3. Madame Blavatsky’s Confession.
The individual to whom the world is most indebted for a critical analysis of Madame Blavatsky’s character and her claims as a producer of occult phenomena is Vsevolod S. Solovyoff, a Russian journalist and litterateur of considerable note. He has ruthlessly torn the veil from the Priestess of Isis in a remarkable book of revelations, entitled, “A Modern Priestess of Isis.” In May, 1884, he was in Paris, engaged in studying occult literature, and was preparing to write a treatise on “the rare, but in my opinion, real manifestations of the imperfectly investigated spiritual powers of man.” One day he read in the Matin that Madame Blavatsky had arrived in Paris, and he determined to meet her. Thanks to a friend in St. Petersburg, he obtained a letter of introduction to the famous Theosophist, and called on her a few days later, at her residence in the Rue Notre Dame des Champs. His pen picture of the interview is graphic:
“I found myself in a long, mean street on the left bank of the Seine, de l’autre cote de l’eau, as the Parisians say. The coachman stopped at the number I had told him. The house was unsightly enough to look at, and at the door there was not a single carriage.
“‘My dear sir, you have let her slip; she has left Paris,’ I said to myself with vexation.
“In answer to my inquiry the concierge showed me the way. I climbed a very, very dark staircase, rang, and a slovenly figure in an Oriental turban admitted me into a tiny dark lobby.
“To my question, whether Madame Blavatsky would receive me, the slovenly figure replied with an ‘Entrez, monsieur,’ and vanished with my card, while I was left to wait in a small low room, poorly and insufficiently furnished.
“I had not long to wait. The door opened, and she was before me; a rather tall woman, though she produced the impression of being short, on account of her unusual stoutness. Her great head seemed all the greater from her thick and very bright hair, touched with a scarcely perceptible gray, and very slightly frizzed, by nature and not by art, as I subsequently convinced myself.
“At the first moment her plain, old earthy-colored face struck me as repulsive; but she fixed on me the gaze of her great, rolling, pale blue eyes, and in these wonderful eyes, with their hidden power, all the rest was forgotten.
“I remarked, however, that she was very strangely dressed, in a sort of black sacque, and that all the fingers of her small, soft, and as it were boneless hands, with their slender points and long nails, were covered with great jewelled rings.”
Madame Blavatsky received Solovyoff kindly, and they became excellent friends. She urged him to join the Theosophical Society, and he expressed himself as favorably impressed with the purposes of the organization. During the interview she produced her astral bell “phenomenon.” She excused herself to attend to some domestic duty, and on her return to the sitting-room, the phenomenon took place. Says Solovyoff: “She made a sort of flourish with her hand, raised it upwards and suddenly, I heard distinctly, quite distinctly, somewhere above our heads, near the ceiling, a very melodious sound like a little silver bell or an Aeolian harp.
“‘What is the meaning of this?’ I asked.
“‘This means only that my master is here, although you and I cannot see him. He tells me that I may trust you, and am to do for you whatever I can. Vous etes sous sa protection, henceforth and forever.’
“She looked me straight in the eyes, and caressed me with her glance and her kindly smile.”
This Mahatmic phenomenon ought to have absolutely convinced Solovyoff, but it did not. He asked himself the question:
“‘Why was the sound of the silver bell not heard at once, but only after she had left the room and come back again?’”
