The H.D. Book (20 page)

My grandmother, as a young wife of eighteen, so I remember the story, had lost two babies in a polio epidemic, and she came down to San Francisco from what is still backwoods Sierra country in California to go from one spiritualist circle to another, seeking consolation or communication, some continuity of her relation with the dead. The Indian guides must have seemed not out of place, for she had been born in Indian country in the wilderness of the Modoc territory in Eastern Oregon in the 1850s. My father’s family had moved West too, first into Ohio at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and then on, at the frontier, or beyond the frontier, of America, into California. Tales of pioneer days, of Indian wars and of Indian sympathies, pacts with the Indians, lingered on, along with the new lore of strange ways, of pacts with the other world. From Modoc County in northeastern California, where she had gone as a young bride, my grandmother brought Indian baskets and beaded belts, feathered charms and
wampum
or strings of shells, her curios. In my childhood, there were still mediums who talked in Indian voices among those adults meeting in the other room. But my grandmother had gone on from the spiritualist circles, and, sometime in the eighties, she had joined with a group to form an Hermetic Brotherhood.

Their thought rose from a swarming ground that had been prepared by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.
Isis Unveiled
had appeared in 1877;
The Secret Doctrine
in 1888. Sinnett’s
Esoteric Buddhism,
the popular presentation of theosophical ideas, had appeared in 1883. Into her alembic or witch’s pot, Blavatsky had stirred whatever hints, scraps, legends, lore, visions, phantasies, things she made up herself, into a muddle or stew. “Pot and Pan-theism” a contemporary wit dubbed it in scorn. Though she ransacked demonologies, histories of magic, studies of religion, encyclopedias of Gnosticism and neo-Platonism (“about 2100 quotations from and references to books that were copies at second hand . . . without proper credit,” an angry critic wrote: “Nearly the whole of
four pages was copied from Oliver’s
Pythagorean Triangle,
while only a few lines were credited to that work”), the material of
Isis Unveiled,
H.P.B. insisted, was her own, not out of reference books she had read, a matter of her research and imagination, but was revealed to her in the Akashic or Astral Records. So her disciple Olcott describes how, in the evening when he would return from his office and sit opposite her as she wrote “with the vacant eye of the clairvoyant seer” (but we see it also as with the vacant eye of one recalling what she had read that day), she would “shorten her vision as though to look at something held invisibly in the air before her, and begin copying on her paper what she saw.”

Did she pretend, as I used to pretend as a child, to sail out in the boat previous to dreaming? Why? Her references were actually all there in books that Olcott and she had gathered in their library in that very room or had borrowed from the libraries of occultist friends. She had an insatiable curiosity and energy in gathering information. She talked with everyone and read everything. In those very years (1875–77) when
Isis Unveiled
was conceived and written, she had drawn upon the learning of a friend, Alexander Wilder, an American occultist, who had edited and annotated Thomas Taylor’s
Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries
and had translated the
Theurgia
of Iamblichus. Blavatsky insisted that her guides were spirits. “One such collaborator,” Gertrude Williams tells us in her book on Blavatsky,
Priestess of the Occult,
“was the Old Platonist who, remaining invisible, talked by the hour, dictating copy, checking references, answering questions.” “The spirit Old Platonist would be more convincing,” Mrs. Williams comments, “if there had not been an Old Platonist in the flesh—Dr. Wilder, who also talked by the hour, checking references and answering questions.”

But the work was not meant to be convincing. It was meant to be upsetting to the mind that would have tolerated Dr. Wilder as an authority in a curious field of thought but would balk at the pretension of a spirit as an authority in a revelation. Her purpose was not to convert but to overthrow the established orders of thought, to set up whatever was doubted, feared, or despised in the place of the ruling authorities. Yes, but mixed up with the hysterical impulse to insult and subvert the respectable and reasonable was—also a component of
hysteria—the intense sense of how much the society itself was in need of some release of vital powers that had been repressed.

