Articles
about the Life and Work
of
H P Blavatsky
Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24 -1DL
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831 – 1891)
The Founder of Modern Theosophy
The Life of
H P Blavatsky
Edited by A P Sinnett
CHAPTER 1
CHILDHOOD
QUOTING the
authoritative statement of her late uncle, General
Fadeef, made at
my request in 1881, at a time when he was
Joint-Secretary
of State in the Home Department at St Petersburg,
Mme. H. P.
Blavatsky (Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, to give the name at
full length) “
is, from her father's side, the daughter of Colonel
Peter Hahn, and
granddaughter of General Alexis Hahn von Rottenstern
Hahn (a noble
family of Mecklenburg, Germany, settled in Russia);
and she is,
from her mother's side, the daughter of Helene Fadeef,
and
granddaughter of Privy Councillor Andrew Fadeef and of the
Princess Helene
Dolgorouky. She is the widow of the Councillor of
State,
Nicephore Blavatsky, late Vice-Governor of the Province of
Erivan,
Caucasus.”
Mademoiselle
Hahn, to use her family name in referring to her
childhood, was
born at Ekaterinoslaw, in the south of Russia, in
1831. Von Hahn would
be the proper German form of the name, and in
French writing
or conversation the name, as used by Russians, would
be De Hahn, but
in its strictly Russian form the prefix was
generally
dropped.
For the
following particulars concerning the family I am indebted to
some of its
present representatives who have taken an interest in
the preparation
of these memoirs.
“The Von Hahn
family is well known in Germany and Russia. The Counts
Von Hahn belong
to an old Mecklenburg stock. Mme. Blavatsky's
grandfather was
a cousin of Countess Ida Hahn-Hahn, the famous
authoress, with
whose writings England is well acquainted. Settling
in Russia, he
died in its service a full general. He was married to
the Countess
Proêbstin, who, after his death, married Nicholas
Wassiltchikof,
the brother of the famous Prince of that name. Mme.
Blavatsky's
father left the military service with the rank of a
colonel after
the death of his first wife. He had been married en
premières
noces to Mademoiselle H. Fadeew, known in the literary
world between
1830 and 1840 as an authoress — the first novel-writer
that had ever
appeared in Russia — under the nom de plume of Zenaida
R . . . , and
who, although dying before she was twenty-five, left
some dozen
novels of the romantic school, most of which have been
translated into
the German language. In 1846 Colonel Hahn married
his second wife
— a Baroness Von Lange, by whom he had a daughter
referred to by
Mme. Jelihowsky as ' little Lisa' in the extracts
here given from
her writings, published in St Petersburg. On her
mother's side
Mme. Blavatsky is the granddaughter of Princess
Dolgorouky,
with whose death the elder line of that family became
extinct in
Russia. Thus her maternal ancestors belong to the oldest
families of the
empire, since they are the direct descendants of the
Prince or Grand
Duke Rurik, the first ruler called to govern Russia.
Several ladies
of that family belonged to the Imperial house,
becoming Czarinas
(Czaritiza) by marriage. For a Princess Dolgorouky
(Maria
Nikitishna) had been married to the grandfather of Peter the
Great, the Czar
Michael Fedorovitch, the first reigning Romanof;
another, the
Princess Catherine Alexeévna, was on the eve of her
marriage with
Czar Peter the II when he died suddenly before the
ceremony.
“A strange
fatality seems always to have persecuted this family in
connection with
England; and its greatest vicissitudes have been in
some way
associated with that country. Several of its members died,
and others fell
into political disgrace, as they were on their way
to London. The
last and most interesting of all is the tragedy
connected with
the Prince Sergeéy Gregoreevitch Dolgorouky, Mme.
Blavatsky's
grandmother's grandfather, who was ambassador in Poland.
At the advent
of the Archduchess Anne of Courlang to the throne of
Russia, owing
to their opposition to her favourite of infamous
memory, the
Chancellor Biron, many of the highest families were
imprisoned or
exiled; others put to death and their wealth
confiscated.
Among these, such fate befell the Prince Sergèey
Dolgorouky. He
was sent in exile to Berezof (Siberia) without any
explanation,
and his private fortune, that consisted of 200,000
serfs, was
confiscated. His two little sons were, the elder placed
with a village
smith as an apprentice, the younger condemned to
become a simple
soldier, and sent to Azof. Eight years later the
Empress Anne
laxnovna recalled the exiled father, pardoned him, and
sent him as
ambassador to London. Knowing Biron well, however, the
prince sent to
the Bank of England 100,000 roubles to be left
untouched for a
century, capital and accumulated interest, to be
distributed after
that period to his direct descendants. His
presentiment
proved correct. He had not yet reached Novgorod, on his
way to England,
when he was seized and put to death by 'quartering'
(cut in four).
When the Empress Elizabeth, Peter the Great's
daughter, came
to the throne next, her first care was to undo the
great wrongs
perpetrated by her predecessor through her cruel and
crafty
favourite Biron. Among other exiles the two sons and heirs of
Prince
Sergeéy were recalled, their title restored, and their
property
ordered to be given back. This, however, instead of being
200,000 serfs,
had dwindled down to only 8000. The younger son,
after a youth
of extreme misery and hardship, became a monk, and
died young. The
elder married a Princess Romadanovsky; and his son,
Prince Paul,
Mme. Blavatsky's great-grandfather, named while yet in
his cradle a
Colonel of the Guards by the Emperor, married a
Countess du
Plessy, the daughter of a noble French Huguenot family,
emigrated from
France to Russia. Her father had found service at the
Court of the
Empress Catherine II where her mother was the favourite
dame d'honneur.
“The receipt of
the Bank of England for the sum of 100,000 roubles,
a sum that at
the end of the term of one hundred years had grown to
immense
proportions, had been handed by a friend of the politically
murdered prince
to the grandson of the latter, the Prince Paul
Dolgorouky. It
was preserved by him with other family documents at
Marfovka, a
large family property in the government of Penja, where
the old prince
lived and died in 1837. But the document was vainly
searched for by
the heirs after his death ; it was nowhere to be
found. To their
great horror further research brought to light the
fact that it
must have been burnt, together with the residence, in a
great fire that
had some time previous destroyed nearly the whole
village. Having
lost his sight in a paralytic stroke some years
previous to his
demise, the octogenarian prince, old and ill, had
been kept in ignorance
of the loss of the most important of his
family
documents. This was a crushing misfortune, that left the
heirs bereft of
their contemplated millions. Many were the attempts
made to come to
some compromise with the bank, but to no purpose. It
was ascertained
that the deposit had been received at the bank, but
some mistake in
the name had been made, and then the bank demanded
very naturally
the receipt delivered about the middle of the last
century. In
short, the millions disappeared for the Russian heirs.
Mme. Blavatsky
has thus in her veins the blood of three nations —
the Slavonian,
the German, and the French.”
The year of
Mademoiselle Hahn's birth, 1831, 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, and carried away a large part of its
populations.
Her birth was quickened by several deaths in the house.
She was ushered
into the world amid coffins and desolation. The
following
narrative is composed from the family records :—
“Her father was
then in the army, intervals of peace after Russia's
war with Turkey
in 1829 being filled with preparations for new
fights. The
baby was born on the night between July 30 and 31 — weak
and apparently
no denizen of this world. A hurried baptism had to be
resorted to,
therefore, lest the child died with the burden of
original sin on
her soul. The ceremony of baptism in 'orthodox'
Russia is
attended with all the paraphernalia of lighted tapers, and
'pairs' of
godmothers and godfathers, every one of the spectators
and actors
being furnished with consecrated wax candles during the
whole
proceedings. Moreover, everyone has to stand during the
baptismal rite,
no one being allowed to sit in the Greek religion —
as they do in
Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches — during the
church and
religious service. The room selected for the ceremony in
the family
mansion was large, but the crowd of devotees eager to
witness it was
still larger. Behind the priest officiating in the
centre of the
room, with his assistants, in their golden robes and
long hair,
stood the three pairs of sponsors and the whole household
of vassals and
serfs. The child-aunt of the baby — only a few years
older than her
niece aged twenty-four hours, — placed as ' proxy '
for an absent
relative, was in the first row immediately behind the
venerable
protopope. Feeling nervous and tired of standing still for
nearly an hour,
the child settled on the floor, unperceived by the
elders, and
became probably drowsy in the overcrowded room on that
hot July day.
The ceremony was nearing its close. The sponsors were
just in the act
of renouncing the Evil One and his deeds, a
renunciation
emphasised 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, inadvertently set
fire to the long
flowing robes
of the priest, no one remarking the accident until 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 Mme.
Blavatsky — was doomed from that day in the eyes of all
the town to an
eventful life, full of vicissitude and trouble.
“Perhaps on
account of an unconscious apprehension to the same
effect, the
child became the pet of her grandparents and aunts, and
was greatly
spoiled in her childhood, knowing from her infancy no
other authority
than that of her own whims and will. From her
earliest years
she was brought up in an atmosphere of legends and
popular fancy. As
far back as her remembrances go, she was possessed
with a firm
belief in the existence of an invisible world of
supermundane
and sub-mundane spirits and beings inextricably blended
with the life
of each mortal. The 'Domovoy' (house goblin) was no
fiction for
her, any more than for her nurses and Russian maids.
This invisible
landlord — attached to every house and building, who
watches over
the sleeping household, keeps quiet, and works hard the
whole year
round for the family, cleaning the horses every night,
brushing and
plaiting their tails and manes, protecting the cows and
cattle from the
witch, with whom he is at eternal feud — had the
affections of
the child from the first. The Domovoy is to be dreaded
only on March
the 30th, the only day in the year when, owing to some
mysterious
reasons, he becomes mischievous and very nervous, when he
teases the
horses, thrashes the cows and disperses them in terror,
and causes the
whole household to be dropping and breaking
everything,
stumbling and falling that whole day — every prevention
notwithstanding.
The plates and glasses smashed, the inexplicable
disappearance
of hay and oats from the stables, and every family
unpleasantness
in general, are usually attributed to the fidgetiness
and nervous
excitement of the Domovoy. Alone, those born on the
night between
July 30th and 31st are exempt from his freaks. It is
from the
philosophy of her Russian nursery that Mademoiselle Hahn
learned the
cause of her being called by the serfs the Sedmitchka,
an
untranslatable term, meaning one connected with number Seven; in
this particular
case, referring to the child having been born on the
seventh month
of the year, on the night between the 30th and 31st of
July — days so
conspicuous in Russia in the annals of popular
beliefs with
regard to witches and their doings. Thus the mystery of
a certain
ceremony enacted in great secrecy for years during July
the 30th, by
the nurses and household, was divulged to her as soon
as her consciousness
could realise the importance of the initiation.
She learned
even in her childhood the reason why, on that day, she
was carried
about in her nurse's arms around the house, stables, and
cow-pen, and
made personally to sprinkle the four corners with
water, the
nurse repeating all the while some mystic sentences.
These may be
found to this day in the ponderous volumes of
Sacharof's '
Russian Demonology,' [The Traditions of the Russian
People by J
Sacharof in seven volumes, embracing popular literature,
beliefs, magic,
witchcraft, the sub-mundane spirits, ancient customs
and rites,
songs and charms, for the last 1000 years.] a laborious
work that
necessitated over thirty years of incessant travelling and
scientific
researches in the old chronicles of the Slavonian lands,
and that won to
the author the appellation of the Russian Grimm.”
Born in the
very heart of the country which the Roussalka (the
Undine) has
chosen for her abode ever since creation — reared on the
shores of the
blue Dnieper, that no Cossack of Southern Ukraine ever
crosses without
preparing himself for death — the child's belief in
these lovely
green-haired nymphs was developed before she had heard
of anything
else. The catechism of her Ukraine nurses passed wholly
into her soul,
and she found all these weird poetical beliefs
corroborated to
her by what she saw, or fancied she saw, herself
around her ever
since her earliest babyhood. Legends seem to have
lingered in her
family, preserved by the recollections of the older
servants, of
events connected with such beliefs, and they inspired
the early
tyranny she was taught to exercise, as soon as she
understood the
powers that were attributed to her by her nurses. The
sandy shores of
the rapid Dnieper encircling Ekaterinoslaw, with
their
vegetation of sallows, were her favorite rambling place, Once
there, she saw
a roussalka in every willow tree, smiling and
beckoning to
her; and full of her own invulnerability, impressed
upon her mind by
her nurses, she was the only one who approached
those shores
fearless and daring. The child felt her superiority and
abused it. The
little four-year-old girl demanded that her will
should be
implicitly recognized by her nurse, lest she should escape
from her side,
and thus leave her unprotected, to be tickled to
death by the
beautiful and wicked roussalka, who would no longer be
restrained by
the presence of one whom she dared not approach. Of
course her
parents knew nothing of this side of the education of
their eldest
born, and learned it too late to allow such beliefs to
be eradicated
from her mind. It is only after a tragic event that
would otherwise
have passed hardly noticed by the family, that a
foreign
governess was thought of. In one of her walks by the river
side a boy
about fourteen who was dragging the child's carriage
incurred her
displeasure by some slight disobedience. “I will have
you tickled to
death by a roussalka ! ” she screamed. “There's one
coming down
from that tree . . . here she comes . . . See, see!”
Whether the boy
saw the dreaded nymph or not, he took to his heels,
and, the angry
commands of the nurse notwithstanding, disappeared
along the sandy
banks leading homeward. After much grumbling the old
nurse was constrained
to return home alone with her charge,
determined to
have “Pavlik” punished. But the poor lad was never
seen alive
again. He ran away to his village, and his body was found
several weeks
later by fishermen, who caught him in their nets. The
verdict of the
police was “drowning by accident”. It was thought
that the lad,
having sought to cross some shallow pools left from
the spring
inundations, had got into one of the many sand pits so
easily transformed
by the rapid Dnieper into whirlpools. But the
verdict of the
horrified household — of the nurses and servants —
pointed to no
accidental death, but to the one that had occurred in
consequence of
the child having withdrawn from the boy her mighty
protection,
thus delivering the victim to some roussalka on the
watch. The
displeasure of the family at this foolish gossip was
enhanced when
they found the supposed culprit gravely corroborating
the charge, and
maintaining that it was she herself who had handed
over her
disobedient serf to her faithful servants the water-nymphs.
Then it was
that an English governess was brought upon the scene.
Miss Augusta
Sophia Jeffries did not believe in the roussalkas or
the domovoys;
but this negative merit was insufficient to invest her
with a capacity
for managing the intractable pupil consigned to her
care. She gave
up her task in despair, and the child was again left
to her nurses
till about six years old, when she and her still
younger sister
were sent to live with their father. For the next two
or three years
the little girls were chiefly taken care of by their
father's
orderlies; the elder, at all events, greatly preferring
these to their
female attendants. They were taken about with the
troops to which
their father was attached, and were petted on all
sides as the
enfants du régiment.
Her mother died
when Mademoiselle Hahn was still a child, and at
about eleven
years of age she was taken charge of altogether by her
grandmother,
and went to live at Saratow, where her grandfather was
civil governor,
having previously exercised similar authority in
Astrachan. She
speaks of having at this time been alternately petted
and punished,
spoiled and hardened; but we may well imagine that she
was a difficult
child to manage on any uniform system. Moreover, her
health was
always uncertain in childhood; she was “ever sick and
dying”, as she
expresses it herself, a sleep walker, and remarkable
for various abnormal
psychic peculiarities, set down by her orthodox
nurses of the
Greek Church to possession by the devil, so that she
was drenched
during childhood, as she often says, in enough holy
water to have
floated a ship, and exorcised by priests who might as
well have been
talking to the wind for all the effect they produced
on her.
Some notes
concerning her childhood have been furnished, for the
service of the
present memoir, by her aunt, a lady who, as well as
Madame
Jelihowsky, is known personally to myself and to many others
of Mme.
Blavatsky's friends in Europe. Her strange excitability of
temperament,
still one of her most marked characteristics, was
already
manifest in her earliest youth. Even then she was liable to
ungovernable
fits of passion, and showed a deep-rooted disposition
to rebel
against every kind of authority or control. Her
warm-hearted
impulses of kindliness and affection, however, endeared
her to her
relatives in childhood, much as they have operated to
obliterate the
irritation caused sometimes by her want of
self-control in
regard to the minor affairs of life with the friends
of a later
period. It is justly asserted by the memoranda before me,
“she has no
malice in her nature, no lasting resentment even against
those who have wronged her, and her true kindness of
heart bears no
permanent
traces of momentary disturbances”.
