New York’s East Side isn’t somewhere that we’d usually associate with the start of a new spiritual movement, but on September 13, 1875, that’s exactly what it was. In a room cluttered with oriental bric-a-brac above an often dangerous neighborhood, three people came together on that day to form an occult society that would have a profound influence, not only on modern spirituality and esotericism, but on practically the whole of modern culture. Two of the three were men with distinguished careers behind them. William Quan Judge, an Irish immigrant, had worked his way up from poor beginnings to become a lawyer and had only a few years earlier passed the New York Bar exam at the age of twenty-one. The forty-two-year-old Colonel Henry Steel Olcott was an officer in the Civil War, a journalist, and an agriculturalist, and had been a member of the commission that investigated Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
But it was the third, female member of this triumvirate that was the real center of attraction. Even before landing on US soil, which she did in 1873, she had lived a life packed with enough adventures to last several incarnations. Revolutionary, spiritualist, music teacher, cousin to a future Russian prime minister, Sergei Witte (a friend of the “Holy Devil,” Gregory Rasputin), and granddaughter of a princess—to name only a few of her many distinctions—in a century noted for larger than life characters, Olcott and Judge’s partner was perhaps the most supersized of them all, both literally and metaphorically. I’m surprised no one has yet made a film of her life, although in today’s world of anorexic supermodels, finding an actress willing to play a 232-pound leading lady might be difficult.
Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the other occupant of that room, has been called many things, both during her lifetime and after it. For some she was an “explosive madcap.” For others, like the psychical researcher Richard Hodgson, she was “one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting impostors in history.” For the founder of Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner, she was a “cheeky creature,” an “electrically-charged Leyden jar” who exhibited a “lack of consistency in external behaviour.” For the poet W. B. Yeats, who knew her in her last days in London, she was like an Irish peasant woman. For her early biographer John Symonds, she was “one of the most remarkable women who ever lived,” yet her later biographer, Peter Washington, called her a “badly wrapped parcel.” And for the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, writing in McCall’s magazine in 1970, she was “the Founding Mother of the Occult in America.”
As with many complex, vital, and fascinating characters, all of these assessments are in some ways true, yet all fail to grasp the full essence of this enormous personality. HPB, as she became known to her followers, was as capacious an individual as possible. If, as the writer Henry Miller once said, we should “live life to the hilt,” she had certainly done that, and more. But on that September day she embraced a destiny that would transcend even her own fantastic life and, quite frankly, affect the world. Because it was then that she, Olcott, and Judge decided to found the Theosophical Society, arguably the most important spiritual and esoteric organization the West has ever known. It is no exaggeration to say that if it weren’t for these three people, much of what we know as modern spirituality, consciousness exploration, and alternative thought—not to mention our inexhaustible fascination with the wisdom of the East—might not have arrived, or at least might have taken much longer to than it did. By the time of Blavatsky’s death in 1891, the Theosophical movement had spread from New York to India, Europe, and beyond. And by the early years of the twentieth century, it was a force, as the saying goes, to be reckoned with, informing major developments in politics, art, religion, and much more. The poet T. S. Eliot, the artist Wassily Kandinsky, the inventor Thomas Edison, the creator of Oz, L. Frank Baum, and Mohandas Gandhi were only some of the people who over the years sat—figuratively or otherwise—at the incomparable Madame’s feet.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was born Helena von Hahn in 1831 in Ekaterinoslav, in what was then Russia and is now the Ukraine. Her mother, Helena Fadeyeva, was a popular novelist, writing under the pen name Zeneida Riva. Her father, Peter von Hahn, was a colonel and descended from a family of German nobility. Helena’s sister, Vera Zhelikhovksy, wrote children’s stories, as well as weird occult fiction, something HPB’s detractors say she did herself when pointing to her vast works of mystical philosophy, Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. (She did, in fact, write some occult short stories.) When her mother died at the age of twenty-eight, Helena was only eleven, and she was raised by her grandmother in a cultured and spiritual milieu. This didn’t prevent her from becoming something of a tomboy, an irrepressible, mischievous spirit more at home in the forests and fields than with dolls, who nevertheless devoured the vast occult library of her great-grandfather, the Freemason Prince Pavel Dolgorukov. Although it wasn’t until she had passed forty and had traveled around the world that HPB revealed the source of her wisdom, she claimed that from an early age she had had meetings with her “master,” Morya, a strange figure who appeared in her childhood dreams and whom she would later meet in the flesh in London’s Hyde Park and then again in Tibet. The master was one of a group of highly evolved beings who guided mankind in its development and whose emissary it was Helena’s destiny to become. But that was sometime ahead, and before then she would take more than one rollicking roller-coaster ride.
