Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (33 page)

From where did Madame Blavatsky draw the self-confidence for such a project? She was not really a scholar, her research sources were limited to New York City, and her command of English was imperfect. Little wonder that she felt compelled to toss in first-person narratives with beginnings such as: “A fearful fever contracted by the writer near Rangoon after a flood of the Irrawaddy River... ,”
¹⁶⁸
But why did she pretend access to uncommon sources by writing “we have at hand a treatise by a pious Catholic, Jilbert de Nogen, on the relics of saints,”
¹⁶⁹
when actually she copied Nogen’s text from J. S. Forsyth’s
Demonologia.
According to H.P.B., she had in her possession the single extant copies of many old manuscripts, photographs, drawings, and ancient tomes. Everything had been carefully skimmed from available sources in the course of careful research. Hence, there was no logical reason for not simply citing her real source. But she, who was not a scholar, had to make herself a super-scholar, and once again she went too far.

In trying to appear more knowledgeable than she actually was, Helena left herself open to charges of plagiarism. It cannot be denied that she was extremely careless about quotation marks, and, having once given a source, she would continue to quote it elsewhere without citing it. Moreover, either from laziness or ignorance, she fell into the habit of lifting from contemporary books the words of ancient authors while giving the impression that she had actually read the originals. For example, when she quoted from Plato’s
Timaeus
and
The Laws,
she cited page numbers and even the original footnotes, but everything quoted can be found in Benjamin F. Cocker’s
Christianity and Greek Philosophy
and Edward Zeller’s
Plato and the Older Academy.
Strangely, H.P.B. failed to find anything wrong with this peculiar ethical procedure. Olcott, who might have set her straight, was not privy to her editorial shortcuts and believed in any case that she had read Plato in the astral light or received it from the Master’s dictation. It would take another twenty years before he could admit that she “has sinned an hundred times against the canons of literary usage” by using “other men’s writings as though they were her own.”
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As the writing of
Isis
progressed, two central themes began to emerge: a venomous hatred of Christianity, which, Helena asserted, has copied most of its rites and dogmas from paganism; and her belief that the one source of all past wisdom was, not Egypt with its Isises and Brotherhoods of Luxor, but India. “When years ago, we first travelled to the East, exploring the penetralia of deserted sanctuaries, two
[sic]
saddening and ever-recurring questions oppressed our thoughts: Where, Who, What is GOD?”
¹⁷¹
But now she knew the answers were to be found in Hinduism and Buddhism. This she felt sincerely to be the truth, although she may have been less positive about the following statement:

It was while most anxious to solve these perplexing problems that we came into contact with certain men, endowed with such mysterious powers and such profound knowledge that we may truly designate them as sages of the Orient. To their instructions we lent a ready ear. They showed us that by combining science with religion, the existence of God and immortality of man’s spirit may be demonstrated like a problem of Euclid.
¹⁷²

Thus did revelation appear in a nutshell. The mysteries were not mysteries after all; miracles did not exist. The caretakers of the secret doctrine, members of the Indian Brotherhood incarnated at intervals in history to reveal mysteries of the divine wisdom, understood the secrets of atomic energy, gravitation, transmutation of metals, extraterrestrial communication and travel, in fact had more scientific knowledge than all modern physics, chemistry and metallurgy combined. Their books were written in an alphabet known only to themselves; and not only did they comprehend the principles of evolution and the decline of societies, but also possessed the most exhaustive cosmogony ever known to humanity. Undeniably, the idea was exhilarating. But it was hardly original to H.P.B., for as mentioned earlier, the concept of a secret brotherhood has always permeated occult tradition.

This is the place to emphasize the two main influences on Madame Blavatsky’s philosophical vision. The first was Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who in his 1842 Rosicrucian novel
Zanoni
had written of a secret fraternity concealing themselves behind “the veil that hides the Isis of their wisdom from the world,” and of the mysterious Indian Zanoni, who is rich, handsome, ageless, and a member of the Brotherhood, As we shall see, Helena’s Mahatmas, Morya and Koot Hoomi, are fleshed out copies of Zanoni. H.P.B. herself is in several important respects reminiscent of Lytton’s heroine Viola, who has seen her invisible protector in dreams since childhood but meets Zanoni in fleshly manifestation only as an adult. Bulwer-Lytton was of course writing fiction, but Helena believed quite seriously that he purveyed fact without knowing it.

