· CHAPTER 4 ·

ARRIVING IN Ommen, Holland, at the end of July 1926, Eugenia joined pilgrims from every corner of Europe and from the United States. There were at least two thousand of them, mostly aristocrats, bohemians, and intellectuals, but also proper middle-class housewives, and poor mystics who came on foot. Extra ferries from the British Isles to the Hook of Holland had to be scheduled to accommodate them all.

The writer Rom Landau’s description of the crowd at the 1927 Star Camp would have been equally apt in 1926. “Such readers as have ever attended a theosophical or practically any sort of religious convention will know the type, and I shall refrain from describing it at length,” he writes. “They generally abhor the idea of meat as violently as that of wine or tobacco; they look deep into your eyes when they talk to you; they have a weakness for sandals, for clothes without any particular distinction of shape, for the rougher kind of textiles and such colours as mauve, bottle-green and purple. The men affect long hair, while the women keep theirs short.”

The Order of the Star gathering took place on the forested grounds of Eerde Castle, which was donated to the order by a Dutch aristocrat named Baron Philip van Pallandt. Important people in the Star organization stayed in the castle itself, an eighteenth-century Dutch classical building ringed by a moat, with pavilions on each side. A formal circular garden fronted the building, which was surrounded by parkland where most of the attendees slept in small canvas tents.

An Associated Press dispatch about the event carried the lurid headline “Secrecy Veils Cult Camp,” but the piece painted a pleasant, bucolic picture. “The camp is beautifully situated on the slopes of Best-Hnerberg [sic], its multicolored and multishaped tents dominated by two giant ones set apart for meetings and meals. These can be seen for miles, surmounted by Dutch and American flags,” it read. “The tents are arranged in pleasing disorder, some labeled ‘married,’ others ‘ladies’ and others ‘gentlemen,’ all trim and comfortable.” In some ways, it reminded the reporter of “an old-fashioned camp meeting.”

Attendees carried their own plates and mugs to meals, which were served from pails. Some amenities had been added since the first Star Camp at Eerde in 1924: pipes had been laid underground to pump hot water into the showers, and huts had been erected to house a post office, a bookstore, a first-aid station, and an information booth. Everything was laid out on a grid, with brick pathways protecting pedestrians from the mud.

Eugenia had never camped before, and she found the camp’s vegetarian food “insipid.” Washing her own dishes was a novelty. Still, the scene generally enchanted her. More than seventy years later, she still remembered the piney forest air and the birdsong that awoke her in the morning.

The Star Camp featured lectures, dances, and plays, but life there revolved around the evening talks given by Jiddu Krishnamurti, the beautiful young messiah-in-training. The days began with meditation and a brief Krishnamurti discourse. Afternoons were given up to various talks and to games of volleyball. It was at dusk, though, when the camp really came alive.

On one or two nights, rain kept everyone inside. Every other evening, attendees would gather in a big open-air amphitheater, sitting on felled logs surrounding a fifteen-foot pyre. They’d sing folk songs for an hour or more, until, sometime after sunset, Krishnamurti would appear alongside white-haired Annie Besant, the indomitable woman who was both his patron and his disciple. A violinist from Vienna played a piece to set the mood. Krishnamurti, a thirty-one-year-old with a thin, noble face, doleful long-lashed eyes, and an aquiline nose, usually wore Western clothes when in Europe, but for the camps, he donned traditional Indian dress. He would light the pyre while chanting a hymn to Agni, the god of fire. The air would then fill with the delicious scent of burning pine, and the attendees would listen, enraptured, as Krishnamurti began to talk.

His words had a pleasant vagueness that allowed his listeners to project all manner of profundity onto him. In one of his most quoted talks, given the night of July 27, he said, “You give me phrases and cover my Truth with your words. I do not want you to break with all you believe. I do not want you to deny your temperament. I do not want you to do things that you do not feel to be right. But, are any of you happy? Have you, any of you, tasted eternity?…I belong to all people, to all who really love, to all who are suffering. And if you would walk, you must walk with me.”

On paper, this might seem empty, but Krishnamurti had a quiet charisma that, coupled with the collective will to believe and the exotic atmospherics, drove many attendees into ecstasy. “Whenever He speaks, it is not as if a separate individual was speaking, but as if someone was giving voice to your own greatest thoughts, your own ennobled feelings,” wrote one attendee. “And you know that everyone in that mighty audience feels the same—that He is thinking the thoughts of the world, and expressing the hope of the multitude, and after He has spoken you feel you know everyone intimately, however strange before, that you have met in His heart, have lived in His dreams.”

