Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (11 page)

I

The Hindu at Ramsgate

In Tiflis, Helena Petrovna went noisily to pieces, swearing that “I would kill myself if I was forced to return”
¹
to Erivan. Her grandfather was embarrassed, unnerved, and finally, furious. Helena’s flight was not only an affront to his friend, it was also a social disgrace. With her indiscreet pursuit of Prince Golitsyn—a scandal narrowly averted by marriage—still fresh in his memory, he could now foresee a whole chain of headaches looming ahead. Fadeyev decided that he could no longer be responsible for his troublesome granddaughter.

The problem, however, was what to do with her. An eighteen-year-old woman, married or not, could not be permitted to run loose. Shipping her back to Blavatsky seemed out of the question, and the ailing Princess Helena was in no condition to supervise her. By process of elimination, Helena’s father became the only alternative. Writing to von Hahn at St. Petersburg, Fadeyev outlined both the situation and the proposed solution in terms that did not brook refusal. Von Hahn, finally settled at fifty-one with his second wife, the Baroness von Lange, who was expecting their first child, could hardly have welcomed the news. But after a further exchange of letters, it was agreed that Fadeyev would have Helena sent overland to Poti, a port on the Black Sea, and from there she would travel by steamer to Odessa, where von Hahn would collect her. Having no trust in Helena, Fadeyev placed her in the custody of four serfs— one of them his personal steward—and dispatched this convoy, amounting to nothing less than an armed guard, in a capacious four-in-hand.

Helena left Tiflis feeling “sick at heart.”
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After years of phantasizing a reunion with her father, she realized that it was, of course, too late. If he had not wanted her before, she now discovered that she no longer wanted him. She felt sure that he would begin by moralizing and end by returning her to Nikifor. These were not unrealistic fears and by the time they approached Poti, her mind was hard at work on schemes to slip away from her escort.

On the westward trip through Georgia, she had caused sufficient delays to make the party miss the steamer for Odessa at Poti. In the harbor was an English vessel, the SS
Commodore,
from whose skipper Helena learned it was headed first for Kerch in the Crimea, and from there would sail north-eastward to Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, before turning south again for Constantinople. She devised a two-stage plan: she would book passage to Kerch for the servants, and to Constantinople for herself. When she proposed this idea to the skipper, he at first refused to have anything to do with it. She succeeded in convincing him, she claimed, by a liberal outlay of rubles. But there were also other reasons for his change of mind.

Kerch, viewed from the steamer, was an extremely pretty town which rose like an amphitheater surrounding the bay: the church cupolas were painted green and topped with immense gilded crosses, and on a steep hill to the left stood a museum modeled after a Greek temple. Telling them that she would join them in the morning, Helena sent the serfs ashore to find lodgings for their layover while they allegedly would await a ship to Odessa.

That night the
Commodore
slipped quietly out of the harbor and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky finally managed to shake free of all restrictions. Hungry for life, she could plunge into the adventures and travels she had dreamed about. “My soul needed space,”
³
as she put it, but she did not bargain for the steep price she would have to pay. No sooner had they reached Taganrog than the skipper suggested it would be best if the harbor police, who would be coming aboard, did not see her. The reason remains obscure: either she had not paid for her passage, or there was some irregularity in her papers, or perhaps, as an unchaperoned female minor, she was a “suspicious person.” The skipper instructed her to conceal herself in a coal bin and, when she balked, he had her dress as a cabin boy and huddle in a bunk feigning illness.

It should have been clear by now that more than respectful regard was motivating the captain to perform these services for a stowaway, and one wonders if she naively believed he would smuggle her into Turkey without asking recompense. She told Alfred Sinnett that “further embarrassments developed” once the
Commodore
dropped anchor in Constantinople harbor, and she was forced to “fly ashore precipitately in a caique with the connivance of the steward to escape the persecutions of the skipper.”
⁴
Thus, with uncharacteristic delicacy, she surmounted this final obstacle to her freedom. She was not the least bit daunted by having to enter Constantinople in a rowboat; nor, apparently was she concerned about the livid, outwitted men she had left in her wake—least of all the amorous skipper of the
Commodore.

