Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (50 page)

When the carriage pulled up to the house, H.P.B. clambered down and went straight inside, while the Chetty boys and Olcott inspected the riverside bungalows and the outbuildings. After tramping about the lower floor, she climbed up to a large tower-like room on the flat roof. From there she could see on the opposite bank of the river a little island connected to the mainland by a pink bridge. The air was alive with the beating wings of large flying foxes who swooped out from the city at sunset and sat feeding among the branches of the mango trees. Here she felt was a place she could be happy in, especially here in the roof room, which of course would be hers. Descending the stairs, she sent for the Chettys. “Soobiah,” she smiled, “Master says buy this.”
¹⁷⁵

Master did not show the way to find nine thousand rupees, however, and it was Olcott and the Madras Theosophical Society who had to mastermind the transaction. Not until November would the purchase be completed.

Back in Bombay just in time for monsoon season, Helena was greeted by a plethora of calamities. The least of them was a letter from Vera with the wholly unexpected news that their brother Leonid had been involved in a scandal and dismissed from his judgeship at Stavropol. Fortunately he had been acquitted at his trial but now could find no other position; according to Vera, he and his family were impoverished. In no way did Helena enjoy playing the supplicant, especially for the always distant Leonid, but she swallowed her pride and wrote immediately to Prince Alexander asking him for help. “Do this good deed and I will die in peace, blessing you and your family, and I will be ever your servant here and after death,” a rash promise from one who did not believe in an afterlife. Three months later, horribly embarrassed when she learned that Vera had exaggerated the whole thing, she reported to Alexander that her brother was “a weathercock of the family of weathercocks! Don’t bother about him.”
¹⁷⁶

Of greater concern during the next three months were catastrophes affecting what she had come to regard as her family in India. Her biggest solace and promoter in the past two years had been Alfred Sinnett, not merely as her friend and Koot Hoomi’s star pupil, but in his capacity as editor of the
Pioneer.
While every other English paper in India exhibited rabid hostility toward her, she could always count on the
Pioneer
for vindication. And if Sinnett sometimes balked, Koot Hoomi would step in to explain why such and such an article had to be published. However, Sinnett’s zealous propagandizing on behalf of the Theosophical Society was growing offensive to the paper’s owners, who warned him to exercise restraint; he was making the
Pioneer
look ridiculous, and consequently the circulation was beginning to drop. Against his own better judgment but on the advice of the Mahatmas, Sinnett ignored the warnings, and in August he was notified that when his contract expired in 1883, it would not be renewed.

Sinnett had not expected that his loyalty to the Masters would cost him his job and now, terribly distressed, rushed to H.P.B. demanding to know what the Mahatmas were going to do about his dismissal.

Momentarily taken back, Helena rattled off soothing answers similar to those she had spoonfed Olcott in New York: not to worry, the Mahatmas were not ungrateful people who abandoned their own in time of trouble. On the contrary, Sinnett could expect to be taken care of; perhaps a way might even be found for him to remain in India. And now she was faced with having to devise a solution.

After high-level decisions in Tibet and consultation with the generally inaccessible
Chohan
himself, Koot Hoomi advised Sinnett to found an English-language newspaper financed by Indian capital. Reminding him that he was no businessman, and the Brotherhood not a bank, he went on to conjecture that five lakhs of rupees (approximately $ 170,000) might be sufficient as a start. The money could be raised in no time from native princes and bankers, he suggested, then proceeded to tick off editorial suggestions.

Helena needed Sinnett in India more than he needed the Mahatmas, and after her initial scare, she calmed down and came up with what seemed the ideal solution. A Sinnett-run paper would be the media outlet she needed to get the Mahatmas the respect they deserved. “Their names have been sufficiently dragged in the mud,” she wrote Alfred. “They have been misused and blasphemed against by all the penny-a-liners in India. Nowadays people call their dogs and cats by the name of ‘Koot-hoomi’...” That these sentences occurred in the middle of a letter
protesting
Alfred’s publicity efforts on behalf of the Masters only indicates how H.P.B.’s manipulation of Sinnett really worked. Even her capitalized proclamation, “I DO NOT CARE ABOUT PUBLIC OPINION,”
¹⁷⁷
merely camouflaged her fear of ridicule. She cared nothing about herself, she insisted, only about the Masters whose names must not be desecrated. Since she was the Masters, this protestation was both true and false.