—

It’s easy to see why, as she listened to Krishnamurti, Eugenia believed that his was a voice straight from the India of her imagination. Yet Krishnamurti was less a product of India than of Europe. More specifically, he was a product of Europe’s obsession with India, a custom-made messiah raised in Theosophy’s most elite circles. To understand how Eugenia became Indra Devi, it’s necessary to understand the bridge Theosophy created between Eastern and Western spirituality.

By the time Krishnamurti was born in 1895, Theosophy had become deeply established in India. Madame Blavatsky and Henry Steele Olcott’s beginnings on the subcontinent had been inauspicious: the first person they stayed with, Arya Samaj president Hurrychund Chintamon, entertained them lavishly but then billed them for everything, even his welcome telegram. Eventually, though, Blavatsky and Olcott were able to find a foothold in both British colonialist and educated Indian society. The English in India, like those in England, loved séances and other supernatural happenings, and Blavatsky obliged them.

Even those who were convinced she was a charlatan found themselves taken with Blavatsky. Her supporters tended to see her as capable of both silly tricks and real magic. That was part of her brilliance: convincing otherwise sensible people that her frauds were but playful embroidery on her deeper engagement with real mysteries. Once one believes this, supernatural claims become unfalsifiable. Indeed, initiates can congratulate themselves on discerning between petty fakery meant for outsiders and authentic wonders. Many gurus (including, decades later, India’s most powerful, Sai Baba) would create a similar dynamic among their followers.

It wasn’t, of course, just parlor tricks that attracted the British. “The fundamental appeal of theosophy lay…in the response it offered to the various dilemmas that constituted the Victorian crisis of faith,” writes philosophy professor Mark Bevir. Theosophy came along at a time of widespread European disenchantment. Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, fundamentally challenging the biblical account of creation and showing that human existence could be explained without reference to God. Annie Besant, the crusading journalist, feminist, political agitator, and speaker, traveled tirelessly throughout the 1870s, promoting atheism and becoming, in the process, one of the most notorious women in England. In 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche would write, famously, “The greatest recent event—that ‘God is dead’; that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable—is already starting to cast its first shadows over Europe.”

By now, the phrase “God is dead” has been repeated so often that it has lost its meaning, much less its ability to shock, but in the Victorian era, the end of religious certainty was a jarring, even cataclysmic thing. “In the minds of many Victorians, geological discoveries and evolutionary theory had combined to pitch science against Christianity. Theosophy offered them a religious faith that appeared to embrace these discoveries whilst also sustaining a spiritual interpretation of life,” writes Bevir.

Some of the leading British figures in India, including A. P. Sinnett, editor of the Allahabad Pioneer, and A. O. Hume, who had retired after an illustrious career in the civil service, became active Theosophists. Theosophy’s appeal in India, though, was hardly limited to Europeans. Blavatsky and Olcott were extremely popular with many Indians because of their respect for Hinduism and Buddhism, faiths that the colonialists tended to treat with contempt. For generations, British-educated Indians had been taught to regard their traditional religions as no more than barbaric superstition. This left many confused and deracinated. They could never really become British, but schooled in European Enlightenment rationalism, they were estranged from the beliefs of their families.

Theosophy offered a way out of this crisis. It made Indians proud to hear Westerners proclaim that their religion was not only equal to Christianity but superior to it. At the same time, Theosophy refracted Hinduism through a liberal Western lens; it emphasized human equality rather than caste divisions and was consonant with scientific rationalism. It offered an intellectual home for Indians trying to reconcile competing cultures. Among the powerful figures who became Theosophists, at least for a time, were Motilal Nehru and, later, his son, Jawaharlal Nehru, the future Indian prime minister.

From its new headquarters in India, Theosophy spread rapidly in Britain and Europe. Its growth was barely hindered by the scandal that forced Blavatsky to leave the subcontinent. In 1882 she and Olcott had settled on an estate in Adyar, just south of Chennai, which continues as the world headquarters of Theosophy today. Blavatsky had hired a down-on-her-luck old friend, Emma Coulomb, as a housekeeper and taken her into her confidence; Coulomb thus knew Blavatsky’s tricks. Increasingly resentful of her menial job, she used that knowledge to try to blackmail the Theosophical Society. Eventually, Coulomb revealed all she knew about the sliding panels and hidden entrances Blavatsky used to “materialize” objects, such as letters from her Himalayan Masters.

