"Never utter these words: 'I do not know this-- therefore it is
false.' One must study to know, know to
understand, understand to judge."-- H P Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 1877
We arm you with our own fact of minimal value
or interest: July 1878 was the month and
year when the first Russian born woman was granted citizenship by the United
States government. The lady in question didn’t
really wish to while out all her days in the land of the free and the home of
the brave. She, in fact, desired to
travel to India and stay there for an indefinite period of time, possibly even
take up residence. But the British were
a suspicious lot and she thought a new nationality on an already well-worn
passport would allay the notion that this visitor to the crown jewel of their
Empire was, in fact, a Russian spy...
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| Madame Blavatsky and the Logo of her Theosophical Society |
Exactly who and what Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
was (or was not) remains a matter of debate.
Toward the end of her life, the British Society for Psychical Research
issued its opinion of her activities in India:
"For our part, we regard her not as the mouthpiece for 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 imposters of history"...
More charitably, we will say Madame Blavatsky
(HPB, to her followers) co-founded the Theosophical Society in New York in
1875. Partners in this venture included
lawyers Henry Steel Olcott and William Q Judge.
Known as "Colonel" for services rendered in the American Civil
War, Olcott was blessed with an inquisitive mind that pondered subjects as
varied as methods to improve agricultural yields and claims made by the
spiritualist movement. Attorney Judge
specialized in commercial paper cases when not pursuing esoterica...
The goals of the Theosophical Society (which
continues as an active and significant force in the occult movement to this
date) cannot be quickly summarized without doing the movement grave injustice…
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| HPB and Colonel Olcott |
Blavatsky believed all faiths and sets of
religious belief contain core spiritual truths that could be recovered through
a combination of direct revelation from the Divine and meditative and/or occult
practices designed to isolate these truths from the dogma surrounding them. A God Who is the Source of all, an immortal soul,
and a possibility of total spiritual enlightenment are among these core truths...
In July 1878, preparing to travel overseas with
a reinvented identity, H P Blavatsky refused to take credit as sole author of
the weighty Isis Unveiled, published
the year previous. She had written much
of the book herself, she confessed to her supporters, but she’d also simply
assembled pages which appeared mysteriously in her study, as many as 50 per
night. The truth of the matter: a Great
Lodge of highly evolved spirits, an invisible brotherhood, had chosen her to be
their instrument to guide mankind to higher states of consciousness...
Born in 1831 near the village of Yekaterinoslav,
Helena Petrovna's father served the Tsar as an artillery officer. He descended from aristocratic German stock. This was well and good but her mother had the
better blood lines-- her noble family traced itself to Prince Mikhail of
Chernigov. In turn, Mikhail claimed Rurik,
the legendary Norseman credited with founding the Russian state, as his
ancestor...
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| Theosophical Society Headquarters, Adyar, India, 1890 |
Several things about HPB's childhood hint at
the woman she becomes...
Her mother and grandmother, also named Helena,
provided strong role models. Mother
wrote novels whose heroines strove to break free of the emotionally constricting
lives society expected of them. The
Russian literati compared her to George Sand (aka Amandine Dupin, Baroness
Dudevant), the scandalous French novelist who advocated free love and had an
affair with composer Frederic Chopin. Grandmother,
aka the Princess Dolgorkurov, studied
the natural world and earned academic respect for her botanical studies...
Blavatsky (her married name) demonstrated disturbing
hints of genuine telepathic and precognitive abilities while growing up at the
family estate near Odessa. More upsetting to her relatives was HPB's distinct
democratic streak. The girl simply did
not care if the new friend she brought home to dinner was an unkempt peasant
child or the equally odious offspring of a peddler...
These factors-- strong female role models,
psychic phenomena, and indifference to her social standing-- appear to have come
together in her mid-teen years to create HPB.
