Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (7 page)

Undaunted and unrepentant, Helena Petrovna insisted that she was not afraid in the cellar and, in any case, had not been alone. Her companions were beings she called “playmates,” one of whom was a hunchbacked little boy.
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It was true that whenever the escort found her, she was usually deep in conversation with someone, but the someone was invisible. The family was loath to consider the possibility that anything more than imagination might have been operating. Actually, it is as common now as then for lonely youngsters to conjure up imaginary playmates. Reflecting a desire for companionship, or perhaps for someone to whom a child can transfer anger or blame, the invisible playmate is not necessarily evidence of emotional instability. On the contrary, it may be an indication of problem-solving, and in an ordinary child, one might perceive it as a struggle toward mental health.

But Helena Petrovna was not ordinary, and her family knew it. Vera, in
Juvenile Reflections Compiled for My Children
—a book based on her childhood diary—admits that her sister “was the strangest girl one has ever seen,”
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though later, in less guarded moments, she disparagingly referred to her as “crazy Helena.”
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It is more than probable that Helena was called “crazy” by the other children, and by the adults, and it was not without ample justification.

However fearless she might have been, Helena was now experiencing terrifying hallucinations in which she was pursued by the “terrible glaring eyes” of inanimate objects.

She would shut her eyes tight during such visions, and run away to hide from the ghostly glances thrown on her by pieces of furniture or articles of dress, screaming desperately, and frightening the whole household. At other times she would be seized with fits of laughter, explaining them as the amusing pranks of her invisible companions.
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That winter, back in Saratov, she would be discovered under the roof, amid nests of pigeons. When asked what she was doing, she explained that she was “putting them to sleep,” according to the rules set forth in
Solomon’s Wisdom.
At other times she would escort Vera, Leonid and Nadyezhda into the Princess’s museum at twilight and, straddling the seal, “narrated to us the most inconceivable tales about herself, the most unheard-of adventures of which she was the heroine,” Vera recalled. Each of the stuffed animals, Helena claimed, had taken her into its confidence and divulged the history of its life in previous incarnations. Where, Vera wondered later, could she have learned about “the superstitious mysteries of metempsychosis” in a family so Christian as theirs? Still, as a child, Vera believed every word that her sister uttered.

Never can I forget the life and adventures of a tall white flamingo . . , He had been ages ago, she told us, no bird, but a real man. He had committed fearful crimes and a murder, for which a great genius had changed him into a flamingo, a brainless bird, sprinkling his two wings with the blood of his victims, and thus condemning him to wander for ever in deserts and marshes.

After that, when Vera came into the museum, she closed her eyes and ran past quickly to avoid seeing the blood-covered murderer.

