Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (31 page)

The strongest evidence for Helena’s version was the marked variation in handwriting Henry saw in the manuscript. In addition to Helena’s own script, there were three or four others: one small and plain, another bold and free, still others whose queer a’s and e’s made the writing nearly illegible. There was also a great variation in the grammatical styles, for some were poor and required corrections in every line, while others were beautifully written. “Most perfect of all,” he recalled, “were the manuscripts which were written for her while she was sleeping.” On one particular evening, they had worked until 2 a.m. and, too exhausted for her final smoke, Helena had begun to doze off in her chair before Henry left. The next morning, at breakfast, she showed him thirty or forty pages that had been written for her by one of her Masters. “It was perfect in every respect,” Olcott reported, “and went to the printers without revision.”

His testimony evidences the overwhelming probability that Madame Blavatsky often wrote while in a dissociated state. It is known that trance handwriting can vary sharply from a medium’s normal script and sometimes changes to approximate that of the purported entity communicating; in fact, Olcott states quite clearly that immediately prior to each change in handwriting, Helena would either fall into a trance or leave the room for a few minutes. When she returned to her desk, she would seem to be a different person with “different—very,
very
different command over her temper, which, at its sunniest was almost angelic, at its worst, the opposite.” Frequently she asked him to frame in good English some ideas she had been unable to express properly, and although Olcott always tried his best, he was hard-pressed to please her. Sometimes she let his failures pass with benevolent patience, sometimes not. “For the slightest of errors, she would seem ready to explode with rage and annihilate me on the spot!” Among her favorite epithets for Henry were “idiot”—which she pronounced “ee-jut,” as well as “ass” and “ass’s grandfather.”
¹⁴²

Not that Henry liked being called names. He attributed both H.P.B.’s nasty temper and her genius to the fact of having undergone seven years of occult training; it would be unfair to expect her to comport herself as a normal person, or write books as an ordinary writer. Of course Helena was the one who had manufactured this further excuse for her outrageous behavior. What she always failed to see was that the myths she invented for Henry’s benefit were gradually turning into monsters that would turn to devour their creator. Worse yet, she gradually came to believe, or to half-believe, her own myths. About this time she wrote to her sister:

Well, Vera, whether you believe me or not, something miraculous is happening to me. I am writing
Isis;
not writing, rather copying out and drawing that which She personally shows to me. Upon my word, sometimes it seems to me that the ancient Goddess of Beauty in person leads me through all the countries of past centuries which I have to describe.... I sit with my eyes open and to all appearances see and hear everything real and actual around me, and yet at the same time see and hear that which I write. I feel short of breath; I am afraid to make the slightest movement for fear the spell might be broken. Slowly century after century, image after image, float out of the distance and pass before me as if in a magic panorama; and meanwhile I put them together in my mind, fitting in epochs and dates, and I know
for sure
that there can be
no mistake.
Races and nations, countries and cities, which have for long disappeared in the darkness of the prehistoric past, emerge and then vanish, giving place to others... and then I am told the consecutive dates.
¹⁴³

Although Helena began the letter attributing her sensations to the goddess Isis, she seemed confused about the real identity of her tour guide. Can it be, after all, the everyday Helena who is responsible? “Most assuredly it is not I,” although possibly it could be “my Ego, the highest principle which lives in me.” Finally she concluded that her information derived from “my Guru and teacher who helps me in everything. If I happen to forget something, I have just to address him” and the needed information passed before her eyes. Abruptly, however, the guru to whom she had just referred metamorphosed into a group. “They know everything. Without them, from whence could I gather my knowledge?”
¹⁴⁴

Remembering Helena Petrovna’s vivid imagination, and her propensity for lying, Vera wrote back to say she feared for Helena’s sanity. H.P.B. replied plaintively:

Do not be afraid that I am off my head. All that I can say is that someone positively
inspires me
—more than this, someone enters me. It is not I who talk and write: it is something within me, my higher and luminous Self, that thinks and writes for me. Do not ask me, my friend, what I experience, because I could not explain it to you clearly. I do not know myself!
¹⁴⁵

To Olcott she could never confess these self-doubts without losing credibility, but with her sister she at least attempted honesty. Think of her, she suggested, as a sort of storehouse of somebody else’s knowledge.

Somebody
comes and envelopes me as a misty cloud and all at once pushes me out of myself, and then I am not “I” anymore—Helena Petrovna Blavatsky—but someone else. Someone strong and powerful, born in a totally different region of the world; and as to myself it is almost as if I were asleep, or lying... not quite conscious—not in my own body but close by, held only by a thread which ties me to it... I am perfectly conscious of what my body is saying and doing— or at least its new possessor. I even understand and remember it all so well that afterwards I can repeat it and even write down
his
words.
¹⁴⁶

These sensations were not, of course, new to her, since even in childhood she had felt the presence of a powerful male protector. Her sense of being pushed out of her body is similar to what she had experienced in Mingrelia after the birth of Yuri. But those past episodes had taken place during times of great psychic stress, while now she was living under conditions of relative well-being. For that matter, she had located a human male protector in the person of Henry Olcott; even though he was much too immature to resemble the man of her visions, nevertheless, he had rescued her from poverty and an unwanted husband and had made it possible for her to write. If she connected her earlier experiences with the intelligence who was currently “enveloping my body and using my brain,” she did not mention it to Vera, or to Nadyezhda to whom she described herself as “an enigma for future generations, a Sphinx!”
¹⁴⁷
She clearly fancied this mysterious image of herself and in letters to her aunt, who knew that she had been a brilliant student, could not resist boasting:

Just fancy that I, who have never in my life studied anything, and possess nothing but the most superficial smattering of general information; I, who never had the slightest idea about physics or chemistry or zoology, or anything else—have now suddenly become able to write whole dissertations about them.
¹⁴⁸

Nadyezhda must have sputtered in astonishment at those words, particularly the claim to know nothing about zoology, for had not all of them in the Fadeyev household imbibed botany and zoology from Princess Helena? Physics and chemistry? These subjects would have presented little difficulty for her niece. As if anticipating Nadyezhda’s reaction, Helena hurried to add:

It’s not a joke; I am perfectly serious; I am really frightened because I do not understand how it all happens. It is true that for nearly three years past I have been studying night and day, reading and thinking. But whatever I happen to read, it all seems familiar to me.
¹⁴⁹

It may be that her recent experiences did frighten her initially, but soon they began to intrigue, excite and flatter her. Actually, almost any creative writer would recognize her sensation of being inspired. Some writers might even admit to having sensed that another’s hand pounded the typewriter keys from time to time. By the same token, it is also a common experience to writers of both fiction and non-fiction, reading over what they have written, to marvel at insights of which they had not believed themselves capable. But H.P.B., despite having had a writer for a mother, knew so little of the creative process that she could only conclude she must be unique.

For Helena these universal experiences were so intense as to push her into trance while writing. Or possibly the cause lay elsewhere. Among her friends during this period was her old companion from Cairo, Albert Rawson, who, now living in New York, felt delighted to see her and obligingly arranged for her to take hashish, he reported, “under the care of myself and Dr. Edward Sutton Smith.” To Rawson she said nothing about voices and invisible entities, but only raved about the hashish which “multiplies one’s life a thousandfold.”

There were some men, and later one woman, whom H.P.B. made no attempt to impress with her occult powers, and Rawson was one of them. He was allowed to see the side of her she generally hid—the tireless, always dissatisfied worker—and accordingly he praised her as “an intellectual wonder, a reader of enormous capacity and retentive memory.” It was a pity, Rawson concluded, that her formal education had been neglected “for if she had been started aright who knows but she might have reincarnated Pythagoras or Bacon?”
¹⁵⁰

The idea of reincarnation was repulsive to Helena, nor was she interested in being Bacon or Pythagoras. She preferred to invent a Helena Petrovna more marvelous than any man who had actually existed, but whether this was a conscious decision is hard to determine. It was impossible for her to open her mouth without over-dramatizing or embellishing, and now with
Isis
she was clearly exaggerating her sensations. Even so, it is hard to understand how she could have forgotten the one hundred books she had combed and digested with such thoroughness.

Undoubtedly it pleased Helena to insist that she “received” much of her material, but she knew very well it was not an unprecedented claim. Aside from the silly Emma Hardinge Britten and her “Chevalier Louis,” more impressive writers had made similar claims. One was the hero of her youth, Edward Bulwer-Lytton who, in
Zanoni,
stated that his story had come from an elderly Rosicrucian. In Helena’s immediate circle, Andrew Jackson Davis swore that the only book he had ever read was a romantic novel, a statement seemingly contradicted by his familiarity with Emanuel Swedenborg and the sociologist Charles Fourier. Supposedly Davis had “received” the material for his two dozen books while in trance; his supporters attributed his familiarity with Swedenborg to “clairvoyance for printed matter,” a term describing the ability of a sensitive to “read” word for word and cite page and line number in books hundreds of miles away. There was no doubt that Davis’s claim to virtual illiteracy made his books seem marvelous, and no one was more aware of this than Helena. She too claimed this rare type of clairvoyance, although it is extremely doubtful that she actually possessed it.
¹⁵¹

By the spring of 1876, work occupied Helena’s attention to the exclusion of all else. She paid no attention to the steadily declining membership of the Theosophical Society nor was she much concerned when, after a quarrel, William Judge no longer attended meetings or visited her.

Although Judge and others had left, Henry refused to abandon the Society; he ordered engraved stationery, paid the rental of the meeting room out of his own pocket, and instituted a secret handshake for what were probably the handful of remaining members. Desperate to dredge up new recruits, Henry named to the Society’s Council an elderly Bavarian nobleman named Joseph Henry Louis Charles, the Baron de Palm.

The baron had a distinguished manner and an impressive list of titles including Grand Cross Commander of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre and Knight of Saint John of Malta. He talked a great deal about his Spanish castles and mining properties in the Western United States, but, unfortunately, was temporarily short of funds. Since he was also obviously ill and alone, Henry brought him home and called a physician, who diagnosed nephritis and pneumonia. In gratitude, Palm decided to make a will in which he named Henry executor of his estate and designated the Theosophical Society as the beneficiary of his silver mines and real estate. In return, he asked that no clergyman officiate at his funeral and that his body be cremated. Henry agreed.

Both H.P.B. and Olcott must have calculated Palm’s fortune as an eventual lifesaver of the Theosophical Society, but this pleasant prospect did not alleviate Helena’s chief difficulties. For one thing, after some three months of arduous labor and eight hundred and seventy pages of manuscript, she decided the book was dreadful, threw it out, and began it over a third time. In part, this decision may have been prompted by the publication of Emma Britten’s
Art Magic,
which received atrocious reviews. H.P.B. was horrified to see that reviewers were linking Emma and her foolish book to the Theosophical Society, described by the
Religio-Philosophical Journal
as “the so-called Theosophical Society, an outgrowth of the absurd religious dogmas of ancient priestcraft.”
¹⁵²
Even though Emma hotly denied all such connections, people continued to treat
Art Magic
as a Society publication and the T.S. (Theosophical Society) itself as a public joke. God forbid that Helena should produce something similar to
Art Magic,
especially since she knew that both Emma and herself used many of the same occult books as source material.