“We who know
Madame Blavatsky well”, writes her aunt, speaking for
herself and for
another relative who had joined with her in the
preparation of
the notes I am now dealing with — “we who know her
now in age can
speak of her with authority, not merely from idle
report. From
her earliest childhood she was unlike any other person.
Very lively and
highly gifted, full of humour, and of most
remarkable
daring; she struck everyone with astonishment by her
self-willed and
determined actions. Thus in her earliest youth and
hardly married,
she disposed of herself in an angry mood, abandoning
her country,
without the knowledge of her relatives or husband, who,
unfortunately,
was a man in every way unsuited to her, and more than
thrice her age.
Those who have known her from her childhood would —
had they been
born thirty years later — have also known that it was
a fatal mistake
to regard and treat her as they would any other
child. Her
restless and very nervous temperament, one that led her
into the most
unheard of, un-girlish mischief; her unaccountable —
especially in
those days — attraction to, and at the same time fear
of, the dead;
her passionate love and curiosity for everything
unknown and
mysterious, weird and fantastical; and, foremost of all,
her craving for
independence and freedom of action — a craving that
nothing and
nobody could control; all this, combined with an
exuberance of
imagination and a wonderful sensitiveness, ought to
have warned her
friends that she was an exceptional creature, to be
dealt with and
controlled by means as exceptional. The slightest
contradiction
brought on an outburst of passion, often a fit of
convulsions.
Left alone with no one near her to impede her liberty
of action, no
hand to chain her down or stop her natural impulses,
and thus arouse
to fury her inherent combativeness, she would spend
hours and days
quietly whispering, as people thought, to herself,
and narrating,
with no one near her, in some dark corner, marvellous
tales of
travels in bright stars and other worlds, which her
governess
described as 'profane gibberish'; but no sooner would the
governess give
her a distinct order to do this or the other thing,
than her first
impulse was to disobey. It was enough to forbid her
doing a thing
to make her do it, come what would. Her nurse, as
indeed other
members of the family, sincerely believed the child
possessed 'the seven
spirits of rebellion'. Her governesses were
martyrs to
their task, and never succeeded in bending her resolute
will, or
influencing by anything but kindness her indomitable,
obstinate, and
fearless nature.
“Spoilt in her
childhood by the adulation of dependents and the
devoted
affection of relatives, who forgave all to ' the poor,
motherless
child' — later on, in her girlhood, her self-willed
temper made her
rebel openly against the exigencies of society. She
would submit to
no sham respect for or fear of the public opinion.
She would ride
at fifteen, as she had at ten, any Cossack horse on a
man's saddle!
She would bow to no one, as she would recede before no
prejudice or
established conventionality. She defied all and
everyone. As in
her childhood, all her sympathies and attractions
went out
towards people of the lower class. She had always preferred
to play with
her servants' children rather than with her equals, and
as a child had
to be constantly watched for fear she should escape
from the house
to make friends with ragged street boys. So, later on
in life, she
continued to be drawn in sympathy towards those who
were in a
humbler station of life than herself, and showed as
pronounced
indifference to the ' nobility ' to which by birth she
belonged.”
The five years
passed in safety with her grandparents seem to have
had an
important influence on her future life. Miss Jeffries had
left the
family; the children had another English governess, a timid
young girl to
whom none of her pupils paid any attention, a Swiss
preceptor, and
a French governess, who had gone through remarkable
adventures in
her youth. Madame Henriette Peigneur was a
distinguished
beauty in the days of the first French Revolution. Her
favorite narratives
to the children consisted in the description of
those days of
glory and excitement when, chosen by the “Phrygian
red-caps”, the
citoyens rouges of Paris to represent in the public
festivals the
Goddess of Liberty, she had been driven in triumph,
day after day,
along the streets of the grande ville in glorious
processions.
The narrator herself was now a weird old woman, bent
down by age,
and looked more like the traditional Fée Carabosse than
anything else.
But her eloquence was moving, and the young girls
that formed her
willing audience were greatly excited by the glowing
descriptions —
most of all the heroine of these memoirs. She
declared then
and there that she meant to be a “Goddess of Liberty”
all her life.
The old governess was a strange mixture of severe
morality and of
that brilliant flippancy that characterises almost
every
Parisienne to her deathbed unless she is a bigot — which Mme.
Peigneur was
not. But while her old husband — the charming, witty,
kind-hearted
Sieur Peigneur, ever ready to screen the young girls
from his wife's
pénitences and severity — taught them the merriest
songs of
Béranger, his best bons mots and anecdotes, his wife had no
such luck with
her lesson books. The opening of Noël and Chopsal
became
generally the signal for an escape to the wild woods that
surrounded the
large villa occupied by Mademoiselle Hahn's
grandparents
during the summer months. It was only when roaming at
leisure in the
forest, or riding some unmanageable horse on a
Cossack's
saddle, that the girl felt perfectly happy.
For the
following interesting reminiscence of this period I am
indebted to
Mme. Jelihowsky: —
“The great
country mansion (datche) occupied by us at Saratow was an
old and vast building,
full of subterranean galleries, long
abandoned
passages, turrets, and most weird nooks
and corners. It
had been built
by a family called Pantchoolidzef, several
generations of
whom had been governors at Saratow and Penja — the
richest proprietors
and noblemen of the latter province. It looked
more like a
mediaeval ruined castle than a building of the past
century. The
man who took care of the estate for the proprietors —
of a type now
happily rare, who regarded the serfs as something far
lower and less
precious than his hounds — had been known for his
cruelty and
tyranny, and his name was a synonym for a curse. The
legends told of
his ferocious and despotic temper, of unfortunate
serfs beaten by
him to death, and imprisoned for months in dark
subterranean
dungeons, were many and thrilling. They were repeated
to us mostly by
Mme. Peigneur, who had been for the last twenty-five
years the
governess of three generations of children in the
Pantchoolidzef
family. Our heads were full of stories about the
ghosts of the
martyred serfs, seen promenading in chains during
nocturnal
hours; of the phantom of a young girl, tortured to death
for refusing
her love to her old master, which was seen floating in
and out of the
little iron-bound door of the subterranean passage at
twilight; and
other stories that left us children and girls in an
agony of fear
whenever we had to cross a dark room or passage. We
had been
permitted to explore, under the protection of half-a-dozen
male servants
and a quantity of torches and lanterns, those
awe-inspiring
'Catacombs'. True, we had found in them more broken
wine bottles
than human bones, and had gathered more cobwebs than
iron chains,
but our imagination suggested ghosts in every
flickering
shadow on the old damp walls. Still Helen (Mme.
Blavatsky)
would not remain satisfied with one solitary visit, nor
with a second
either. She had selected the uncanny region as a
Liberty Hall,
and a safe refuge where she could avoid her lessons. A
long time passed
before her secret was found out, and whenever she
was found
missing, a deputation of strong-bodied servant-men, headed
by the gendarme
on service in the Governor's Hall, was despatched in
search of her,
as it required no less than one who was not a serf
and feared her
little to bring her up-stairs by force. She had
erected for
herself a tower out of old broken chairs and tables in a
corner under an
iron-barred window, high up in the ceiling of the
vault, and
there she would hide for hours, reading a book known as
Solomon's
Wisdom, in which every kind of popular legend was taught.
Once or twice
she could hardly be found in those damp subterranean
corridors,
having in her endeavours to escape detection lost her way
in the
labyrinth. For all this she was not in the least daunted or
repentant, for,
as she assured us, she was never there alone, but in
the company of
' beings ' she used to call her little ' hunch-backs
' and
playmates.
“Intensely
nervous and sensitive, speaking loud, and often walking
in her sleep,
she used to be found at nights in the most out-of-way
places, and to
be carried back to her bed profoundly asleep. Thus
she was missed
from her room one night when she was hardly twelve,
and, the alarm
having been given, she was searched for and found
pacing one of
the long subterranean corridors, evidently in deep
conversation
with someone invisible for all but herself. She was the
strangest girl
one has ever seen, one with a distinct dual nature in
her, that made
one think there were two beings in one and the same
body; one
mischievous, combative, and obstinate — everyway
graceless; the
other as mystical and metaphysically inclined as a
seeress of
Prevorst. No schoolboy was ever more uncontrollable or
full of the most
unimaginable and daring pranks and espiègleries
than she was.
At the same time, when the paroxysm of mischief-making
had run its
course, no old scholar could be more assiduous in his
study, and she
could not be prevailed to give up her books, which
she would
devour night and day as long as the impulse lasted. The
enormous
library of her grandparents seemed then hardly large enough
to satisfy her
cravings.
“Attached to
the residence there was a large abandoned garden, a
park rather,
full of ruined kiosks, pagodas, and out-buildings,
which, running
up hillward, ended in a virgin forest, whose hardly
visible paths
were covered knee-deep with moss, and with thickets in
it which
perhaps no human foot had disturbed for centuries. It was
reputed the
hiding-place for all the runaway criminals and
deserters, and
it was there that Helen used to take refuge, when the
' catacombs'
had ceased to assure her safety.”
Her strange
temperament and character are thus described in a work
called Juvenile
Recollections Compiled for my Children, by Mme.
Jelihowsky, a
thick volume of charming stories selected by the
author from the
diary kept by herself during her girlhood: —
“Fancy, or that
which we all regarded in these days as fancy, was
developed in
the most extraordinary way, and from her earliest
childhood, in
my sister Helen. For hours at times she used to
narrate to us
younger children, and even to her seniors in years,
the most
incredible stories with the cool assurance and conviction
of an eye-witness,
and one who knew what she was talking about. When
a child, daring
and fearless in everything else, she got often
scared into
fits through her own hallucinations. She felt certain of
being
persecuted by what she called ' the terrible glaring eyes,'
invisible to
everyone else, and often attributed by her to the most
inoffensive
inanimate objects; an idea that appeared quite
ridiculous to
the bystanders. As to herself, she would shut her eyes
tight during such
visions, and run away to hide from the ghostly
glances thrown
on her by pieces of furniture or articles of dress,
screaming
desperately, and frightening the whole household. At other
times she would
be seized with fits of laughter, explaining them by
the amusing
pranks of her invisible companions. She found these in
every dark
corner, in every bush of the thick park that surrounded
our villa
during the summer months ; while in winter, when all our
family
emigrated back to town, she seemed to meet them again in the
vast reception
rooms of the first floor, entirely deserted from
midnight till
morning, Every locked door notwithstanding, Helen was
found several
times during the night hours in those dark apartments
in a
half-conscious state, sometimes fast asleep, and unable to say
how she got
there from our common bedroom on the top story. She
disappeared in
the same mysterious manner in daytime also. Searched
for, called and
hunted after, she would be often discovered, with
great pains, in
the most unfrequented localities; once it was in the
dark loft,
under the very roof, to which she was traced, amid
pigeons' nests,
and surrounded by hundreds of those birds. She was '
putting them to
sleep ' (according to the rules taught in Solomon's
Wisdom], as she
explained. [And, indeed pigeons were found if not
asleep still
unable to move, and as though stunned in her lap at
such times.] At
other times behind the gigantic cupboards that
contained our
grandmother's zoological collection — the old
princess's
museum of natural history having achieved a wide renown
in Russia in
those days, — surrounded by relics of fauna, flora, and
historical
antiquities, amid antediluvian bones of stuffed animals
and monstrous birds,
the deserter would be found, after hours of
search, in deep
conversations with seals and stuffed crocodiles. If
one could
believe Helen, the pigeons were cooing to her interesting
fairy tales,
while birds and animals, whenever in solitary
tête-à-tête
with her, amused her with interesting stories,
presumably from
their own autobiographies. For her all nature seemed
animated with a
mysterious life of its own. She heard the voice of
every object
and form, whether organic or inorganic; and claimed
consciousness
and being, not only for some mysterious powers visible
and audible for
herself alone in what was to everyone else empty
space, but even
for visible but inanimate things such as pebbles,
mounds, and
pieces of decaying phosphorescent timber.
“With a view of
adding specimens to the remarkable entomological
collection of
our grandmother, as much as for our own instruction
and pleasure,
diurnal as well as nocturnal expeditions were often
arranged. We
preferred the latter, as they were more exciting, and
had a
mysterious charm to us about them. We knew of no greater
enjoyment. Our
delightful travels in the neighbouring woods would
last from 9
P.M. till I, and often 2, o'clock A.M. We prepared for
them with an
earnestness that the Crusaders may have experienced
when setting
out to fight the infidel and dislodge the Turk from
Palestine. The
children of friends and acquaintances in town were
invited — boys
and girls from twelve to seventeen, and two or three
dozen of young
serfs of both sexes, all armed with gauze nets and
lanterns, as we
were ourselves, strengthened our ranks. In the rear
followed a
dozen of strong grown-up servants, cossacks, and even a
gendarme or
two, armed with real weapons for our safety and
protection. It
was a merry procession as we set out on it, with
beating hearts,
and bent with unconscious cruelty on the destruction
of the
beautiful large night-butterflies for which the forests of
the Volga province
are so famous. The foolish insects, flying in
masses, would
soon cover the glasses of our lanterns, and ended
their ephemeral
lives on long pins and cork burial grounds four
inches square.
But even in this my eccentric sister asserted her
independence.
She would protect and save from death all those dark
butterflies —
known as sphynxes —whose dark fur-covered heads and
bodies bore the
distinct images of a white human skull. ' Nature
having
imprinted on each of them the portrait of the skull of some
great dead
hero, these butterflies are sacred, and must not be
killed,' she
said, speaking like some heathen fetish-worshipper. She
got very angry
when we would not listen to her, but would go on
chasing those '
dead heads' as we called them; and maintained that
by so doing we
disturbed the rest of the defunct persons whose
skulls were
imprinted on the bodies of the weird insects.
“No less
interesting were our day-travels into regions more or less
distant. At
about ten versts from the Governor's villa there was a
field, an
extensive sandy tract of land, evidently once upon a time
the bottom of a
sea or a great lake, as its soil yielded petrified
relics of
fishes, shells, and teeth of some (to us) unknown
monsters. Most
of these relics were broken and mangled by time, but
one could often
find whole stones of various sizes on which were
imprinted
figures of fishes and plants and animals of kinds now
wholly extinct,
but which proved their undeniable antediluvian
origin. The
marvellous and sensational stories that we, children and
schoolgirls,
heard from Helen during that epoch were countless. I
well remember
when stretched at full length on the ground, her chin
reclining on
her two palms, and her two elbows buried deep in the
soft sand, she
used to dream aloud and tell us of her visions,
evidently
clear, vivid, and as palpable as life to her! . . . How
lovely the
description she gave us of the submarine life of all
those beings,
the mingled remains of which were now crumbling to
dust around us.
How vividly she described their past fights and
battles on the
spot where she lay, assuring us she saw it all; and
how minutely
she drew on the sand with her finger the fantastic
forms of the
long-dead sea-monsters, and made us almost see the very
colours of the
fauna and flora of those dead regions. While
listening
eagerly to her descriptions of the lovely azure waves
reflecting the
sunbeams playing in rainbow light on the golden sands
of the sea
bottom, of the coral reefs and stalactite caves, of the
sea-green grass
mixed with the delicate shining anemones, we fancied
we felt
ourselves the cool, velvety waters caressing our bodies, and
the latter
transformed into pretty and frisky sea-monsters; our
imagination
galloped off with her fancy to a full oblivion of the
present
reality. She never spoke in later years as she used to speak
in her
childhood and early girlhood. The stream of her eloquence has
dried up, and
the very source of her inspiration is now seemingly
lost! She had a
strong power of carrying away her audiences with
her, of making
them see actually, if even vaguely, that which she
herself saw. .
. . Once she frightened all of us youngsters very
nearly into
fits. We had just been transported into a fairy world,
when suddenly
she changed her narrative from the past to the present
tense, and
began to ask us to imagine that all that which she had
told us of the
cool, blue waves with their dense populations was
around us, only
invisible and intangible, so far. . . . 'Just fancy!
