The Woman Behind The Most Influential Book No One Actually Reads

"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

 Trivia lovers constantly seek to impress others with obscure facts for reasons probably best (and better) known only to themselves.  This truth can be verified by anyone who has suddenly been asked by the resident know-it-all to state, for the record, the average distance between Jupiter and Pluto, the atomic weight of Molybdenum or the occupation of Theda Bara's father...  

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...

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… 

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...

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...     

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/