Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (26 page)

In late January, H.P.B. badly injured her knee and leg. To some, she claimed she had slipped on an icy sidewalk. To Gen. Francis J. Lippitt, Boston attorney and Spiritualist, she reported she had “nearly broken my leg by falling down under a heavy bedstead I was trying to move and that fell on me.”
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The latter version may well be true since about this time she moved from Girard Street to the Holmes’s former apartment at 825 North 19th Street. When her leg refused to mend as expected, Helena was forced to spend much of her time in bed where she distracted herself by reading and by writing surprisingly cheerful letters. From Andrew Jackson Davis she ordered a complete set of his works, as well as a set of Shakespeare and several books on magic. The bill came to a whopping $33.15, which she did not have and therefore neglected to pay.
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In addition to Davis and Shakespeare, she also read Epes Sargent’s
Proof Palpable of Immortality,
which fascinated her more than any other Spiritualist book she had seen. “You may tell him so if you see him,” she wrote to General Lippitt, “and say to him that he has perfectly psychologized a true born Cossack and made her fall in love with him. My best leg
won’t
heal and seems determined to remain lame.”
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Despite the bravado, she sensed that all her old insecurities were waiting to pounce. Since her defense of the Holmes, the Spiritualist journals who had clamored for her work refused to buy. She felt poor, ill, and unprotected; unseen voices kept whispering in her ears.

Troubled by her inadequacies as a writer and fearful once again that she would be unable to earn a living, Helena keenly felt the need of a sponsor. The ideal person would have been Henry Olcott, but he was busy in New York and Hartford and, in any case, as she observed to Aksakov, “he is far from rich and has nothing to live on but his literary labours, and he has to keep a wife and a whole lot of children.”
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There remained only Michael, whose business, while still small, was prospering. He was even predicting that “in a few years I will be able to open a large trade between Russia and America.”
⁶⁶
Toward the middle of March, Helena moved into a house Michael had leased at 3420 Sansom Street in West Philadelphia and on April 3, they were married in the First Unitarian Church by Rev. William H. Furness.

H.P.B.’s ambivalences about the marriage are evident in her behavior. She even neglected to inform her houseguest, Henry Olcott, of the wedding until after the event. Stunned, Olcott called the marriage “a freak of madness” and added, “when I privately expressed to her my amazement at what I conceived to be her act of folly in marrying a man younger than herself, and inexpressibly her inferior in mental capacity,”
⁶⁷
she had her defense prepared: their fates were linked by karma, and the marriage was her punishment for “awful pride and combativeness.”
⁶⁸
Besides, she insisted, Michael had threatened suicide if she refused him.

She was not so frank as she might have been with Henry, but certainly more candid than she was with others. She told him that Michael asked “nothing but the privilege of watching over her, that his feeling was one of unselfish adoration for her intellectual grandeur” and added “he would make no claim to any of the privileges of wedded life.”
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Why she felt compelled to convince Henry the marriage would not be consummated is unclear, for surely it was no scandal for a married woman to sleep with her own husband. Incredibly, Henry seems to have bought the story. While there is no reason to doubt Helena’s account of her non-sexual marriage to Blavatsky, it is almost impossible to believe her relationship with Michael Betanelly was not physical.

Unable or unwilling to admit she had sexual needs, Helena spent the rest of her wedding day pretending that nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. She dashed off a postcard to General Lippitt telling him she was sending him a self-portrait done by John King on white satin. He must excuse the smudges because Michael had taken it to his office “and it passed through so many uncleanly hands that it lost partially its virgin purity.”
⁷⁰
Aside from the references to John King’s non-virginal portrait, there is no allusion to having been married earlier in the day.

Ten years later she would look back on her wedding and claim that a black wizard, possibly some beast or devil, had taken possession of her body and spoken with her tongue. When she regained consciousness, she found living in her house a “handsome young Armenian” who treated her as if he were her husband. “I order him off, but he does not go, declares that I am his wife, and that he has just been legally married to me, married before witnesses, Olcott among them.” She herself remembered nothing. “I turn to Olcott; imagine my horror when he confirms it. He was a witness at the wedding, and signed the register.”
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A decade hence, such a colossal mistake must have seemed to her to be due to possession.

Actually, she had simply made the conventional error of marrying for financial security. But to her dismay, she discovered almost immediately that Betanelly’s business was in trouble, and that her groom was virtually bankrupt.

Michael’s situation did little to improve a temper already short from pain and incapacity. She must have made her resentment obvious enough to spark reciprocal feelings in Michael. Whatever ties of affection there were binding them began at once to crumble, and within ten days, she had begun to call John King “my only friend.” Claiming to be “fonder of him than of anything on earth,” she praised King for having “transformed”
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her.

By April, 1975, H.P.B. was finally beginning to develop a profile of her mission as an ethical and religious teacher. To be sure, there had for twenty-five years been fleeting glimpses of a special destiny but up until now the exact nature of this life work had eluded her. Suddenly, revelations germinating for forty-four years began to bubble into her consciousness, prompted either by the presence of John King, or by her own subconscious desires. She now felt certain that a secret Brotherhood had elected her to be its spokesperson in the world; it was she who would carry a message of Truth: that is, the secrets of the universe that lay hidden from a race ill-equipped to grasp the ungrasp-able. Each century, she contended, the keepers of the Truth seek someone to act as their agent; in the nineteenth century, however unsatisfactory she might appear to others, they had chosen Helena for this exalted task.

No one can know if Helena viewed the discovery of her special mission with misgivings, or whether or not she questioned the validity of her perceptions. Did she consider that the Brotherhood might be nothing more than a functional symbol of her unconscious? Or was it a sign of mental illness? Did it occur to her that these images might have been long languishing in her unconscious, waiting for the chance to break through? Even so, her doubts must have quickly been overpowered by the radiance of her vision.