Soon after, the Society for Psychical Research, a British group devoted to investigating supernatural phenomena, started looking into Theosophy. The SPR was a respected organization—members included Lord Tennyson, W. E. Gladstone, and William James—with a genuinely open-minded approach to spiritual matters. It even shared some members with the Theosophical Society. The report that emerged from its investigation was enormously damning, though it evinced a sort of respect for Blavatsky’s audacity: “For our own part, we regard her neither as the mouthpiece of hidden seers, nor as a mere vulgar adventuress; we think that she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting imposters in history.”

Blavatsky’s reputation, particularly in India, was deeply damaged. Under pressure from Olcott, in March 1885 she resigned her official role as the Theosophical Society’s corresponding secretary and left for Europe.

Her career, though, was far from over. In London, she settled on Landsdowne Road, supported by wealthy British Theosophists. She started a magazine, Lucifer, and as she had in New York, she attracted all sorts of fascinating guests to her home, including Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, and a young law student named Mohandas K. Gandhi. Gandhi read Blavatsky’s Key to Theosophy, which, he later wrote, “stimulated in me the desire to read books on Hinduism, and disabused me of the notion fostered by the missionaries that Hinduism was rife with superstition.”

It was during this period that Blavatsky made her most important convert. In the 1880s, Annie Besant, famed through England and much of the world for her rejection of religion, her daring advocacy of birth control, her Irish republicanism, and her passionate socialism, was having a crisis of faith. Despite her flamboyant apostasy, she had always had a spiritual nature—she’d been an intensely religious child and had married a clergyman, though that union ended in disaster. Even as an atheist, she’d devised freethinking hymnals and replicated the rituals of worship for a secular audience. She threw herself into each new cause with the zeal of a salvation-seeking convert. When these movements failed to deliver the universal brotherhood she longed for, she turned, reluctantly but inexorably, to mysticism.

Besant first encountered Blavatsky when she was asked to review Blavatsky’s 1888 opus, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy. Unexpectedly, Besant found that the book spoke to her submerged longings, and she asked a mutual acquaintance for an introduction to the notorious occultist. Blavatsky invited Besant to call on her. It was a fairly ordinary chat, but when Besant went to leave, Blavatsky, staring into her guest’s eyes, cried, “Oh, my dear Mrs. Besant, if you would only come among us!”

After that, Blavatsky worked hard to lure Besant into her circle. High-level Theosophists received letters from the Masters about the importance of cultivating her. “Mme. Blavatsky, a skilled amateur psychologist, must have guessed that something of this nostalgia for a belief in the other world still hovered in Mrs. Besant’s soul,” writes one of Besant’s biographers. Besant, meanwhile, fought her attraction to Theosophy, knowing what it would do to her friendships and reputation. Still, the pull was strong, and at one point she heard a divine voice asking, “Are you willing to give up everything for the sake of the truth?” She was.

Imagine if Richard Dawkins announced that he had become a Scientologist—that was the kind of shock Besant’s conversion occasioned in England. Her close friend George Bernard Shaw learned of it when he spotted the proofs for an article by Besant titled “Sic Itur ad Astra; or Why I Became a Theosophist,” in the offices of the Star, a London newspaper. “Staggered by this unprepared blow…I rushed round to her office in Fleet Street, and there delivered myself of an unbounded denunciation of Theosophy in general, of female inconstancy, and in particular of H. P. Blavatsky, one of whose books…had done all the mischief,” he wrote.

Shaw’s remonstrance did no good; Besant’s mind, once made up, could not be changed. Theosophy, naturally, led her to India, and by the end of the 1890s, she was living most of the year in either Adyar or the home she’d built in Benares—now called Varanasi—a holy city on the banks of the Ganges. Once again, she threw herself into social reform, establishing the Central Hindu College in Benares, which was intended to educate a generation of nationalist leaders steeped equally in Hinduism and modern science. She became a major figure in Indian nationalist politics—in 1917 she would even serve a brief term as president of the Indian National Congress, the body that eventually led the drive for Indian independence.

Blavatsky died in 1891, leaving Besant as the premier public face of Theosophy. When Olcott died in 1907, she became the society’s president. Soon after, she declared that Jiddu Krishnamurti, a young Brahmin boy whose father worked on the Adyar grounds, was going to save the world.