A few days after this event, the Russian journalist was regularly enrolled as a member of the Theosophical Society, and began to study Madame Blavatsky instead of Oriental literature and occultism. He was introduced to Colonel Olcott, who showed him the turban that had been left at the New York headquarters by the astral Koot Hoomi. Solovyoff witnessed other “phenomena” in the presence of Madame Blavatsky, which did not impress him very favorably. Finally, the High Priestess produced her chef d’ oeuvre, the psychometric reading of a letter. Solovyoff was rather impressed with this feat and sent an account of it to the Rebus, but subsequently came to the conclusion that trickery had entered into it. When the Coulomb exposures came, he did not see much of Madame Blavatsky. She was overwhelmed with letters and spent a considerable time anxiously travelling to and fro on Theosophical affairs. In August, 1885, she was at Wurzburg sick at heart and in body, attended by a diminutive Hindoo servant, Bavaji by name. She begged Solovyoff to visit her, promising to give him lessons in occultism. With a determination to investigate the “phenomena,” he went to the Bavarian watering place, and one morning called on Madame Blavatsky. He found her seated in a great arm chair:
“At the opposite end of the table stood the dwarfish Bavaji, with a confused look in his dulled eyes. He was evidently incapable of meeting my gaze, and the fact certainly did not escape me. In front of Bavaji on the table were scattered several sheets of clean paper. Nothing of the sort had occurred before, so my attention was the more aroused. In his hand was a great thick pencil. I began to have ideas.
“‘Just look at the unfortunate man,’ said Helena Petrovna suddenly, turning to me. ‘He does not look himself at all; he drives me to distraction’.... Then she passed from Bavaji to the London Society for Psychical Research, and again tried to persuade me about the ‘master.’ Bavaji stood like a statue; he could take no part in our conversation, as he did not know a word of Russian.
“‘But such incredulity as to the evidence of your own eyes, such obstinate infidelity as yours, is simply unpardonable. In fact, it is wicked!’ exclaimed Helena Petrovna.
“I was walking about the room at the time, and did not take my eyes off Bavaji. I saw that he was keeping his eyes wide open, with a sort of contortion of his whole body, while his hand, armed with a great pencil, was carefully tracing some letters on a sheet of paper.
“‘Look; what is the matter with him?’ exclaimed Madame Blavatsky.
“‘Nothing particular,’ I answered; ‘he is writing in Russian.’
“I saw her whole face grow purple. She began to stir in her chair, with an obvious desire to get up and take the paper from him. But with her swollen and almost inflexible limbs, she could not do so with any speed. I made haste to seize the paper and saw on it a beautifully drawn Russian phrase.
“Bavaji was to have written, in the Russian language with which he was not acquainted: ‘Blessed are they that believe, as said the Great Adept.’ He had learned his task well, and remembered correctly the form of all the letters, but he had omitted two in the word ‘believe,’ [The effect was precisely the same as if in English he had omitted the first two and last two letters of the word.]
“‘Blessed are they that lie,’ I read aloud, unable to control the laughter which shook me. ‘That is the best thing I ever saw. Oh, Bavaji! you should have got your lesson up better for examination!’
“The tiny Hindoo hid his face in his hands and rushed out of the room; I heard his hysterical sobs in the distance. Madame Blavatsky sat with distorted features.”
As will be seen from the above, the Hindoo servant was one of the Madame’s Mahatmas, and was caught in the act of preparing a communication from a sage in the Himalayas, to Solovyoff.
“After this abortive phenomena,” remarks the Russian journalist, “things marched faster, and I saw that I should soon be in a position to send very interesting additions to the report of the Psychical Society.”... “Every day when I came to see the Madame she used to try to do me a favor in the shape of some trifling ‘phenomenon,’ but she never succeeded. Thus one day her famous ‘silver bell’ was heard, when suddenly something fell beside her on the ground. I hurried to pick it up—and found in my hands a pretty little piece of silver, delicately worked and strangely shaped. Helena Petrovna changed countenance, and snatched the object from me. I coughed significantly, smiled and turned the conversation to indifferent matters.”
On another occasion he was conversing with her about the “Theosophist,” and “she mentioned the name of Subba Rao, a Hindoo, who had attained the highest degree of knowledge.” She directed Mr. Solovyoff to open a drawer in her writing desk, and take from it a photograph of the adept.
“I opened the drawer,” says Solovyoff, “found the photograph and handed it to her—together with a packet of Chinese envelopes (See Fig. 34), such as I well knew; they were the same in which the ‘elect’ used to receive the letters of the Mahatmas Morya and Koot Hoomi by ‘astral post.’
