The Victorian-era occultist eludes facile analysis
2 days ago (mitch-horowitz-nyc.medium.com)
How controversial is globe-spanning Russian occultist Madame H.P. Blavatsky (1831–1891), whose exploits and exotic claims enthralled Victorians and future generations?
Here’s a story from my publishing days. In 2012, at the corner of Penguin Random House focused on metaphysical literature, I issued an excellent biography of the nineteenth-century icon by historian Gary Lachman.
The book received wide praise — as well as scrutinizing and caustic coverage in arteries of mainstream culture, including Harper’s Magazine and The Paris Review. We had never sent them the book nor sought their attention.
I was surprised that bastions of lettered opinion dedicated significant space to a mystic traveler who died in 1891. Unremarkably, Blavatsky was depicted as a peddler of fake mysticism, manufactured mediumistic tricks, and charlatanry.
And that, mind you, is the duller end of the critics’ stick. The sharper one, pervasive online, calls her a purveyor of colonialism, genocide, and even a forerunner of Nazism.
Into the third decade of the twenty-first century, this figure of minor nobility who traversed the globe in search of esoteric wisdom, still attracts umbrage and debate — along with semi-devotional praise.
Who was she, really?
In a March 1970 historical profile in McCall’s magazine (!), Kurt Vonnegut — no friend to fluffy headed incense imbibers — wrote,
Madame Blavatsky has plenty of followers still. Her most important contribution to American intellectual history is this, it seems to me: She encouraged a lot of Yankees to suspect that spooky aspects of foreign religions might not be the claptrap scientists said they were…Many Americans, I find, are dimly aware that there was a Madame Blavatsky somewhere in our P. T. Barnum past. When I make them guess who she was and what she did, they commonly suppose that she was an outstanding quack among many quacks who pretended to talk to the dead. This response is ignorant and unfair.
Indeed, pursuing the story of Madame Blavatsky, often called H.P.B., means entering a “hall of magic mirrors,” as historian Victor A. Endersby titled his 1969 biography.
Love or hate her, or any perspective in between (and there are many), it is difficult to imagine our modern world without Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, the universalist occult movement she cofounded in 1875.
Indeed, an extraordinary range of cultural and social figures crisscross H.P.B.’s career and impact, from composers Igor Stravinsky and Alexander Scriabin to political leaders Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Henry A. Wallace to poets W.B. Yeats, George Russell (AE), and T.S. Eliot to artists Agnes Pelton, Hilma af Klint, Nicholas Roerich, Piet Mondrian, and Wassily Kandinsky to novelist L. Frank Baum (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) to modern artists such as musician Todd Rundgren, filmmaker David Lynch, and Elvis Presley (an avid reader) to movements ranging across the alternative spiritual spectrum, including those adapting Eastern spirituality in the West and variants of Wicca and witchcraft.
No hot take or preferential reading of history plumb the legacy of the sphinx-like seeker or of Theosophy.
The answers, if they exist, entail turning the clock forward and backward, not once but several times, starting with Blavatsky’s earliest collaborators, including Theosophical Society cofounder and retired Civil War Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907). It is with their partnership that we begin.
Inwinter 1877 there stood a squat, redbrick tenement on the West Side of Manhattan at Eighth Avenue and 47th Street, what is today considered Hell’s Kitchen or the Theater District. The five-story brick building still stands as an Econo Lodge, part of the discount hotel chain. But in winter of early 1877 it was a walkup dwelling.
On the second floor sat a cramped warren of rooms, which the New York press jokingly dubbed “the Lamasery” for the religious monasteries of Tibet. Within the Lamasery dwelt Blavatsky, who arrived in New York City in 1873.
She came, she explained, because she yearned to visit the birthplace of Spiritualism. More so, she felt that the free religious winds in the U.S. made the nation a propitious launch pad for her re-ignition of occult spirituality, whose influences had been receding since the close of the Renaissance. (There exist other theories, the most alluring of which I consider below.)
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About a year after arriving, she met her roommate, Henry Steel Olcott, a retired staff colonel from the Civil War. During Henry’s twenties, he was considered a wunderkind of scientific agriculture. As an officer, he was among the first investigators of the Lincoln assassination. Henry later grew interested in Spiritualism and researched various mediumistic claims. His efforts led to an 1875 book, People from the Other World, an illustrated investigation.