During that summer, rats ate her canary, and Helena was feeling particularly vulnerable, though one would not have suspected it from the restraint and lofty objectivity of the
Theosophist.
Any hope she had cherished of achieving respectability through the Arya Samaj was dead; Swami Dayananda had actually gone to the expense of printing handbills denouncing her and Henry as “atheists, liars and selfish persons”
¹⁷⁸
who knew the art of clever conjuring but nothing of the Yoga Vidya. In an editorial comment she gently chided him as an “eccentric,”
¹⁷⁹
but claimed she could take his brickbats philosophically for she had anticipated them.

She also appeared to take lightly Allan Hume’s
Hints on Esoteric Theosophy,
in which her writings were termed crude, unenlightened, and beneath the criticism of real scholars; her Society was an excuse for talk instead of action; her personal motives amounted to “the love of notoriety—the desire to be known—to be
somebody
instead of
nobody.”
¹⁸⁰
In Hume’s opinion, neither he nor any other Theosophist had learned one iota about psychic power or the hidden mysteries of nature as a result of his membership in the Society. Helena reserved her disgust for Sinnett’s ears: “Oh Jesus son of the nun and uncle of Moses!”
¹⁸¹
she erupted. She had had enough of “the great Hume, the Mount Everest of intellect”
¹⁸²
and if he wished to leave the Society, she wished him a speedy farewell. Koot Hoomi did not go quite so far, merely attributing Hume’s barbs to jealousy. “Did I not warn you?” he reminded Alfred.
¹⁸³

Dayananda and Hume had been anticipated. What Helena had not glimpsed in her crystal ball was trouble from Charles Massey, president of the British Theosophical Society. There were a few people she had taken real pains to win, and Massey was one of them. How could she know that rascal Hurrychund Chintamon would go to London, strike up an acquaintanceship with Massey, and squeal that Madame and her Mahatmas were frauds? It was a piece of bad luck. Nonetheless back in the summer of 1879 she had taken precautions to counteract Chintamon by appealing to her old friends and helpers Mary Hollis Billing and her spirit guide “Ski”:

My dear Good Friend:

Do you remember what Z [Ski] told or rather promised to me? That whenever there is need for it he will always be ready to carry any message, leave it either on Massey’s table, his pocket, or some other mysterious place. Well now, there is the
most important need
for such a show of his powers. Please ask him to take the enclosed letter and put it into M.’s pocket, or in some other still more mysterious place. But he must not know it is Z.
¹⁸⁴

The enclosure was a Koot Hoomi letter that Massey eventually discovered tucked inside the pages of the Society’s minute book. Since no one could conceive of how it got there, Massey concluded it must have traveled from Tibet to London supernaturally, and he was thrilled—for the moment. Before long local skeptics, in the persons of Hurrychund and Mary’s husband, whispered that the Mahatma letter had arrived by steamer from India and had in fact been delivered by Mary herself. Pressed for the truth, she admitted her role and even showed Massey Madame’s letter of instruction.

Apparently this experience had not totally disenchanted Massey, for he never confronted H.P.B. directly, but he was transformed from a believer into a needling critic. In the July 1882 issue of
Light,
a London Spiritualist weekly, he posed a question more embarrassing than anything Hume had come up with: Why did the Mahatmas teach the concept of reincarnation as one of the basic tenets of their philosophy when their messenger, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, had contemptuously denied reincarnation five years earlier in
Isis Unveiled?
To jog Madame’s memory, he quoted from page 351 of the first volume of
Isis,
in which she stated that reincarnation was not a natural rule but “an exception like the teratological phenomenon of a two-headed infant.”
¹⁸⁵
It happens, she had written, only in cases of abortion, infant death, or incurable idiocy, that is, when nature had not been able to produce a perfect human being. Massey mused whether Koot Hoomi was not, “as has been maliciously suggested, an alias for Madame Blavatsky.”
¹⁸⁶