When Helena was seventeen, she married a man more than twice her age, the vice-governor of Yerevan in Armenia, Nikifor Vladimirovich Blavatsky. One motivation seems to have been the belief that no one else would have her, although, until she gained weight in her later years, she was attractive, something that comes through in her portraits, and, in any case, her appearance was always striking. The marriage was never consummated, and although they were never divorced, Helena soon left Nikifor for the great unknown. It is thought Blavatsky remained celibate throughout her life—sex, she said, was “beastly”—and to counter later accusations of promiscuity (she was also rumored to be lesbian and a transvestite), she produced a doctor’s certificate establishing that a fall from a horse during her time as a circus bareback rider had made it impossible for her to have intercourse. The place, she said, was “filled up with some crooked cucumber,” and she was frank enough to prove it. That flight from her crestfallen husband was the start of her decade-long Wanderjahre, a journey into adventure that her contemporary Jules Verne would restrict to fiction. For young Helena, it was everyday life.
Between 1848, when she abandoned Nikifor, and 1858, when she briefly returned to Russia, HPB’s boot heels, as Bob Dylan sang, went wandering. Egypt, France, Canada, England, South America, Germany, Mexico, India, Greece, and Tibet were some of the main stops on her journey. Her passport, if she had one, must have taken a beating. Many of a mystical bent in the West have gone on prodigious voyages. In the sixteenth century, the travels of Paracelsus, the father of Western alternative medicine, were legendary, and in more recent times figures like the enigmatic Greco-Armenian spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff and the dark magician Aleister Crowley trekked into more than one unusual place. But Blavatsky was a woman, just out of her teens, and for a woman to travel alone at all in those days was unusual; for one to enter Tibet was unheard of. Even after the British expedition in 1903 led by Francis Younghusband, in which more than a thousand Tibetans were slaughtered, for many years Tibet was off-limits to most Westerners. HPB herself said she was turned away a few times before finally crossing the threshold, an accomplishment echoed more than half a century later in 1924 by another intrepid woman, the Belgian-French writer, explorer, and Buddhist Alexandra David-Néel.
Blavatsky’s tenure in Tibet has always been contested; the controversy won’t stop here, but some of her other adventures suggest it was more than possible. In 1867 she was wounded while fighting with the Italian liberator Giuseppe Garibaldi against the papal army and the French at the battle of Mentana, a sacrifice that led to a friendship with Giuseppe Mazzini, leader of the revolutionary movement Young Italy. And if that wasn’t enough to qualify as “living dangerously,” in 1871 she was one of the few survivors of the wreck of the Eumonia, a sea disaster as famous in its day as the Titanic. She washed ashore in Cairo, and it’s believed she started her career as a spirit medium then, although she had exhibited psychic powers from the start. At any rate, it was then that she started holding séances.
From Cairo she went to France, and it was in Paris that the masters pointed her in the right direction. Go west, they said, so she sailed for New York. When she arrived in the summer of 1873 at the age of forty-two, she was penniless—she had crossed the Atlantic in steerage—and for a time lived in hostels and cheap boardinghouses, scratching out a living by sewing purses. But it wasn’t long before she showed her resourcefulness. Reading Colonel Olcott’s series of articles in the Daily Graphic about a haunting at a farm in Chittenden, Vermont—he had developed an interest in spiritualism while learning to farm in Ohio—Blavatsky determined to meet him. Her decision to ensnare Olcott in many ways resembles Gurdjieff’s later decision to “entrap” his disciple Ouspensky, who was also a journalist; both “crazy gurus” seemed to need a respectable PR man devoted to the cause. When the robust Helena approached the cautious Olcott at the farm, it was a case of platonic love at first sight. The retiring, conventional colonel was smitten, as much by Helena’s fiery Garibaldi shirt (a bright red blouse with military embroidery, a souvenir of the barricades) as by her chutzpah. (As one writer remarked, she was “capable of colourful and imaginative profanity,” another characteristic she shared with Gurdjieff.) She proceeded to dominate the séances, introducing her own crew of spirits—appropriately Russian—and made it clear that a real contender had arrived.
