Religion: Theosophy’s Madame

She was a massive mountain of a woman, with crinkly brown hair, wide eyes and billowing chins. She lumbered among tier disciples in a dirty wrapper, fumbling endlessly in the tobacco pouch from which she rolled her cigarets. Again & again she was caught red-handed in chicaneries that would have made a carnival rifter blush.

But Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the occult, semi-religious Theosophical Society, had something that brought savants and social leaders to her feet and keeps her memory hallowed by the 50,000-odd Theosophists scattered around the world. What she had and how she used it is expertly told in a new biography, Priestess of the Occult, by ex-journalist Gertrude Marvin Williams (Knopf; $3.50). Loyal Theosophists will wince at this well-documented story of the Society’s origins.

Sin & Spirits. Madame Blavatsky began life as an adventuress. Born (1831) in the Ukraine of an aristocratic Russian family, she was married at 16 to General Nicephore Blavatsky, deserted him three months later to spend the next 25 years traipsing through European third-class hotels with a broken-down singer. For a while, she operated a shady spiritualist “society” in Cairo. In 1873, at the age of 41, she decided to try the New World.

During her first struggling year in New York, ex-aristocrat Blavatsky lived at a lower East Side home for working women, picked up what jobs she could, such as designing leatherwork and making artificial flowers in a sweatshop. In October 1874, she read a newspaper account of séances held by the Eddy brothers in Vermont. Spiritualist Blavatsky promptly descended on the Eddys in a scarlet shirt and a whirl of exotic spirit controls.

It was at this haunted houseparty that she made her most brilliant capture— Colonel Olcott, cofounder of the Theosophical Society. Honest, credulous Henry Steel Olcott, part-time journalist, a Civil War colonel who had recently been admitted to the New York bar, was the perfect front man. A year later, he had deserted his wife and three sons to devote his time to serving the dynamic Blavatsky.

Madame and the Colonel surrounded themselves with dabblers in necromancy and occultism, took the imposing title of the Theosophical (i.e., “divine wisdom”) Society. Meetings were held in Madame’s apartment, nicknamed “The Lamasery,” and decorated like a bad dream. Here, for two years, she picked the brains and reference libraries of her more scholarly associates to write her 1,200-page Isis Unveiled, which she claimed was dictated to her by the Masters of Wisdom via astral light and spirit guides. In 1878, Madame, the Colonel and two followers set out for mysterious India to search out “secret doctrines.”

Madame & the Masters. It was in India—eventually she set up Theosophy’s permanent international headquarters at Adyar, Madras—that the pattern of the Society began to crystallize. Here she accumulated Theosophy’s assorted bag of borrowings from Buddhism, Hinduism, yoga, the cabala. Here she incorporated the key Theosophist doctrine of reincarnation and developed to the full her hierarchy of “Masters”—Tibetan superbeings who guide mankind through Theosophy.

But the Masters were not enough. Wherever she went, her urge to impress prospective converts with her magical powers led her to stage “phenomena”— the miraculous and well-timed materialization of teacups, pin trays, rings, etc. In the end, this was her undoing: the confederates she needed to perform these ready-made miracles exposed her. In 1885, repudiated by her own followers, she left the land of her Masters forever.

Success at Last. But the best was still ahead. Her rescuers were not Tibetan supermen but a brace of wealthy young Englishmen, who established her in a London suburb and set up a staff of experts to edit her 6,000-page manuscript of Secret Doctrine. When Atheist Annie Wood Besant reviewed it, she was so excited that she went to see Madame, and was quickly converted to Theosophy.*

Fat and tired, Madame Blavatsky ended her days steeped in the adulation she loved. Says Biographer Williams: “London society was curious to see her and the moody lioness became the rage. . . . Even the Church of England, thundering against her on Sunday, peeked at her on Monday. Leaning back against her cushions at one of her soirees, Madame watched the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury sitting primly on a front row chair. . . . Such eminent scientists as Alfred Russel Wallace, Sir William Crookes and Thomas Edison became members of her Theosophical Society. . . . When Alfred, Lord Tennyson . . . died, a copy of Madame’s mystical poem, The Voice of the Silence, lay on the table beside his bed.”

Wrote the London Society for Psychical Research, in its painstakingly detailed investigation of Theosophist Blavatsky: “We regard her neither as the mouthpiece of hidden seers nor as a mere vulgar adventuress; we think she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious and interesting impostors in history.”

*After Madame’s death in 1891, Mrs. Besant became head of the Society, immediately set about revamping it according to her own lights. Result: Blavatsky followers seceded by thousands. Mrs. Besant’s greatest coup: discovery in 1909 of the twelve-year-old Hindu moppet, Jiddu Krishnamurti, whom she proclaimed a “vehicle” of the World Teacher whose last incarnation was Christ. He quit the role 20 years later, took up California residence and lecturing on “the search for truth,” is now on a lecture tour of his native India.