A miracle!' she
said ; ' the earth suddenly opening, the air
condensing
around us and rebecoming sea waves.....Look, look there,
they begin
already appearing and moving. We are surrounded with
water, we are right
amid the mysteries and the wonders of a
submarine world
! . . .'
“She had
started from the sand, and was speaking with such
conviction, her
voice had such a ring of real amazement, horror, and
her childish
face wore such a look of a wild joy and terror at the
same time, that
when, suddenly covering her eyes with both hands, as
she used to do
in her excited moments, she fell down on the sand
screaming at
the top of her voice, 'There's the wave . . . it has
come! . . . The
sea, the sea, we are drowning !' . . . Every one of
us fell down on
our faces, as desperately screaming and as fully
convinced that
the sea had engulfed us, and that we were no more! .
.
“It was her
delight to gather around herself a party of us younger
children at
twilight, and, after taking us into the large dark
museum, to hold
us there, spell-bound, with her weird stories. Then
she narrated to
us the most inconceivable tales about herself; the
most unheard of
adventures of which she was the heroine, every
night, as she
explained. Each of the stuffed animals in the museum
had taken her
in turn into its confidence, had divulged to her the
history of its
life in previous incarnations or existences. Where
had she heard
of reincarnation, or who could have taught her
anything of the
superstitious mysteries of metempsychosis, in a
Christian
family ? Yet she would stretch herself on her favourite
animal, a
gigantic stuffed seal, and caressing its silvery, soft
white skin, she
would repeat to us his adventures, as told to her by
himself, in
such glowing colours and eloquent style, that even
grown-up
persons found themselves interested involuntarily in her
narratives.
They all listened to, and were carried away by the charm
of her recitals,
the younger audience believing every word she
uttered. Never
can I forget the life and adventures of a tall white
flamingo, who
stood in unbroken contemplation behind the glass panes
of a large
cupboard, with his two scarlet-lined wings widely opened
as though ready
to take flight, yet chained to his prison cell. He
had been ages
ago, she told us, no bird, but a real man. He had
committed
fearful crimes and a murder, for which a great genius had
changed him
into a flamingo, a brainless bird, sprinkling his two
wings with the
blood of his victims, and thus condemning him to
wander for ever
in deserts and marshes. . . .
“I dreaded that
flamingo fearfully. At dusk, whenever I chanced to
pass through
the museum to say goodnight to our grandmother, who
rarely left her
study, an adjoining room, I tried to avoid seeing
the
blood-covered murderer by shutting my eyes and running quickly
by.
“If Helen loved
to tell us stories, she was still more passionately
fond of
listening to other people's fairy tales. There was, among
the numerous
servants of the Fadeef family, an old woman, an
under-nurse,
who was famous for telling them. The catalogue of her
tales was
endless, and her memory retained every idea connected with
superstition.
During the long summer twilights on the green grassy
lawn under the
fruit trees of the garden, or during the still longer
winter
evenings, crowding around the flaming fire of our
nursery-room,
we used to cling to the old woman, and felt supremely
happy whenever
she could be prevailed upon to tell us some of those
popular fairy
tales, for which our northern country is so famous.
The adventures
of' Ivan Zarewitch,' of' Kashtey the Immortal,' of
the
'Gray-Wolf', the wicked magician travelling in the air in a
self-moving
seive; or those of Meletressa, the Fair Princess, shut
up in a dungeon
until the Zarevitch unlocks its prison door with a
gold key, and
liberates her — delighted us all. Only, while all we
children forgot
those tales as easily as we had learned them, Helen
never either
forgot the stories or consented to recognise them as
fictions. She
thoroughly took to heart all the troubles of the
heroes, and
maintained that all their most wonderful adventures were
quite natural.
People could change into animals and take any form
they liked, if
they only knew how; men could fly, if they only
wished so
firmly. Such wise men had existed in all ages, and existed
even in our own
days, she assured us, making themselves known, of
course, only to
those who were worthy of knowing and seeing them,
and who
believed in, instead of laughing at, them. . . .
“As a proof of
what she said, she pointed to an old man, a
centenarian,
who lived not far from the villa, in a wild ravine of a
neighbouring
forest, known as 'Baranig Bouyrak'. The old man was a
real magician,
in the popular estimation; a sorcerer of a good,
benevolent
kind, who cured willingly all the patients who applied to
him, but who
also knew how to punish with disease those who had
sinned. He was
greatly versed in the knowledge of the occult
properties of
plants and flowers, and could read the future, it was
said. He kept
beehives in great numbers, his hut being surrounded by
several
hundreds of them. During the long summer afternoons he could
be always found
at his post, slowly walking among his favourites,
covered as with
a living cuirass, from head to foot, with swarms of
buzzing bees,
plunging both his hands with impunity into their
dwellings,
listening to their deafening noise, and apparently
answering them
— their buzzing almost ceasing whenever he addressed
them in his (to
us) incomprehensible tongue, a kind of chanting and
muttering.
Evidently the golden-winged labourers and their
centenarian master
understood each other's languages. Of the latter,
Helen felt
quite sure. ' Baranig Bouyrak' had an irresistible
attraction for
her, and she visited the strange old man whenever she
could find a
chance to do so. Once there, she would put questions
and listen to
the old man's replies and explanations as to how to
understand the
language of bees, birds, and animals with a
passionate
earnestness. The dark ravine seemed in her eyes a fairy
kingdom. As to
the centenarian ' wise-man', he used to say of her
constantly to
us: ' This little lady is quite different from all of
you. There are
great events lying in wait for her in the future. I
feel sorry in
thinking that I will not live to see my predictions of
her verified;
but they will all come to pass! . . .' ”
It would be
impossible to write even a slight sketch of Mme.
Blavatsky's
life without alluding continually to the occult theories
on which her
own psychological development turns, and I think the
narrative will
be rendered most intelligible if I frankly explain
some of these
at the outset, without here being supposed to argue
the question as
to whether these theories rest upon a correct
appreciation of
natural laws (operating above and within those of
physical
existence), or whether they constitute an exclusive
hallucination
to which her mind has been subject. It will be seen,
at all events,
that, according to such a view, the hallucination has
been very
protracted and coherent, so much so that, as I say, the
life which has
been entirely subordinate to the career marked out
for it by those
to whom Mme. Blavatsky believes herself, and always
has believed
herself, guided and protected, would be meaningless
without
reference to this vitalising thread running through it. Of
course I have
no wish to disguise my own adhesion to the view of
nature on which
Mme. Blavatsky's theory of life rests, nor my own
conviction
concerning the real existence of the living Adepts of
occult science
with whom I believe Mme. Blavatsky, throughout her
life, to have
been more or less closely associated. But to argue the
matter would
convert this memoir into a philosophical treatise going
over a great
deal of ground more fitly traversed in works of a
purely
theosophical character. It will be enough for my present
purpose to
expound the theory on which, as I say, Mme. Blavatsky's
comprehension
of her own life rests, merely for the sake of
rendering the
story which has to be set forth intelligible to the
reader.
The primary
conception of oriental occultism, in reference to the
human soul,
recognises it as an entity, a moral and intellectual
centre of
consciousness, which not only survives the death of any
physical body
in which it may be functioning at any given time, but
has also
enjoyed many periods of both physical and spiritual
existence
before its incarnation in that body. In fact, the entity —
the real
individual according to this view — may be identified by
persons with
psychic faculties sufficiently developed through a
series of
lives, and not merely in reference to one. The view of
Nature I am
describing — the Esoteric Doctrine — quite sufficiently
accounts for
the fact that, from the point of view of any given
body, no
incarnated person can command a prospect of the life-series
through which
he may have passed. Each incarnation, each successive
life of the
series, is a descent into matter from the point of view
of the real
spiritual entity: a descent into a new organism in which
the entity —
which is only altogether its true or higher self on the
spiritual plane
of Nature — may function with greater or less
success
according to the qualifications of the organism. The
organism only
remembers, with specific detail, the incidents of its
own objective life.
The true entity animating that organism may
perhaps retain
the capacity of remembering a great deal more, but
not through the
organism. Moreover, until the organism is complete —
that is to say,
until the person concerned is grown up — the true
entity is only
immersed in it — if I may employ a materialistic
illustration to
suggest the idea which would be only fully
expressible m
metaphysical language of great elaboration — to a
limited extent.
The quite young child, as we ordinarily phrase it,
is not a
morally responsible being: that is to say, the organism has
not attained a
development in which the moral sense of the true
entity can
function through the physical brain and direct physical
acts. But the
young child is already marked out as in process of
becoming the
efficient habitat of the entity or soul that has begun
to function
through its organism; and, therefore, if we imagine that
there are in
the world living men — adepts in the direction of
forces on the
higher planes of Nature with which physical science is
not yet
acquainted — we shall readily understand the peculiar
relations that
exist between them and a child in process of growing
up, and
gradually taking into itself a soul that such adepts are
already in
relations with.
Let me repeat
that this mere statement of the occult science view of
human nature is
not put forward as a proof that things are so; but
simply because
that theory of things will be found a continuous
thread upon
which the facts of Mme. Blavatsky's life are strung. It
may be that, as
the story goes on, some readers will develop other
theories to
account for them, but all I have to say would appear
disjointed and
incoherent without this brief explanation, while it
becomes, at all
events, clearly intelligible with that clue to its
successive
incidents.
In this way I
proceed to assume, as a working hypothesis, that even
in childhood
Mademoiselle Hahn was under the protection of a certain
abnormal agency
capable even of producing results on the physical
plane when in
extraordinary emergencies these were called for. For
example, I have
more than once heard her tell a story of her
childhood's
days about a great curiosity she entertained in
reference to a
certain picture — the portrait of one of the
ancestors of
the family — which hung up in the castle where her
grandfather
lived, at Saratow, with a curtain before it. It hung at
a great height
above the ground in a lofty room, and Mademoiselle
Hahn was a
small mite at the time, though very resolute when her
mind was set
upon a purpose. She had been denied permission to see
the picture, so
she waited for an opportunity when the coast was
clear, and
proceeded to take her own measures for compassing her
design. She
dragged a table to the wall, and contrived to set
another small
table on that, and a chair on the top of all, and then
gradually
succeeded in mounting up on this unstable edifice. She
could just
manage to reach the picture from this point of vantage,
and leaning
with one hand against the dusty wall, contrived with the
other to draw
back the curtain. The effect wrought upon her by the
sight of the
picture was startling, and the momentary movement back
upset her frail
platform. But exactly what occurred she does not
know. She lost
consciousness from the moment she staggered and began
to fall, and
when she recovered her senses she was lying quite
unhurt on the
floor, the tables and chair were back again in their
usual places,
the curtain had been run back upon its rings, and she
would have
imagined the whole incident some unusual kind of dream
but for the
fact that the mark of her small hand remained imprinted
on the dusty
wall high up beside the picture.
On another
occasion again her life seems to have been saved under
peculiar circumstances,
at a time when she was approaching fourteen.
A horse bolted
with her — she fell, with her foot entangled in the
stirrup, and
before the horse was stopped she ought, she thinks, to
have been
killed outright but for a strange sustaining power she
distinctly felt
around her, which seemed to hold her up in defiance
of gravitation.
If anecdotes of this surprising kind were few and
far between in
Mme Blavatsky's life I should suppress them in
attempting to
edit her memoirs, but, as will be seen later, they
form the staple
of the narratives which each person in turn, who has
anything to say
about her, comes forward to tell. The records of her
return to
Russia after her first long wanderings are full of
evidence, given
by her relatives, compared to which these little
anecdotes of
her childhood told by herself sink into insignificance
as marvels. I
refer to them, moreover, not for their own sake, but,
as I began by
saying, to illustrate the relations which appear to
have existed in
her early childhood between herself and those whom
she speaks of
as her “Masters”, unseen in body, unknown by her at
that time as
living men, but not unknown to the visions with which
her child-life
was filled.
In the
narrative quoted above, it will have been seen that she was
often noticed
by her friends sitting apart in corners, when she was
not interfered
with, apparently talking to herself. By her own
account she was
at this time talking with playmates of her own size
and apparent
age, who to her were as real in appearance as if they
had been flesh
and blood, though they were not visible at all to
anyone else
about her. Mademoiselle Hahn used to be exceedingly
annoyed at the
persistent way in which her nurses and relatives
refused to take
any notice whatever of one little hunchback boy who
was her
favourite companion at this time. Nobody else was able to
take notice of
him, for nobody else saw him, but to the abnormally
gifted child he
was a visible, audible, and amusing companion,
though one who
seems to have led her into endless mischief. But
amidst the
strange double life she thus led from her earliest
recollections,
she would sometimes have visions of a mature
protector,
whose imposing appearance dominated her imagination from
a very early
period. This protector was always the same, his
features never
changed ; in after life she met him as a living man,
and knew him as
though she had been brought up in his presence.
Students of
spiritualism, of occultism, of clairvoyance will find
this record
strangely confused at the first glance, but I think, by
the light of
what I have said above in reference to the occult
theory of
incarnation, people who hold that theory will be excused
for thinking
that they see their way through the entanglement pretty
clearly.
Mademoiselle 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. And as a child, the time had not
come at which
it would have been possible for the occult protectors
of the entity
thus beginning to function in that organism to set on
foot any of
those processes of physical training by which such
natural gifts
can be tamed, disciplined, and utilised. They had to
run wild for a
time; thus we find Mademoiselle Hahn — looking at her
childhood's
history from the psychological point of view —
surrounded by
all, or a large number of the usual phenomena of
mediumship, and
also visibly under the observation and occasional
guardianship of
the authorities to whose service her mature
faculties were
altogether given over, to the absolute repression in
after life of
the casual faculties of mediumship.
Her friends were
half-interested, half-terrified by those of her
manifestations
which they could understand sufficiently to observe.
Her aunt says
that from the age of four years “she was a
somnambulist
and somniloquent. She would hold, in her sleep, long
conversations
with unseen personages, some of which were amusing,
some edifying,
some terrifying for those who gathered around the
child's bed. On
various occasions, while apparently in the ordinary
sleep, she
would answer questions, put by persons who took hold of
her hand, about
lost property or other subjects of momentary
anxiety, as
though she were a sibyl entranced. Sometimes she would
be missing from
the nursery, and be found in some distant room of
the mansion, or
in the garden, playing and talking with companions
of her
dream-life. For years, in childish impulse, she would shock
strangers with
whom she came in contact, and visitors to the house,
by looking them
intently in the face and telling them that 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.”
In 1844, the
middle of the period during which she was growing up
from childhood
to girlhood at Saratow, her father took her on her
first journey
abroad. She accompanied him to Paris and London, a
child of
fourteen, but a troublesome charge even then and even for
him, though in
her father's hands she was docile from the point of
view of her
demeanour in any other custody. One object of the visit
to London was
to get her some good music lessons, for she showed
great natural
talents as a pianist — which indeed have lingered
about her in
later life, though often in total abeyance for many
years together.
She had some lessons from Moscheles, and even, I
understand,
played a duet at a private concert with a then
celebrated
professional pianist. Colonel Hahn and his daughter went
to stay for a
week in Bath during this visit to England, but the
only striking
feature of this excursion that I can hear of had to do
with a little
difficulty that arose between mademoiselle and her
father on the
subject of riding. She wanted to go on a man's saddle,
Cossack fashion,
as she had been used to, in face of all protests to
the contrary,
in Saratow. The Colonel would not tolerate this, so
there was a
scene, and a fit of hysterics on the part of the young
lady, followed
by an attack of some more serious illness. He is
represented as
having been well satisfied to get her home again, and
lodge her once
more in the congenial wilds of Asia Minor. Her pride
in another
accomplishment, her knowledge of the English language,
received a rude
shock during this early visit to London. She had
been taught to
speak English by her first governess, Miss Jeffries,
but in Southern
Russia people did not make the fine distinctions
between
different sorts of English which more fastidious linguists
are alive to.
The English governess had been a Yorkshire woman, and
as soon as
Mademoiselle Hahn began to open her lips among friends to
whom she was
introduced in London, she found her remarks productive
of much more
amusement than their substance justified. The
combination of
accents she employed — Yorkshire grafted on
Ekaterinoslow —
must have had a comical effect, no doubt, but Mdlle
Hahn soon came
to the conclusion that she had done enough for the
entertainment
of her friends, and would give forth her “hollow o's
and a's” no more.