H.P.B.’s marvelous evocative powers carried away her audiences to the point where, even if vaguely, they saw what she saw. As a child, she frightened her sister “very nearly into fits.” Vera remembered that near the summer estate there was a sandy tract of land which appeared to have at one time been the bottom of a lake, since its soil yielded petrified relics of fishes and shells. Helena would stretch out on the ground, her elbows buried in the sand, and conjure underwater battles of long-dead sea monsters. Then she would abruptly switch her narrative from past to present tense. Suddenly the earth was opening. Around them the air was condensing into waves. Water surrounded them. They were standing on the bottom of the sea, amid coral reefs and caves with stalactites. She could feel the velvety water caressing her body. Then suddenly the sea was engulfing them; they were drowning. Helena could see it all.
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During the drama, her audience would be sure they were drowning. Afterward, they would feel abused and regard Helena Petrovna as quite mad. A notable exception to this critical view was held by her Aunt Nadyezhda who argued that H.P.B. was superior to everyone else in the family, and simply not appreciated. She spoke of the “envy and animosity of all those who, in their trivial inferiority, felt wounded by the splendor of the faculties and talents of this really marvellous”
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niece of hers. There is apparently much truth in Nadyezhda’s words, for Helena unquestionably had a superior intelligence. Her aversion to formal instruction notwithstanding, she had the facility of grasping and assimilating the most difficult subjects with speed and ease, subjects that took other people years of study to master. This is confirmed by independent testimony from other members of the family who were decidedly hostile to H.P.B., but who recall being “impressed by the extraordinary facility with which she acquired skill and knowledge of the most varied description. Her abilities in this respect verged on the uncanny.”
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Forty years later people on several continents would be arguing whether Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was a genius, a consummate fraud, or simply a lunatic. By that time, an excellent case could have been made for any of the three. To a great extent, the truth was confused by H.P.B. herself. Far from trying to pass herself off as a genius or a scholar, she went out of her way to insist that she had only normal intelligence and, furthermore, a relatively poor education. If Nadyezhda’s statements can be trusted—and in this instance it appears that they can be—her niece received the typical superficial education given to a girl of good family: she studied Russian, French and English. Afterwards, during her travels, she would pick up a smattering of Italian. As far as serious academic study was concerned, “there was no shadow of it, not even the least promise thereof.” Then where did Helena get her knowledge of hieroglyphics, of Hebrew, Sanskrit and Greek? “She never saw them even in a dream,” would declare Nadyezhda in 1881. “I can swear to it.”
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Forty years hence, when Nadyezhda would make that declaration, H.P.B. was flatly refusing to take any credit whatsoever for the complex philosophies coming from her pen. Rather, she insisted that she was but the passive instrument of others wiser and greater than herself. But in the 1840s, her brilliance was so obvious that the Fadeyevs did not view her abnormal behavior with excessive alarm. Helena was unquestionably strange, but, given her extraordinary intelligence, they must have hoped that she would outgrow her eccentricities, as children outgrow stammering or bed-wetting.

Maturity often does bring an end to such difficulties, but sometimes the problems simply take a different form. For several years, Helena had been receiving nightly visitations from an elderly woman who chose to make known her presence through H.P.B.’s handwriting. She called herself Tekla Lebenorff and gave a detailed account of her life, including her birthplace (Revel,in the Baltic Provinces), her marriage, the history of her daughter Z—-and her thrilling romance, and her son F—-who had committed suicide, and who in fact sometimes appeared in person to lament his sufferings. Tekla went on to describe her death and to give the name and address of the Lutheran pastor who had administered the last sacrament. In case that was not proof enough, she also reproduced a petition that she had presented to the Czar, writing it out verbatim and even including a remark Nicholas had written in the margin.

Tekla Lebendorff, it will be remembered, was the aunt of D—-, an officer in Peter von Hahn’s regiment who had befriended H.P.B. This was the woman whose portrait Helena had thought so ugly, but she had forgotten all that by then. All she knew was that when she sat down with paper and pen, she could produce pages of manuscript in Tekla’s “clear, old-fashioned, peculiar handwriting and grammar, in German (a language I had never learnt to write and could not even speak well) and in Russian.” The fact that some of the writing was in German and all of it clearly not in Helena’s own hand caught the Fadeyevs’ attention and led them to predictable conclusions.

“From the first,” Helena explained, “all around me were impressed with the belief that the spirit possessing me must be that of a dead person,”
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and H.P.B. agreed. The Fadeyevs knew nothing about mediumship or automatic writing, nor did they believe in seances and disembodied spirits as did some trendy intellectuals of that era. In their opinion, the writing was a by-product of possession and they sent for the family priest who attended the sessions, sprinkling holy water from an aspergillum. The priest unhesitatingly declared the messages to be devil’s work, but since Tekla insisted that she saw God, the Virgin Mary and a host of angels, he could not object strongly enough to halt the proceedings.

Despite their horror and disapproval, it seems likely that the Fadeyevs could not help being intrigued by the writing. One imagines, too, that they regarded the sessions as a diverting parlor game for the long winter evenings. Inadvertently, of course, they were encouraging Helena to produce further communiques from Tekla Lebendorff by providing her with the attention she craved. Even if the attention was negative, it was welcomed by Helena.