Krishnamurti was first identified by Charles Leadbeater, a former Anglican priest who had followed Blavatsky to India many years earlier. Besant’s loyalty to Leadbeater was perhaps her greatest human weakness. He was a giant, imposing man with the long beard of a biblical messiah, and he cultivated the image of a powerful clairvoyant. A great fabulist, he would hold the members of his Theosophical circle rapt with elaborate narratives purporting to trace their interwoven past lives, an epic supposedly embedded in a higher plane of knowledge that Theosophists called the Akashic Records. He also had an unfortunate passion for adolescent boys.

Rumors about Leadbeater’s involvement with boys in his care stretched back to his Anglican days. As a Theosophist, he was often in the company of young male disciples, taking some of them along with him on his lecture tours. In 1906, two young men, both sons of American Theosophists, accused Leadbeater of encouraging them to masturbate. A typewritten letter, apparently found in the Toronto flat where Leadbeater had stayed with one of them, was produced. It was written in a simple code; when deciphered, one passage read, “Glad sensation is so pleasant. Thousand kisses darling.”

When the scandal erupted, Leadbeater resigned from the Theosophical Society. For Besant, this was more than just a personal disappointment; it was a theological crisis. Leadbeater had encouraged and affirmed her own supernatural visions, and now she was faced with the possibility that they were all merely delusions. Meanwhile, Leadbeater argued that he was merely teaching the boys a kind of psycho-sexual hygiene. In a letter addressed to “My dear Annie,” he explained that a man in need of sexual release is “constantly oppressed by the matter,” but through self-stimulation, he could create a habit of “regular but smaller artificial discharges, with no thoughts at all in between.”

Besant’s need to believe him seems to have overpowered her, because she both accepted his explanation and, after becoming president of the society, helped to reinstate him. By 1909 he was once again living at Adyar. There, one evening, he went swimming at the estate’s small private beach with some of his young male assistants. That’s where he first spied Krishnamurti. Exactly what he saw in the fourteen-year-old is unclear—Krishnamurti was a scrawny, sickly boy, with protruding ribs and a vacant stare, considered something of an idiot by his teachers. According to his lifelong friend and biographer, Mary Lutyens, he was dirty, with crooked teeth and a persistent cough. Nevertheless, Leadbeater expressed awe at his glorious aura and was adamant that he would someday be a great spiritual teacher. Perhaps Leadbeater, despite his apparent pederasty, actually had a measure of mystical insight, because Krishnamurti would indeed go on to a remarkable career as a spiritual sage, particularly once he renounced the Theosophical Society.

Soon, Besant persuaded Krishnamurti’s father to give him over to her care, and she founded a separate organization, the Order of the Star in the East, devoted to celebrating and learning from him. She and Leadbeater brought Krishnamurti and his younger brother, Nityananda, to Europe, raising them in a hothouse environment that combined English propriety and fevered religious expectation. Brought up simultaneously to be a gentleman and a savior, Krishnamurti studied both Sanskrit and Shakespeare, took riding lessons, played croquet, and went to the theater, while at the same time learning to give speeches to groups of adoring Theosophists, who found depth in even his most trite utterances. By the time he entered his twenties, he was a shy but beautiful young man who wore suits from the best English tailors and holidayed in the luxurious homes of his many admirers. He had an entourage of upper-class English ladies and young unmarried girls who were sometimes half-jokingly called his Gopis, after the maidens devoted to his namesake, the god Krishna. The fact that he didn’t become a monster is itself a minor miracle.

Most of what Krishnamurti knew about Hinduism came to him through Theosophy, though that didn’t stop Westerners from imagining that he bore some ineffable Oriental essence. In March of 1926, Fritz Kunz, the leader of the American section of the Order of the Star in the East, lectured about Krishnamurti to two thousand people in Chicago’s elegant Hotel Sherman. “The Brahmins of India are gentle and loving, like the Christ, and have the most profound sense of God of any people on earth,” he explained. “Therefore, it is natural the new religious leader should come from India. America is too skeptical and too much given to murders.”

Krishnamurti was particularly popular among young people—he represented a cosmopolitan, pacifist, healthy spirituality, at once anciently rooted and distinctly modern. This was especially true of the people who flocked to the Star Camps, which were in many ways a decorous precursor to the festivals of the 1960s Western counterculture.

Krishnamurti had a powerful effect on Eugenia. The day after she arrived at the Star Camp, she joined the throng in the main tent for morning meditation. She didn’t really know how to meditate, or understand quite what meditation was, so she asked some of the adepts around her. None was very helpful.