Her second inspiration was Louis Jacolliot, a contemporary who had been French consul at Calcutta before writing works such as
The Bible in India
and
Occult Science in India.
Jacolliot stated categorically that the legendary society of unknown men actually existed. Deliberately concealed from public view, these ideal men scanned the world from their watchtower somewhere in India, forever observing civilizations born, destroyed, reborn, always prepared to come to the rescue of the race.

Reality or magnificent legend? Like Jacolliot, Helena believed it all to be reality. Making Jacolliot’s concepts her own, she began to quote extensively from his works, all the while resenting having to share these unknown Indians with Jacolliot. By the time she neared the end of
Isis,
she was calling his books “a curious conglomeration of truth and fiction,” and Jacolliot little more than “a sensual French romancer”
¹⁷³
who had worn out his spiritual welcome.

Slowly, the men who dictated to Helena had been transmogrified into Indians. To Vera she confided,

I see this Hindu every day, just as I might see any other living person, with the only difference that he looks to me more ethereal and transparent. Formerly I kept silent about these appearances, thinking they were hallucinations. But now they have become visible to other people as well.
¹⁷⁴

One evening when work on
Isis
had been finished for the day, Henry said goodnight to H.P.B., went to his room, and sat down in a chair to smoke and read; he remembered, later, that it was not a ghost story he had opened but a travel book about Yucatan. Suddenly, from the corner of his right eye, he noticed towering above him a tall Indian dressed in white robes and a turban of amber stripes embroidered with yellow silk. Dropping his book, Henry stared in astonishment at the man’s black beard, which was parted on the chin and twisted up over the ears in Rajput fashion, and at his unusual eyes. They were alive with soul-fire, he thought, piercing yet benign, the eyes of a loving father gazing on a son. Without thinking, Henry fell to his knees “as one does before a god or a god-like personage.”

Bading Henry to rise, the visitor sat down beside him and began to talk: a great work could be done for humanity and Henry had the right to share in it, if he wished. He and Helena were bound by a mysterious tie which might be strained but could never be broken.

Would he see his visitor again?

Often, if he became a co-worker for the good of mankind.

As the Indian rose to leave, Olcott recalled thinking, “What if this be hallucination; what if H.P.B. has cast a hypnotic glamour over me?”
¹⁷⁵
and he wished for some tangible object to prove that the Indian had really been there. Looking up, he saw the Indian smile as he saluted him farewell; then the room was empty and Henry was alone once more.

But not quite alone. On the table lay the man’s embroidered turban. Clutching it, Henry ran to Helena’s door and pounded.

Several possible explanations of the phenomenon present themselves, the most obvious being that Helena hired a man to dress up like an Indian. There is sufficient reason to believe she was capable of such a trick.

Secondly, Olcott’s initial suspicion, that H.P.B. had hypnotized him, may have been essentially correct, in which case it would have been simple for her to have left the turban on his table.

More intriguing is a third possibility, that Henry had somehow been tuned into Helena’s thought-form, in which case, he did actually see the Indian character she had created. While this may sound impossible, it is far from unheard of. For instance, “Seth,” the famous trance personality of the Elmira, New York, medium Jane Roberts, has been seen and talked to by sensitives other than Ms. Roberts. And such a concept would not seem remarkable in Tibet, where the word
tulpas
connotes a magic formation generated by powerful concentration of thought.

Alexandra David-Neel, in
Magic and Mystery in Tibet,
tells how the
tulpa,
once endowed with enough vitality to be capable of impersonating a real being, tends to free itself from its maker’s control and appear to others; and she goes on to recount how she herself decided to try to visualize, then animate, a
tulpa.
Choosing for experiment a short, fat, jolly monk, “I shut myself in
tsams
[seclusion] and proceeded to perform the prescribed concentration of thought and other rites. After a few months the phantom monk was formed. His form grew gradually
fixed
and life-like looking. He became a kind of guest, living in my apartment.” Accompanying her on her travels, the monk walked, stopped and looked around him without speaking. Sometimes his hand actually seemed to touch her shoulder. “Once,” she recalled, “a herdsman who brought me a present of butter saw the
tulpa
in my tent and took it for a live lama.”

