hindu College in Benares, which was intended to educate a generation of nationalist leaders steeped equally in Hinduism and modern science. She became a major figure in Indian nationalist politics—in 1917 she would even serve a brief term as president of the Indian National Congress, the body that eventually led the drive for Indian independence.

  Blavatsky died in 1891, leaving Besant as the premier public face of Theosophy. When Olcott died in 1907, she became the society’s president. Soon after, she declared that Jiddu Krishnamurti, a young Brahmin boy whose father worked on the Adyar grounds, was going to save the world.

  Krishnamurti was first identified by Charles Leadbeater, a former Anglican priest who had followed Blavatsky to India many years earlier. Besant’s loyalty to Leadbeater was perhaps her greatest human weakness. He was a giant, imposing man with the long beard of a biblical messiah, and he cultivated the image of a powerful clairvoyant. A great fabulist, he would hold the members of his Theosophical circle rapt with elaborate narratives purporting to trace their interwoven past lives, an epic supposedly embedded in a higher plane of knowledge that Theosophists called the Akashic Records. He also had an unfortunate passion for adolescent boys.

  Rumors about Leadbeater’s involvement with boys in his care stretched back to his Anglican days. As a Theosophist, he was often in the company of young male disciples, taking some of them along with him on his lecture tours. In 1906, two young men, both sons of American Theosophists, accused Leadbeater of encouraging them to masturbate. A typewritten letter, apparently found in the Toronto flat where Leadbeater had stayed with one of them, was produced. It was written in a simple code; when deciphered, one passage read, “Glad sensation is so pleasant. Thousand kisses darling.”

  When the scandal erupted, Leadbeater resigned from the Theosophical Society. For Besant, this was more than just a personal disappointment; it was a theological crisis. Leadbeater had encouraged and affirmed her own supernatural visions, and now she was faced with the possibility that they were all merely delusions. Meanwhile, Leadbeater argued that he was merely teaching the boys a kind of psycho-sexual hygiene. In a letter addressed to “My dear Annie,” he explained that a man in need of sexual release is “constantly oppressed by the matter,” but through self-stimulation, he could create a habit of “regular but smaller artificial discharges, with no thoughts at all in between.”

  Besant’s need to believe him seems to have overpowered her, because she both accepted his explanation and, after becoming president of the society, helped to reinstate him. By 1909 he was once again living at Adyar. There, one evening, he went swimming at the estate’s small private beach with some of his young male assistants. That’s where he first spied Krishnamurti. Exactly what he saw in the fourteen-year-old is unclear—Krishnamurti was a scrawny, sickly boy, with protruding ribs and a vacant stare, considered something of an idiot by his teachers. According to his lifelong friend and biographer, Mary Lutyens, he was dirty, with crooked teeth and a persistent cough. Nevertheless, Leadbeater expressed awe at his glorious aura and was adamant that he would someday be a great spiritual teacher. Perhaps Leadbeater, despite his apparent pederasty, actually had a measure of mystical insight, because Krishnamurti would indeed go on to a remarkable career as a spiritual sage, particularly once he renounced the Theosophical Society.

  Soon, Besant persuaded Krishnamurti’s father to give him over to her care, and she founded a separate organization, the Order of the Star in the East, devoted to celebrating and learning from him. She and Leadbeater brought Krishnamurti and his younger brother, Nityananda, to Europe, raising them in a hothouse environment that combined English propriety and fevered religious expectation. Brought up simultaneously to be a gentleman and a savior, Krishnamurti studied both Sanskrit and Shakespeare, took riding less
ons, played croquet, and went to the theater, while at the same time learning to give speeches to groups of adoring Theosophists, who found depth in even his most trite utterances. By the time he entered his twenties, he was a shy but beautiful young man who wore suits from the best English tailors and holidayed in the luxurious homes of his many admirers. He had an entourage of upper-class English ladies and young unmarried girls who were sometimes half-jokingly called his Gopis, after the maidens devoted to his namesake, the god Krishna. The fact that he didn’t become a monster is itself a minor miracle.

