Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (30 page)

The evening closed with the election of Olcott as president, Pancoast and Felt as vice-presidents, and Judge as counsel. Helena consented to accept the modest position of corresponding secretary.

Even though the Society was only a discreet whisper away from Spiritualism, Henry took great pains to inform the public that Theosophy was no Spiritualist offshoot. His about-face made Helena uncomfortable, enough so that she assured Aksakov that the Society “is the same spiritualism but under another name.” She went on to boast that “the rules of the society are so strict that it is impossible for a man who has been in the least mixed up in any dirty matter to become a member. No free lovers or atheists or positivists are admitted....”
¹²⁴
Aksakov, who knew something of Madame’s own past, must have puzzled over how she herself had passed the Society’s strict admission requirements.

To Olcott, the Society was a serious business worthy of his time and money; accordingly, he hired a room in Mott Memorial Hall at 64 Madison Avenue where, on November 17, 1875, he delivered his presidential address. Used regularly by another club, the dim, book-lined chamber boasted a platform at one end. It was small but adequate to their needs since only a handful of “fellows” turned up. H.P.B. listened from the audience, while Henry grandiosely predicted the Theosophical Society would earn a place in history as the first group to communicate with races of unseen beings. Helena thought these were rash predictions and wrote in her scrapbook that Henry was “counting the price of the bear’s skin before the beast is slain.”
¹²⁵
The colonel himself, rereading the speech seventeen years later, admitted that it sounded “a bit foolish.”
¹²⁶

In spite of Olcott’s efforts to put the Society on a dignified footing, difficulties arose immediately. George Felt failed to produce a single “elemental,” not even “the tip end of the tail of the tiniest Nature-spirit.”
¹²⁷
Assured by Helena that he would come through eventually, Henry authorized the Society’s treasurer to give Felt a hundred dollars for his experiments, but as the months passed and Felt did not even bother to turn up for scheduled lectures, he was mortified. Felt had exposed them to the mockery of every skeptic in New York. It was bad enough that the general press ridiculed the new Society while, worse yet, the Spiritualist papers ignored it, but after a few months the membership began to drop. When Charles Sotheran, one of the founders, noisily resigned, he warned people, in a letter to the
Banner of Light,
to stay away from the Theosophists. Henry tried to bolster interest by hiring clairvoyants and mesmerizers, paid for out of his own pocket, but, by the following spring, even Helena no longer bothered to attend meetings.

H.P.B. had more important concerns on her mind than the fading Theosophical Society. At the end of November, she and Henry moved together to 433 West Thirty-fourth Street, thereby relieving him of having to pay rent on two establishments. While his room was on the second floor and H.P.B.’s on the first, gossip still circulated. Olcott may have been divorced but Madame was still married and although she had tried to conceal her second marriage, too many people knew about Michael. She gave instructions to turn him away if he ever appeared at the door, but this order was gratuitous, for he desired a reconciliation no more than she. Still, her simultaneous intimacy with two men was shocking. Louisa Andrews, writing to Hiram Corson, called Madame’s treatment of Betanelly shameful. “What her relationship with Olcott is, I do not know, but if it be not criminal (and I believe it is not), it is not from principle.”
¹²⁸

At Thirty-fourth Street, H.P.B. planned to get down to business on her book, but she found that good intentions were hardly enough. During her stay at Ithaca, she had galloped through twenty-five pages of foolscap each day and since she remained there nearly a month, must have accumulated roughly six hundred pages. Unfortunately, little was publishable, and she knew it. Unlike many fledgling writers, Helena understood her intention: to restate the entire occult doctrine and salvage the ancient world from the modern stigma of superstition and ignorance. To reveal the traces, in ancient and medieval history, of a secret science whose principles had been lost was a formidable task. First it meant foraging through science, religion and philosophy, then correlating the findings in a book with structural unity. An encyclopedia of legends and fables would not do; rather, H.P.B. planned to digest and codify the ancient myths, retelling them in terms intelligible to the modern devotee.