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The two met on a porch in Chittenden, Vermont, in 1874. Henry was on assignment for one of New York’s dailies to investigate a “ghost farm” run by two brothers, William and Horatio Eddy. The siblings claimed the ability to conjure ghostly phenomena and otherworldly spirits.
As Henry stepped onto the veranda the sunny midday of October 14, he encountered and chivalrously lit the cigarette of the commanding, imposing woman who arrived that day. She was oddly garbed in a puffy red shirt, known as a Garibaldi shirt. It was named for Italian revolutionary and Freemason Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882) who popularized its style while fighting to unify a fragmented Italy into a single democratic republic.
Garibaldi’s struggles led him into military conflict with the Vatican, which until 1870 maintained its own militia. Although not widely remembered, Garibaldi was considered a dramatic, romantic, and idealistic revolutionary challenging Western Europe’s waning aristocracies.
Blavatsky told her new friend that she had fought at Garibaldi’s side — she lifted her shirt to reveal to a wide-eyed Henry bullet wounds from their campaigns. He was enthralled. They did not become lovers but, for a time, inseparable though fractious friends with a shared passion for the unseen.
Their vehicles were first the short-lived Miracle Club formed in May 1875 and soon after the Theosophical Society, which they founded in New York City that November. Henry installed the two of them in the cluster of rooms called the Lamasery in late summer or early fall of 1876.
One winter night at the Lamasery in 1877, Henry experienced perhaps the formative episode of his life. Madame Blavatsky had gone to sleep and he was seated alone in his room reading by the flicker of gas lamp. Henry was poring over explorer John Lloyd Stephens’ memoir of scouting Mayan ruins in Yucatan, with the only noise the hiss of steam heat. Reading and smoking, Henry was suddenly startled to attention. There appeared before him, with no footsteps, creaking floorboards, or sound of an opening door, a massively tall, turbaned man later identified as Master Morya, an adept from the East.
“All at once,” Henry wrote in his memoir Old Diary Leaves,
as I read with my shoulder a little turned from the door, there came a gleam of something white in the right-hand corner of my right eye; I turned my head, dropped my book in astonishment, and saw towering above me in his great stature an Oriental clad in white garments, and wearing a head cloth or turban of amber-striped fabric, hand-embroidered in yellow floss silk.
It was one of the “hidden masters” that Madame Blavatsky said had been tutoring her since adolescence — and from whom Henry had begun receiving letters during his efforts organizing an occult salon called the Miracle Club. The earliest missive, sent in May 1875, bore the injunction, TRY, the slogan of American occultist P.B. Randolph, soon to die from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
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Now, standing before Henry in resplendent white garb with a silk turban encircling his head, was this Eastern mystery teacher, Morya, who, Henry later recounted, reassured the acolyte that he was on the right path.
Morya encouraged him in his investigations, his close partnership with Madame Blavatsky — and something more: he told Henry that he wanted the pair to relocate to India, which was then under the yolk of colonial machinery. The Hindu religion was being eaten away by well- funded and military-backed missionary campaigns dispatched from England and Western Europe.
As proof of their encounter, and to persuade Henry he wasn’t dreaming, Morya removed his fehta or turban and left it on the table for the stunned onlooker. [1] With that, the adept vanished.
As it happened, about eighteen months later in December 1878, Henry and Madame Blavatsky did leave New York City for Bombay, now Mumbai, arriving in January.
The pair reestablished themselves in a nation then as unfamiliar to most Westerners as the surface of another planet. They had limited finances; no command over language, culture, or custom; few personal contacts; and both were well into middle age and not in robust health. Blavatsky was obese and had some difficulty getting around. Henry suffered from a gouty leg.
They uprooted themselves from the relative comforts of Victorian-era New York where reasonably well-established dwellers could have domestic servants, ice in their drinks, and enjoy a coal-heated and gaslit home. You could taxi around town in a horse and carriage, go to the theater, or take a train to Coney Island; restaurants abounded. Moreover, the couple were widely known personalities about town accustomed to jousting with the tabloid press.
In September 1877, Blavatsky had published her first book, Isis Unveiled, a sprawling work of occult philosophy and history. Henry was respected as a lawyer and journalist who had covered the execution of abolitionist John Brown and made some of the first arrests of suspected collaborators in Lincoln’s assassination. Although considered eccentric in their partnership in occult studies, they were eminent if notorious figures.
Leaving all that behind, they established themselves in the ancient nation where they and followers helped inaugurate the nascent Indian National Congress, the policymaking arm of the independence movement, the helm of which was later taken by Mahatma Gandhi.
