Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (93 page)

When his accusers asked for proof that the Mahatma letters were genuine, Judge refused to cooperate but, writing to a friend, he sniffed: “Proofs. Proofs be damned. What proof did they ever get from H.P.B.? None.” In 1894, a Judicial Committee was appointed to look into the alleged fraud, but Judge claimed that the Committee had no right to make an inquiry because it involved the question of whether or not the Masters existed. In the end, the Committee upheld him on that point and matters reached an impasse. In November of that year, Judge announced that he had received orders from the Masters insisting Mrs. Besant be removed as European head of the Esoteric Section because she was under the influence of “Dark Powers of evil”; instead the Masters had appointed him as the sole head. Most European Theosophists laughed at Judge, while most of the Americans supported him. The situation was resolved on April 28, 1895, when three-quarters of the American branches seceded from the parent Society and formed a new organization called “The Theosophical Society in America,” electing Judge as its lifetime president. Over the next several years, there was further splintering of the American Society.

William Judge died in 1896, Henry Olcott in 1907. During the last months of Olcott’s life, his thinking became increasingly muddled; in his final illness he would leap out of bed and fall to his knees, claiming that K.H. and M. were in the room. His death left Annie Besant as the acknowledged head of the Society. Soon after, she made her permanent home at Adyar and became part of the destiny of India.

It seemed the Society’s karma to suffer periodic scandals. After H.P.B.’s death, Annie Besant came to depend greatly on Charles Leadbeater and made him assistant secretary of the European Section, after which he achieved a solid reputation as a clairvoyant, writer, speaker and teacher. In the early years of the twentieth century, he made long lecture tours of the United States, Canada and Australia, always accompanied by several young boys. The growing gossip about him was indignantly denied by Annie Besant, until, in 1906, two of his proteges told their shocked parents that Leadbeater had encouraged them to masturbate. A type-written note in cipher was found on the floor of a Toronto apartment where he had stayed with one of the boys and was said to have been written by Leadbeater. Decoded, it read: “Glad sensation is so pleasant. Thousand kisses, darling.”

Leadbeater denied having written the incriminating note, but he did not deny having advocated masturbation. He maintained that when celibacy was impossible and marriage out of the question, masturbation was a lesser evil than consorting with prostitutes. This view was fiercely condemned by most Theosophists, and, when the Society put him on trial, he accounted for his sexual philosophy by saying that in a former incarnation he had been an ancient Greek. He was asked to resign. When made public, this scandal shook the Society to its foundations; three years later, however, Annie Besant took him back into her advisory circle and he was invited to rejoin the Society by a nearly unanimous vote of the general secretaries.

None of this dimmed Annie’s personal prestige; indeed it increased with the years, particularly in India, where she attracted some of the country’s most outstanding minds. Thirteen-year-old Jawaharlal Nehru joined the Society after hearing her lecture at Allahabad and was initiated by Annie herself. He would always retain warm admiration for her and call her “the most magnificent lady” he had ever met, but the ideas of Indian nationalism soon drove Theosophy from his head. Politically oriented herself, she became president of the Indian National Congress and was once imprisoned briefly by her own countrymen for her activities on behalf of Indian independence. With the rise of Mohandas Gandhi, her influence in the Indian Home Rule movement began to wane and it was then she confined herself to Theosophy. Becoming more mystical, she instituted rites and rituals and adopted flowing white robes as her everyday dress.

In 1909 Annie took as her protege a young Hindu boy, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and before long she was hailing him as the avatar of the New Messiah who would regenerate the world. It was the Mahatmas themselves, she said, who had warned her of the coming of the World Teacher and now she believed that she had found him. The care and education of both Jiddu and his brother Nitya were entrusted to Charles Leadbeater, despite the fact that the boys’ father brought an unsuccessful suit for the custody of his sons. Mrs. Besant, convinced that the voice of Jesus spoke through Krishnamurti, announced to the Associated Press that “the Divine Spirit has descended once more on a man, Krishnamurti, one who in his life is literally perfect... The World Teacher is here.”