With her natural talent for speaking foreign
tongues,
however, she set her conversation in another key by the
time she next
visited England in 1851.
CHAPTER 2
MARRIAGE AND
TRAVEL
THE marriage by
which Mdlle Hahn acquired the name she has since
been known by
took place in 1848. She was then, it will be seen,
about
seventeen, and General Blavatsky to whom she was united — as
far as the
ceremonies of the Church were concerned — was, at all
events, a man
of advanced age. Madame herself believed that he was
nearer seventy
than sixty. He was himself reluctant to acknowledge
to more than
about fifty. Other matrimonial opportunities of a far
more attractive
character were, as I now learn from her relatives,
open to her
really at the time, but these would have rendered the
marriage state,
had she entered it with some of her younger
admirers, a
much more serious matter than she designed it to be in
her case. Her
demeanor, therefore, with the most desirable of her
suitors was
purposely intolerable. The actual adventure on which she
launched
herself — for in its precipitation and brevity it may
fairly be
described by that phrase — seems to have been brought
about by a
combination of circumstances that could only have
influenced a
girl of Mademoiselle Hahn's wild temper and irregular
training. Her
aunt describes the manner in which the marriage was
arranged as
follows : —
“She cared not
whether she should get married or not. She had been
simply defied
one day by her governess to find any man who would be
her husband, in
view of her temper and disposition. The governess,
to emphasize
the taunt, said that even the old man she had found so
ugly, and had
laughed at so much, calling him 'a plume-less raven' —
that even he would
decline her for a wife! That was enough: three
days after she
made him propose, and then, frightened at what she
had done,
sought to escape from her joking acceptance of his offer.
But it was too
late. Hence the fatal step. All she knew and
understood was
— when too late — that she had been accepting, and
was now forced
to accept — a master she cared nothing for, nay, that
she hated; that
she was tied to him by the law of the country, hand
and foot. A
'great horror ' crept upon her, as she explained it
later ; one
desire, ardent, unceasing, irresistible, got hold of her
entire being,
led her on, so to say, by the hand, forcing her to act
instinctively,
as she would have done if, in the act of saving her
life, she had
been running away from a mortal danger. There had been
a distinct
attempt to impress her with the solemnity of marriage,
with her future
obligations and her duties to her husband, and
married life. A
few hours later, at the altar, she heard the priest
saying to her:
'Thou shalt honour and obey thy husband', and at this
hated word
'shalt,' her young face — for she was hardly seventeen —
was seen to
flush angrily, then to become deadly pale. She was
overheard to
mutter in response, through her set teeth —' Surely, I
shall not.' ”
And surely she
has not. Forthwith she determined to take the law and
her future life
into her own hands, and — he left her ' husband '
for ever,
without giving him any opportunity to ever even think of
her as his
wife.
“Thus Mme.
Blavatsky abandoned her country at seventeen, and passed
ten long years
in strange and out-of-the-way places — in Central
Asia, India,
South America, Africa, and Eastern Europe.”
At the time the
marriage took place, Mademoiselle Hahn was staying
with her grandmother
and some other relatives at Djellallogly, a
mountain
retreat frequented in the summer by the residents of
Tiflis. The
young lady herself had never intended to do more than
establish the
fact that General Blavatsky would be ready to marry
her, but with
an engagement regularly set on foot, announced in the
family,
proclaimed to friends, and so forth, with “congratulations”
coming in, and
the bridegroom claiming its fulfilment, a restoration
of the status
quo was found by the reckless heroine of the
complication
more easily talked about than obtained. Her friends
protested
against the scandal that would be created if the
engagement were
broken off for no apparent reason. Pressed to go on
with the
wedding, she seems to have consoled herself with the belief
that she would
be securing herself increased liberty of action as a
married woman
than ever she could compass as a girl. Her father was
altogether off
the scene, far away with his regiment in Russia, and
though
consulted by letter, was not sufficiently acquainted with the
facts of the
case to take up any decided attitude either way. The
ceremony of the
marriage, at all events, duly took place on the 7th
of July 1848.
Of course the
theories concerning the married state entertained by
General
Blavatsky and his abnormally natured young bride differed
toto coelo, and
came into violent conflict from the day of the
wedding — a day
of unforeseen revelations, furious indignation,
dismay, and
belated repentance. Nothing was ever imagined in fiction
more
extravagant than the progress of the brief and stormy though
imperfect
partnership. The intelligent reader will understand that a
born occultist
like Mademoiselle Hahn could never have plunged into
a relationship
so intolerable, so impossible for her, as that of
husband and
wife if she had understood on the ordinary plane of
human affairs
what she was about. The day after the wedding she was
conducted by
the General to a place called Daretchichag, a summer
retreat for
Erivan residents. She tried already on this journey to
make her escape
towards the Persian frontier, but the Cossack she
sought to win
over as her guide in this enterprise betrayed her
instead to the
General, and she was carefully guarded. The cavalcade
duly reached
the residence of the governor — the scene of his
peculiar
honeymoon. Certainly the position in which he was placed
commands our
retrospective sympathy for some reasons ; but it is
impossible to
go into a discussion of details that might go far to
qualify this.
For three months the newly married couple remained
together under
the same roof, each fighting for impossible
concessions,
and then at last, in connection with a quarrel more
violent even
than the rest, the young lady took horse on her own
account and
rode to Tiflis.
Family councils
followed, and it was settled that the unmanageable
bride should be
sent to join her father. He arranged to meet her at
Odessa, and she
was despatched in the care of an old servant-man and
a maid, to
catch at Poti a steamer that would take her to her
destination.
But her desperate passion for adventure, coupled with
apprehensions
that her father might endeavour to refasten the broken
links of her
nuptial bond, led her to design in her own mind an
amendment to
this programme. She so contrived matters on the journey
through
Georgia, to begin with, that she and her escort missed the
steamer at
Poti. But a small English sailing vessel was lying in the
harbour. Mme.
Blavatsky went on board this vessel — the Commodore
she believes
was the name, and, by a liberal outlay of roubles,
persuaded the
skipper to fall in with her plans. The Commodore was
bound first to
Kertch, then to Taganrog in the Sea of Azof, and
ultimately to Constantinople.
Mme. Blavatsky took passage for
herself and
servants, ostensibly to Kertch. On arriving there, she
sent the
servants ashore to procure apartments and prepare for her
landing the
following morning. But in the night, having now shaken
herself free of
the last restraints that connected her with her past
life, she
sailed away in the Commodore for Taganrog in the first
instance, as
the vessel had business at that port, and afterwards
returning to
the Black Sea, for Constantinople.
The little
voyage itself seems to have been full of adventures,
which, in
dealing with a life less crowded with adventures all
through, than
Mme. Blavatsky's one would stop to chronicle. The
harbour police
of Taganrog visiting the Commodore on her arrival,
had to be so
managed as not to suspect that an extra person was on
board. The only
available hiding place — amongst the coals — was
found
unattractive by the passenger, and was assigned to the cabin
boy, whose
personality she borrowed for the occasion, being stowed
away in a bunk
on pretence of illness. Later on, when the vessel
arrived at
Constantinople, further embarrassments had developed
themselves, and
she had to fly ashore precipitately in a caique with
the connivance
of the steward to escape the persecutions of the
skipper. At
Constantinople, however, she had the good fortune to
fall in with a
Russian lady of her acquaintance, the Countess
K-----, with
whom she formed a safe intimacy, and travelled for a
time in Egypt,
Greece, and other parts of Eastern Europe.
Unfortunately,
it is impossible for me to do more than sketch the
period of her
life that we now approach in the meagrest outline. For
the full
details of her childhood given in the foregoing pages, we
are indebted to
her relatives. She herself, though frequently able
to tell
disjointed anecdotes of her childhood, could never have put
together so
connected a narrative as that obtained from Mme.
Jelihowsky, and
there was no sister at hand to keep a record of her
subsequent adventures
during her wanderings all over the world. She
never kept
diaries during this period, and memory at a distance of
time is a very
uncertain guide, but if the present record is uneven
in its
treatment of various periods, I can only point in excuse for
this to the
obvious embarrassments of my task.
In Egypt, while
travelling with the Countess K-----, Mme. Blavatsky
already began
to pick up some occult teaching, though of a very
different and
inferior order from that she acquired later. At that
time there was
an old Copt at Cairo, a man very well and widely
known ; of
considerable property and influence, and of a great
reputation as a
magician. The tales of wonder told about him by
popular report
were very thrilling. Mme. Blavatsky seems to have
been a pupil
who readily attracted his interest, and was
enthusiastic in
imbibing his instruction. She fell in with him again
in later years,
and spent some time with him at Boulak, but her
acquaintance
with him in the beginning did not last long, as she was
only at that
time in Egypt for about three months. With an English
lady of rank
whom she met during this period she also travelled for
a time. Her
relatives at Tiflis had lost all traces of her from the
time the
deserted servants at Kertch reported her disappearance, but
she herself
communicated privately with her father, and secured his
consent to her
vague programme of foreign travel. He realised the
impossibility
of inducing her to resume the broken thread of her
married life;
and, indeed, considering all that had passed, it is
not
unreasonable to suppose that General Blavatsky himself was ready
to acquiesce in
the separation. He endeavoured, indeed, to obtain a
formal divorce
on the ground that his marriage had never been more
than a form,
and that his wife had run away; but Russian law at the
time was not
favourable to divorce, and the attempt failed. Colonel
Hahn, however,
supplied his fugitive daughter with money, and kept
her counsel in
regard to her subsequent movements. Ten years elapsed
before she
again saw her relatives, and her restless eagerness for
travel carried
her during this period to all parts of the world. She
kept no diary,
and at this distance of time can give no very
connected story
of these complicated wanderings. Within about a year
of their
commencement she seems to have been in Paris, where she was
intimate with
many literary celebrities of the time, and where a
famous
mesmerist, still living as I write, though an old man now,
discovered her
wonderful psychic gifts, and was very eager to retain
her under his
control as a sensitive. But the chains had not yet
been forged
that could make her prisoner, and she quitted Paris
precipitately
to escape this influence. She went over to London, and
passed some
time in company with an old Russian lady of her
acquaintance,
the Countess B------, at Mivart's Hotel, whom,
however, she
out-stayed in London, remaining there in company with
the Countess's
demoiselle de compagnie in a big hotel, she says,
somewhere
between the City and the Strand, “but as to names or
numbers, you
might as well ask me to tell you what was the number of
the house you
lived in in your last incarnation.”
Connected as
she was in Russia, she naturally met a good many of her
own countrymen
abroad with whom she was either already acquainted,
or who were
glad to befriend her. Sometimes, when circumstances were
favourable, she
would travel with companions thus thrown in her way,
at other times
altogether alone. Her craving for adventure and for
all strange and
outlandish places and people was quite unsatiable.
Her first long
flight abroad was prompted by a passionate enthusiasm
for the North
American Indians, contracted from the perusal of
Fennimore Cooper's
novels. After a little minor touring about Europe
with the
Countess B------ in 1850, she welcomed the New Year of 1851
at Paris, and
in the July of that year went in pursuit of the Red
Indians of her
imagination to Canada. Fortunately her illusion on
the subject of
these heroes was destined to an early dissipation. At
Quebec (she
believes it was) a party of Indians were introduced to
her. She was
delighted to encounter the sons of the forest, and even
the daughters
thereof, their squaws. With some of these she settled
down for a long
gossip over the mysterious doings of the medicine
men. Eventually
they disappeared, and with them various articles of
Madame's
personal property — especially a pair of boots that she
greatly prized,
and which the resources of Quebec in those days
could not
replace. The Red Indian of actual fact thus ruined the
ideal she had
constructed in her fancy. She gave up her search for
their wigwams,
and developed a new programme. In the first instance,
she thought she
would try to come to close quarters with the
Mormons, then
beginning to excite public attention; but their
original city,
Nauvoo, in Missouri, had just been destroyed by the
unruly mob of
their less industrious and less prosperous neighbours,
and the
survivors of the massacre in which so many of their people
fell were then
streaming across the desert in search of a new home.
Mme. Blavatsky
thought that under these circumstances Mexico looked
an inviting
region in which to risk her life next, and she made her
way, in the
meanwhile, to New Orleans.
This apparently
hasty sketch will give the reader no idea of the
difficulty with
which she has, at this long subsequent period,
recalled even
so much as is here set down. It has only been by help
of public
events that she can remember to have heard about at such
and such places
that I have been enabled to construct a skeleton
diary of her
wanderings, on which here and there her recollections
enable me to put
a little flesh and blood At New Orleans the
principal
interest of her visit centred in the Voodoos, a sect of
negroes,
natives of the West Indies, and half-castes, addicted to a
form of magic
practices that no highly-trained occult student would
have anything
to do with, but which nevertheless presented
attractions to
Mme. Blavatsky, not yet far advanced enough in the
knowledge held
in reserve for her, to distinguish “black” from
“white”
varieties of mystic exercise. The Voodoos' pretensions were
of course
discredited by the educated white population of New
Orleans, but
they were none the less shunned and feared. Mme.
Blavatsky might
have been drawn dangerously far into association
with them,
fascinated as her imagination was liable to become by
occult
mysteries of any kind; but the strange guardianship that had
so often
asserted itself to her advantage during her childhood —
which had by
this time assumed a more definite shape, for she had
now met, as a
living man the long familiar figure of her visions —
again come to
her rescue. She was warned in a vision of the risk she
was running
with the Voodoos, and at once moved off to fresh fields
and pastures
new.
She went
through Texas to Mexico, and contrived to see a good deal
of that insecure
country, protected in these hazardous travels by
her own
reckless daring, and by various people who from time to time
interested
themselves in her welfare. She speaks with special
gratitude of an
old Canadian, a man known as Père Jacques, whom she
met in Texas,
where at the time she was quite without any
companionship.
He saw her safely through some perils to which she
was then
exposed, and thus by hook or by crook Madame always managed
to scramble along
unscathed; though it seems miraculous in the
retrospect that
she should have been able — young woman at that time
as she was — to
lead the wild life on which she was embarked without
actually
incurring disasters. There was no reliance in her case, as
in that of
Moore's heroine, on “Erin's honour and Erin's pride”. She
passed through
rough communities of all kinds, savage as well as
civilised, and
seems to have been guarded from harm, as assuredly
she was
guarded, by the sheer force of her own fearlessness, and her
fierce scorn
for all considerations however remotely associated with
the “magnetism
of sex”.
During her
American travels, which for this period lasted about a
year, she was
lucky enough to receive a considerable legacy
bequeathed her
by one of her godmothers. This put her splendidly in
funds for a
time, though it is much to be regretted on her account
that the money
was not served out to her in moderate instalments,
for the
temperament, which the facts of her life so far even will
have revealed,
may easily be recognised as one not likely to go with
habits of
prudent expenditure. Madame, in the course of her
adventures, has
often shown that she can meet poverty with
indifference,
and battle with it in any way that may be necessary,
but with her
pockets full of money, her impulse has always been to
throw it away
with both hands. She is wholly unable to explain how
she ran through
her 80,000 roubles, except that amongst other random
purchases she
bought land in America, the very situation of which
she has long
since totally forgotten, besides having, as a matter of
course, lost
all the papers that had any reference to the
transaction.
She resolved
during her Mexican wanderings that she would go to
India, fully
alive already to the necessity of seeking beyond the
northern
frontiers of that country for the further acquaintanceship
of those great
teachers of the highest mystic science, with whom the
guardian of her
visions was associated in her mind. She wrote,
therefore, to a
certain Englishman, whom she had met in Germany two
years before,
and whom she knew to be on the same quest as herself,
to join her in
the West Indies, in order that they might go to the
East together.
He duly came, but the party was further augmented by
the addition of
a Hindu whom Mme. Blavatsky met at Copau, in Mexico,
and whom she
soon ascertained to be what is called a “chela”, or
pupil of the
Masters, or adepts of oriental occult science. The
three pilgrims
of mysticism went out via the Cape to Ceylon, and
thence in a
sailing ship to Bombay, where, as I make out the dates,
they must have
arrived at quite the end of 1852.
A dispersion of
the little party soon followed, each being bent on
somewhat
different ends. Madame would not accept the guidance of the
Chela, and was
bent on an attempt of her own to get into Tibet
through Nepal.