The anti-colonial leader spoke admiringly of the influence that Blavatsky’s philosophy of religious universality had on him during his student years. Indeed, in a remarkably overlooked facet of twentieth-century history, Gandhi openly credited Theosophy with returning him to Hinduism and its holy book, the Bhagavad Gita, which became the guiding text of the leader’s life. Blavatsky’s Key to Theosophy, Gandhi wrote in his autobiography, “stimulated in me the desire to read books on Hinduism, and disabused me of the notion fostered by the missionaries that Hinduism was rife with superstition.” [2]
Theosophy, Gandhi later told biographer Louis Fischer, “is Hinduism at its best. Theosophy is the brotherhood of man.” [2]
Gandhi partnered (and sometimes feuded) with the Theosophical Society during India’s independence movement, crediting it with easing relations between Hindu and Muslim delegates to the Indian National Congress. So prominent was Theosophy in India’s political life that even the Congress’s founding in 1885 was instigated by an early Theosophist, A.O. Hume, a retired Anglo–Indian government secretary who said that he was acting under “advice and guidance of advanced initiates.” [4]
In 1973, Hume, seen as a founding light of the independence movement, appeared on a commemorative Indian postal stamp. In 1917, Blavatsky’s successor, Annie Besant, was elected president of the Congress, making the Theosophist the first woman and last European to hold the title.
For his part, Henry made speaking tours of India, Japan, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Burma (now Myanmar), and helped instigate a vast Buddhist revival. In Sri Lanka, an Anglican bishop groused in a letter home that “the Secretary of an obscure society” had been encouraging Buddhist monks, “hailing them as brothers in the march of intellect.” [5] Olcott used the missionaries’ own methods against them: He wrote The Buddhist Catechism — still read in Sri Lankan classrooms today — to codify the native faith as missionaries had the Christian one.
He successfully lobbied English authorities to permit the national celebration of Buddha’s birthday, during which worshippers rallied around an international Buddhist flag Olcott helped design. He raised money for schools and educational programs. The Buddhist revival ignited. Within twenty years of Olcott’s first visit, the number of Buddhist schools in the island nation grew from four to more than two hundred. [6]
In recognition, Henry’s death, February 17, 1907, is today nationally celebrated as “Olcott Day.” In 1967, Henry’s visage, too, was memorialized on a Sri Lankan postal stamp.
The notion of Westerners making a spiritual sojourn to India had not yet entered the Western psyche. Most Victorians did not see India as a fount of religious wisdom. Rather, the nation was widely considered a cultural boondocks that the British Empire used as a base for mercantilism and military command. It was not until decades later that writers like W. Somerset Maugham or Paul Brunton wrote about spiritual journeys to India — and nearly a century later that the Beatles visited in 1968, joining Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at his ashram in Rishikesh. The tracks for such journeys were laid by Blavatsky and Olcott.
What, if anything, happened that winter night in the gaslight of Henry’s room on the West Side of Manhattan? Did he invent the story? Did he imagine it?
I am hardly about to advocate for a mysterious turbaned man materializing in front of Henry. At the same time, I also reckon that the strange and outwardly spiraling history of this couple expands in directions that shouldn’t be possible. If the critics are right, Blavatsky and Olcott ought to be a forgotten novelty of the nineteenth century occult revival, their names an afterthought. And yet, what they and their closest colleagues created, widely acknowledged or not, was history itself.
This returns us to the question: who, in essence, was Madame Blavatsky? If asked seriously, such a query may never yield any complete answer.
Forensically, Blavatsky was born to minor Russian nobility in 1831, involved in a coerced and unhappy marriage (she later had another short-lived marriage in Philadelphia), and began to travel as a young woman.
Since girlhood, she reported dreams about figures from the East who wished to tutor and help her. As she entered her early twenties while touring England, Blavatsky said that she experienced her first encounter with a hidden master at the International Exhibition at Hyde Park’s Crystal Palace in 1851 — a hugely tall man who accompanied the royal Nepalese delegation.
There abound records and controversies around her traveling to Tibet, Egypt, Persia, and the Far East. She said she was guided in her studies and travels by the adept Morya and others such as Koot Hoomi (also spelled Kuthumi), Serapis Bey, and Tuitit Bey — flesh-and-blood beings who she maintained were unbound by certain dimensional or material realities and thus able to materialize at will.
