Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (46 page)

There followed thirteen pages that alternated between a scholarly metaphysical treatise and a ragbag of gossip about various London occultists such as Stainton Moses, Anna B. Kingsford, and Charles Massey, who was inaccurately described as “the hapless parent of about half a dozen illegitimate brats.”
¹¹³
In passing, K.H. warned Sinnett not to expect too much from Madame Blavatsky for “our old lady is weak and her nerves worked to a fiddle string; so is her jaded brain.”
¹¹⁴

At a reception that evening hosted by the Bombay Theosophical Society, Sinnett talked about his book and positively affirmed his conviction that Madame Blavatsky could not be the author of the Mahatma letters. It was, he assured his audience, “physically impossible”
¹¹⁵
and as proof he cited the telegram he had received from Jhelum. He went on to point out that K.H.’s handwriting and literary style were completely different from Madame’s and that, for the most part, she knew nothing about the contents of the letters. As if all this were not sufficiently reassuring, he had received proof positive that very morning when a letter had suddenly fallen out of nowhere onto the table before him. Since Madame had been with him at the time, the mere hypothesis of fraud was, in his opinion, “contemptibly absurd.”
¹¹⁶
Helena, sitting in the audience, must have breathed an imperceptible sigh of relief.

III

The Astral Post Office

It is hardly surprising that Sinnett’s verdict should have been accepted at the time by a number of intelligent people, since despite the extracts published in
Occult World
and later in
Esoteric Buddhism,
almost no one concerned, except Sinnett and his wife, ever saw the letters in their entirety. Reading them today, there can be no reasonable doubt that Helena was their author.

Toward the end of his life, Sinnett admitted that the letters “were not, in the beginning, what I imagined them to be—letters actually written by the Master and then forwarded by occult means either to Madame Blavatsky or deposited somewhere about the house where I should find them.”
¹¹⁷
But even if they were not what he imagined, he by no means saw them as totally fraudulent; simply, he had invested too much in the Mahatmas to deny their existence. All the letters were inspired by Koot Hoomi, “but for the most part, if not always, were dictations to a competent amanuensis and Madame Blavatsky was generally the amanuensis in question.”
¹¹⁸
After he was no longer on speaking terms with H.P.B., and had begun communicating with the Mahatma through mediums, it was explained to him that Madame had added her own views to the Master’s, generally tampering with the messages until they became a travesty of his meaning. (See Appendix B.)

The one hundred twenty letters written between 1880 and 1884 are a remarkable achievement for which H.P.B. should be given the credit she was forced to deny herself. The correspondence became for her a vehicle by which she could disseminate an occult religious philosophy she dared not claim as her own and that, moreover, she felt impelled to filter to the world’s attention through two men, one of them fictional. From a distance of one hundred years, it is easy to criticize her methods, but Helena, by 1880, had already become a prisoner of her hallucinations. Having become entrapped by her own invention, forced to share her vision of the Brotherhood by proclaiming herself its messenger, she placed herself in an untenable position. Of necessity she was compelled to give her mythical Mahatmas credit for her philosophy and, as we shall see, to fashion ever more complicated lies so that the whole flimsy structure did not crash down upon her.

Like every literary genius, Madame Blavatsky could beget characters so full-bodied and distinctive that they truly seemed to live. Perhaps this talent was inherited from her novelist mother. Perhaps her skill is due to the fact that she modeled her characters on certain living individuals, admittedly rare but nevertheless real. In her century, there did exist hermits in Tibet and northern India, most of them practicing Buddhist ascetics and Hindu yogis who were making serious efforts to tread the path to arhatship, or enlightenment, and in so doing were able to liberate themselves from ill will, desire, ignorance, lust and anger. In the 1920s, the distinguished Tibetan scholar W. Y. Evans-Wentz would pose an interesting question that is highly relevant to Madame Blavatsky’s life: are there members of the human race who have reached the heights of such spiritual and physical evolution as this planet permits, “and who being a species apart from other human beings, are possessed of mastery over natural forces as yet undiscovered, but probably suspected, by Western Science?”
¹¹⁹

Evans-Wentz hazarded a qualified yes, saying that as a result of his studies he had good reason to believe that among the Himalayan hermits “there are possibly some—if perchance there be but two or three”
¹²⁰
who have attained arhatship.

