1. The Priestess.
The greatest “fantaisiste” of modern times was Madame Blavatsky, spirit medium, Priestess of Isis, and founder of the Theosophical Society. Her life is one long catalogue of wonders. In appearance she was enormously fat, had a harsh, disagreeable voice, and a violent temper, dressed in a slovenly manner, usually in loose wrappers, smoked cigarettes incessantly, and cared little or nothing for the conventionalities of life. But in spite of all—unprepossessing appearance and gross habits—she exercised a powerful personal magnetism over those who came in contact with her. She was the Sphinx of the second half of this Century; a Pythoness in tinsel robes who strutted across the world’s stage “full of sound and fury,” and disappeared from view behind the dark veil of Isis, which she, the fin-de-siecle prophetess, tried to draw aside during her earthly career.
In searching for facts concerning the life of this really remarkable woman—remarkable for the influence she has exerted upon the thought of this latter end of the nineteenth century—I have read all that has been written about her by prominent Theosophists, have talked with many who knew her intimately, and now endeavor to present the truth concerning her and her career. The leading work on the subject is “Incidents in the Life of Madame Blavatsky,” compiled from information supplied by her relatives and friends, and edited by A. P. Sinnett, author of “The Occult World.” The frontispiece to the book is a reproduction of a portrait of Madame Blavatsky, painted by H. Schmiechen, and represents the lady seated on the steps of an ancient ruin, holding a parchment in her hand. She is garbed somewhat after the fashion of a Cumaean Sibyl and gazes straight before her with the deep unfathomable eyes of a mystic, as if she were reading the profound riddles of the ages, and beholding the sands of Time falling hot and swift into the glass of eternity—
“And all things creeping to a day of doom.”
FIG. 32—MADAME BLAVATSKY.
Sinnett’s life of the High Priestess is a strange concoction of monstrous absurdities; it is full of the weirdest happenings that were ever vouchsafed to mortal. We cannot put much faith in this biography, and must delve in other mines for information; but some of the remarkable passages of the book are worth perusing, particularly if the reader be prone to midnight musings of a ghostly character.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the daughter of Col. Peter Hahn of the Russian Army, and granddaughter of General Alexis Hahn von Rottenstern Hahn (a noble family of Mecklenburg, Germany, settled in Russia), was born in Eskaterinoslaw, in the south of Russia, in 1831. “She had,” says Sinnett, “a strange childhood, replete with abnormal occurrences. The year of her birth was fatal for Russia, as for all Europe, owing to the first visit of the cholera, that terrible plague that decimated from 1830 to 1832 in turn nearly every town of the Continent.... Her birth was quickened by several deaths in the house, and she was ushered into the world amid coffins and desolation, on the night between July 30th and 31st, weak and apparently no denizen of this world.” A hurried baptism was given lest the child die in original sin, and the ceremony was that of the Greek Church. During the orthodox baptismal rite no person is allowed to sit, but a child aunt of the baby, tired of standing for nearly an hour, settled down upon the floor, just behind the officiating priest. No one perceived her, as she sat nodding drowsily. The ceremony was nearing its close. The sponsors were just in the act of renouncing the Evil One and his deeds, a renunciation emphasized in the Greek Church by thrice spitting upon the invisible enemy, when the little lady, toying with her lighted taper at the feet of the crowd, inadvertantly set fire to the long flowing robes of the priest, no one remarking the accident till it was too late. The result was an immediate conflagration, during which several persons—chiefly the old priest—were severely burnt. That was another bad omen, according to the superstitious beliefs of orthodox Russia; and the innocent cause of it, the future Madame Blavatsky, was doomed from that day, in the eyes of all the town, to an eventful, troubled life.
“Mlle. Hahn was born, of course, with all the characteristics of what is known in Spiritualism as mediumship in the most extraordinary degree, also with gifts as a clairvoyant of an almost equally unexampled order. On various occasions while apparently in an ordinary sleep, she would answer questions, put by persons who took hold of her hand, about lost property, etc., as though she were a sibyl entranced. For years she would, in childish impulse, shock strangers with whom she came in contact, and visitors to the house, by looking them intently in the face and telling them they would die at such and such a time, or she would prophesy to them some accident or misfortune that would befall them. And since her prognostications usually came true, she was the terror, in this respect, of the domestic circle.”