Under tutelage to the masters, she spurred a spiritual revolution to save the Western world from domination by philosophical materialism, or belief that matter creates itself and nothing exists beyond flesh and bone, motor skill and cognition — that one’s psyche is an epiphenomenon of the brain, like bubbles in a glass of carbonated water, and when the water is gone, so are the bubbles. As seen, she said she was charged with rescuing the Eastern philosophies from dissolution under colonial rule.
Her stories of hidden masters of wisdom from Persia, the Himalayas, Egypt, and India, wielded an unusual effect on the West. Although earlier Transcendentalist thinkers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott, were versed in some of the Vedic literature available to English speakers, and they wrote about such things in their journals, poetry, and essays, their work did not necessarily reach the everyday individual, the kind of person who hadn’t read British poet Edwin Arnold’s 1879 epic “The Light of Asia” on the life of Buddha.
Indeed, we have an overdeveloped sense of the availability of ancient or Eastern literature in translation prior to the late nineteenth century. In 1841, when Emerson published his first series of essays, there were probably just four or five copies of the Bhagavad Gita in English throughout all of America. One was in the library at Harvard, one was in Emerson’s personal library. Emerson lent his copy to Thoreau and some of his contemporaries. The remaining two or three, according to best estimates, were in private libraries. The first Latin and French translations of the Chinese ethical classic the Tao Te Ching were not available until 1838 and the first English version in 1868. (Catholic missionaries circulated partial Latin translations starting in 1788). I’ve noted elsewhere (see below) the paucity of Hermetic translations. Hence, it’s important to recall these limits.
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It was the fantastical and theatrical quality of Madame Blavatsky, and the manner in which the press took to her, that began to spread the idea in the popular mind that there existed gurus, swamis, and masters of wisdom in the nations of the East, a world that many Americans barely knew existed, or if they thought of such places at all were likely to consider them holdouts of superstition and burlesque tribalism. Blavatsky’s stories of tutelage by these masters gave Westerners an alternate point of reference.
Hence, Americans were able to understand what it meant when the first gurus ventured West, such as Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) who visited the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and spent the next two years touring America, speaking on karma, nonattachment, and reincarnation. [7] Or the monk Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) who came to America in 1920 and taught Kriya Yoga, a practice encompassing both spiritual and physical techniques. When Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of Transcendental Meditation, visited Southern California in 1959, modern Westerners had a way to contextualize him.
“In a tiny room on the fourth floor of the Central Y.M.C.A.,” wrote the Honolulu Star Bulletin on Maharishi’s stopover, “a remarkable man sits cross-legged on a deer’s pelt. His eyes remind you of the innocence of a puppy’s eyes. He has no money. He asks for nothing. His worldly possessions can be carried in one hand. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is on a world odyssey . . . In the meantime, he sits quietly in room 424. He sleeps three hours a night, eats one vegetarian meal a day, and does not think of tomorrow.” [8]
This process expanded in the U.S. with the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, which allowed greater Asian immigration, permitting entry to a new cohort of gurus and yogis, including Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977) that year. Again, when John, Paul, George, and Ringo visited Maharishi at Rishikesh in 1968, the notion of a Westerner sojourning East, and vice versa, had a touch of familiarity. That acclimation began largely through Madame Blavatsky.
Aside from her narrative about spiritual masters, Madame Blavatsky taught that there exists an occult philosophy, or “secret doctrine,” as she titled her vast cosmological opus in 1888.
This secret doctrine, in her telling, is a primeval “hierohistory,” using Henry Corbin’s term. [9] Renaissance thinkers embraced the concept of a prisca theologia or primeval theology antedating all else. Blavatsky conveyed a similar theme. This occult or secret doctrine was deeply, almost unthinkably, ancient and unknown. It was far older than all modern faiths and, in fact, underscored them.
What’s more, she taught that humanity itself is millennia upon millennia older than modern authorities understood. And, further, that humanity spans vast evolutionary cycles of development, through which it eventually evolves finer sensory abilities and exists under fewer restrictions of physical law. Blavatsky described this in terms of epochs of evolving “root races” — not races in the ethnic sense but pertaining to spiritual development.
In the fetid atmosphere of Darwinian misapplications, Blavatsky, on occasion, made racial generalizations that were at once conventional to the Victorian era and shabbily conceived, a subject of future controversies. This, along with Blavatsky’s use of the Vedic swastika and her timeworn references to ancient Asiatic races, including the Aryan, burnished a brutally simplistic shorthand, easily referenced within the character-limit of tweets, namely that H.P.B. was a progenitor of Nazism, a canard I explore elsewhere (see below).