So far, the bulk of her work was almost totally incoherent. Unable to admit this, she kept the manuscript hidden and made no comment on its progress. Although she had written that “I am nailed up like a slave to my chair writing all day,”
¹²⁹
Olcott, who knew better, found her “not very industrious.”
¹³⁰
Frustrated and more than a little guilty about her poor progress, Helena informed Professor Corson on January 8, 1876, that “my book is finished,”
¹³¹
when actually she had yet to seriously begin.

For a change, money was not a problem, since Henry took care of everything, including her debt to Andrew Jackson Davis. She had at last succeeded in selling two articles to the New York
Sun,
although “A Story of the Mystical” and “The Luminous Circle” can hardly be termed journalism. H.P.B.’s own distinctive blend of fact and fiction, they were first-person occult travelogues stuffed with vampires, dervishes, and Rumanian gypsies. She was delighted to get a more than respectable thirty dollars for each story.

In fact, what she often tried to pass off in her writings as fact was so bizarre even Gerry Brown’s readers protested. That sort of niggling never failed to irritate Helena, who never bothered with personal responses to readers’ inquiries. Instead, Brown received a response from “Endreinek Agardi of Koloswar,”
¹³²
who swore that he could vouch for Madame Blavatsky as he had been an eyewitness to the events described in one of her articles.

Where Helena got the name
Endreinek
is hard to say, but
Agardi
was obviously suggested by Metrovitch, and
Koloswar
was a pretty Hungarian town the two of them had visited on tour in 1867. It is amusing to note that “Endreinek Agardi’s” letter found its way into H.P.B.’s scrapbook.

By early January, 1876, both Helena and Henry had begun to make changes in their daily routines. She was fond of pointing out lightly that a true ascetic did not indulge in sex, meat or alcohol. Now, to her astonishment, Henry began taking her seriously. No more was he seen at the Lotos Club bar and gave up meat and wine. Frequently he did not eat at all. Seeing him waste away, Helena regretted having nagged him; she had simply not expected him to turn into a fanatic. “I can do nothing with him,” she wrote Corson, adding pointedly that Olcott lived “to purify American Spiritualism of the dirt of free love.”
¹³³

As for herself, she had never liked alcohol. Sex was another matter, but after Michael, she had relinquished it with less regret than difficulty. Once she had even exclaimed to a friend, “To Hades with this sex love! It is a beastly appetite that should be starved into submission.”
¹³⁴
She had considerably less success in taming her excessive passions for tobacco and rich food. Shamed by Henry’s new regime, she fasted for nine days on salad, stopped smoking, and slept on the floor. She suffered from nightmares. On the ninth night, she felt herself leaving her body, “looking at it with repulsion while it was walking, talking, getting puffed up with fat and sinning. Pheugh, how I hated myself.” It was, she decided, “one of the most disgusting scenes”
¹³⁵
she had ever witnessed and she resolved to change.

In spite of her good intentions, she soon slipped back into her customary excesses, although she was again making another attempt to begin her book. She remained at her desk for seventeen or eighteen hours a day, to Henry’s boundless admiration, and he claimed to know of no managing editor or reporter with her “dogged endurance and tireless working capacity... it was seldom that either of us got to bed before two o’clock a.m.” Later, he would brag that Helena did not go out of the house for six months. In any case, Henry spent his days at his law office and had no real idea what she did in his absence. When he returned after work, they would have an early dinner before settling down to their big writing table “and work, as if for dear life, until bodily fatigue would compel us to stop. What an experience!”
¹³⁶

IV

Isis Unveiled

There has been considerable controversy over how—and by whom—
Isis Unveiled
was actually written. During Madame Blavatsky’s lifetime, it would be said that she could not possibly have produced it herself, the book being far too complex to have issued from the mind of a woman; instead, she had found the completed manuscript, so the story went, among the effects of a man who had died while living in Olcott’s apartment. Other rumors attributed the work to Olcott himself, still others to a Platonist scholar named Alexander Wilder. Shortly after Helena’s death, William Emmette Coleman, a scathing critic of Madame, spent three years studying
Isis
and her other works for the express purpose of proving her a plagiarist. In
Isis Unveiled,
he claimed, there were some two thousand passages copied from other books without credit.