As evidenced in her correspondence, Helena saw herself as a psychological cripple whose nervousness and mercurial temper revolted the sober-minded. Still, she was guiltless, since she had been born that way and could now even see how her disabilities helped qualify her for the unique future role. Her selection, she believed, was less the result of personal merit than the total willingness to sacrifice herself for the propagation of great truths. Few, if any, besides her would voluntarily accept the persecution and ridicule sure to accompany such a thankless assignment.

The secret group under whose direct command she worked, she called the Brotherhood of Luxor. Unlike John King, the Brotherhood were not entities from the cosmic plane of existence, but rather living men with headquarters somewhere in Egypt. The chief adept and supervisor was Serapis Bey, but there were seven associate brothers, among them: Tuitit Bey, Polydorus Isurenus, Robert More. Some of their names were never revealed. While she called them her “Masters,”
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she does not seem to have conceived of herself as their servant but, rather, as their equal, as their St. Paul.

Even though the spirit John King had pointed her in her present direction, she seems to have been uncertain about how to fit him into the overall scheme. She wrote to Aksakov that “John and I are acquainted from old times”
⁷⁴
before he began to materialize for every run-of-the-mill medium. For General Lippitt, she added further details: for the past fourteen years John King had been with her daily and saved her life in the shipwreck of the
Eumonia
and at the battle of Mentana. “He loves me, I know it.”
⁷⁵

From these statements, it appears that she identified King with the invisible protector of her childhood. Eventually, however, John would find himself replaced by more dignified spirits, and even now she realized that John was too earthy to act as anything but messenger and servant of the Brotherhood of Luxor.

Meanwhile Henry Olcott remained at Sansom Street with H.P.B. and Michael. Their interminable discussions must have excluded Michael, and no doubt the other odd happenings in the household did not contribute to his peace of mind. Helena, in addition, did not deign to concern herself with domestic matters. Since there were only a few ragged towels in the house, Henry bought a length of toweling, which he and Helena cut into pieces. Noting that she was about to use the fabric unhemmed, he protested such shoddy housekeeping and shamed her into getting out a needle. Suddenly, kicking the table, she yelled, “Get out, you fool!” but hastily explained that her remark had been directed not at Henry, but at an invisible being who had been tugging her skirt.

“Capital,” Henry joked. “Make it hem these towels.”

Towels, needles and thread were locked in a bookcase. Fifteen minutes later, Henry heard a squeaky sound “like a mouse’s pipe” and Helena informed him that “that nuisance” had finished the sewing. “So,” Olcott reported, “I unlocked the bookcase door and found the dozen towels actually hemmed, though after a clumsy fashion that would disgrace the youngest child in an infant-school sewing class.”
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However poor the job, he could not deny that the towels were indeed hemmed.

On another day, Helena disappeared into her bedroom and did not return. Henry called her name, but there was no answer, and, when he looked in the closet and under the bed, he found no trace of her. Finally she did return and to his inquiries as to her whereabouts, she laughed and responded that she had had some occult business to attend to, and had made herself invisible.”
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It would be years before Henry attributed these feats to hypnosis. Then, in Philadelphia, he was at least mystified, if not “psychologized,” as Helena had boasted he was. For Helena, it was less a matter of conning Henry than of comprehending the true nature of his character; he was clearly an extremely suggestible man who could be influenced against his better judgment, but who was also quick to respond to any appeal to his finer self. Above all, he was tantalized by occult knowledge, and eagerly sought to become her student. Little by little, H.P.B. set about weaning him both from Spiritualism and from his family, mistresses and clubs.

By this time, while publicly portraying herself as a leading Spiritualistic supporter, she privately was beginning to break away from its orthodoxy. American Spiritualism, she decided, was a kitchen garden of spooks and ghouls; her version loftily preached the sacred truth of “spiritual spiritualism.” It was her duty, she believed, “to purify the new religion from all its filthy weeds.... In this desire and effort I have been thitherto alone. I am only now beginning to collect adepts; I have collected half a dozen.”
⁷⁸

Actually she had corraled only Henry Steel Olcott, and even of him she could not be absolutely certain. What is interesting about her subjugation of Olcott is its matter-of-factness. Before his return to New York, Helena had convinced Olcott that the two leading Spiritualist papers,
Banner of Light
and the
Religio-Philosophical Journal,
were no longer dependable and suggested instead they support the more modest Boston periodical,
Spiritual Scientist.
While its publisher, Gerry Brown, was young and open to new ideas, his operation was failing until Helena threw herself into saving him. Contributing fifty dollars of her own money, she asked friends to invest and nagged Henry to find New York subscribers. “For God’s sake, do if you can. Why, they say the Lotus Club and all your numberless acquaintances can furnish hundreds and hundreds.”
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Finally she suggested that Olcott fund and write a subscription circular for the
Scientist.
Titled “Important to Spiritualists,” the piece was a simple six-paragraph plea for readers. When Olcott had finished correcting the proofs, H.P.B. suggested that, rather than signing his own name, he attribute the work to
“the Committee of Seven,
BROTHERHOOD OF LUXOR.” And who, Henry demanded, was the Brotherhood of Luxor? At which point Helena revealed that her work was being supervised by a committee of seven adepts from the Egyptian branch of a universal mystic brotherhood. Henry, as usual, was impressed.

H.P.B.’s next project for Henry was the creation of a “Miracle Club” for the investigation of psychic phenomena. Club members would be entitled to attend private seances, but were forbidden to speak of their experiences or even to disclose the address of the meeting place. As club medium, H.P.B. suggested David Dana, whom she said was an upstanding young man, whose brother, Charles Dana, was editor of the New York
Sun.