Working to earn one’s living was socially unacceptable for upper-class women in the 1840s. The fact that only the meanest kinds of employment were open to them served as further discouragement. Indeed, it was commonly accepted that if a woman worked, she was making a statement: either her father had provided insufficiently for her support, or that she had failed to find a husband. In a foreign country, the odds against finding employment were vastly increased.

How Helena supported herself after she left Russia remains a mystery. Not only did H.P.B. provide no illumination, she did her best to add to the confusion. Her biographer dutifully set down what she told him: that she “communicated privately with her father and secured his consent to her vague programme of foreign travel.” Von Hahn, according to Sinnett, “supplied his fugitive daughter with money, and kept her counsel in regard to her subsequent movements.”
⁵
Yet, from everything that is known of Peter von Hahn, left fuming at the Odessa docks, this account seems wildly out of character. The unromantic fact was she found herself stranded in Turkey with little or no funds, and she had to live by her wits. Even for a person as clever as H.P.B., income-producing activities were limited to three: governess, lady’s companion, or mistress—being kept by a man. Helena could never have endured the restricted life of a governess and, although she was not really suited for the remaining two “careers” either, these appear to be among those that she eventually settled for.

First, however, she apparently tried to capitalize on the only talent of which she was then aware—horseback riding. Gossip reported much later, some of it by her own relatives, has her joining the circus as a bareback rider. H.P.B. herself admitted that she did have an experience with horses at Constantinople, but she gave a rather different account:

At Constantinople I was in need of money and I wanted to earn the 100 offered to the one who won the
steeplechase
— eighteen hedges to jump with a wild horse which had just killed two grooms. I jumped sixteen but at the seventeenth my horse reared, fell backwards and
crushed
me. It was in 1851. I came to myself six weeks later; but before entering my
Nirvana
(for it was fully one), I saw a man, a giant, dressed differently from the Turks, who lifted my tattered and bloody garments from under the horse and—nothing more, nothing but the memory of a face I had seen somewhere.
⁶

Allowing for exaggeration, and understanding that the main point of this tale is that unseen forces protected her, it is still possible to extract a few nuggets of plain truth from it: that she rode for money in Constantinople and, in the course of this activity, suffered an injury which left her with a chest scar that would still be troubling her twenty years later.

There is evidence that most of Helena’s time for the next two years was spent as companion to various wealthy old women. She soon attached herself to the Russian community living in Constantinople. Such enclaves of Slav expatriates—temporary transplants or permanent residents—flourished in London, Paris, Rome and in nearly every large European city. They gathered around the samovar, smoked cigarettes and engaged in interminable discussions about God, politics and music, all of them tinged with nostalgia for the homeland they had abandoned in favor of the palmy lobbies of first-class European hotels. Given Helena’s family background, it was natural for her to gravitate toward this group, and equally natural for them to befriend her.

H.P.B. was fortunate to meet in Constantinople a Countess Kiselev, an eccentric woman in her sixties who happened to be well connected in Russia. Her husband, Count Paul Kiselev, was both a liberal reformer who had devoted most of his life to the unsuccessful cause of serf liberation, and an intimate of Czar Nicholas—seemingly incompatible roles, but this was nevertheless a fact. The countess’s interests ran, evidently, to the more exotic, and in particular, to the occult. H.P.B. would later waggishly declare that when the countess died, she left “millions and all her medium apparatuses, writing tables and
tarots
to the Church of Rome.”
⁷
The countess took on Helena as her companion, dressed her in trousers because she thought it to be chic to be seen with “a gentleman student,”
⁸
and the two of them moved on to Egypt.