Madame V. P. Jelihowsy, a sister of the seeress, has furnished to the world many extraordinary stories of Mme. Blavatsky’s childhood, published in various Russian periodicals. At the age of eleven the Sibyl lost her mother, and went to live with her grandparents at Saratow, her grandfather being civil governor of the place. The family mansion was a lumbering old country place “full of subterraneous galleries, long abandoned passages, turrets, and most weird nooks and corners. It looked more like a mediaeval ruined castle than a building of the last century.” The ghosts of martyred serfs were supposed to haunt the uncanny building, and strange legends were told by the old family servants of weir-wolves and goblins that prowled about the dark forests of the estate. Here, in this House of Usher, the Sibyl lived and dreamed, and at this period exhibited many abnormal psychic peculiarities, ascribed by her orthodox governess and nurses of the Greek Church to possession by the devil. She had at times ungovernable fits of temper; she would ride any Cossack horse on the place astride a man’s saddle; go into trances and scare everyone from the master of the mansion down to the humblest vodka drinker on the estate.
In 1848, at the age of 17, she married General Count Blavatsky, a gouty old Russian of 70, whom she called “the plumed raven,” but left him after a brief period of marital infelicity. From this time dates her career as a thaumaturgist. She travelled through India and made an honest attempt to penetrate into the mysterious confines of Thibet, but succeeded in getting only a few miles from the frontier, owing to the fanaticism of the natives.
In India, as elsewhere, she was accused of being a Russian spy and was generally regarded with suspicion by the police authorities. After some months of erratic wanderings she reappeared in Russia, this time in Tiflis, at the residence of a relative, Prince ——. It was a gloomy, grewsome chateau, well suited for Spiritualistic séances, and Madame Blavatsky, it is claimed, frightened the guests during the long winter evenings with table-tippings, spirit rappings, etc. It was then the tall candles in the drawing-room burnt low, the gobelin tapestry rustled, sighs were heard, strange music “resounded in the air,” and luminous forms were seen trailing their ghostly garments across the “tufted floor.”
FIG. 33—MAHATMA LETTER.
The gossipy Madame de Jelihowsy, in her reminiscences, classifies the phenomena, witnessed in the presence of her Sibylline sister, as follows:
1. Direct and perfectly clearly written and verbal answers to mental questions—or “thought reading.”
2. Private secrets, unknown to all but the interested party, divulged, [especially in the case of those persons who mentioned insulting doubts].
3. Change of weight in furniture and persons at will.
4. Letters from unknown correspondents, and immediate answers written to queries made, and found in the most out-of-the-way mysterious places.
5. Appearance of objects unclaimed by anyone present.
6. Sounds of musical notes in the air wherever Madame Blavatsky desired they should resound.
In the year 1858, the High Priestess was at the house of General Yakontoff at Pskoff, Russia. One night when the drawing-room was full of visitors, she began to describe the mediumistic feat of making light objects heavy and heavy objects light.
“Can you perform such a miracle?” ironically asked her brother, Leonide de Hahn, who always doubted his sister’s occult powers.
“I can,” was the firm reply.
De Hahn went to a small chess table, lifted it as though it were a feather, and said: “Suppose you try your powers on this.”
“With pleasure!” replied Mme. Blavatsky. “Place the table on the floor, and step aside for a minute.” He complied with her request.
She fixed her large blue eyes intently upon the chess table and said without removing her gaze, “Lift it now.”
The young man exerted all his strength, but the table would not budge an inch. Another guest tried with the same result, but the wood only cracked, yielding to no effort.
FIG. 34—MAHATMA LETTER ENVELOPE.
“Now, lift it,” said Madame Blavatsky calmly, whereupon De Hahn picked it up with the greatest ease. Loud applause greeted this extraordinary feat, and the skeptical brother, so say the occultists, was utterly nonplussed.