For the time her attempt failed, chiefly, she
believes, as
far as external and visible difficulties were
concerned,
through the opposition of the British resident then in
Nepal. Mme.
Blavatsky went down to Southern India, and then on to
Java and
Singapore, returning thence to England.
1853, however,
was an unfortunate year for a Russian to visit this
country. The
preparations for the Crimean War were distressing to
Mme.
Blavatsky's patriotism, and she passed over at the end of the
year again to
America, going this time to New York, and thence out
West, first to
Chicago, then an infant city compared to the Chicago
of the present
day, and afterwards to the Far West, and across the
Rocky Mountains
with emigrants' caravans, till ultimately she
brought up for
a time in San Francisco. Her stay in America was
prolonged on
this occasion altogether to something like two years,
and she then made
her way a second time to India via Japan and the
Straits,
reaching Calcutta in the course of 1855.
In reference to
her prolonged wanderings her aunt writes: —
“For the first
eight years she gave her mother's family no sign of
life for fear
of being traced by her legitimate 'lord and master',
Her father
alone knew of her whereabouts. Knowing, however, that he
would never
prevail upon her to return home, he acquiesced in her
absence, and
supplied her with money whenever she came to places
where it could
safely reach her.”
During her
travels in India in 1856 she was overtaken at Lahore by a
German
gentleman known to her father, who, — in association with two
friends, having
laid out a journey in the East on his own account,
with a mystic
purpose in view, in reference to which fate did not
grant him the
success that attended Mme. Blavatsky's efforts — had
been asked by
Colonel Hahn to try if he could find his errant
daughter. The
four compatriots travelled together for a time, and
went through Kashmir
to Leli in Ladakh in company with a Tartar
Shaman, who was
instrumental in helping them to witness some
psychological
wonders wrought at a Buddhist monastery. Her
companions,
Mme. Blavatsky explains, had all formed what, referring
to the incident
in Isis Unveiled, she calls “the unwise plan of
penetrating
into Tibet under various disguises — none of them
speaking the
language, although one of them, a Mr K------, had
picked up some
Kasan Tartar, and thought he did”. The passage in
Isis rather too
long for quotation here. It begins on page 599, vol.
ii of that
book, and describes the animation of an infant by the
psychic
principles of the old Lama, the superior of the monastery.
The passage as given
in his is taken from a narrative written by Mr
K-----, and put
by him in Mme. Blavatsky's hands, and corresponds in
outline to
similar marvels related by the Abbé Huc in the first
edition of his
Recollections of Travel in Tartary, Tibet, and China.
In the later
editions of that book the testimony the author gives to
the wonders he
witnessed in Tibet is all cut down and mutilated. His
story was found
to be too striking in recognition of “miracles” that
were not, under
the direction of the church, to be tolerated by the
authorities in
its earlier form ; but the first edition of the book
can still be
seen at the British Museum, where I have verified the
accuracy of the
quotation given in Isis.
In reference to
the journey in the course of which the Russian
travellers
witnessed the transaction at the Buddhist monastery, Mme.
Blavatsky
writes: —
“Two of them,
the brothers N------, were very politely brought back
to the frontier
before they had walked sixteen miles into the weird
land of Eastern
Bod, and Mr K------, an ex-Lutheran minister, could
not even
attempt to leave his miserable village near Leli, as from
the first days
he found himself prostrated with fever, and had to
return to
Lahore via Kashmir.”
The Tartar
Shaman, referred to above, rendered Mme. Blavatsky more
substantial
assistance in her efforts to penetrate into Tibet than
he was able to
afford to her companions. Investing her with an
appropriate
disguise, he conducted her successfully across the
frontier, and
far on into the generally inaccessible country. It was
to this journey
that she vaguely refers in a striking passage
occurring in
the last chapter of Isis Unveiled. As the narrative,
though given in
Isis without any of the surrounding circumstances,
fits here into
its proper place in these records, I quote it at full
length.
Reference has just been made to certain talismans which each
shaman carries
under his left arm, attached to a string. Mme.
Blavatsky goes
on : —
“ ' Of what use
is it to you, and what are its virtues ? ' was the
question we
often offered to our guide. To this he never answered
directly, but
evaded all explanation, promising that as soon as an
opportunity was
offered and we were alone, he would ask the stone to
answer for
himself. With this very indefinite hope we were left to
the resources
of our own imagination.
“But the day on
which the stone 'spoke' came very soon. It was
during the most
critical hours of our life; at a time when the
vagabond nature
of a traveller had carried the writer to far-off
lands where
neither civilisation is known nor security can be
guaranteed for
one hour. One afternoon, as every man and woman had
left the yourta
(Tartar tent) that had been our house for over two
months, to witness
the ceremony of the Lamaic exorcism of
Tshoutgour, [An
elemental demon, in which every native of Asia
believes.’]
accused of breaking and spiriting away every bit of the
poor furniture
and earthenware of a family living about two miles
distant, the
Shaman, who had become our only protector in those
dreary deserts,
was reminded of his promise. He sighed and
hesitated, but
after a short silence, left his place on the
sheepskin, and
going outside, placed a dried-up goat's head with its
prominent horns
over a wooden peg, and then dropping down the felt
curtain of the
tent, remarked that now no living person would
venture in, for
the goat's head was a sign that he was ' at work.'
“After that,
placing his hand in his bosom, he drew out the little
stone, about
the size of a walnut, and, carefully unwrapping it,
proceeded, as
it appeared, to swallow it. In a few moments his limbs
stiffened, his
body became rigid, and he fell, cold and motionless
as a corpse.
But for a slight twitching of his lips at every
question asked,
the scene would have been embarrassing, nay
dreadful. The
sun was setting, and were it not that the dying embers
flickered at
the centre of the tent, complete darkness would have
been added to
the oppressive silence which reigned. We have lived in
the prairies of
the West, and in the boundless steppes of Southern
Russia; but
nothing can be compared with the silence at sunset on
the sandy
deserts of Mongolia; not even the barren solitudes of the
deserts of
Africa, though the former are partially inhabited, and
the latter
utterly void of life. Yet, there was the writer, alone
with what
looked no better than a corpse lying on the ground.
Fortunately
this state did not last long.
“ '
Mahaudû !' uttered a voice which seemed to come from the bowels
of the earth,
on which the Shaman was prostrated, ' Peace be with
you. What would
you have me do for you ? '
“Startling as
the fact seemed, we were quite prepared for it, for we
had seen other
Shamans pass through similar performances. 'Whoever
you are', we
pronounced mentally, 'go to K-----, and try to bring
that person's
thought here. See what that other party does, and tell
----- what we
are doing and how situated.'
“ ' I am
there,' announced the same voice. ' The old lady (kokona)
is sitting in
the garden. . . . she is putting on her spectacles and
reading a
letter.'
“ 'The contents
of it, and hasten', was the hurried order, while
preparing
note-book and pencil. The contents were given slowly, as
if, while
dictating, the invisible presence desired to put down the
words
phonetically, for we recognised the Vallachian language, of
which we knew
nothing beyond the ability to recognise it. In such a
way a whole
page was filled.
“ ' Look west .
. . toward the third pole of the yourta,' pronounced
the Tartar in
his natural voice, though it sounded hollow, and as if
coming from
afar. 'Her thought is here.'
“Then with a
convulsive jerk the upper portion of the Shaman's body
seemed raised,
and his head fell heavily on the writer's feet, which
he clutched
with both his hands. The position was becoming less and
less
attractive, but curiosity proved a good ally to courage. In the
west corner was
standing, life-like, but flickering unsteady, and
mist-like, the
form of a dear old friend, a Roumanian lady of
Vallachia, a
mystic by disposition, but a thorough disbeliever in
this kind of
occult phenomena.
“ 'Her thought
is here, but her body is lying unconscious. We could
not bring her
here otherwise', said the voice.
“We addressed
and supplicated the apparition to answer, but all in
vain. The
features moved and the form gesticulated as if in fear and
agony, but no
sound broke forth from the shadowy lips; only we
imagined —
perchance it was a fancy — hearing, as if from a long
distance, the
Roumanian words, 'Non se pote' ('It cannot be done' ).
“For over two
hours the most substantial, unequivocal proofs that
the Shaman's
astral soul was travelling at the bidding of our
unspoken wish
were given us. Ten months later, we received a letter
from a
Vallachian friend in response to ours, in which we had
enclosed the
page from the note-book, inquiring of her what she had
been doing on
that day, and describing the scene in full. She was
sitting, she
wrote, in the garden on that morning,[The hour in
Bucharest
corresponded perfectly with that of the country in which
the scene had
taken place.] prosaically occupied in boiling some
conserves; the letter
sent to her was word for word the copy of the
one received by
her from her brother; all at once, in consequence of
the heat she
thought, she fainted, and remembered distinctly
dreaming she
saw the writer in a desert place, which she accurately
described, and
sitting under a gipsy's tent,' as she expressed it. '
Henceforth,'
she added, 'I can doubt no longer'.
“But our
experiment was proved better still. We had directed the
Shaman's Inner
Eye to the same friend heretofore mentioned in this
chapter, the
Kutchi of Lhassa, who travels constantly to British
India and back.
We know that he was apprised of our critical
situation in
the desert; for a few hours later came help, and we
were rescued by
a party of twenty-five horsemen, who had been
directed by
their chief to find us at the place where we were, which
no living man
endowed with common powers could have known. The chief
of this escort
was a Shaberon, an 'adept' whom we had never seen
before, nor did
we after that, for he never left his soumay
(lamasary), and
we could have no access to it. ... But he was a
personal friend
of the Kutchi.”
This incident
put an end for the time to Mme. Blavatsky's wanderings
in Tibet. She
was conducted back to the frontier by roads and passes
of which she
had no previous knowledge, and after further travels in
India, was
directed by her occult guardian to leave the country,
shortly before
the troubles which began in 1857.
She went in a
Dutch vessel from Madras to Java, and thence returned
to Europe in 1858.
Meanwhile the
fate to which she has been so freely exposed all
through her
later life was already asserting itself to her
disadvantage,
and without, up to this time, having challenged the
world's
antagonism, by associating her name with tales of wonder,
she,
nevertheless, already found herself — or rather, in her
absence, her
friends found her — the mark for slanders, no less
extravagant, in
a different way, than some that have been aimed at
her quite recently
by people claiming to take an interest in psychic
phenomena, but
unable to tolerate those reported to have been
brought about
by her agency. Her aunt writes: “ Faint rumours
reached her
friends of her having been met in Japan, China,
Constantinople,
and the far East. She passed through Europe several
times, but
never lived in it. Her friends, therefore, were as much
surprised as
pained to read, years afterwards, fragments from her
supposed
biography, which spoke of her as a person well known in the
high life, as
well as the low, of Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw, and Paris,
and mixed her
name with events and ancedotes whose scene was laid in
these cities,
at various epochs, when her friends had every possible
proof of her
being far away from Europe. These anecdotes referred to
her
indifferently under the several Christian names of Julie,
Nathalie, etc
which were those really of other persons of the same
surname; and
attributed to her various extravagant adventures. Thus
the Neue Freie
Presse spoke of Madame Heloise (?) Blavatsky, a
non-existing
personage, who had joined the Black Hussars — les
Huzzards de la
Mart — during the Hungarian revolution, her sex being
found out only
in 1849.” Similar stories, equally groundless, were
circulated at a
later date. Anticipating this, her aunt goes on : —
“Another
journal of Paris narrated the story of Mme. Blavatsky, 'a
Pole from the
Caucasus' (?), a supposed relative of Baron Hahn of
Lemberg, who,
after taking an active part in the Polish Revolution
of 1863 (during
the whole of which time Mme. H. P. Blavatsky was
quietly living
with her relatives at Tiflis), was compelled, from
lack of means,
to serve as a female waiter in a ' restaurant du
Faubourg St
Antoine'. ”
These, and many
other infamous stories circulated by idle gossips,
were laid at
the door of Mme. Blavatsky, the heroine of our
narrative.
On her return
from India in 1858, Mme. Blavatsky did not go straight
to Russia, but,
after spending some months in France and Germany,
rejoined her
own people at last in the midst of a family
wedding-party
at Pskoff, in the north-west of Russia, about 180
miles from St
Petersburg.
Concerning the
next few years of Mme. Blavatsky's life, we are
furnished with
ample details by means of narrative written at the
time by her
sister, Mme. V. P.de Jelihowsky, and published in 1881
in a Russian
periodical — the Rebus — as a series of papers, headed,
“The Truth
about H. P. Blavatsky”. To this source of information we
may now turn.
CHAPTER 3
AT HOME IN
RUSSIA, 1858
IN the course
of certain Personal and Family Reminiscences, put
together by Mme
de Jelihowsky, she explains the attitude of mind in
which she was
brought up, interesting both as bearing on the
narrative she
has to relate and also as connected with the family
history of the
subject of this memoir. She writes: —
“I was born and
bred in a strictly orthodox, sincerely religious,
yet far from
being mystically-inclined, family. But if the spirit of
mysticism had
failed to influence its members, it was not in
consequence of
any predetermined policy of an a priori denial of
everything
unknown, or of a tendency to sneer at the
incomprehensible
only because it is far beyond one's capacities and
nature to take it
in; but as ' highly educated and polished people'
can hardly be
expected to confess their mental and intellectual
failings, hence
the conscious efforts of playing at incredulity and
esprits forts.
Nothing of the sort was to be found in our family.
Nor was there
any great superstition or bigotry amongst them — two
feelings the
best calculated to generate and develop faith in the
supernatural.
But when, at the age of sixteen, I had to part with my
mother's
family, in which I had been brought up since her death, and
went to live
with my father, I met in him a man of quite a different
'nature. He was
an extreme sceptic, a deist, if anything, and one of
a most
practical turn of mind; a highly intellectual and even a
scientific man,
one who knew and had seen a great deal in life, but
whose erudition
and learning had been developed in full accordance
with his own
personal views, and not at all in any spirit of
humility before
the truths of Christianity, or blind belief in man's
immortality and
life beyond the grave.”
In 1858, when
Mme. Blavatsky returned to Russia, her sister, the
writer of the
reminiscences from which I have just quoted, bore the
name of
Yahontoff — that of her first husband, who had died shortly
before that
date. She was staying at Pskoff with General N. A.
Yahontoff —
Maréchal de Noblesse of that place — her late husband's
father. A
wedding-party, that of her sister-in-law, was in progress,
and Colonel
Hahn was amongst the guests. On Christmas night, Mme. de
Jelihowsky
writes, “They were all sitting at supper, carriages
loaded with
guests were arriving one after the other, and the hall
bell kept
ringing without interruption. At the moment when the
bridegroom's
best men arose, with glasses of champagne in their
hands, to
proclaim their good wishes for the happy couple — a solemn
moment in
Russia — the bell was again rung impatiently. Mme.
Yahontoff, Mme.
Blavatsky's sister, moved by an irrepressible
impulse, and
notwithstanding that the hall was full of servants,
jumped up from
her place at the table, and, to the amazement of all,
rushed herself
to open the door. She felt convinced, she said
afterwards,
though why she could not tell, that it was her long lost
sister! ”
For some time
this memoir will closely follow Mme. de Jelihowsky's
narrative, now
translated into English for the first time, but it
will be
unnecessary to load every page with quotation marks. Where
the first
person is used, it will be understood that Mme de
Jelihowsky is
speaking, although she also frequently refers to
herself in the
third person, as the narrative was originally
published in
Russia anonymously. When I, the present editor, have
occasion to
intervene with comments, such passages will be enclosed
in brackets.
Spiritism (or
spiritualism) was then just looming on the horizon of
Europe, During
her travels, the psychological peculiarities of Mme.
Blavatsky's
childhood and girlhood had developed, and she returned
already
possessed of occult powers, which were in those days
attributed to
mediumship.
These powers
asserted themselves in strange incessant knocks and
raps and
sounds, which many hearers mistook for the esprits
frappeurs; in
the moving of furniture without contact, in the
increase and
the decrease of the weight of various objects, in her
faculty of
seeing herself (and occasionally of transferring that
faculty to
others) things invisible to ordinary sight, and living
but absent
persons who had resided years ago in the places where she
happened to be,
as well as spectral images of personages dead at
various epochs.
