The Mysteries of Madame Blavatsky

I have been intrigued by H.P. Blavatsky (Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, 1831-1891), and the religion she founded, Theosophy, ever since I moved to New York and saw print ads for the center of the local Theosophical Society in The Village Voice. The ads usually invited readers to meetings. I always wanted to attend one to see what it was all about, but I never did. Technically, Theosophy claims to be a “synthesis of science, religion and philosophy”, as distinct from an outright religion, but in the modern world (to be blunt), at least in the West, neither science nor philosophy admits of religious components. Her holistic approach to wisdom draws from the East, and also the pre-Enlightenment West.

And this is one of the times where we realize that this is a CULTURAL blog, as opposed to one dealing strictly with show biz and the performing arts. We’ve had many occasions to mention Madame Blavatsky and her work here. People we’ve written about with connections to, or interests in, Theosophy have included Natacha Rambova, Elsa Schiaparelli,Vera Olcott, Maria Rasputina,Walter Hampden, Edward Bellamy, L. Frank Baum, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Edison, H.P. Lovecraft (I’ve always been struck by their common initials),and Harry Smith. Marion Meade wrote a biography of her. W.B. Yeats, Tolstoy, and Algernon Blackwood were interested in the movement, as were the painters Klimt, Kandinsky, and Mondrian. You’ll find references to it in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned.

Yes, but what the hell IS it, you ask? Well, that’s the point of esoteric religions. You never actually know. You’re set on a path, promised future access to answers, but they never do quite arrive. I suppose that adepts would answer that you know it with your heart and not your head, which can be a source of frustration to the writers of articles trying to get some kind of handle on it from the outside. But we can tell you that she and her colleague Colonel Henry Steel Olcott were the first from America known to have converted to Buddhism, and some of the central things that went into the mix were Hinduism, Spiritualism, Neoplatonism, hermeticism, occultism, Zoroastrianism, and, to be blunt (again), substantial portions of old fashioned hokum. As to the latter, the principal whopper was that in her youth she had been to places like the Americas (where she claimed to have learned from Native tribes), and India and Tibet, where she encountered the “Masters of the Ancient Wisdom”, who transmitted knowledge to her. If that sounds a bit like the same premise that informs the comic book Dr. Strange, surely it is no coincidence. And she claimed to have all sorts of picaresque adventures all over the globe which remain both uncorroborated and unlikely. It is probable that she saw a bit of Europe during the time she claimed to have been surviving shipwrecks and climbing Tibetan mountaintops.

The better established facts are these. She was born Helena Petrovna Hahn von Rottenstern in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. Blavatsky was the name of her first husband, who was only in the picture briefly. Her own heritage was Russian, Baltic-German, and a little French, and the lore of her very old noble families had to have fed into her youthful imagination, for tales of Knights Templar and the beliefs of Rosicrucianism are not worlds away from the spiritual journey she embarked upon.

In the early 1870s she turned up in America and this where the story becomes much more verifiable. This was the era when Spiritualism was a blazing out of control fire — into which Blavatsky jumped with both feet. In 1874 she went to Vermont to visit the Eddy Brothers, a pair of fraudulent mediums who claimed to be able to levitate and communicate with the dead. That is where she met the journalist Olcott, who’d become interested in Spiritualism after seeing the Fox Sisters during one of their tours. Olcott and Blavatsky were inseparable after that, to the extent of sharing living quarters (though they appear not to have had a romantic relationship. It has been theorized that she was celibate, lesbian, or both. Some ungenerous people have even speculated that she was male. She was, erm, not a beauty queen. In photos, she looks to me somewhat like the actor Eugene Pallette.)

Blavatsky became a medium herself, enduring the customary charges of fraud, and this is when she began weaving her fanciful backstory. Blavatsky and Olcott began writing esoteric articles for publications, billing themselves as “the Brotherhood of Luxor”, clearly inspired by the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. With a third partner William Quan Judge, they formed The Theosophical Society in 1875. (They didn’t coin the word theosophy, btw. It predated them, and roughly means “God-Wisdom”). Two years later, Blavatsky published a work outlining the fruits of her studies, the demonstrably plagiarized Isis Unveiled.

In 1880, she and Olcott actually moved to India, where they became involved with the Hinduism Reform Movement, and were actually quite influential. By the mid ’80s her movement had become international, with branches in several countries. Her newsletter The Theosophist developed a wide readership. Her last years were spent in London. Suffering from Bright’s Disease, she was finally confined to a wheelchair, and died of influenza in 1891.

She has her adherents to this day, numbering in the tens of thousands, scattered around the globe. As with many such movements, it is splintered into lots of even tinier sects. One thing is certain, however. It is indeed possible for the dead to address the living. Madame Blavatsky does it all the time.