At sixteen, she discovered her late grandfather's library and began
poring over his books about medieval occultists, hoping to make sense of her
own paranormal experiences. A year
later, she ran away from home to spite her governess and promptly married a General
decades older than herself. Three months
after exchanging vows with the old soldier, Helena walked away from the
marriage...
 |
| Thomas Edison would eventually be among the many persons who made the acquaintance of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. An agnostic on the question of the survival of the human personality after death, Edison toyed with the idea of creating a machine that would capture spirit vibrations if they existed. |
Four decades and three years later, Helena
Petrovna Blavatsky would die far from New York, India, or Holy Mother Russia. She would move to the next plane of existence
in London...
Those 43 years spanned a time of incredible
technological progress and the atheistic intellectual challenges posed by
Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. They simultaneously
twined with serious attempts by educated men and women to find a scientific
basis to believe in a teleological universe-- or at least locate reasonable
hints lives had some meaning and we could hope to continue beyond the grave...
The British were in the forefront of this
search. Since the appearance of the
London Dialectical Society in the late 1860s, many intellectuals in the land of
Angles and Scots had investigated claims of contact with spirits, thought
transference, glimpses into the future, and similar phenomena. At the suggestion of physicist William
Barrett, a Society for Psychical Research was formed in 1882...
 |
| The city of Wurzburg where HPB worked on The Secret Doctrine |
The society attracted the attention of natural scientists
like William Crookes (discoverer of the element Thallium) and Oliver Lodge
(noted for studies in electromagnetism), as well as students of the mind Sigmund
Freud and psychologist William James. Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, the Scottish physician best remembered for creating Sherlock
Homes, belonged to the group. Like
Doyle, Lodge had a very personal interest in knowing if the soul continued its
existence after death-- both had lost family members to the horror of the First
World War…
Another thread of research co-existed with
organizations interested in finding any hard science that might explain paranormal
events. This thread consisted of
esoteric societies whose goal was to isolate, refine, and reunite the divine
spark in mankind with the Ultimate Source.
It is probably fair to say these magical orders were more in search of
mythic truth rather than scientific fact...
Members of these esoteric orders were well
educated, well-to-do, often with some sort of connection to Masonic lodges. Perhaps the best known of these societies is
the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn whose members included William Butler
Yeats, Bram Stoker and Arthur Edward Waite...
 |
| Adherents of societies such as The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn were inclined to odd costumes. Here, a member seeks to embody Isis |
For Helena Petrovna (whose Theosophical Society
was closer in intent to the purpose of the Golden Dawn than the goals of the
Society for Psychical Research) the 43 years during which she attached
Blavatsky to her name were simply a magnificent adventure, a rollercoaster whirlwind
of activity. There were shipwrecks off
the Egyptian coast, treks to remote monasteries in Tibet, voyages to New
Orleans to learn secrets of voodoo…
But, above all, there was the grand stay in India
where the invisible (and probably non-existent) Ascended Master and Secret
Brother Koot Hoomi assisted HPB in creating a lucrative business as a spiritual
adviser…
Then came the British Society of Psychical
Research to examine her claims. Oddly
enough, their experts determined Master Koot apparently used HPB's own hand and
ink to write his messages from The Great Beyond...
Denying wrongdoing, the disheartened HPB left
India. She penned another book in Europe,
The Secret Doctrine, spending time in
Italy and Germany as she did so. Then it
was on to Belgium. Then London. One hopes she found her way to a joyful
reunion with Koot Hoomi in the world beyond this and that the Ascended Master
enjoyed traveling as much as she did ...
HPB's magnum opus, Isis Unveiled, remains in print today, thanks to the Theosophical
Society that she, Olcott, and Judge organized well over a century ago. It is a massive work consisting of two
volumes (Science, 657 pages, and Theology, 848 pages). One suspects that very few of HPB's critics or
devotees have actually read this collection of writings despite its impact on
New Age thought. This is a shame,
considering Volume 1, page 327 (Science) offers the definitive discussion on
the subject of the astral body of apes...
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| Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes and member of the Society for Psychical Research, found himself at odds with colleagues who considered this 1917 "Fairy Photographs" to be a blatant hoax |
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CREDITS
Note: All
photographs and research for this essay were located through Google Images or
Wikipedia or other readily available public materials, without authoritative
source or ownership information except as noted: HPB/Theosophical Society logo
from http://www.richardcassaro.com/