In the 1920s, Mahatmas Koot Hoomi and Morya were still very much alive in the minds of Theosophists; their messages were received by Leadbeater, Francesca Arundale’s nephew George and a few others who claimed to be communicating clairvoyantly on the astral plane. Many of these messages contained directives for Krishnamurti, and once Master K.H. was said to have appeared in astral form to Nitya, with the message that Krishnaji was to develop a larger vocabulary.

As Annie grew older, she offered her protege reverence and humility in such an ostentatious manner that she would insist upon sitting on the floor at his feet during public events. Nevertheless, by 1926, it was clear that the Coming was going wrong. Krishnamurti seemed to be moving away from the role written for him; there were occasions when he was heard to speak as if he did not believe in the Masters. Three years later he severed himself from the Theosophical Society and repudiated all claims to Messiahship, although he has continued his career as a spiritual teacher. It had never occurred to Annie that the World Teacher might disown the organization that had proclaimed him, or that the Masters could have been wrong.

In her eighties, she was visibly weary and there were rumors among her intimates of her senility, but to the world at large she remained one of the most remarkable women of the age. The New York
Times
placed her in the company of Madame Curie, Jane Addams and Anna Pavlova; a London paper called her one of the most unique women of all time, to be ranked with the Duchess of Marlborough and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She died at Adyar on September 20, 1933, age eighty-six, after five days of semi-consciousness in which she refused to eat or drink water. Her body, clad in white silk, was cremated on a pyre of sandalwood.

To the last she believed that she had kept faith with H.P.B.’s message, but the fact was that she had not; along with Leadbeater, Arundale and others, she gradually betrayed the original vision by enveloping Theosophy in a religious atmosphere that its founder would have considered odious. Helena’s sublime aims of brotherhood were neglected in expectation of the Messiah, her Esoteric Buddhism watered down and relegated to the background in favor of an Esoteric Christianity. Finally a full circle was made when Leadbeater and Arundale declared themselves bishops and, under the name of the Liberal Catholic Church, instituted candles, High Mass and vestments, and labored to build up exactly that which H.P.B. had tried to destroy.

The Theosophical Society today continues to thrive in sixty countries. There are approximately forty thousand members worldwide, with some fifty-five hundred in the United States. The international headquarters, still at Adyar, is now a beautiful estate of two hundred sixty-six acres along the banks of the Adyar River, and the Adyar Library is world famous for its unique collection of Oriental literature.

Each year, Theosophists commemorate the anniversary of H.P.B.’s death on May 8, which they call White Lotus Day.

APPENDIX A: 

The Question of H.P.B.’s Psi Faculties

H.P.B. is associated with a wide range of paranormal phenomena, some of which was confirmed by witnesses. Physical phenomena she is said to have produced include spirit photography, levitation of objects, raps, apports, poltergeists, materializations called “ectoplasm,” and out-of-body experiences. In the category of mental phenomena, Madame Blavatsky claims to have had psi faculties for telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience (the sensing of unseen presences), and mediumistic communications.

Whether or not H.P.B. possessed all or some of these capabilities, it is necessary to examine the evidence of such phenomena because they are as controversial today as they were during the past century. Few parapsychologists are convinced about the reality of most of the physical phenomena that flourished in H.P.B.’s time. Such things as ectoplasm, apports, levitation and psychic photography are regarded as doubtful, firstly because almost every physical medium of the nineteenth century is known to have cheated on occasion, thus casting doubt on the genuineness of all the other phenomena. Secondly, very few agreed to scientific testing under controlled conditions. It is ironic, and perhaps to be expected, that today when the techniques for detecting fraud have advanced enormously, physical mediums have become extremely rare. Just about the only physical phenomena for which there is some evidence would be “poltergeists,” now termed Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis, or RSPK.