By careful analysis, I found that in compiling
Isis
about 100 books were used. About 1400 books are quoted from and referred to in this work; but, from the 100 books which its author possessed, she copied everything in
Isis
taken from and relating to the other 1300. There are in
Isis
about 2100 quotations from and references to books that were copied, at second-hand, from books other than the originals; and of this number only about 140 are credited to the books from which Madame Blavatsky copied them at second-hand. The others are quoted in such a manner as to lead the reader to think that Madame Blavatsky had read and utilised the original works, and had quoted from them first-hand—the truth being that these originals had evidently never been read by Madame Blavatsky. [Readers of
Isis,
Coleman went on to insist] had been mislead into thinking Madame Blavatsky an enormous reader, possessed of vast erudition; while the fact is her reading was very limited, and her ignorance profound in all branches of learning.
¹³⁷

While this particular conclusion may be challenged, Coleman seems to have done his homework thoroughly when he estimated that H.P.B. used about a hundred books. As Olcott admitted, “our whole working library scarcely comprised one hundred books of reference,”
¹³⁸
including Joseph Ennemoser’s
History of Magic,
Hargrave Jennings’
Rosicrucians,
J. S. Forsyth’s
Demonologia,
and works by Eliphas Levi, S. F, Dunlap, Louis Jacolliot, Henry Roger Gougenot Des Mousseaux, and Max Muller. Occasionally H.P.B. would borrow books from friends, but most were purchased through Andrew Jackson Davis, or discovered in out-of-the-way bookshops.

Even though Olcott acknowledged H.P.B.’s library, he believed it to be neither her only source, nor her main one. Looking at the hundreds of quotations in
Isis,
he was sure they could not all have emerged from the books on her shelf; had he not known better, he would have assumed
Isis
was written in an alcove in the British Museum. However, Olcott is not a good witness for H.P.B. because, unlike the arch-analyzer William Coleman, he had not read those hundred books, and in any case, always opted for romance over reality. It excited him to see Helena sparkling with unimaginable erudition. “Whence did she get this knowledge?”
¹³⁹
he wondered, dismissing the traditional childhood governesses, universities, libraries and travel experience. The answer was simple; she received her knowledge

from the Astral Light,
and, by her soul-senses, from her Teachers—the “Brothers,” “Adepts,” “Sages,” “Masters,” as they have been variously called. How do I know it? By working two years with her on
Isis
and many more years on other literary work.
¹⁴⁰

More to the point, Henry knew not only because H.P.B. told him so but because every night as he sat opposite her, he could see she did not function in an ordinary manner. Her pen flying across the page, she would suddenly stop, stare vacantly into space, and adjust her vision as if looking at something which was invisible to him. Then she would copy down what she had just read in the astral light. The quotation complete, her eyes would resume their natural expression, and she would continue writing as before. Helena’s “astral light” was the universal fluid spoken of by Eliphas Levi; in the twentieth century, Edgar Cayce would call it “the Akashic record,” God’s book of life written upon the skein of time and space; and parapsychologists would hypothesize it as possibly some psychic collective memory that could be drawn upon by mediums. To Henry Olcott, who had never read Levi, the astral light was pure magic.

Once, when he questioned a quotation he believed she had miscopied, her eyes glazed over and she pointed to a shelf in the corner: “There, there; go look for it over there!”
¹⁴¹
Finding two books that to his knowledge had not been in the house before, he corrected the quotation, returned the books to the shelf, and resumed his seat. However, when he looked over at the shelf a few minutes later, he was stupefied to see that the books had vanished. Of course, Helena explained serenely they were merely apports that had been “dematerialized,” i.e., transported through space and material obstacles such as walls, and then “rematerialized” in their original forms.