Still, there are mahatmas and Mahatmas.
¹²¹
Helena’s Mahatmas had been incarnated in embryo in New York in 1875 and fully perfected by 1880 in India. They should have ceased to exist by 1891, but lingered on remarkably, the product of Helena Blavatsky’s inward life during her previous fifty-nine years. Piecing together their biographies from the letters, one can summarize them as follows:

Somewhere in Tibet live the few men who have reached sainthood and become members of the hierarchy that govern the world. Although the exact address of The Brotherhood of the Snowy Range is not divulged, it might well be Shigatse, a village south of Lhasa on the river Tsangpo, where Helena said she stayed in 1870 in the house of Master Koot Hoomi’s sister. The Mahatmas appear to live in a type of communal setting reminiscent of a lamasery. As masters and teachers, they supervise apprentices who have resolved to devote themselves to humanity, and K.H. speaks of the house as being “full of young and innocent
chelas”
¹²²
preparing for initiation. The masters are not cloistered, indeed some of them travel a good deal; Koot Hoomi journeys to Bhutan and to the mountains of “Kouenlun” (K’uenlun) for business consultations, he writes letters from Kashmir and Amritsar and sends a telegram from Jhelum in the Punjab. On one occasion he mentions that he has just spent nine days on horseback. The Brothers go to Lhasa at the beginning of every lunar year to take part in the festivals, but ordinarily keep busy at home performing duties which are referred to but never described. Possibly much of their time is spent in study, since they seem to be curators of the largest and most complete library on earth.

Why Helena chose to present so few details about the daily lives of the Brothers is unclear. Granted, she was usually writing in a hurry, and the requisite religious research was sufficiently taxing to discourage research into details like life-style and diet. While she knew nothing of Tibet from personal experience, she might have checked more carefully into the works of Abbe Hue, William Rockville and other travelers, who painted a fairly accurate picture. As it is, there is nothing in the letters to indicate the Mahatmas were living in Tibet; for that matter, they could have been settled in Madras or London, even New York.

Perhaps because of lack of this essential knowledge, the Brothers Koot Hoomi and Morya are not, as one might expect, Tibetans, but Indians. K.H. was born in the Punjab in the early nineteenth century and came from an old Kashmiri family of the Brahmin caste. In his youth he studied in Europe, probably in Germany because he makes playful references to Munich beer-hall beauties. He does not, however, speak or write German, Punjabi, Hindi or Tibetan; his Latin is faulty, his Sanskrit nonexistent, his French impeccable, his English queer. He also has a habit of overlining his m’s, a mannerism of Russians writing in English or French. Although his letters are written in English, it is not the English of an educated Indian and they sometimes falter in the use of punctuation, spelling and grammar. For example, he inserted commas between subject and predicate. Worse yet, K.H. is fond of American slang and his awkward sentence constructions lead one to believe he is thinking in French but translating his thoughts into English. “S.M. passes the two thirds (les deux tiers) of his life in Trance.” “I write but seldom letters.”
¹²³
(Je n’ecrit que rarement des lettres.)

K.H. is in semi-command of Western literature, science, and philosophy; he quotes Shakespeare correctly, and Swift incorrectly, has a passing acquaintance with Thackeray, Tennyson and Dickens, and keeps au courant by reading current English novels. “My knowledge of your Western Sciences is
very
limited,”
¹²⁴
he insists, which does not prevent him from aiming barbs at Darwin, Edison, Tyndall, and some thirty others. In personality, he was alternately witty, stern, cheerful, spiteful, highly idealistic, petty, and downright bitchy. But he was always entertaining.