“‘Look at that, Helena Petrovna! I should advise you to hide this packet of the master’s envelopes farther off. You are so terribly absent-minded and careless.’
“It was easy to imagine what this was to her. I looked at her and was positively frightened; her face grew perfectly black. She tried in vain to speak; she could only writhe helplessly in her great arm-chair.”
Solovyoff with great adroitness gradually drew from her a confession. “What is one to do,” said Madame Blavatsky, plaintively, “when in order to rule men it is necessary to deceive them; almost invariably the more simple, the more silly, and the more gross the phenomenon, the more likely it is to succeed.” The Priestess of Isis broke down completely and acknowledged that her phenomena were not genuine; the Koot Hoomi letters were written by herself and others in collusion with her; finally she exhibited to the journalist the apparatus for producing the “astral bell,” and begged him to go into a co-partnership with her to astonish the world. He refused! The next day she declared that a black magician had spoken through her mouth, and not herself; she was not responsible for what she had said. After this he had other interviews with her; threats and promises; and lastly a most extraordinary letter, which was headed, “My Confession,” and reads, in part, as follows:
“Believe me, I have fallen because I have made up my mind to fall, or else to bring about a reaction by telling all God’s truth about myself, but without mercy on my enemies. On this I am firmly resolved, and from this day I shall begin to prepare myself in order to be ready. I will fly no more. Together with this letter, or a few hours later, I shall myself be in Paris, and then on to London. A Frenchman is ready, and a well-known journalist too, delighted to set about the work and to write at my dictation something short, but strong, and what is most important—a true history of my life. I shall not even attempt to defend, to justify myself. In this book I shall simply say: “In 1848, I, hating my husband, N. V. Blavatsky (it may have been wrong, but still such was the nature God gave me), left him, abandoned him—a virgin. (I shall produce documents and letters proving this, although he himself is not such a swine as to deny it.) I loved one man deeply, but still more I loved occult science, believing in magic, wizards, etc. I wandered with him here and there, in Asia, in America, and in Europe. I met with So-and-so. (You may call him a wizard, what does it matter to him?) In 1858 I was in London; there came out some story about a child, not mine (there will follow medical evidence, from the faculty of Paris, and it is for this that I am going to Paris). One thing and another was said of me; that I was depraved, possessed with a devil, etc.
“I shall tell everything as I think fit, everything I did, for the twenty years and more, that I laughed at the qu’en dira-t-on, and covered up all traces of what I was really occupied in, i. e., the sciences occultes, for the sake of my family and relations who would at that time have cursed me. I will tell how from my eighteenth year I tried to get people to talk about me, and say about me that this man and that was my lover, and hundreds of them. I will tell, too, a great deal of which no one ever dreamed, and I will prove it. Then I will inform the world how suddenly my eyes were opened to all the horror of my moral suicide; how I was sent to America to try my psychological capabilities; how I collected a society there, and began to expiate my faults, and attempted to make men better and to sacrifice myself for their regeneration. I will name all the Theosophists who were brought into the right way, drunkards and rakes, who became almost saints, especially in India, and those who enlisted as Theosophists, and continued their former life, as though they were doing the work (and there are many of them) and yet were the first to join the pack of hounds that were hunting me down, and to bite me....
“No! The devils will save me in this last great hour. You did not calculate on the cool determination of despair, which was and has passed over.... And to this I have been brought by you. You have been the last straw which has broken the camel’s back under its intolerably heavy burden. Now you are at liberty to conceal nothing. Repeat to all Paris what you have ever heard or know about me. I have already written a letter to Sinnett forbidding him to publish my memoirs at his own discretion. I myself will publish them with all the truth.... It will be a Saturnalia of the moral depravity of mankind, this confession of mine, a worthy epilogue of my stormy life.... Let the psychist gentlemen, and whosoever will, set on foot a new inquiry. Mohini and all the rest, even India, are dead for me. I thirst for one thing only, that the world may know all the reality, all the truth, and learn the lesson. And then death, kindest of all.