Madame Blavatsky, as recorded by Sinnett, stated afterwards that the above phenomenon could be produced in two different ways: “First, through the exercise of her own will directing the magnetic currents so that the pressure on the table became such that no physical force could move it; second, through the action of those beings with whom she was in constant communication, and who, although unseen, were able to hold the table against all opposition.”
The writer has seen similar feats performed by hypnotizers with good subjects without the intervention of any ghostly intelligences.
In 1870 the Priestess of Isis journeyed through Egypt in company with a certain Countess K—, and endeavored to form a Spiritualistic society at Cairo, for the investigation of psychic phenomena, but things growing unpleasant for her she left the land of pyramids and papyri in hot haste. It is related of her that during this Egyptian sojourn she spent one night in the King’s sepulchre in the bowels of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, sleeping in the very sarcophagus where once reposed the mummy of a Pharoah. Weird sights were seen by the entranced occultist and strange sounds were heard on that eventful occasion within the shadowy mortuary chamber of the pyramid. At times she would let fall mysterious hints of what she saw that night, but they were as incomprehensible as the riddles of the fabled Sphinx.
Countess Paschkoff chronicles a curious story about the Priestess of Isis, which reminds one somewhat of the last chapter in Bulwer’s occult novel, “A Strange Story.” The Countess relates that she was once travelling between Baalbec and the river Orontes, and in the desert came across the caravan belonging to Madame Blavatsky. They joined company and towards nightfall pitched camp near the village of El Marsum amid some ancient ruins. Among the relics of a Pagan civilization stood a great monument covered with outlandish hieroglyphics. The Countess was curious to decipher the inscriptions, and begged Madame Blavatsky to unravel their meaning, but the Priestess of Isis, notwithstanding her great archaeological knowledge, was unable to do so. However, she said: “Wait until night, and we shall see!” When the ruins were wrapped in sombre shadow, Mme. Blavatsky drew a great circle upon the ground about the monument, and invited the Countess to stand within the mystic confines. A fire was built and upon it were thrown various aromatic herbs and incense. Cabalistic spells were recited by the sorceress, as the smoke from the incense ascended, and then she thrice commanded the spirit to whom the monument was erected to appear. Soon the cloud of smoke from the burning incense assumed the shape of an old man with a long white beard. A voice from a distance pierced the misty image, and spoke: “I am Hiero, one of the priests of a great temple erected to the gods, that stood upon this spot. This monument was the altar. Behold!” No sooner were the words pronounced than a phantasmagoric vision of a gigantic temple appeared, supported by ponderous columns, and a great city was seen covering the distant plain, but all soon faded into thin air.
This story was related to a select coterie of occultists assembled in social conclave at the headquarters in New York. The question is, had the charming Russian Countess dreamed this, or was she trying to exploit herself as a traveler who had come “out of the mysterious East” and had seen strange things?
We next hear of the famous occultist in the United States, where she associated chiefly with spirit-mediums, enchanters, professional clairvoyants, and the like.
“At this period of her career she had not,”[4] says Dr. Eliott Coues, a learned investigator of psychic phenomena, “been metamorphosed into a Theosophist. She was simply exploiting as a Spiritualistic medium. Her most familiar spook was a ghostly fiction named ‘John King.’ This fellow is supposed to have been a pirate, condemned for his atrocities to serve earth-bound for a term of years, and to present himself at materializing séances on call. Any medium who personates this ghost puts on a heavy black horse-hair beard and a white bed sheet and talks in sepulchral chest tones. John is as standard and sure-enough a ghost as ever appeared before the public. Most of the leading mediums, both in Europe and America, keep him in stock. I have often seen the old fellow in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington through more mediums that I can remember the names of. Our late Minister to Portugul, Mr. J. O’Sullivan, has a photograph of him at full length, floating in space, holding up a peculiar globe of light shaped like a glass decanter. This trustworthy likeness was taken in Europe, and I think in Russia, but am not sure on that point. I once had the pleasure of introducing the pirate king to my friend Prof. Alfred Russel Wallace, in the person of Pierre L. O. A. Keeler, a noted medium of Washington.