  Most of what Krishnamurti knew about Hinduism came to him through Theosophy, though that didn’t stop Westerners from imagining that he bore some ineffable Oriental essence. In March of 1926, Fritz Kunz, the leader of the American section of the Order of the Star in the East, lectured about Krishnamurti to two thousand people in Chicago’s elegant Hotel Sherman. “The Brahmins of India are gentle and loving, like the Christ, and have the most profound sense of God of any people on earth,” he explained. “Therefore, it is natural the new religious leader should come from India. America is too skeptical and too much given to murders.”

  Krishnamurti was particularly popular among young people—he represented a cosmopolitan, pacifist, healthy spirituality, at once anciently rooted and distinctly modern. This was especially true of the people who flocked to the Star Camps, which were in many ways a decorous precursor to the festivals of the 1960s Western counterculture.

  Krishnamurti had a powerful effect on Eugenia. The day after she arrived at the Star Camp, she joined the throng in the main tent for morning meditation. She didn’t really know how to meditate, or understand quite what meditation was, so she asked some of the adepts around her. None was very helpful.

  Still, she closed her eyes and tried to concentrate. Though there were more than a thousand people in the tent, it was silent except for the sound of wind in the trees outside. Krishnamurti appeared and sat on a small platform, then began to sing a Sanskrit mantra. Eugenia felt odd. Her heart beat quickly, and there was a knot in her throat. She started trembling. As she recalled later, the mantra seemed familiar, though she knew she hadn’t heard it before. Around her, everyone was calm, but she felt nervous and dizzy. She’d often been plagued by anxiety attacks, but this was different, stranger. It was, she writes, a kind of “inner shock.”

  When she opened her eyes, people were moving around her, and she realized that the meditation was over. She stood up and started running until she was in the forest, where she stayed for a while, sobbing, feeling as if all her sadness and fear was pouring out. When she stopped crying, she felt suddenly inexplicably happy, peaceful, and liberated.

  That week at the Star Camp was, she writes, “a turning point in my life. Without realizing it then, I had made the first step on the path towards Yoga, with Krishnamurti as my teacher and guide.”

  Returning to Riga, Eugenia felt completely transformed, with a new sense of tranquility and security. Shortly after she’d come home, she went to dinner at a friend’s house. Her friend served her beef, which she’d craved during her meatless days in Ommen. Instead of a nice meal, she saw a slab of dead flesh on her plate, and it disgusted her. She was, she believed, a changed woman.

  If Eugenia was different, life in Riga proceeded in much the same way. She kept working in the theater, and Bolm, her fiancé, kept making plans for their future together. More than ever, though, Eugenia felt compelled toward India—and soon a woman came to town who could help her get there.

  Alice Adair was a feminist and Theosophist, “an Englishwoman of great dignity, aristocratic bearing, fine taste and cosmopolitan outlook,” in the words of a friend. After several years in Australia, she was living at the Theosophical Society’s Adyar headquarters. A passionate aesthete, she was an important international champion of Indian art. In 1927 she went to Europe to give lectures on the subject and to present a traveling exhibition of Indian painting, and when she got to Riga, she met Eugenia.

  After her European tour, Adair was returning to India in time for a Theosophical convention in December. She seems to have taken Eugenia under her wing and encouraged her to make the trip. With Adair as her guide, Eugenia felt that her dream of getting to India was starting to seem feasible. Only one obstacle remained, though it was a big one: money.

  Bolm was impatient with his fiancée’s obsession, but he also realized that it was consuming her. He started to think that maybe if she went, she would get it out of her system. Surely India’s squalor, crowds, and sickness would disabuse Eugenia of her fantasies. “It’s better that she goes,” he told her mother, who was even more opposed to the idea. “It could be that this trip will help to destroy all her illusions about India.” He bought her a ticket, sending her away for several months with the understanding that they would get married upon her return.

  So, on November 17, 1927, Eugenia, traveling alone, boarded a steamship in Naples that was bound for Australia via Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka). As they approached Colombo, Ceylon’s capital, after almost a month at sea, “I was in a state of almost delirious ecstasy,” she writes. “How many times I had made this journey, travelling in my imagination.” In Colombo, she connected with a group of India-bound Australian Theosophists, and before the year’s end, she arrived in the port at Madras, now Chennai, in India’s southeast. She was finally in the land of her dreams.