Well acquainted
with a number of facts of the most striking
character which
have happened at that period of her life (which,
however, has
not lasted very long, as she succeeded very soon in
conquering and
even obtaining mastery over the influence of forces
that surrounded
her), I will describe only those phenomena of which
I was an
eye-witness.
For this I must
return to the night of Mme. Blavatsky's arrival.
From that time
all those who were living in the house remarked that
strange things
were taking place in it. Raps and whisperings,
sounds,
mysterious and unexplained, were now being constantly heard
wherever the
newly arrived inmate went. Not only did they occur in
her presence
and near her, but knocks were heard, and movements of
the furniture
perceived nearly in every room in the house, on the
walls, the
floor, the windows, the sofa, cushions, mirrors, and
clocks ; on
every piece of furniture, in short, about the rooms.
However much
Mme. Blavatsky tried to conceal these facts, laughing
at them and
trying to turn these manifestations into fun, it was
useless for her
to deny the fact or the occult significance of these
sounds. At
last, to the incessant questions of her sister, she
confessed that
those manifestations had never ceased to follow her
everywhere as
in the early days of her infancy and youth. That such
raps could be
increased or diminished, and at times even made to
cease
altogether, by the mere force of her will, she also
acknowledged,
proving her assertion generally on the spot. Of course
the good people
of Pskoff, like the rest of the world, knew what was
then occurring,
and had heard of spiritualism and its
manifestations.
There had been mediums in Petersburg, but they had
not penetrated
as far as Pskoff, and its guileless inhabitants had
never heard the
rappings of the so-called spirit.
[All who have
become acquainted with Mme. Blavatsky in the present
phase of her development
will be aware of the eagerness with which
she repudiates
the least trace of mediumship as entering into the
phenomena with
which she had been associated in recent years. In
1858 she
appears to have been in a transition state, already
invested with
occult will-power, which put her in a position to
repress the
manifestations of mediumship in emergencies, but still
liable to their
spontaneous occurrence when they were not thus under
repression.
Expressly asked the question, she would always deny that
she was a
medium — which, indeed, she would appear no longer to have
been, in the
strict sense of the term — for she does not seem to
have been
controlled by the agencies recognised in spiritualism,
even when
sometimes acquiescing in casual manifestations on their
part. Mme. de
Jelihowsky, questioned on this subject recently, says:
“I remember
that when addressed as a medium, she (Mme. Blavatsky)
used to laugh
and assure us she was no medium, but only a. mediator
between mortals
and beings we knew nothing about. But I could never
understand the
difference.”
This may be the
best opportunity for bringing to the reader's notice
some passages
from Mme. Jelihowsky's Personal and Family
Reminiscences
which bear on the point, an important one as regards
all psychic
students of Mme. Blavatsky's phenomena and
characteristics.
Her sister says
:—
“Although
everyone had supposed that the manifestations occurring in
H. P.
Blavatsky's presence were the results of a mediumistic power
pertaining to her,
she herself had always obstinately denied it. My
sister H. P.
Blavatsky had passed most of her time, during her many
years' absence
from Russia, travelling in India, where, as we are
now informed,
spiritual theories are held in great scorn, and the
so-called (by
us) mediumistic phenomena are said to be caused by
quite another
agency than that of spirits; mediumship proceeding,
they say, from
a source, to draw from which, my sister thinks it
degrading to
her human dignity; in consequence of which ideas she
refuses to
acknowledge such a force in herself. From letters
received by me
from my sister, I found she had been dissatisfied
with much that
I had said of her in my ' Truth about H. P.
Blavatsky.' She
still maintains, now as then, that in those days (of
1860) she was
influenced as well as she is now by quite another kind
of power —
namely, that of the Indian sages, the Raj-Yogis — and
that even the
shadows (figures) she sees all her life, are no
phantoms, no
ghosts of the deceased, but only the manifestations of
her powerful
friends in their astral envelopes. However it may be,
and whatever
the power that produced her phenomena only, during the
whole time that
she lived with us at the Yahontoff such phenomena
happened
constantly before the eyes of all, believers and
unbelievers
(relatives and outsiders) — and they plunged everyone
equally into
amazement.”
As this memoir
is a narrative and not an occult treatise, I refrain
from any minute
analysis of the psychological problem involved, and
would only
point out that the condition of things Mme. de Jelihowsky
refers to,
chimes in with the rough explanation I gave in the first
chapter as to
the occult theory of Mme. Blavatsky's development,
which would
recognise her natural born, physical attributes as only
coming under
control when the higher faculties of her real self,
entering into
union with the bodily organism as this reached
maturity, put
her in a position to be taught how to eradicate the
weed-growth of her
abnormally fertile psychic faculties.]
With the
arrival of Mme. Blavatsky at Pskoff, the news about the
extraordinary
phenomena produced by her spread abroad like
lightning,
turning the whole town topsy-turvy.
The fact is,
that the sounds were not simple raps, but something
more, as they
showed extraordinary intelligence, disclosing the past
as well as the
future to those who held converse through them with
those Mme.
Blavatsky called her kikimorcy (or spooks). More than
that, for they
showed the gift of disclosing unexpressed thoughts,
i.e.
penetrating freely into the most secret recesses of the human
mind, and
divulging past deeds and present intentions.
The relatives
of Mme. Blavatsky's sister were leading a very
fashionable
life, and received a good deal of company in those days.
Her presence
attracted a number of visitors, no one of whom ever
left her
unsatisfied, for the raps which she evoked gave answers,
composed of
long discourses in several languages, some of which were
unknown to the
medium, as she was called. The poor “medium” became
subjected to
every kind of test, to which she submitted very
gracefully, no
matter how absurd the demand, as a proof that she did
not bring about
the phenomena by juggling. It was her usual habit to
sit very
quietly and quite unconcerned on the sofa, or in an
arm-chair,
engaged in some embroidery, and apparently without taking
the slightest
interest or active part in the hubbub which she
produced around
herself. And the hubbub was great indeed. One of the
guests would be
reciting the alphabet, another putting down the
answers
received, while the mission of the rest was to offer mental
questions,
which were always and promptly answered. It so happened,
however, that
the unknown and invisible things at work favoured some
people more
than others, while there were those who could obtain no
answers
whatever. In the latter case, instead of replying to queries
asked aloud,
the raps would answer the unexpressed mental thought of
some other person,
first calling him by name. During that time,
conversations
and discussions in a loud tone were carried on around
her. Mistrust
and irony were often shown, and occasionally even a
doubt
expressed, in a very indelicate way, as to the good faith of
Mme. Blavatsky.
But she bore it all very coolly and patiently, a
strange and
puzzling smile or an ironical shrugging of the shoulders
being her only
answer to questions of very doubtful logic offered to
her over and
over again.
“But how do you
do it, and what is it that raps ? ” people kept on
asking. Or
again, “but how can you so well guess people's thought ?
How could you
know that I had thought of this or that ? ”
At first H. P.
B. sought very zealously to prove to people that she
did not produce
the phenomena, but very soon she changed her
tactics. She
declared herself tired of such discussions, and silence
and a
contemptuous smile became for some time her only answer. Again
she would
change as rapidly; and in moments of good-humour, when
people would be
foolishly and openly expressing the most insulting
doubts of her
honesty, instead of resenting them she used to laugh
aloud in their
faces. Indeed, the most absurd hypotheses were
offered by the
sceptics. For instance, it was suggested that she
might produce
her loud raps by the means of a machine in her pocket,
or that she
rapped with her nails; the most ingenious theory being
that “when her
hands were visibly occupied with some work, she did
it with her
toes.”
To put an end
to all this, she allowed herself to be subjected to
the most stupid
demands ; she was searched, her hands and feet were
tied with
string, she permitted herself to be placed on a soft sofa,
to have her
shoes taken off and her hands and feet held fast against
a soft pillow,
so that they should be seen by all, and then she was
asked that the
knocks and rappings should be produced at the further
end of the
room. Declaring that she would try, but would promise
nothing, her
orders were, nevertheless, immediately accomplished,
especially when
the people were seriously interested. These raps
were produced
at her command on the ceiling, on the window sills, on
every bit of
furniture in the adjoining room, and in places quite
distant from
her.
At times she
would wickedly revenge herself by practical jokes on
those who so
doubted her. Thus, for example, the raps which came one
day inside the
glasses of the young Professor M------, while she was
sitting at the
other side of the room, were so strong that they
fairly knocked
the spectacles off his nose, and made him become pale
with fright. At
another time, a lady, an esprit fort, very vain and
coquettish, to
her ironical question of what was the best conductor
for the
production of such raps, and whether they could be done
everywhere,
received a strange and very puzzling answer. The word,
“Gold”, was
rapped out, and then came the words, “We will prove it
to you
immediately”.
The lady kept
smiling with her mouth slightly opened. Hardly had the
answer come, than
she became very pale, jumped from her chair, and
covered her
mouth with her hand. Her face was convulsed with fear
and
astonishment. Why ? Because she had felt raps in her mouth, as
she confessed
later on. Those present looked at each other
significantly.
Previous even to her own confession all had
understood that
the lady had felt a violent commotion and raps in
the gold of her
artificial teeth! And when she rose from her place
and left the
room with precipitation, there was a homeric laugh
among us at her
expense.
CHAPTER 4
MM DE
JELIHOWSKY'S NARRATIVE
IT is
impossible to give in detail even a portion of what was
produced in the
way of such phenomena during the stay of Mme.
Blavatsky
amongst us in the town of Pskoff. But they may be
mentioned under
general classification as follows : —
1. Direct and
perfectly clear written and verbal answers to mental
questions — or
“thought-reading”.
2.
Prescriptions for different diseases, in Latin, and subsequent
cures.
3. Private
secrets, unknown to all but the interested party,
divulged,
especially in the case of those persons who mentioned
insulting
doubts.
4. Change of
weight in furniture and of persons at will.
5. Letters from
unknown correspondents, and immediate answers
written to
queries made, and found in the most out-of-the-way
mysterious
places.[Thus a governess, named Leontine, who wanted to
know the fate
of a certain young man she had hoped to be married to,
learnt what had
become of him ; his name, that she had purposely
withheld, being
given in full — from a letter written in an unknown
handwriting she
found in one of her locked boxes, placed inside a
trunk equally
locked.]
6. Appearances
and apport of objects unclaimed by any one present.
7. Sounds as of
musical notes in the air wherever Mme. Blavatsky
desired they
should resound.
All these
surprising and inexplicable manifestations of an
intelligent,
and at times, I should almost say, an omniscient force,
produced a
sensation in Pskoff, where there yet remain many who
remember it
well. Truth compels us to remark that the answers were
not always in
perfect accord with the facts, but seemed purposely
distorted as
though for the purpose of making fun, especially of
those querists
who expected infallible prophecies.
Nevertheless,
the fact remains of the manifestation of an
intelligent
force, capable of perceiving the thoughts and feelings
of any person;
as also of expressing them by rappings and motions in
inanimate
objects. The following two occurrences took place in the
presence of
many eye-witnesses during the stay of Mme. Blavatsky
with us.
As usual, those
nearest and dearest to her were, at the same time,
the most
skeptical as to her occult powers. Her brother Leonide and
her father
stood out longer than all against evidence, until at last
the doubts of
the former were greatly shaken by the following fact.
The
drawing-room of the Yahontoffs was full of visitors. Some were
occupied with
music, others with cards, but most of us, as usual,
with phenomena.
Leonide de Hahn did not concern himself with
anything in
particular, but was leisurely walking about, watching
everybody and
everything. He was a strong, muscular youth, saturated
with the Latin
and German wisdom of the University, and believed, so
far, in no one
and nothing. He stopped behind the back of his
sister's chair,
and was listening to her narratives of how some
persons, who
called themselves mediums, made light objects become so
heavy that it
was impossible to lift them; and others which were
naturally heavy
became again remarkably light.
“And you mean
to say that you can do it ? ” ironically asked the
young man of
his sister.
“Mediums can,
and I have done it occasionally; though I cannot
always answer for
its success”, coolly replied Mme. Blavatsky.
“But would you
try ? ” asked somebody in the room; and immediately
all joined in
requesting her to do so.
“I will try”,
she said, “but I beg of you to remember that I promise
nothing. I will
simply fix this chess-table and try. ... He who
wants to make
the experiment, let him lift it now, and then try
again after I
shall have fixed it.”
“After you
shall have fixed it ? ” said a voice, “ and what then ?
Do you mean to
say that you will not touch the table at all ? ”
“Why should I
touch it ? ” answered Mme. Blavatsky, with a quiet
smile.
Upon hearing
the extraordinary assertion, one of the young men went
determinedly to
the small chess-table, and lifted it up as though it
were a feather.
“All right”,
she said. “Now kindly leave it alone, and stand back! ”
The order was
at once obeyed, and a great silence fell upon the
company. All,
holding their breath, anxiously watched for what Mme.
Blavatsky would
do next. She apparently, however, did nothing at
all. She merely
fixed her large blue eyes upon the chess-table, and
kept looking at
it with an intense gaze. Then, without removing her
gaze, she
silently, with a motion of her hand, invited the same
young man to
remove it. He approached, and grasped the table by its
leg with great
assurance. The table could not be moved !
He then seized
it with both his hands. The table stood as though
screwed to the
floor.
Then the young
man, crouching down, took hold of it with both hands,
exerting all his
strength to lift it by the additional means of his
broad
shoulders. He grew red with the effort, but all in vain! The
table seemed
rooted to the carpet, and would not be moved. There was
a loud burst of
applause. The young man, looking very much confused,
abandoned his
task en désespoir de cause, and stood aside.
Folding his
arms in quite a Napoleonic way, he only slowly said,
“Well, this is
a good joke ! ”
“Indeed, it is
a good one ! ” echoed Leonide.
A suspicion had
crossed his mind that the young visitor was acting
in secret
confederacy with his sister and was fooling them.
“May I also try
? ” he suddenly asked her,
“Please do, my
dear”, was the laughing response.
Her brother
upon this approached, smiling, and seized, in his turn,
the diminutive
table by its leg with his strong muscular arm. But
the smile
instantly vanished, to give place to an expression of mute
amazement. He
stepped back a little and examined again very
carefully the,
to him, well-known chess-table. Then he gave it a
tremendous
kick, but the little table did not even budge.
Suddenly
applying to its surface his powerful chest he enclosed it
within his
arms, trying to shake it. The wood cracked, but would
yield to no
effort. Its three feet seemed screwed to the floor. Then
Leonide Hahn
lost all hope, and abandoning the ungrateful task,
stepped aside,
and frowning, exclaimed but these two words, “How
strange! ” his
eyes turning meanwhile with a wild expression of
astonishment
from the table to his sister.
We all agreed
that this exclamation was not too strong.
The loud debate
had meanwhile drawn the attention of several
visitors, and
they came pouring in from the drawing-room into the
large apartment
where we were.
Many of them, old
and young, tried to lift up, or even to impart
some slight
motion to, the obstinate little chess-table. They
failed, like
the rest of us.
Upon seeing her
brother's astonishment, and perchance desiring
finally to
destroy his doubts, Mme. Blavatsky, addressing him with
her usual
careless laugh, said, “Try to lift the table now, once
more I ”
Leonide H.
approached the little thing very irresolutely, grasped it
again by the
leg, and, pulling it upwards, came very near to
dislocating his
arm owing to the useless effort: the table was
lifted like a
feather this time [Madame Blavatsky has stated that
this phenomenon
could only be produced in two different ways:
1st.. 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 ; and
2nd. 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.]
And now to our
second case. It occurred in St Petersburg, a few
months later,
when Mme. Blavatsky had already left Pskoff with her
father and
sister, and when all three were living in a hotel. They
had come to St
Petersburg on business on their way to Mme.
Yahontoff’s
property, in the district of Novorgeff, where they had
decided to pass
the summer. All their forenoons were occupied with
business, their
afternoons and evenings with making and receiving
visits, and
there was no time for, or even mention of, phenomena.
One night they
received a visit from two old friends of their
father; both
were old gentlemen, one of them a school-fellow of the
Corps des
Pages, Baron M------, the other the well-known K------w. [
Sceptics who insist
upon having the full names are invited to apply
to the writer
of the above, Mme de Jelihowsky, St Petersburg,
Zabalkansky
Prospect, No. 10 house, r.31 apartment’] Both were much
interested in
recent spiritualism, and were, of course, anxious to
see something.