In addition to seeing entities that no one else saw, she also heard the voices of pebbles, trees, and pieces of decaying timber. To Helena, all of nature seemed animated with a life of its own—visible and audible to herself alone. Without discounting the possibility that some sensitive individuals might very well communicate with trees, it is undeniable that Helena sometimes had a distorted concept of her environment. That she confused daydreams with reality is at once an obvious and insufficient explanation. More exactly, she seemed to find life in its natural state flat and tepid, and felt a compulsion to exaggerate and embroider her surroundings. She also wanted to dramatize Helena Petrovna.

Yet some small part of H.P.B. always managed to retain a grip on the real world, even if it came and went in flashes. At the age of twelve, she must have felt herself in a struggle to maintain her sanity. Although the writings of her relatives give the impression that she fully accepted her bizarre experiences, this is highly unlikely. She was, it must be emphasized, an intelligent, hypersensitive girl who undoubtedly tried to understand herself. Given her orthodox religious environment, she must have been secretly burdened with despair, a suspicion that she was headed for madness, and a sense of having sinned grievously.

Like the Irish-born medium Eileen Garrett who also had invisible playmates as a child and was called “liar” and “crazy,” H.P.B. must have been deeply hurt by the reactions of her family. Bewildered by accusations of dishonesty, resentful because her inner experiences were not considered valid, she withdrew to the catacombs or the attic where she found peace in being alone. There she could speak freely with children who accepted and loved her for what she was, and for what she was not. If she was forced to invent them, it did not much matter.

At this point, it might be instructive to pause and further examine the experiences of Eileen Garrett,
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since her childhood bears a number of striking similarities to H.P.B.’s. Both of Garrett’s parents committed suicide within a few weeks of her birth, although she was not aware of this until some years later. She was raised by an aunt and uncle. At the age of four, she first saw “the children,” two invisible girls and a boy, and soon afterward discovered that she could avoid suffering by retreating into episodes of amnesia. This technique of escape, she stated, seemed to come naturally to her from earliest childhood and “may well have prepared the way for the later development” of her clairvoyance. Later, as an adult, Garrett spent many years bouncing from one psychiatrist to another in an attempt to learn more about the nature of her psychic experiences. She was always quite open in admitting that she herself did not know whether they were rooted in mental illness or in genuine supernormal powers. Garrett, of course, was a child of the twentieth century, while H.P.B. was born before psychoanalysis was practiced.

Even though Eileen Garrett finally came to believe that “the entities are formed from spiritual and emotional needs of the person involved,” the psychiatric establishment did not offer her much enlightenment, doubtless because the answers to her questions cannot be answered with any degree of surety. Traditionally, psychologists have viewed psi capabilities as evidence of neurasthenia, pathological daydreaming, multiple or disintegrated personality, or
grand hysterie.
Sigmund Freud refused to take the subject seriously, while Carl Jung, the psychologist most intrigued by the supernormal, started out attributing psi facilities to pathology, but seems to have been in the process of changing his mind shortly before his death.

Tormented by doubts as H.P.B. must have been, she did not discuss them, except perhaps with Nadyezhda. Early on, she became convinced that confiding in people was useless and, given her stubborn nature, she must have decided to brazen it out by confidently insisting that her visions and voices were without a doubt real. Either way, the Fadeyevs never let her forget they were the doings of “the evil one.”

Curiously, a kind of vicious-circle effect now began to operate. In dodging the pain of her mother’s death and her father’s absence, she was able to dream herself into a state of altered consciousness where another kind of reality held sway. At the same time, her belief in an invisible world of supernatural beings predated the traumatic parental experiences. By the age of thirteen, her defenses seemed to be reinforcing each other and pulling her even further from facing the problem. Now, instead of
roussalkas
and invisible children, she saw an adult male—handsome, virile, wise, protective and... invisible. A psychiatrist might have contended that she had devised a father figure, but Helena had a completely different interpretation of the events that began to take place.