Spiritualism had been a part of American culture since 1848, when the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, discovered they could communicate with the spirit of a dead man. By the time HPB appeared, it had even entered politics. In 1872, Victoria Woodhull, another extraordinary nineteenth-century woman, had run for president on a spiritualist-free love-feminist-socialist ticket; needless to say, she didn’t win. But spiritualism was running out of steam, and when Blavatsky and Olcott formed their occult alliance after Olcott received a message from one of HPB’s masters advising him to leave his unsatisfactory marriage and live with Helena, it was clear something new was wanted. Blavatsky herself had grown bored with table rapping and levitating tambourines. She could easily produce phenomena at will, and, unlike most psychics, was not a mere “medium” but had control of her “powers.” Nevertheless, her masters had counseled that she was being primed for something greater. She and the colonel agreed, and their first attempt was to found what they called the Miracle Club. When this didn’t produce the required miracle, they looked for something else.
Part of that something else was Blavatsky’s massive tome, Isis Unveiled, a fourteen-hundred-page epic of occult wisdom, which she started writing in 1875, with references nabbed from the astral plane. When it was published two years later, in 1877, it sold out its first printing overnight. Although some papers panned the work—one reviewer called it “a dish of hash”—The New York Herald said it was “one of the most remarkable productions of the century,” and The Boston Evening Transcript argued that its author had “read more, seen more, and thought more than most wise men.” Its eager readers agreed. People today familiar with Theosophy’s better-known Eastern character may be surprised at the more Western, Egyptian esotericism that fills Isis Unveiled’s many pages. For a time in her career, Egypt, and not the Himalayas, was the focus of Blavatsky’s mystic yearnings, a popular spot, as the contemporaneous Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, led by the mysterious Max Théon, showed. Blavatsky herself spoke of a mysterious “brotherhood of Luxor,” and Colonel Olcott received his mystic messages from a certain Tuitit Bey. These messages themselves were the first of a series of “precipitated” (i.e., materialized) letters for which HPB would soon become famous. Later epistles would fall from thin air and apprise HPB’s colleagues and skeptics of her masters’ wishes.
It is impossible to summarize Isis Unveiled here, except to say it was one of the first works of occultism to argue that magic was not some mindless superstition palmed off on the gullible, but a profound wisdom and science known to the ancients, yet lost to modern materialism. It’s an idea still popular today, as a look at the works of Graham Hancock and other authors that make much the same argument shows. For much of her theme, Blavatsky drew on the writings of Éliphas Lévi and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose novel Zanoni weaves Rosicrucian and Hermetic motifs into a historical romance. She also quoted—or plagiarized, depending on your perspective—dozens of other authorities, from Plato and The Egyptian Book of the Dead to Schopenhauer and Giordano Bruno. Whatever we may think of Isis Unveiled, its historical importance is undeniable, as it contained the first detailed critique of Darwin’s recently enshrined version of evolution. Samuel Butler—of Erewhon fame—published Life and Habit, the first of his several vigorous attacks on Darwinian theory, in 1878, but Blavatsky beat him to it. Her central argument is that the transition from monkey to man is only part of the more significant evolution of men and women into gods, a transformation that embraces the entire cosmos. As one writer remarked, instead of opposing religion to scientific fact, Blavatsky “subsumes those facts into a grand synthesis that makes religious wisdom not the enemy of scientific knowledge but its final goal.”