H. Blavatsky.
“You may print this letter if you will, even in Russia. It is all the same now.”
This remarkable effusion may be the result of a fever-disordered brain, it may be, as she says, the “God’s truth;” at any rate it bears the ear-marks of the Blavatsky style about it. The disciples of the High Priestess of Isis have bitterly denounced Solovyoff and the revelations contained in his book. They brand him as a coward for not having published his diatribe during the lifetime of the Madame, when she was able to defend herself. However that may be, Solovyoff’s exposures tally very well with the mass of corroborative evidence adduced by Hodgson, Coues, Coleman, and a host of writers, who began their attacks during the earthly pilgrimage of the great Sibyl.
On receipt of this letter, Feb 16, 1886, Solovyoff resigned from the Theosophical Society. He denounced the High Priestess to the Paris Theosophists, and the Blavatsky lodges in that city were disrupted in consequence of the exposures. This seems to be a convincing proof of the genuineness of his revelations. After the Solovyoff incident, Madame Blavatsky went into retirement for a while. Eventually she appeared in London as full of enthusiasm as ever and added to her list of converts the Countess of Caithness and Mrs. Annie Besant, the famous socialist and authoress.
Finally came the last act of this strange life-drama. That messenger of death, whom the mystical Persian singer, Omar Khayyam, calls “The Angel of the Darker Drink,” held to her lips the inevitable chalice of Mortality; then the “golden cord was loosened and the silver bowl was broken,” and she passed into the land of shadows. It was in London, May 8, 1891, that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky ended one of the strangest careers on record. She died calmly and peacefully in her bed, surrounded by her friends, and after her demise her body was cremated by her disciples, with occult rites and ceremonies. All that remained of her—a few handfuls of powdery white ashes—was gathered together, and divided into three equal parts. One portion was buried in London, one sent to New York City, and the third to Adyar, near Madras, India. The New World, the Old World, and the still Older World of the East were honored with the ashes of H. P. B. Three civilizations, three heaps of ashes, three initials—mystic number from time immemorial, celebrated symbol of Divinity known to, and revered by, Cabalists, Gnostics, Rosicrucians, and Theosophists.
Mr. J. Ransom Bridges, who had considerable correspondence with the High Priestess from 1888 until her death, says (Arena, April, 1895): “Whatever may be the ultimate verdict upon the life and work of this woman, her place in history will be unique. There was a Titanic display of strength in everything she did. The storms that raged in her were cyclones. Those exposed to them often felt with Solovyoff that if there were holy and sage Mahatmas, they could not remain holy and sage, and have anything to do with Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. The ‘confession’ she wrote rings with the mingled curses and mad laughter of a crazy mariner scuttling his own ship. Yet she could be as tender and sympathetic as any mother. Her mastery of some natures seemed complete; and these people she worked like galley-slaves in the Theosophical tread mill of her propaganda movement.
“To these disciples she was the greatest thaumaturgist known to the world since the days of the Christ. The attacks upon her, the Coulomb and Solovyoff exposures, the continual newspaper calumnies they look upon as a gigantic conspiracy brewed by all the rules of the black art to counteract, and, if possible, to destroy the effect of her work and mission.”
“Requiescat in Pace,” O Priestess of Isis, until your next incarnation on Earth! The twentieth century will doubtless have need of your services! For the delectation of the curious let me add: the English resting place of Madame Blavatsky is designed after the model of an Oriental “dagoba,” or tomb; the American shrine is a marble niche in the wall of the Theosophical headquarters, No. 144 Madison avenue, the ashes reposing in a vase standing in the niche behind a hermetically-sealed glass window. The Oriental shrine in Adyar is a tomb modelled after the world-famous Taj Mahal, and is built of pink sandstone, surmounted by a small Benares copper spire.