  If Bolm had seen her arrival, his heart would have sunk. Many Westerners who travel to India are overwhelmed when they get there. The heat is often viscous, like something you swim rather than walk through. Dust assaults you everywhere. The human panoply can be thrilling; there are so many people with unfamiliar faces in unfamiliar clothes: dark and fine-boned southerners, green-eyed Kashmiris, people from the Himalayas who look almost Chinese. Women shimmer in parrot-bright silk saris or light cotton salwar kameezes, jewels sparkling in their noses. There are men in crisp white tunics, men in sarongs, men with wild hair in the shabby loincloths of wandering mystics. Turbans, sometimes brilliantly colored, sit on the heads of bearded Sikhs and mustachioed Rajputs. In the air, there’s a constant buzz of mutually unintelligible languages.

  The crush of people can be exhilarating, but it can also be terrifying. The poverty is as degraded as anything on earth, the maimed and leprous beggars a reproachful contrast to the opulence of Mughal and Raj architecture. Bands of potbellied urchins, hair turned rust-colored from malnutrition, swarm Westerners. Terrible tropical illnesses thrive in the swampy heat, and in the 1920s, with antibiotics not yet on the market, visiting Europeans often fell seriously ill.

  Perhaps Bolm thought that, faced with all this, Eugenia would be cured of her obsession. Instead, she saw only India’s enchantments. She was, she writes, “[h]appy beyond measure to be there.” Europe would never feel like home again.

  · CHAPTER 5 ·

  IN 1882, when Colonel Olcott bought the Theosophical Society’s property in Adyar, India, for six hundred pounds, it comprised twenty-seven acres, with a single large house flanked by two pavilions. By 1927, when Eugenia arrived toward the end of the rainy season, Theosophy’s mecca was a verdant estate of more than two hundred fifty acres, an earnest panreligious fantasia overlaid with Raj gentility. Located seven miles from the South Indian city of Madras on the southern bank of the Adyar River, it was lush with canna lilies, hibiscus, bougainvillea, and oleander, with various groves and gardens named for Theosophical luminaries. Talks and gatherings often took place in a sprawling banyan grove so big it provided shade for thousands. C. W. Leadbeater would stand beneath a canopy of leaves, looking, in the words of one visitor, “like an ancient Druid priest,” and lecture about the place of occultism in the new civilization that everyone believed was imminent.

  Visitors entered through a carved stone trilithon that Olcott had brought from the ruins of a South Indian temple. On the grounds, there was a Masonic temple and a building for the Liberal Catholic Church, an odd sect (wholly separate from the Roman Catholic Church) that atte
mpted to merge Theosophical ideas with Catholicism’s costumes, pomp, and pageantry. A square, columned Parsi temple was under construction, and foundations had been laid for a synagogue and a mosque. Inside the main meeting hall, a cool, whitewashed respite from the pulsating heat outside, the words “There Is No Religion Higher Than Truth” were embossed in gold. Bas-relief figures of Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, and Zarathustra lined the walls, along with an Islamic inscription. There were also smaller images of the Sikh guru Nanak, and of Lao Tse, Confucius, Osiris, Quetzalcoatl, Moses, and others. In a recess behind the speaker’s platform stood statues of Olcott and Blavatsky, his hand upon her shoulder. Offerings of flowers were placed before it daily.

  During the British Raj, as British rule of the subcontinent was known, employees of the colonial administration generally disdained Indians. Generations of English memsahibs warned new arrivals, “Never shake hands with an Indian, my dear, because you never know where his hand has been.” (As historian Margaret MacMillan points out, even after decades of British life in the subcontinent, these English ladies never bothered to learn that Indians generally wash themselves with their left hand and use their right for most everything else.)

  Adyar, though, was a different world. There, Indians, Europeans, and Americans all intermingled. One Australian notable, Major General Kenneth Mackay, writes that at Adyar he felt like a citizen of the world, “untrammeled alike by Western or Eastern ecclesiastic or secular tradition.”