Still, she closed her eyes and tried to concentrate. Though there were more than a thousand people in the tent, it was silent except for the sound of wind in the trees outside. Krishnamurti appeared and sat on a small platform, then began to sing a Sanskrit mantra. Eugenia felt odd. Her heart beat quickly, and there was a knot in her throat. She started trembling. As she recalled later, the mantra seemed familiar, though she knew she hadn’t heard it before. Around her, everyone was calm, but she felt nervous and dizzy. She’d often been plagued by anxiety attacks, but this was different, stranger. It was, she writes, a kind of “inner shock.”

When she opened her eyes, people were moving around her, and she realized that the meditation was over. She stood up and started running until she was in the forest, where she stayed for a while, sobbing, feeling as if all her sadness and fear was pouring out. When she stopped crying, she felt suddenly inexplicably happy, peaceful, and liberated.

That week at the Star Camp was, she writes, “a turning point in my life. Without realizing it then, I had made the first step on the path towards Yoga, with Krishnamurti as my teacher and guide.”

Returning to Riga, Eugenia felt completely transformed, with a new sense of tranquility and security. Shortly after she’d come home, she went to dinner at a friend’s house. Her friend served her beef, which she’d craved during her meatless days in Ommen. Instead of a nice meal, she saw a slab of dead flesh on her plate, and it disgusted her. She was, she believed, a changed woman.

If Eugenia was different, life in Riga proceeded in much the same way. She kept working in the theater, and Bolm, her fiancé, kept making plans for their future together. More than ever, though, Eugenia felt compelled toward India—and soon a woman came to town who could help her get there.

Alice Adair was a feminist and Theosophist, “an Englishwoman of great dignity, aristocratic bearing, fine taste and cosmopolitan outlook,” in the words of a friend. After several years in Australia, she was living at the Theosophical Society’s Adyar headquarters. A passionate aesthete, she was an important international champion of Indian art. In 1927 she went to Europe to give lectures on the subject and to present a traveling exhibition of Indian painting, and when she got to Riga, she met Eugenia.

After her European tour, Adair was returning to India in time for a Theosophical convention in December. She seems to have taken Eugenia under her wing and encouraged her to make the trip. With Adair as her guide, Eugenia felt that her dream of getting to India was starting to seem feasible. Only one obstacle remained, though it was a big one: money.

Bolm was impatient with his fiancée’s obsession, but he also realized that it was consuming her. He started to think that maybe if she went, she would get it out of her system. Surely India’s squalor, crowds, and sickness would disabuse Eugenia of her fantasies. “It’s better that she goes,” he told her mother, who was even more opposed to the idea. “It could be that this trip will help to destroy all her illusions about India.” He bought her a ticket, sending her away for several months with the understanding that they would get married upon her return.

So, on November 17, 1927, Eugenia, traveling alone, boarded a steamship in Naples that was bound for Australia via Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka). As they approached Colombo, Ceylon’s capital, after almost a month at sea, “I was in a state of almost delirious ecstasy,” she writes. “How many times I had made this journey, travelling in my imagination.” In Colombo, she connected with a group of India-bound Australian Theosophists, and before the year’s end, she arrived in the port at Madras, now Chennai, in India’s southeast. She was finally in the land of her dreams.

If Bolm had seen her arrival, his heart would have sunk. Many Westerners who travel to India are overwhelmed when they get there. The heat is often viscous, like something you swim rather than walk through. Dust assaults you everywhere. The human panoply can be thrilling; there are so many people with unfamiliar faces in unfamiliar clothes: dark and fine-boned southerners, green-eyed Kashmiris, people from the Himalayas who look almost Chinese. Women shimmer in parrot-bright silk saris or light cotton salwar kameezes, jewels sparkling in their noses. There are men in crisp white tunics, men in sarongs, men with wild hair in the shabby loincloths of wandering mystics. Turbans, sometimes brilliantly colored, sit on the heads of bearded Sikhs and mustachioed Rajputs. In the air, there’s a constant buzz of mutually unintelligible languages.

The crush of people can be exhilarating, but it can also be terrifying. The poverty is as degraded as anything on earth, the maimed and leprous beggars a reproachful contrast to the opulence of Mughal and Raj architecture. Bands of potbellied urchins, hair turned rust-colored from malnutrition, swarm Westerners. Terrible tropical illnesses thrive in the swampy heat, and in the 1920s, with antibiotics not yet on the market, visiting Europeans often fell seriously ill.

Perhaps Bolm thought that, faced with all this, Eugenia would be cured of her obsession. Instead, she saw only India’s enchantments. She was, she writes, “[h]appy beyond measure to be there.” Europe would never feel like home again.