After a few
successful phenomena, the visitors declared themselves
positively
delighted, amazed, and quite at a loss what to make of
Mme.
Blavatsky's powers. They could neither understand nor account,
they said, for
her father's indifference in presence of such
manifestations.
There he was, coolly laying out his “grande
patience” with
cards, while phenomena of such a wonderful nature
were occurring
around him. The old gentleman, thus taken to task,
answered that
it was all bosh, and that he would not hear of such
nonsense; such
occupation being hardly worthy of serious people, he
added. The
rebuke left the two old gentlemen unconcerned. They
began, on the
contrary, to insist that Colonel Hahn should, for old
friendship's
sake, make an experiment, before denying the
importance, or
even the possibility of his daughter's phenomena.
They offered
him to test the intelligences and their power by
writing a word
in another room, secretly from all of them, and then
asking the raps
to repeat it. The old gentleman, more probably in
the hope of a
failure that would afford him the opportunity of
laughing at his
two old friends, than out of a desire to humour
them, finally
consented. He left his cards, and proceeding into an
adjoining room,
wrote a word on a bit of paper; after which,
conveying it to
his pocket, he returned to his patience, and waited
silently,
laughing behind his grey moustache.
“Well, our
dispute will now be settled in a few moments”, said
K------w. “What
shall you say, however, old friend, if the word
written by you
is correctly repeated? Will you not feel compelled to
believe in such
a case ? ”
“What I might
say, if the word were correctly guessed, I could not
tell at
present”, he skeptically replied. “One thing I could answer,
however, from
the time I can be made to believe your alleged
spiritism and
its phenomena, I shall be ready to believe in the
existence of
the devil, undines, sorcerers, and witches — in the
whole
paraphernalia — in short, of old women's superstitions; and
you may prepare
to offer me as an inmate of a lunatic asylum.”
Upon delivering
himself thus, he went on with his patience, and paid
no further
attention to the proceedings. He was an old “Voltarian”,
as the
positivists who believed in nothing are called in Russia. But
we, who felt
deeply interested in the experiment, began to listen to
the loud and
unceasing raps coming from a plate brought there for
the purpose.
The younger
sister was repeating the alphabet; the old general
marked the
letters down; while Mme. Blavatsky did nothing at all —
apparently.
She was what
would be called, in our days, a “good writing medium”;
that is to say,
she could write out the answers herself while
talking with
those around her upon quite indifferent topics. But
simple and more
rapid as this mode of communication may be, she
would never
consent to use it.
She was too
afraid to employ it, fearing as she explained,
uncalled-for
suspicion from foolish people who did not understand
the process.
[From the
first, that is to say, almost from her childhood, and
certainly in
the days mentioned above, Mme. Blavatsky, as she tells
us, would, in
such cases, see either the actual present thought of
the person putting
the questions, or its paler reflection — still
quite distinct
for her — of an event, or a name, or whatever it was,
in the past, as
though hanging in a shadow world around the person,
generally in
the vicinity of the head. She had but to copy it
consciously, or
allow her hand to do so mechanically. At any rate,
she never felt
herself helped or led on by an external power, i.e.
no “spirits”
helped her in this process after she returned from her
first voyage,
she avers. It seemed an action entirely confined to
her own will,
more or less consciously exercised by her, more or
less
premeditated and put into play.
Whenever the
thought of a person had to be communicated through
raps, the
process changed. She had to read, first of all, sometimes
to interpret
the thought of the querist, and having done so, to
remember it
well after it had often disappeared; watch the letters
of the alphabet
as they were read or pointed out, prepare the
will-current
that had to produce the rap at the right letter, and
then have it
strike at the right moment the table or any other
object chosen
to be the vehicle of sounds or raps. A most difficult
process, and
far less easy than direct writing.']
By the means of
raps and alphabet we got one word, but it proved
such a strange
one, so grotesquely absurd as having no evident
relation to
anything that might be supposed to have been written by
her father,
that all of us who had been in the expectation of some
complicated
sentence looked at each other, dubious whether we ought
to read it
aloud. To our question, whether it was all, the raps
became more
energetic in the affirmative sounds. We had several
triple raps,
which meant in our code — Yes ! . . . yes, yes, yes !!!
Remarking our agitation
and whispering, Madame Blavatsky's father
looked at us
over his spectacles, and asked:
“Well! Have you
any answer ? It must be something very elaborate and
profound
indeed! ”
He arose and,
laughing in his moustache, approached us. His youngest
daughter, Mme.
Yahontoff, then went to him and said, with some
little
confusion :
“We only got
one word.”
“And what is
it?”
“Zaïtchik!
” [Zaïchik means, literally,”a little hare”, while Zaïtz
is the Russian
term for any hare. In the Russian language every
substantive and
adjective may be made to express the same thing,
only in the
diminutive. Thus a house is dom, while small house is
expressed by
the word domik, etc.]
It was a sight
indeed to witness the extraordinary change that came
over the old
man's face at this one word! He became deadly pale.
Adjusting his
spectacles with a trembling hand, he stretched it out
while hurriedly
saying:
“Let me see it!
Hand it over. Is it really so ? ”
He took the
slips of paper, and read in a very agitated voice, — “
'Zaïtchik'.
Yes, Zaïtchik; so it is. How very strange!”
Taking out of
his pocket the paper he had written upon in the
adjoining room,
he handed it in silence to his daughter and guests.
They found on
it both the question offered and the answer that was
anticipated.
The words read thus:
“What was the
name of my favorite war-horse which I rode during my
first Turkish
campaign ? ” and lower down, in parenthesis (“
Zaïtchik
”).
We felt fully
triumphant, and expressed our feelings accordingly.
This solitary
word, Zaïtchik, had an enormous effect upon the old
gentleman. As
it often happens with inveterate sceptics, once he had
found out that
there was indeed something in his eldest daughter's
claims, and that
it had nothing to do whatever with deceit or
juggling,
having been convinced of this one fact, he rushed into the
region of
phenomena with all the zeal of an ardent investigator. As
a matter of
course, once he believed he felt no more inclined to
doubt his own
reason.
Having received
from Mme. Blavatsky one correct answer, her father
became
passionately fond of experimenting with his daughter's
powers. Once he
inquired of the date of a certain event in his
family that had
occurred several hundred of years before. He
received it.
From that time he set himself and Mme. Blavatsky the
difficult task
of restoring the family chronology. The genealogical
tree, lost in
the night of the first crusades, had to be restored
from its roots
down to his day.
The information
was readily promised, and he set to work from
morning to
night.
First, the
legend of the Count von Rottenstern, the Knight Crusader,
was given him.
The year, the month, and the day on which a certain
battle with the
Saracens had been fought; and how, while sleeping in
his tent, the
Knight Crusader was awakened by the cry of a cock
(Hahn) to find
himself in time to kill, instead of being stealthily
killed by an
enemy who had penetrated into his tent. For this feat
the bird, true
symbol of vigilance, was raised to the honor of being
incorporated in
the coat of arms of the Counts of Rottenstern, who
became from
that time the Rottenstern von Rott Hahn; to branch off
later into the
Hahn-Hahn family and others.
Then began a
regular series of figures, dates of years and months,
of hundreds of
names by connection and side marriages, and a long
line of descent
from the Knight Crusaders down to the Countess Ida
Hahn-Hahn —
Mme. Blavatsky's father's cousin, and her father's
family names and
dates, as well as a mass of contemporary events
which had taken
place in connection with that family's descending
line, were
given rapidly and unhesitatingly. The greatest historian,
endowed with
the most phenomenal memory, could never be equal to
such a task.
How then could one who had been on cold terms from her
very youth with
simple arithmetic and history be suspected of
deliberate
deceit in a work that necessitated the greatest
chronological
precision, the knowledge very often of the most
unimportant
historical events, with their involved names and dates,
all of which
upon the most careful verification were found to be
correct to a
day.
True, the
family immigrants from Germany since the days of Peter
III. had a good
many missing links and blanks in their genealogical
tables, yet the
few documents that had been preserved among the
various
branches of the family in Germany and Russia — whenever
consulted, were
found to be the originals of those very exact copies
furnished
through Mme. Blavatsky's raps.
Her uncle, a
high official at the General Post Office at St
Petersburg,
whose great ambition in those days was to settle the
title of a
Count on his eldest sons permanently, took the greatest
interest in
this mysterious work. Over and over again he would, in
his attempts to
puzzle and catch his niece in some historical or
chronological
inaccuracy, interrupt the regular flow of her raps,
and ask for
information about something which had nothing to do with
the genealogy,
but was only some contemporaneous fact. For instance
:
“You say that
in the year 1572 Count Carl von Hahn-Hahn was married
to the Baroness
Ottilia, so and so. This was in June at the castle
of — — at
Mecklenburg. Now, who was the reigning Kurfuerst at that
time; what
Prince reigned at ----- (some small German state); and
who was the
confessor of the Pope, and the Pope himself in that year
? ”
And the answer,
always correct, would invariably come without a
moment's pause.
It was often found far more difficult to verify the
correctness of
such names and dates than to receive the information.
Mr J. A. Hahn,
then Post Director at St Petersburg, Mme. Blavatsky's
uncle, had to
plunge for days and weeks sometimes into dusty old
archives, write
to Germany, and apply for information to the most
out-of-the-way
places, that were designated to him, when he found
difficulties in
his way to obtain the knowledge he sought for in
easily
obtainable books and records.
This lasted for
months. Never during that time were Mme. Blavatsky's
invisible
helper or helpers found mistaken in any single instance.
[Indeed not;
for it was neither a “spirit” nor “spirits” but living
men who can
draw before their eyes the picture of any book or
manuscript
wherever existing, and in case of need even that of any
long-forgotten
and unrecorded event, who helped “Mme Blavatsky”, The
astral light is
the storehouse and the record book of all things,
and deeds have
no secrets for such men. And the proof of it may be
found in the
production of Isis Unveiled.(Note by H.P. Blavatsky)]
They only asked
occasionally for a day or two to get at the correct
information.
Unfortunately,
these records, put down on fly-leaves and then copied
into a book,
are probably lost. The papers remained with Mme.
Blavatsky's
father, who treasured them, and with many other far more
valuable
documents were stolen or lost after his death. But his
sister-in-law,
Mme. Blavatsky's aunt, has in her possession letters
from him in which
he speaks enthusiastically of his experiments.
One of the most
startling of her phenomena happened very soon after
Mme.
Blavatsky's return, in the early spring of 1858. Both sisters
were then
living with their father, in their country house in a
village
belonging to Mme. Yahontoff.
In consequence
of a crime committed not far from the boundaries of
my property,
she writes — (a man having been found killed in a gin
shop, the
murderers remaining unknown) — the superintendent of the
district police
passed one afternoon through our village, and
stopped to make
some inquiries.
The researches
were made very secretly, and he had not said one word
about his
business to anyone in the house, not even to our father.
As he was an
acquaintance who visited our family, and stopped at our
house on his
district tour, no one asked him why he had come, for he
made us very
frequent visits, as to all the other proprietors in the
neighborhood.
It was only on
the following morning, after he had ordered the
village serfs
to appear for examination (which proved useless), that
the inmates
learned anything of his mission.
During tea, as
they were all sitting around the table, there came
the usual
knocks, raps, and disturbance on the walls, the ceiling,
and about the
furniture of the room.
To our father's
question why the police-superintendent should not
try to learn
something of the name and the whereabouts of the
murderer from
my sister's invisible agents, the officer Captain O
only
incredulously smiled.
He had heard of
the “all-knowing” spirits, but was ready to bet
almost anything
that these “horned and hoofed gentlemen” would prove
insufficient
for such a task. “They would hardly betray and inform
against their
own”, he added, with a silly laugh.
This fling at
her invisible “powers”, and laugh, as she thought, at
her expense,
made Mme. Blavatsky change color, and feel, as she
said, an
irrepressible desire to humble the ignorant fool, who
hardly knew
what he was talking about. She turned fiercely upon the
police-officer.
“And suppose I
prove to you the contrary ?” she defiantly asked him.
“Then”, he
answered, still laughing, “I would resign my office, and
offer it to
you, Madame ; or, still better, I would strongly urge
the authorities
to place you at the head of the Secret Police
Department.”
“ Now, look
here, Captain”, she said, indignantly, “I do not like
meddling in
such a dirty business, and helping you detectives. Yet,
since you defy
me, let my father say over the alphabet, and you put
down the
letters, and record what will be rapped out. My presence is
not needed for
this, and with your permission I will even leave the
room.”
She went away,
and taking a book, placed herself on the balcony,
apparently
quite unconcerned with what was going on.
Colonel Hahn,
anxious to make a convert, began repeating the
alphabet. The
communication received was far from complimentary in
its adjectives
to the address of the police-superintendent.
The outcome of
the message was, that while he was talking nonsense
at Rougodevo
(the name of our new property), the murderer, whose
name was
Samoylo Ivanof, had crossed over before daylight to the
next district,
and thus escaped the officer's clutches.
“At present he
is hiding under a bundle of hay in the loft of a
peasant, named
Andrew Vlassof, of the village of Oreshkino. By going
there
immediately you will secure the criminal.”
The effect upon
the man was tremendous! Our Stanovoy (district
officer) was
positively nonplused, and confessed that Oreshkino was
one of the
suspected villages he had on his list.
“But — allow
me, however, to inquire”, he asked of the table from
which the raps
proceeded, and bending over it with a suspicious look
upon his face,
“how come you — whoever you are — to know anything of
the murderer's
name, or of that of the confederate who hides him in
his loft ? And
who is Vlassof, for I know him not ? ”
The answer came
clear and rather contemptuous.
“Very likely
that you should neither know nor see much beyond your
own nose. We,
however, who are now giving you the information, have
the means of
knowing everything we wish to know. Samoylo Ivanof is
an old soldier
on leave. He was drunk, and quarreled with the
victim. The
murder was not premeditated; it is a misfortune, not a
crime.”
Upon hearing
these words the superintendent rushed out of the house
like a madman,
and drove off at a furious rate towards Oreshkino,
which was more
than thirty miles distant from Rougodevo. The
information
agreeing admirably with some points he had laboriously
collected, and
furnishing the last word to the mystery of the names
given — he had
no doubt in his own mind that the rest would prove
true, as he
confessed some time after.
On the
following morning a messenger on horseback, sent by the
Stanovoy, made
his appearance with a letter to her father.
Events in
Oreshkino had proved every word of the information to be
correct. The
murderer was found and arrested in his hiding place at
Andrew Vlassofs
cottage, and identified as a soldier on leave named
Samoylo Ivanof.
This event
produced a great sensation in the district, and
henceforward
the messages obtained, through the instrumentality of
my sister, were
viewed in a more serious light. [Madame Blavatsky
denies, point
blank, any intervention of spirits in this case. She
tells us she
had the picture of the whole tragedy and its subsequent
developments
before her from the moment the Stanovoy entered the
house. She knew
the names of the murderers, the confederate, and of
the village,
for she saw them interested, so to say, with the
visions. Then
she guided the raps, and thus gave the information.]
But this
brought, a few weeks after, very disagreeable
complications,
for the police of St Petersburg wanted to know how
could one, and
that one a woman who had just returned from foreign
countries, know
anything of the details of a murder.
It cost Colonel
Hahn great exertion to settle the matter and satisfy
the suspicious
authorities that there had been no fouler play in the
business than
the intervention of supernatural powers, in which the
police
pretended, of course, to have no faith.
The most
successful phenomena took place during those hours when we
were alone,
when no one cared to make experiments or sought useless
tests, and when
there was no one to convince or enlighten.
At such moments
the manifestations were left to produce themselves
at their own
impulse and pleasure, none of us — not even the chief
author of the
phenomena under observation, at any rate as far as
those present
could see and judge from appearances — assuming any
active part in
trying to guide them.
We very soon
arrived at the conviction that the forces at work, as
Mme, Blavatsky
constantly told us, had to be divided into several
distinct
categories. While the lowest on the scale of invisible
beings produced
most of the physical phenomena, the very highest
among the
agencies at work condescended but rarely to a
communication or
intercourse with strangers. The last-named
“invisibles”
made themselves manifestly seen, felt, and heard only
during those
hours when we were alone in the family, and when great
harmony and
quiet reigned among us.