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Topick up with The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky described seven root races, which span vast millennia, and are older than anything understood in terms of human history, some emanating from supposed “lost continents” of Atlantis and Lemuria. Each of these seven root races, in turn, divides into seven subraces, with humanity working its way up this scale of spiritual development.
She wrote that current humanity is the fifth subrace of the fifth root race and that the early twenty-first century would see emergence of the sixth sub-race. This developmental process requires 700 or 800 years. And another 25,000 years before commencement of the seventh subrace.
It is important to clarify that Blavatsky counted evolutionary cycles in millions of years. As Pablo Sender helpfully summarized in “The Dawn of Civilization: An Esoteric Account of the First Three Root Races” in Fall 2019 in Quest magazine:
According to The Secret Doctrine, the First Root Race, nonphysical beings lacking in consciousness, began to develop over 1.5 billion years ago. The first self-conscious humanity resembling what we know today was the Third Root Race, which started over 18 million years ago. The anthropological records, historic and even prehistoric, belong to our current Root Race, which is the fifth (out of seven).
Blavatsky’s cycles are correspondingly vast in nature to the Vedic cycle of yugas or world ages. The four recurrent cycles require 4,320,000 earth years to complete and then recommence.
Humanity’s current cycle of Kali Yuga — considered an era of conflict and spiritual degradation — began in 3,102 B.C. and concludes in 428,899 A.D., lasting 432,000 conventional years (a number with surprising congruences in other religious systems).
Using esoteric calendrics of his own, Traditionalist philosopher René Guénon (1886–1951) calculated stage four, the Kali Yuga, at a more compact 6,480 years, running 4,481 B.C. to 1999 A.D. This means that present humanity has returned to the first stage of Krita Yuga or the Golden Age: “But it is hard to imagine the author of The Reign of Quantity [Guénon] if he were living now, agreeing with that,” Joscelyn Godwin notes in Atlantis and the Cycles of Time (Inner Traditions, 2011).
Back to more graspable measures of time, Blavatsky wrote in 1888 that the current process of transformation from the fifth to sixth subrace would begin in the United States. “It is in America that the transformation will take place,” reads The Secret Doctrine, “and has already silently commenced.” Signposts in The Secret Doctrine and later interpretation by Blavatsky’s protege and successor, British political reformer Annie Besant, point to the change originating on the West Coast in California.
This warrants pausing over. In 1888, California was a place of orange groves, ranches, mines, desert climate, and seashore. Although the 1840s Gold Rush brought a wave of migrants, the coastal state remained, in essence, a ranch town and agricultural hub. It wasn’t until an economic boom brought on by the shipping industry around World War I that California began to develop into the economic powerhouse and migratory magnet it is today. People arrived for myriad reasons, including commerce and health, as the climate was considered a tonic. California not only became home to the nascent movie business but started to develop into the epicenter of alternative spirituality, which it has remained.
As with Central New York’s Burned-Over District, population flows presage religious innovation. Hence, the Southern California coast became the capital of everything radical and breakaway in spirituality.
None of that was especially foreseeable in 1888 when Blavatsky published The Secret Doctrine in which she wrote: “Occult Philosophy teaches that even now, under our very eyes, the new Race and races are preparing to be formed, and that it is in America that the transformation will take place, and has already silently commenced.” She specifically referenced humanity’s transformation from its current role as the fifth subrace of the fifth root race into a sixth subrace (again, seven subraces appear within each root race) in the Pacific Rim, a process that would unfold in “some few hundred years more.” As alluded, Besant interpreted the quoted passage referencing Southern California, which I consider accurate to Blavatsky’s outlook.
Inthe opening page of The Secret Doctrine, Madame Blavatsky tells the reader she is viewing and writing down stanzas of wisdom from The Book of Dzyan, a mythical Tibetan Buddhist text not known to physically exist. The author leaves open the question of whether she’s perusing a physical work or viewing its passages in a phenomenalistic or clairvoyant manner: “An Archaic Manuscript — a collection of palm leaves made impermeable to water, fire, and air, by some specific unknown process — is before the writer’s eye.”
Continue reading In the Hall of Magic Mirrors: Reckoning with Madame H.P. Blavatsky