“But the connection between the pirate and my story is this: Madame Blavatsky was exploiting King at the time of which I speak, and several of her letters to friends, which I have read, are curiously scribbled in red and blue pencil with sentences and signatures of ‘John King,’ just as, later on, ‘Koot Hoomi’ used to miraculously precipitate himself upon her stationery in all sorts of colored crayons. And, by the way, I may call the reader’s attention to the fact that while the ingenious creature was operating in Cairo, her Mahatmas were of the Egyptian order of architecture, and located in the ruins of Thebes or Karnak. They were not put in turbans and shifted to Thibet till late in 1879.”
In 1875, while residing in New York, Madame Blavatsky conceived the idea of establishing a Theosophical Society. Stupendous thought! Cagliostro in the eighteenth century founded his Egyptian Free-Masonry for the re-generation of mankind, and Blavatsky in the nineteenth century laid the corner stone of modern Theosophy for a similar purpose. Cagliostro had his High Priestess in the person of a beautiful wife, Lorenza Feliciani, and Blavatsky her Hierophant in the somewhat prosaic guise of a New York reporter, Col. Olcott, since then a famous personage in occult circles.
During the Civil War, Olcott served in the Quartermaster’s Department of the Army and afterwards held a position in the Internal Revenue Service of the United States. In 18— he was a newspaper man in New York, and was sent by the Graphic to investigate the alleged Spiritualistic phenomena transpiring in the Eddy family in Chittenden, Vermont. There he met Madame Blavatsky. It was his fate.
FIG. 35. COL. H. S. OLCOTT.
Col. Olcott’s description of his first sight of Mme. Blavatsky is interesting:
“The dinner at Eddy’s was at noon, and it was from the entrance door of the bare and comfortless dining-room that Kappes and I first saw H. P. B. She had arrived shortly before noon with a French Canadian lady, and they were at table as we entered. My eye was first attracted by a scarlet Garibaldian shirt the former wore, as being in vivid contrast with the dull colors around. Her hair was then a thick blonde mop, worn shorter than the shoulders, and it stood out from her head, silken, soft, and crinkled to the roots, like the fleece of a Cotswold ewe. This and the red shirt were what struck my attention before I took in the picture of her features. It was a massive Kalmuck face, contrasting in its suggestion of power, culture, and imperiousness, as strangely with the commonplace visages about the room, as her red garment did with the gray and white tones of the wall and woodwork, and the dull costumes of the rest of the guests. All sorts of cranky people were continually coming and going at Eddy’s, to see the mediumistic phenomena, and it only struck me on seeing this eccentric lady that this was but one more of the sort. Pausing on the door-sill, I whispered to Kappes, ‘Good gracious! look at that specimen, will you!’ I went straight across and took a seat opposite her to indulge my favorite habit of character-study.”
Commenting on this meeting, J. Ransom Bridges, in the Arena, for April, 1895, remarks: “After dinner Colonel Olcott scraped an acquaintance by opportunely offering her a light for a cigarette which she proceeded to roll for herself. This ‘light’ must have been charged with Theosophical karma, for the burning match or end of a lighted cigar—the Colonel does not specify—lit a train of causes and their effects which now are making history and are world-wide in their importance. So confirmed a pessimist on Theosophical questions as Henry Sidgwick of the London Society for Psychical Research, says, ‘Even if it [the Theosophical Society] were to expire next year, its twenty years’ existence would be a phenomenon of some interest for a historian of European society in the nineteenth century.’”
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FIG. 36. OATH OF SECRECY TAKEN BY CHARTER MEMBERS OF THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY.
[Kindness of the New York Herald.]
The séances at the Eddy house must have been character studies indeed. The place where the ghosts were materialized was a large apartment over the dining room of the ancient homestead. A dark closet, at one end of the room, with a rough blanket stretched across it, served as a cabinet. Red Indians and pirates were the favorite materializations, but when Madame Blavatsky appeared on the scene, ghosts of Turks, Kurdish cavaliers, and Kalmucks visited this earthly scene, much to the surprise of every one. Olcott cites this fact as evidence of the genuineness of the materializations, remarking, “how could the ignorant Eddy boys, rough, rude, uncultured farmers, get the costumes and accessories for characters of this kind in a remote Vermont village.”