“I am solely occupied,” Blavatsky wrote to her sister, “not with writing
Isis,
but with Isis herself”:

I live in a kind of permanent enchantment, a life of visions and sights, with open eyes, and no chance whatever to deceive my senses! I sit and watch the fair good goddess constantly. And as she displays before me the secret meaning of her long-lost
secrets,
and the veil, becoming with every hour thinner and more transparent, gradually falls off before my eyes, I hold my breath and can hardly trust to my senses! . . . Night and day the images of the past are ever marshaled before my inner eyes. Slowly, and gliding silently like images in an enchanted panorama, centuries after centuries appear before me . . . I certainly refuse point-blank to attribute it to my own knowledge or memory. I tell you seriously I am helped. And he who helps me is my Guru.

My “Daemon,” Socrates had called him. Or Genius. My
Muse,
a poet might have called Isis. But Blavatsky was not, she insisted, musing. Whatever else
Isis Unveiled
might be, it was not to be taken as a scholarly study, a philosophy, or a work of the imagination. It was to be taken as revelation, a dictate of the unconscious. A new specter was raised to haunt the course of Western Civilization.

“The mind is the great Slayer of the Real,” reads one of the aphorisms in
The Voice of Silence,
“translated” so Blavatsky declared, out of
Senzar,
the lost language of the world before Atlantis. The scholar, the philosopher, the poet, were all men of the mind, and in the critical distance of their disciplines or arts, slayers of the real. This “Real” was Isis naked, the Revealed Doctrine. We can read another message in the oracle, for the Mind, the idiotic or autistic dream and will, is also a great slayer of another “Real,” the common sense of things. Blavatsky had set about to destroy what Freud calls the reality principle. John Symonds in his book on Blavatsky,
The Lady with the Magic Eyes,
comments: “The
Mind
is here used in the sense of consciousness, upon which all our Western scientific knowledge is based, but which the East regards as only part of the world of illusion.” Blavatsky’s Mind as Slayer of the Real may have stood for the Conscious then at war with the Unconscious, as Freud was
to find it in his study of hysteria at the end of the century. Plagiarism, fraud, perversion by pun, by reversal of values and displacement of content, of above into below, of male into female, left into right, before into after—all these Freud saw as operations of the unconscious in the psychopathology of daily life.

She impersonated the Unconscious, but she also gave her ego over to unconscious—“invisible” or “occult,” she called them—guides. She was unconscious of what she read or learned in talking with Dr. Wilder, and accepted the information only in a trance-like state from the unconscious where it had been banished from her consciousness.

She was a wishful thinker, and she flew into rages when her wishes were questioned. She did not rage at Nature. Nature seemed to cooperate with her powers. But she was savage when confronted by ways of the mind that others took for granted as proper, by what was right to think, reasonable to hope for. More, she was outraged by her own disciples, the credulous and ever-admiring Olcott, the reason-seeking Sinnett, for she wanted the mind in following her Doctrine to be converted by what it could not believe, to submit to the unreasonable. She did not want her Theosophic manifesto to be accepted; she wanted men to come by way of what they could not accept into the rebellious impulses that lay back of
Isis Unveiled.
“If you only knew what lions and eagles in every part of the world have turned into asses at my whistle, and have obediently wagged their long ears in time as I piped,” she wrote to a confidante.

There is pathos in her scorn. She had wanted to awaken a disobedience in man that would restore the lion or eagle he must be. The hidden Adam restored, man transformed under the dictatorship of the unconscious. You have nothing to lose but your chains of belief and disbelief, she had wanted to say.

For she herself was bound in chains of belief and disbelief. The imagination was intolerable to her conscious mind. She denied that there was any truth or trust in what a man might create or initiate. Even her book, in order to be doctrine, could not be created by her or have any virtue in her own thought but must be dictated by the authority of Masters outside the work, just as the truth of Man could not be immanent in his evolution but must be established in a paradigm,
an actual plan given in the beginning, recorded in the eternal—the “Akashic” or Astral Light—and lost. “I certainly refuse point-blank to attribute it to my own knowledge or memory,” she had said then, as if such an attribution would have brought the authenticity of
Isis Unveiled
into question. She would have excluded the more vehemently any suggestion of her own phantasy or imagination as a source.