In recent years the paranormal phenomena receiving the most attention from both parapsychologists and the general public are those falling into the category of mental phenomena. The widely held assumption is that certain persons do have the psi faculty (General Extrasensory Perception). Recently, complicated machinery and procedures have been devised to determine the existence of telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and retrocognition. A type of mental phenomena currently under investigation, one which directly relates to H. P. Blavatsky, involves mediumistic data. The term medium, first used in a religious context by Spiritualists to denote a person who could communicate with the surviving spirits of the dead, is no longer in vogue. Parapsychologists prefer “sensitive” or “psychic,” terms that do not imply acceptance of survival after death.

One kind of sensitive is the “trance medium,” who is able to put herself (the majority of psychics are women) into a self-induced hypnotic state that may range from a very light dissociation to an extremely deep one. While in this altered state of consciousness, another personality appears to control the psychic’s body and voice, either by involuntary (“automatic”) writing or by “direct voice,” that is, directly controlling the sensitive’s entire body. It is a matter of debate whether a psychic’s controlling personality is in fact the discarnate it often claims to be, or merely a secondary personality, or a dream-creation existing only when the psychic is entranced. The dream-creation is consolidated by repetition into personalities consistent enough to play their assigned roles.

More common today is a second type of sensitive, the “clairvoyant medium,” who claims to psychically see, hear and sense unseen presences while in her normal state of consciousness.

From a distance of one hundred years, the evidence for H.P.B.’s psi faculty for physical phenomena appears to be extremely shaky and in some instances completely non-existent. For that matter, much of the evidence points to fraud. On at least two occasions she seems to have hired individuals to impersonate her Mahatmic entities. The most that can be said for her in these instances is that if she was not cheating, she had the bad luck to look as though she were.

On the other hand, I do not believe there can be much doubt that she was a genuine sensitive. Members of her family attested to the fact that since early childhood she claimed to see and hear invisible entities, and later as an adult H.P.B. herself supplied detailed accounts of hypnotic states in which other personalities seemed to be colonizing her body. Apparently it was not until her forties that she began attaching names to these unseen personages, whom she called Masters or Mahatmas, feeling that they were supplying her with information. Unlike other sensitives, she rejected the idea that they might be spirits of the dead, nor would she have accepted the more recent theory that they might be secondary personalities of hers. Developing her own interpretation of these experiences, she preferred to believe that the communicating entities were living men who had chosen her as a channel through which they could feed messages to the world. She believed that they spoke to her telepathically or visited her in their astral and physical bodies. Theoretically, it is possible that she was tapping some cosmic reservoir of memories or tuning into the minds and/or memories of living persons, but whether these people were, as she thought, supermen living in Tibet or simply symbolic forms of dramatization is an unanswerable question.

In psychical research, the principal test for mediumistic data is whether or not it can be verified. Is the knowledge being presented available in the sensitive’s own memory or the memory of some other persons, or can it be found in publications, extant documents or objects? In the case of H.P.B., virtually all her data was available in Eastern scripture or from occult writings. Even though she synthesized the material in a fresh, provocative way, the fact remains that it predated her psychic experience. At the same time, it should be kept in mind that, while she was not a formal scholar, she did happen to be a voracious reader with a remarkably retentive memory. Analyses of her two major works, supposedly written with the aid of her Mahatmas, reveal nothing that was not already known—there are no unexpected discoveries, no startling revelations, and in fact the data could be found in books readily available to anyone willing to take the time and effort to seek it.

In spite of the fact that the first full-scale investigation conducted by the Society for Psychical Research was an inquiry into Theosophical phenomena, Madame Blavatsky’s psi faculties were never tested. It is unclear whether the S.P.R. ever requested her to undergo testing, but it appears that they did not. If they had suggested the idea, she would not have cooperated because she refused to submit to even the simplest test when repeatedly urged to do so by some of her followers. The fact that her phenomena occurred spontaneously and unexpectedly lends some validity to the charge that they were consciously prearranged to achieve certain effects. Without exception, the psychical researchers of the past century have given H.P.B. short shrift, either ignoring her completely or dismissing her as did Frederic Myers when he called her an imposter, or William James, who in personal letters rather uncomplimentarily termed her a “jade.”