At the same time as Blavatsky scoured the astral plane for quotable material, a suggestion at a lecture given at her apartment—nicknamed “the Lamasery” because of its exotic decor—triggered the second phase of that elusive “something else.” After hearing a talk about the “secret canon of proportions” the ancient Egyptians used to construct the pyramids (like spiritualism, pyramidology was another late nineteenth-century craze), Colonel Olcott had the brainstorm of forming a society that would study such things. HPB and the others present agreed, and a week later she, Olcott, and Judge met again and the Theosophical Society was born. The name was not new. Theosophy, meaning the “wisdom of the gods,” had been used by Neoplatonic philosophers in the Alexandria of the third century AD, and also by the gnomic seventeenth-century Hermetic cobbler, Jacob Boehme. With HPB and the colonel, however, it would take on a somewhat different sense. The society’s mission statement set out its goals: to promote the universal brotherhood of humanity, regardless of race, creed, color, or sex; to study ancient and modern religions, philosophies, and sciences; and to investigate the unexplained phenomena of nature and the hidden powers in man. With its multifaith, multicultural emphasis, the Theosophical Society anticipated our own pluralistic sensibility by more than a century. And, as mentioned, its belief in a lost, ancient wisdom is still going strong.
Although the new society gathered some initial interest, later bolstered by the success of Isis Unveiled and Olcott’s involvement in one of the earliest cremations in America, by the end of 1878, the “chums,” as Olcott and Blavatsky called themselves, were running out of resources and seriously needed some new direction. Perhaps the masters had tired of Luxor, or perhaps Egypt was by this time old hat. Whatever it was, the needle on the Madame’s mystic compass began to bypass the Sphinx and turn toward points east, and the chums shifted their gaze toward India. Blavatsky had already introduced Eastern themes in the second part of Isis Unveiled, but a perhaps more encouraging motive was the invitation from Swami Dayananda Sarasvati, leader of a Hindu movement called Arya Samaj, to come to India and unite their new society with his; an acquaintance of Olcott’s had told the swami about Theosophy, and he felt it was in tune with his teachings. Daniel Dunglas Home, the most successful medium of the age, had only recently made some damaging remarks about the Madame, who, according to some reports, had been his assistant for a time, so perhaps a journey to the East was in order. After selling most of their possessions to placate creditors, and following the orders of the masters, who would soon be called Mahatmas, on December 17, 1878, the chums boarded ship for Bombay (today’s Mumbai). Blavatsky’s US citizenship had come through just a few months earlier, but she would never see America again. Abner Doubleday, Civil War hero and purported inventor of baseball, was left in charge of the New York branch, while Judge later became head of the society in America.
When the chums reached India in February 1879, the subcontinent was still in thrall to the British Raj, and the natives knew less about Hinduism and its great works, like the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita, than most New Age folk do today. Two cultured and famous Westerners who embraced the immortal wisdom of the East and rejected Christianity (which was busily being foisted on the Hindus) were welcome, and soon HPB knew they had made the right choice. Swami Dayananda, however, grew to regret it, as Theosophy soon eclipsed the Arya Samaj, and the two went their separate ways. Blavatsky and Olcott’s magazine, The Theosophist, sold incredibly well, and many flocked to join the society. Even HPB’s powers seemed to have increased. Among other feats, she caused a shower of roses, made a lamp flame grow larger and smaller at will, materialized cups and saucers, and located a brooch lost years before by her hostess. These miracles garnered much publicity, but Blavatsky herself thought them unimportant. She made a hefty social and political impact when she brought A. P. Sinnett, editor of the influential Allahabad Pioneer, into the fold. Sinnett’s books, The Occult World and Esoteric Buddhism, spread the teachings to a huge readership, including a shy young Austrian scholar named Rudolf Steiner and an Irish poet named Yeats. Another catch was A. O. Home, a high-ranking civil servant who later organized the first Indian National Congress. Blavatsky’s Hinduphilia and contempt for the British, who thought she was a Russian spy, set the snowball rolling; and some years later, when her successor, the Fabian suffragette Annie Besant, arrived on India’s shores, Theosophy was at the heart of the independence movement. Both Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru became Theosophists and later praised the society for the immense good it did their nation.
For the first five years, India was an unqualified success for Theosophy. Olcott was so successful in bringing Buddhism to Buddhists that in 1968, Sri Lanka—in Olcott’s day, Ceylon—issued a commemorative stamp in his honor, and the growing Theosophical ranks were a serious rival to imported Christianity.