Whatever came from the individual inner volition was suspect. Over and over again she warns against the elemental and animal entities, the false impulses, that threaten any free life of the psyche as a medium. It is experience itself that she warns against. What does not come from a superior external authority, from Adepts “closely connected with a certain island of an inland sea,” what does not come from the teachings of a primal and esoteric wisdom, comes from below, from the Left, from the swarming mass of a false science based upon the senses. All the imaging, voicing, personating, creating activity that characterizes the imagination in the ego was denied and mistrusted by her conscious mind. Only what was actual and imperative was permitted reality. Her ideas, her intuitions, her voices—the imagined teachers Morya and Koot Houmi—were illusions, if they belonged to her own creative life. The Universe itself was Maya, if it was created. The real could not be made up.

Given the chains of belief and disbelief, the alternative of illusion is delusion. The creative was the veil of Isis. To find the hidden thing one had to strip the creative veil away. The magic of Blavatsky, the fascination of her writing, was never then to be the magic of an enchanting prose, evoking its life in us to become most real in the weaving of a spell that is also a music with many images and levels of meaning—the illusion of an experience. Her magic was to be, on the contrary, the fascination of an argumentative delusion, the pursuit of proofs and laws behind appearances.

She searched in India and in Egypt, she drew portraits, and, finally, she faked evidence, to prove that her Masters were not figures of a dream or fiction, creatures of the veil, but were actual persons. Anti-materialistic though she declared herself, she could not believe they might be spiritual beings “not of this world.” She rejected all sublimations. Proofs lay in materializations—cups and saucers, gloved hands, bells rung, wafts of scent, actual letters received in a spirit post office.
Ideas, imaginings, reveries, were immaterial. She sought only the manifest. Yet she could live too in “a kind of permanent enchantment,” as she writes to her sister, smoking hashish and having, not her own phantasies, but hashish phantasies. Given the manifest agency of the drug, so that any suspicion of her own psychic agency might be denied, she could dwell “with Isis herself.”

In 1891, a month before her death, she closed her last essay with a quotation from Montaigne: “I have here made only a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the string that ties them.” The string she had brought of her own was the thread of her argument, a wish that she, and mankind with her, might be released from the contradictions of dream and fact, creative idea and actuality, volition and authority that tortured her spirit. But the string was also the quest for the end of dream, creative idea, volition—if only they could be proved to be their opposites, so that what we thought was moving would prove to be schematic and settled. The string was the obsessional winding of the thread—the double-faced words “mind” and “real,” the inversion of evolutionary theory, the perversions of geological theory, the inversions that must not be conversions, the transference of fact into fiction and of fiction into the mode of fact, the subversion of accepted scientific thought, the plagiarism, the fraud—worst of all, the reasoning of a woman who knows she must be right and will take any means to prove it.

With pathos, she added: “Is anyone of my helpers prepared to say that I have not paid the full price of my string?” She had been attacked and exposed, vilified and ridiculed. Her own followers had come to doubt that her Masters “really” existed. But the pathos was Mercurial, for she had meant for her followers in all the stupidity of their conscious minds, bound by chains of Theosophic belief, like her defamers, bound by the chains of scientific or religious disbelief, to pay the full price of her string.

For the price of the string, the price of the wish, the quest, the obsession, lay in an oppressive state. She had gathered a pitchblende of suggestion, once her doctrine was mixed, in which some radium lay hid. In the mess of astrology, alchemy, numerology, magic orders and disorders, neo-Platonic, Vedic, and Kabbalistic systems combined,
confused, and explained, queered evolution and wishful geology, transposed heads—the fact of her charged fascination with it all remains genuine. It has the charge of a need, and her sense binds: that until man lives once more in these awes and consecrations, these obediences to what he does not know but feels, until he takes new thought in what he has discarded from thought, he will not understand what he is.