Once she became famous, Madame Blavatsky would contend that she had spent twenty years wandering the globe in pursuit of esoteric knowledge. However, only a handful of individuals came forward to support her claim, stating they had encountered her during this period. One of them was Albert Leighton Rawson, a young American artist, scholar and traveler who was just as fascinated by the mysteries of the East as was Helena. A native of Chester, Vermont, who had once disguised himself as a Moslem divinity student and joined a caravan making the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, Rawson had a weakness for wild ventures, disguises, and colorful women. In 1850, when he met Helena in Cairo, he found her “charming,” “companionable,” and “almost irresistible” (later adding the qualification that she was all those things “when not ‘possessed’”)
⁹
and he offered to squire her around the city.

Somewhere between Tiflis and Cairo, Helena had blossomed into a highly attractive young woman. Having shed her extra weight, she described herself as “very thin then,”
¹⁰
and Rawson commented admiringly on her “full, moon-shaped” face, a figure that was “supple, muscular and well rounded, fit to delight an artist,” and her small, delicately molded hands and feet. He declared that “she could win at a single interview the admiration of any man who had ever lived outside of himself long enough to discover that he was not three-quarters of the universe,” obviously including himself in this unchauvinistic group. He hurried to add, however, that male admiration of her womanliness meant little to Helena—it was for her mind that she wanted to be appreciated.

Helena took pains to create an interesting image of herself for Rawson. She told him that she was the widow of a Russian general and that she had come to Cairo with a friend to study the relics of an ancient civilization. Having “killed” Nikifor and widowed herself in one imaginative stroke, she proceeded to enjoy her visit. Rawson, an obliging tour guide, made no objection when she suggested taking lessons from a snake charmer, although he warned her that “persons in European dress would be sure to be molested as hated infidels, if not actually put in danger of life or limb by crazy fanatics.” Disguising themselves as Moslems, with H.P.B. in male attire, they visited the chief of the Cairo snakemen, Sheik Yusaf ben Makerzi, and learned how to handle the serpents without getting bitten. Back at Shepheard’s Hotel, where Helena was staying with the countess, she gleefully informed her employer that she had solved one of Egypt’s mysteries—and she proved it by loosing a snake from a bag she had hidden in the folds of her skirt.

Having mastered snake charming, Helena was ready for further challenges. She had heard of a Coptic magician, Paulos Mentamon, who was reputed to be a respository of astrological formulas and magical incantations. Rawson somehow wrangled an introduction and, once again in disguise, they set off for the native quarter. Rawson flatteringly told the Coptic: “We are students who have heard of your great learning and skill in magic, and wish to learn at your feet.” Mentamon did not beat around the bush: “I perceive that you are two Franks in disguise,” he snorted, “and I have no doubt you are in search of knowledge—of occult and magical lore. I look for coin.”
¹¹

While this callous demand for money was a big letdown, Rawson fortunately had ample funds that he was willing to part with, not without noting sarcastically that Mentamon had indeed discovered the secret whereby the philosophers’ stone could turn anything into gold. Later, H.P.B. would mention studying with Mentamon, but she dismissed his teachings as unimportant and inferior. To know how much of the magician’s repertory she actually mastered might help to throw important light on her later career, but this apparently was not information she wished to advertise.

In Cairo, as always, Helena had a recurrent need to get out of her body, and one way to do this, she had already discovered, was by smoking tobacco. There was nothing extraordinary about her adopting this habit; many fashionable Russian women now smoked. But apparently she found special advantages in it that others did not. It seemed to tranquilize her, to lift her up off the earth: “I close my eyes and float on and on, anywhere or wherever I wish,” she said.
¹²
Less conventionally smoked among her social peers, but more commonly used as a means to out-of-body experiences, was hashish, to which she was then introduced by Rawson. Twenty-five years later, along with opium, she was still taking hashish, and there is some evidence that she was addicted to the drug.
¹³
Among its varied physiological effects, hashish produces visions. Helena thought it “a wonderful drug” that enabled her to lift the veil and solve various “profound mysteries.” She told Rawson that her hashish dreams “are as real as if they were ordinary events of actual life.”
¹⁴
The hypnotic states that she achieved artificially were not totally unlike those that she could induce naturally in herself without hashish, but undoubtedly they were far more spectacular with the drug.