Until coming out to India Helena had displayed quite a vocal abhorrence of reincarnation, not only in
Isis
but in person and in letters to friends. But in India, where the idea was taken for granted and where no respectable Mahatma would have been caught denying it, she had quickly altered her opinion, suddenly finding reincarnation quite feasible. Unfortunately page 351 of
Isis
still had to be explained. In the first place, she replied to Massey in the
Theosophist, Isis
was not only incomplete and clumsy but teeming with errors; secondly, while writing
Isis,
she had not been permitted to teach reincarnation. Now she was. It was that simple.

To her annoyance, this reply to Massey brought a snide letter from Allan Hume suggesting it was a pity that the Masters had not copyedited
Isis
more carefully, and further that it was “a sin on their part” to have withheld important information. In any case, the Mahatmas cared nothing about accuracy and “in one week I could teach any ordinarily intelligent man, all, that in eighteen months, we all of us have succeeded in extracting from them.”
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By September Helena felt drained. Weeks earlier her exhaustion had taken the form of boredom with her charade; she felt that “inner suffering is drying up the marrow of my spine” and merely longed for death. It seemed to her that she had been “a hundred times happier in the days when I was hungry and lived in a garret.”
¹⁸⁸
Suddenly everything that she had worked for seemed insignificant, all the important people she had won to her cause only “stupid little donkeys.” Perhaps, she wrote Prince Alexander, “when I die and all the philosophy and miracles cease, then they will become more intelligent.”
¹⁸⁹

Virtually all of the summer’s crises she had faced alone; Henry was now back in Ceylon and the overworked Damodar had collapsed and been sent away to recuperate. By autumn Helena’s psychic tensions were erupting in serious illness because when she consulted a physician she was given the unexpected news that she had Bright’s disease. Horribly discouraged and frightened, she sat down to compose a deathbed farewell to Patience and Alfred (and mailed an almost verbatim copy of the letter to her sister):

I am afraid you will have soon to bid me goodbye... This time I have it well and good—Bright’s disease of the kidneys; and the whole blood turned into water with ulcers breaking out in the most unexpected and the less explored spots, blood or whatever it may be forming into bags
a la Kangaroo
and other pretty extras and
etceteras.
¹⁹⁰

Bright’s disease is a kidney disorder characterized by large amounts of fluid in the intercellular spaces of the body (edema) and by albumin in the urine. H.P.B.’s description of edemic kangaroo bags seems to suggest the hemorrhagic type of Bright’s disease, which is essentially an inflammation of the capillary blood vessels in the filtering units of the kidney and is believed caused by poisons that have been formed by a bacterial infection elsewhere in the body. Or, possibly it was another variety of kidney disorder in which waste products accumulating in the blood cause swelling; but, without medical records, one can only speculate.

On top of this affliction, she told Sinnett, “I have become so stupidly nervous that the unexpected tread of Babula’s naked foot near me makes me start with the most violent palpitations of the heart.” Reading between the lines, it seems clear that Dr. Dudley recognized her anxiety and advised rest in less hectic surroundings. Perhaps he did say, as she wrote Sinnett, that she “can kick the bucket at any time in consequence of
an emotion”
as well as suggest she take a vacation, for that seems to be the point of the letter. “Boss [Master Morya] wants me to prepare and go somewhere for a month or so toward the end of September.” He had sent a
chela
who would escort her somewhere, “where I don’t know, but of course somewhere in the Himalayas.”
¹⁹¹

Toward the end of September H.P.B. left Bombay for north India. No special escort arrived to squire her to the Himalayas, but she was accompanied, or perhaps trailed, by a half-dozen Hindu Theosophists who had heard of
Upasika’s
plans and tagged along in the hope of glimpsing a Mahatma.