Yet it was Blavatsky’s own good nature that proved her undoing. Emma Coulombe, a woman she had befriended in Cairo, wrote to her from Ceylon, telling of hard times. Blavatsky invited her and her husband to keep house for her in Bombay. This proved disastrous. In 1884, Blavatsky left India to visit France and England. In London the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) suggested they investigate her claims. Sensational reports of the “precipitated letters” from her master—not Morya this time, but Koot Hoomi—had been in newspapers around the world, and they were eager to verify their authenticity. But back in India Emma Coulombe, peeved by some assumed slight, told the editor of a Christian missionary magazine that the whole thing was faked. The Mahatma letters were “precipitated” by being slipped through cracks in the ceiling, and the figure of Koot Hoomi—often seen by astounded visitors—was really Blavatsky, wearing a model of the Mahatma on her shoulders. There was other chicanery as well, and remembering her scathing remarks about Christian missionaries, the Christian College Magazine was only too happy to blow the whistle on the Madame.
The scandal reached the SPR, and to this day it’s unclear if the evidence for fraud their investigator Richard Hodgson allegedly found was planted or authentic. Either way, he issued a damning report, and HPB’s reputation suffered badly, although the SPR itself retracted his report a century later, saying it was prejudiced and unreliable. Although she was not above hoodwinking when necessary, it’s difficult to study Blavatsky’s life and not conclude she was genuine. She returned to India to defend her reputation, but to avoid being drawn into a legal battle that would inevitably turn into a show trial, she soon left again, never to return.
On the road again, Blavatsky found herself in Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. She finally roosted in England. She was by this time ill, suffering from kidney failure brought on by her weight and other stress. Contrary to much current spiritual thought, HPB didn’t give a hoot for her health; her cholesterol levels were scandalous and she chain-smoked incessantly. She may have known her days were numbered and so decided to write another monstrous tome, The Secret Doctrine, Theosophy’s bible. Even longer than Isis Unveiled, The Secret Doctrine expounded a monumental synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy that remains thrilling and controversial enough to fuel many a metaphysical discussion, although, as one writer remarked, it is in many ways “a muddy torrent carrying all kinds of strange objects on its surface.” Blavatsky threw together a smorgasbord of occult and mystical teachings about humanity and the cosmos in a way that again precludes summary, speaking of the mysterious Book of Dzyan, written in the lost language of Senzar, and its profound revelations about human and cosmic evolution. The universe has been created and destroyed several times—an idea that science came to only much later—and we modern humans are only one of a series of races to inhabit the planet, our history going back to ancient Atlantis, Lemuria, and beyond. Reincarnation was a fundamental theme, and with it the eventual evolution of humanity into the divine.
When the book appeared in 1888, it fed the ravenous hunger many Westerners felt for some spiritual and religious meaning in a world increasingly seen to be little more than an accident. Darwin had shown us to be merely “trousered apes”; and, in any case, the universe itself was rolling toward its “heat death,” an inescapable outcome of entropy, in which the innumerable galaxies would flatten out into a formless cosmic puddle like a lukewarm cup of coffee. Having given so much ground to science that it had nothing to offer against these “facts,” the church had become little more than an empty shell. Blavatsky’s strange, exotic blend of hidden Mahatmas, supernatural powers, cosmic evolution, past lives, sunken continents, and prehistoric civilizations struck more than a chord in the fin de siècle mind; it offered a powerful counter-narrative to the doom and gloom that mainstream science served on tap. Many who rejected the church but refused science’s cosmic inconsequence gravitated toward HPB and the Theosophical view. To this day both she and the Theosophical Society are yet to receive the credit they are due for providing a vital alternative to the sense of purposelessness that characterized the last years of the nineteenth century.
Blavatsky’s last days were spent in St. John’s Wood, London, where she was wheeled around in a kind of perambulator. She died on May 8, 1891, a day celebrated in Theosophical communities as White Lotus Day. She was sixty and had taken the world by storm, and her last words are characteristically blunt: “Don’t let my last incarnation be a failure.” Chances are we will not see her like again, but with her help, anyone today can remove the veil from Isis and discover where the secret wisdom can be found.