When Alfred Sinnett first asked to be put in touch with a Mahatma, Helena responded with Koot Hoomi, who would sign the majority of the letters. One wonders why she created a totally new personage when she might have used one already at hand, Master Morya (usually called M.), her childhood protector already known to Henry Olcott as the man who left his turban in New York. Obviously Helena did not wish to share her personal master with Sinnett, although when Koot Hoomi wearied of the correspondence, Morya was brought in as a relief writer. A Rajput of the Kshatriya caste, he is flinty, humorless, brusque and in most respects a totally different personality from K.H. M. is not fond of traveling, although he does make astral visits. He claims to know very little English and hates writing, which may account for the fact that his letters are concise and his comments snappish. Morya’s single sensual indulgence is pipe-smoking and once, writing to Sinnett from Lhasa, he thanks him for sending him a pipe to replace the one he had broken in an unmahatmic rage. The pipe was a nice touch, but a mistake on Helena’s part, for it was strictly forbidden to smoke in Tibet; one wonders how Morya escaped detection, or even where he managed to obtain tobacco. Helena, a tobacco addict, could not resist giving her favorite creation one of her own bad habits.

In addition to K.H. and M., there are glimpses of several minor characters:

Djual Khool (D.K.) was called “the Disinherited” because he had been disowned by his family when he became a
chela.
At the outset of the letters, D.K. was only a
chela,
but eventually he became a Master himself and K.H. refers to him as his alter ego. One of the Mahatma letters was written by D.K.

Above the Masters is the
Chohan,
a venerable personage who does not write letters. When the Masters submit questions or plans to him, he passes judgment in short, emphatic sentences, seldom giving reasons for his decisions. Once, congratulating Sinnett for a book review, K.H. tells him that he is “beginning to attract the
Chohan’s
attention.”
¹²⁵
Generally, however, the
Chohan
is contemptuous and patronizing to the Westerners whom he calls
“pelings.”

Still higher than the
Chohan
towers the
Maha-Chohan,
or “Chief,” as K.H. calls him, who corresponds more or less to the concept of God. It is the
Maha-Chohan
who gives K.H. permission to correspond with Sinnett.

There are, of course, no women in this organization; in fact, a sturdy strain of anti-feminism can be discerned throughout the letters:
“Women
do lack the power of concentration”; “Generally I never trust a woman any more than I would trust an echo”; and so forth. Referring to H.P.B., who was after all the Brotherhood’s official representative, K.H. is affectionately sexist: “We have nothing against the old woman with the exception that she is one.”
¹²⁶
Koot Hoomi vacillated between defense of H.P.B. and criticism of her shortcomings so devastating that many believed Madame Blavatsky could not possibly have written the letters. The misogyny had a definite purpose: it helped throw Sinnett off the track, at the same time as it boosted Helena above all others of her sex, awarding her a position comparable to the Virgin Mary’s. She had the Masters bestow on her a modest title,
Upasikanl
(female disciple), but there is no missing the powerful position she handpicked for herself in the divine plan.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was a woman who used her inner myths in a most unorthodox manner. During her lifetime, she was ignored by psychologists and psychic researchers, who assumed she was a fraud; she was revered by many thousands who believed that she spoke the truth about her Mahatmas, and who thought her unique. Both evaluations now seem to be somewhat wide of the mark.

Although some of her methods for publicizing herself and her ideas were blatantly dishonest and inexcusable, she sincerely believed that she was serving the cause of some greater truth higher than herself. Certainly her objective, synthesizing all human knowledge into a universal religion and a universal social order, cannot be called ignoble. There must have been periods when her perception of the Brotherhood was sufficiently potent, so that no tricks were necessary to sustain them, but there were also times when the visions faded, the voices vanished, and she was marooned on a sinking island of subliminal romance.

If she does not fit the category of fraud, neither was she unique, and it is interesting to compare Madame Blavatsky with parallel recorded cases in which individuals, usually women, have created dramatic personages who transmit writing of various kinds. (See Appendix C.)