Before long, however, David-Neel would have cause to regret having created the monk, for he escaped her control and became bold and troublesome. To dissolve her mind-creature required six months of difficult struggle. In retrospect, the most interesting aspect of the experience was that others shared her own hallucination. “Tibetans disagree in their explanations of such phenomena”; she went on to add: “some think a material form is really brought into being, others consider the apparition as a mere case of suggestion, the creator’s thought impressing others and causing them to see what he himself sees.”
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In Madame Blavatsky’s case, still another explanation suggests itself, which should be mentioned only because some people believed it to be the true one: that the Indian who Olcott met was a member of a secret brotherhood for which Madame Blavatsky was the visible agent. Certainly Henry had no trouble in accepting him as such. Little by little, Helena had been weaning him first from John King and then from the Egyptian Brotherhood of Luxor. Now, Olcott reports, “I was transferred to the Indian section and a different group of Masters.”
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It was all very neat and made a good deal of sense.

In August, Henry decided to scout a publisher for Helena’s book, and he approached J. W. Bouton, who had published other works of an esoteric nature. Once Bouton saw the size of the manuscript, his interest quickly faded; he was about to sail for England, he told Henry, and had no time for reading. Refusing to accept rejection, Olcott continued to rave about Helena until Bouton, to get rid of him, told him to see Alexander Wilder, the scholar and editor who occasionally served as a first-reader of manuscripts. If Wilder judged the manuscript worthy of publication, Bouton might consider it.

Wilder, then fifty-three, was a tall, Lincolnesque man with a massive head of gray hair and speech full of quaint Saxon-Americanisms. Almost entirely self-educated, he was knowledgeable in medicine, mathematics and the classics, and his area of special interest was Plato and metaphysics. Although he had a definite taste for esotericism, he disliked individuals who pretended to possess superior powers, and he lacked the slightest impulse to join organizations such as the Theosophical Society. So when Henry Olcott arrived unannounced one afternoon at Wilder’s home in Newark, New Jersey, and began to babble exuberantly about some manuscript by a crank, the editor reacted with extreme annoyance. He had never laid eyes on Olcott before, although they did have mutual acquaintances; and “I had barely heard of Madame Blavatsky,” but what he had heard had not attracted him.

More than that, Wilder failed to understand why Bouton had sent Olcott to him, because he had talked to the publisher several times that week and Bouton had mentioned neither Madame Blavatsky nor her manuscript. Did Bouton seriously expect him to read the thousand pages? Suspecting that Bouton had foisted the pesky Olcott on him in order to avoid saying no himself, Wilder grumbled over the publisher’s inefficiency but consented to look at the work.

Wilder read the manuscript with greater severity than he might have under other circumstances, and when he had finished there was no doubt in his mind that the book should be rejected. In his reader’s report, he admitted that extensive research had gone into the project and “that so far as related to current thinking, there was a revolution in it,” but in his opinion it was “too long for remunerative publishing.” To his amazement, Bouton ignored his advice, accepted the manuscript and returned it to Wilder “with instructions to shorten it as much as it would bear.”

Without much enthusiasm, Wilder sped through it and hacked out everything he judged superfluous. In a tactful letter to H.P.B., he explained his cuts and pointed out her faults of style; he also emphasized the importance of explaining her sources of information. Far from offended, Helena replied that “there are many parts in my Book that /
do not like
either, but the trouble is I do not know how to get rid of them without touching facts which are important, as arguments.” Wilder of course was reading it objectively while her own “overworked brains and memory are all in a sad muddle.” Still, she was
“very,
very thankful” for his suggestions and wished he had made more. As for his complaint about her lack of documentation, she passed over that quickly and merely commented that she could not, unfortunately, oblige. “I am a Thibetan Buddhist, you know, and pledged myself to keep certain things secret.”