It is said that
harmony helps wonderfully toward the manifestation
of the
so-called mediumistic force, and that the effects produced in
physical
manifestations depend but little on the volition of the
“medium”. Such
feats as that accomplished with the little
chess-table at
Pskoff were rare. In the majority of the cases the
phenomena were
sporadic, seemingly quite independent of her will,
apparently
never heeding anyone's suggestion, and generally
appearing in
direct contradiction with the desires expressed by
those present.
We used to feel extremely vexed whenever there was a
chance to
convince some highly intellectual investigator, but
through H. P.
Blavatsky's obstinacy or lack of will nothing came out
of it. For
instance :
If we asked for
one of those highly intellectual, profound answers
we got so often
when alone, we usually received in answer some
impertinent
rubbish; when we begged for the repetition of some
phenomena she
had produced for us hundreds of times before, our wish
was only
laughed at.
I well remember
how, during a grand evening party, when several
families of
friends had come from afar off, in some cases from
distances of
hundreds of miles on purpose to witness some phenomena,
to “hear with
their ears and see with their eyes” the strange doings
of Mme. Blavatsky,
the latter, though mockingly assuring us she did
all she could,
gave them no result to ponder upon. This lasted for
several days. [
She explains this by describing herself as tired and
disgusted with
the ever-growing public thirst for “miracles”.]
The visitors
had left dissatisfied and in a spirit as skeptical as
it was
uncharitable. Hardly, however, had the gates been closed
after them, the
bells of their horses yet merrily tinkling in the
last alley of
the entrance park, when everything in the room seemed
to become
endowed with life. The furniture acted as though every
piece of it was
animated and gifted with voice and speech, and we
passed the rest
of the evening and the greater part of the night as
though we were
between the enchanted walls of the magic palace of
some
Scheherazade.
It is far
easier to enumerate the phenomena that did not take place
during these
forever memorable hours than to describe those that
did. All those
weird manifestations that we had observed at various
times seemed to
have been repeated for our sole benefit during that
night. At one
moment as we sat at supper in the dining-room, there
were loud
accords played on the piano which stood in the adjoining
apartment, and
which was closed and locked, and so placed that we
could all of us
see it from where we were through the large open
doors.
Then at the
first command and look of Mme. Blavatsky there came
rushing to her
through the air her tobacco-pouch, her box of
matches, her
pocket-handkerchief, or anything she asked, or was made
to ask for.
Then, as we
were taking our seats, all the lights in the room were
suddenly
extinguished, both lamps and wax candles, as though a
mighty rush of
wind had swept through the whole apartment; and when
a match was instantly
struck, there was all the heavy furniture,
sofas,
arm-chairs, tables, cupboards, and large sideboard standing
upside down, as
though turned over noiselessly by some invisible
hands, and not
an ornament of the fragile carved work nor even a
plate broken.
Hardly had we gathered our senses together after this
miraculous
performance, when we heard again someone playing on the
piano a loud
and intelligible piece of music, a long marche de
bravoure this
time. As we rushed with lighted candles to the
instrument (I
mentally counting the persons to ascertain that all
were present),
we found, as we had anticipated, the piano locked,
the last sounds
of the final chords still vibrating in the air from
beneath the
heavy closed lid.
After this,
notwithstanding the late hour, we placed ourselves
around our
large dining-table, and had a séance. The huge family
dining-board
began to shake with great force, and then to move,
sliding rapidly
about the room in every direction, even raising
itself up to
the height of a man. In short, we had all those
manifestations
that never failed when we were alone, i.e. when only
those nearest
and dearest to H. P. B. were present, and none of the
strangers who
came to us attracted by mere curiosity, and often with
a malevolent
and hostile feeling.
Among a mass of
various and striking phenomena that took place on
that memorable
night, I will mention but two more.
And here I must
notice the following question made in those days
whenever my
sister, Madame B sat, to please us, for “communications
through raps”.
We were asked by her to choose what we would have.
“Shall we have
the mediumistic or spook raps, or the raps by
clairvoyant
proxy ? ” she asked.
[To make this
clearer and intelligible, I must give her (Mme.
Blavatsky's)
explanation of the difference.
She never made
a secret that she had been, ever since her childhood,
and until
nearly the age of twenty-five, a very strong medium;
though after
that period, owing to a regular psychological and
physiological
training, she was made to lose this dangerous gift,
and every trace
of mediumship outside her will, or beyond her direct
control, was
overcome. She had two distinct methods of producing
communications
through raps. The one consisted almost entirely in
her being
passive, and permitting the influences to act at their
will, at which
time the brainless Elementals, (the shells would
rarely, if
ever, be allowed to come, owing to the danger of the
intercourse)
chameleon-like, would reflect more or less
characteristically
the thoughts of those present, and follow in a
half-intelligent
way the suggestions found by them in Madame
Blavatsky's
mind. The other method, used very rarely for reasons
connected with
her intense dislike to meddle with really departed
entities, or
rather to enter into their “currents of thought” is
this: — She
would compose herself, and seeking out, with eyes shut,
in the astral
light, that current that preserved the genuine impress
of some
well-known departed entity, she identified herself for the
time being with
it, and guiding the raps made them to spell out that
which she had
in her own mind, as reflected from the astral current.
Thus, if the
rapping spirit pretended to be a Shakespeare, it was
not really that
great personality, but only the echo of the genuine
thoughts that
had once upon a time moved in his brain and
crystallized
themselves, so to say, in his astral sphere whence even
his shell had
departed long ago — the imperishable thoughts alone
remaining. Not
a sentence, not a word spelt by the raps that was not
formed first in
her brain, in its turn the faithful copier of that
which was found
by her spiritual eye in the luminous Record Book of
departed humanity.
The, so to express it, crystallized essence of
the mind of the
once physical brain was there before her spiritual
vision; her
living brain photographed it, and her will dictated its
expression by
guiding the raps which thus became intelligent.]
And though few,
if any, of us then understood clearly what she
meant, yet she
would act either one way or the other, never uniting
the two
methods.
We chose the
former in this instance — the “spook-raps” — as the
easiest to
obtain, and affording us more amusement, and to her less
trouble.
Thus, out of
the many invisible and “ distinguished ” phantom
visitors of
that night, the most active and prominent among them was
the alleged
spirit of Poushkine.
I beg the
reader to remember that we never for a moment believed
that spook to
be really the great poet, whose earthly remains rest
in the
neighbourhood of our Rougodevo, in the monk's territory known
as the “holy
mountain”.
We had been
warned by Mme. Blavatsky, and knew well how much we
could trust to
the communications and conversation of such unseen
visitors. But
the fact of our having chosen for that séance the
“spook raps”,
does not at all interfere with the truth of that other
assertion of
ours, namely, that, whenever we wanted something
genuine, and
resorted to the method of “clairvoyant proxy”, we had
very often
communications of great power and vigor of thought,
profoundly
scientific and remarkable in every way; made not by but
in the spirit
of the great defunct personage in whose name they were
given.
It is only when
we resorted to the “spook raps” that,
notwithstanding
the world-known names of the eminent personages in
which the
goblins of the séance-room love to parade, we got answers
and discourses that
might do honor to a circus clown, but hardly to
a Socrates, a
Cicero, or a Martin Luther.
CHAPTER 5
MM. DE
JELIHOWSKY'S NARRATIVE -CONTINUED-
I REMEMBER that
we were deeply interested in those days in reading
aloud in our
little family circle, the Memoirs of Catherine
Romanovna
Dashkoff, just then published. The interest of this
remarkable
historical work was greatly enhanced to us owing to the
fact that our
reading was very often interrupted by the alleged
spirit of the
authoress herself. The gaps and hiatuses of a
publication,
severely disfigured and curtailed by the censor's pen
and scissors,
were constantly filled up by comparing notes with her
astral records.
By the means of
guided raps — Mme. B. refusing, as usual, to help us
by direct
writing, preferring lazily to rest in her arm-chair — we
received, in
the name of the authoress, innumerable remarks,
additions,
explanations, and refutations. In some cases, her
apparent and
mistaken views in the days when she wrote her memoirs
were corrected
and replaced by more genuine thoughts. [The fact that
many of the
remarks and notes were different in their character from
the original
memoirs, and that errors and mistakes were corrected,
can easily be
explained. The old thoughts of Catherine Romanovna
were expounded
and corrected in the intellectual sphere of Madame B.
The manner and
nature of the expression would not cease to resemble
that of the
author, and, in the astral light, the original of the
work, as conceived
in the brain of the historian, would certainly be
returned in
preference to the mutilated views of the censor; while
the brain of
Madame B would supply the rest.] All such corrections
and additional
matter given, fascinated us deeply by their
profundity,
their wit and humor, often, indeed, with the natural
pathos that was
one of the prominent features of this remarkable
historical
character.
But I must
return to my reminiscences of that memorable night. Thus,
among other
post-mortem visitors, we were entertained on that
evening by A.
Poushkine.
The poet seemed
to be in one of his melancholy and dark moments; and
to our queries,
what was the matter, what made him suffer, and what
we could do for
him, he obliged us with an extemporary poem, which I
preserved,
although its character and style are beneath criticism.
The substance
of it — which is hardly worth translation — was to the
effect that
there was no reason for us to know his secret
sufferings. Why
should we try to know what he may be wishing for ?
He had but one
desire: to rest on the bosom of Death, instead of
which he was
suffering in great darkness for his sins, tortured by
devils, and had
lost all hope of ever reaching the bliss of becoming
a winged
cherub, etc etc..[In the recollection of Mme. Blavatsky,
this was a
genuine spirit-manifestation, i.e. a clumsy
personification
of the great poet by passing shells and spooks,
allowed to
merge into the circle for a few moments. The rhymed
complaint
speaking of hell and devils was the echo of the feelings
and thoughts of
a pious governess present ; most assuredly it was
not any
reflection from Madame Blavatsky's brain, nor would her
admiring
respect for the memory of the greatest Russian poet have
ever allowed her
to make such a blasphemous joke under the cover of
his name.]
“Poor Alexander
Sergeïtch!” exclaimed Colonel Hahn, upon hearing
this wretched
production read; and so saying he rose as though in
search of
something. “ What are you looking for? ” we asked. “My
long pipe! I
have had enough of these cigars, and I cannot find my
pipe ; where
can it be ? ”
“You have just
smoked it, after supper, father”. I replied.
“I did; and now
Helen's spirits must have walked off with it or
hidden it
somewhere.”
“One, two,
three! One, two, three! ” affirmed triple raps around us,
as though
mocking the old gentleman.
“Indeed! Well,
this is a foolish joke. Could not our friend
Poushkine tell
us where he has hidden it ? Do let us know, for life
itself would be
worthless on this earth without my old and faithful
pipe.”
“One, two,
three ! One, two, three ! ” knocked the table.
“Is this you,
Alexander Sergei'tch ? ” we asked.
At this
juncture my sister frowned angrily, and the raps suddenly
stopped.
“No”, she said,
after a moment's pause, “it is somebody else”. And
putting her
hand upon the table she set the raps going again.
“Who is it,
then ? ”
“It is me; your
old orderly, your honor: Voronof.”
“Ah, Voronof!
very glad to meet you again, my good fellow. . . .
Now, try to
remember old times: bring me my pipe.”
“I would be
very happy to do so, your honor, but I am not able;
somebody holds
me fast. But you can take it yourself, your honor.
See, there it
is swinging over your head on the lamp.”
We all raised our
heads. Verily, where a minute before there was
nothing at all,
there was now the huge Turkish pipe, placed
horizontally on
the alabaster shade, and balancing over it with its
two ends
sticking out at both sides of the lamp which hung over the
dining table.
This new
physical demonstration filled with astonishment even those
of us who had
been accustomed to live in a world of marvels for
months. Hardly
a year before we would not have believed even in the
possibility of
what we now regarded as perfectly proved facts.
In the early
part of the year 1859, as above stated, soon after her
return to
Russia, Mme. Blavatsky went to live with her father and
sister in a
country house of a village belonging to Mme. Jelihowsky
at
Rougodevo.[In the district of Novorgeff, in the Government of
Pskoff - about
200 versts from St Peterburg. It was at that time a
private
property, a village of several hundred serfs, but soon after
emancipation of
the land passed into other hands.]
It had been
bought only a year before by my deceased husband from
parties
entirely unknown to us till then, and through an agent; and
therefore no
one knew anything of their antecedents, or even who
they really
were. It was quite unexpectedly that, owing to the
sudden death of
M. Yahontoff, I decided to settle in it for a time,
with my two
baby sons, our father, and my two sisters, H. P.
Blavatsky and
Lisa, the youngest, our father's only daughter by
another wife.
I could
therefore have no acquaintance with our neighbors or the
landed
proprietors of other villages, or with the relatives of the
late owner of
my property. All I knew was, that Rougodevo had been
bought from a
person named Statkovsky, the husband of the
granddaughter
of its late owners — a family named Shousherin. Who
were those
Shousherins, the hereditary proprietors of those
picturesque
hills and mountains, of the dense pine forests, the
lovely lakes,
our old park, and nearly as old a mansion, from the
top of which one
could take a sweeping view of the country for 30
versts around,
its present proprietors could have no conception
whatever; least
of all, H. P. B., who had been out of Russia for
over ten years,
and had just then returned.
It was on the
second or third evening after our arrival at
Rougodevo. We
were two of us walking along the side of the
flower-beds, in
front of the house.
The
ground-floor windows looked right into the flower-garden, while
those of its
three other sides were surrounded with large, old,
shaded grounds.
We had settled
on the first floor, which consisted of nine or ten
large rooms,
while our elderly father occupied a suite of rooms on
the ground
floor, on the right-hand side of the long entrance hall.
The rooms
opposite to his, on the left side, were uninhabited, and
in the
expectation of future visitors, stood empty, with their doors
securely
locked. The rooms occupied by the servants were at the back
of the mansion,
and could not be seen from where we were. The
windows of the
empty apartment came out in bright relief, especially
the room at the
left angle ; its windows, reflecting the rays of the
setting sun in
full glory, seemed illuminated through and through
with the
effulgence of the bright sunbeams.
We were slowly
walking up and down the gravel walk under the
windows, and
each time that we approached the angle of the house, my
sister (H. P.
B.) looked into the windows with a strange searching
glance, and
lingered on that spot, a puzzling expression and smile
settling upon
her face.
Remarking at
last her furtive glances and smiles, I wanted to know
what it was
that so attracted her attention in the empty room ?
“Shall I tell ?
Well, if you promise not to be frightened, then I
may”, she
answered hesitatingly.
“What reason
have I to be frightened ! Thank heaven, I see nothing
myself. Well,
and what do you see? Is it, as usual, visitors from
the other world
? ”
“I could not
tell you now, Vera, for I do not know them. But if my
conjectures are
right, they do seem, if not quite the dwellers
themselves, at
least the shadows of such dwellers from another, but
certainly not
from our, world. I recognize this by certain signs.”
“What signs ?
Are their faces those of dead men ? ” I asked, very
nervously, I
confess.
“Oh, no! ” she
said; “for in such a case I should see them as dead
people in their
beds, or in their coffins. Such sights I am familiar
with. But these
men are walking about, and look just as if alive.
They have no
mortal reason to remind me of their death, since I do
not know who
they are, and never knew them alive. But they do look
so very
antiquated. Their dresses are such as we see only on old
family
portraits. One, however, is an exception.”
“How does he
look ? ”
“ Well, this
one looks as though he were a German student or an
artist. He
wears a black velvet blouse, with a wide leather sash. .
. . Long hair
hanging in heavy waves down his back and shoulders.
This one is
quite a young man. ... He stands apart, and seems to
look quite in a
different direction from where the others are.”
We had now
again approached the angle of the house, and halting,
were both
looking into the empty room through the bright window
panes. It was
brilliantly lit up by the sunbeams of the setting sun,
but the room was
empty evidently, but only for one of us. For my
sister it was
full of the images probably of its long-departed late
inmates.
Mme. Blavatsky
went on looking thoughtfully, and describing what she
saw.
“There, there,
he looks in our direction. See ! ” she muttered, “ he
looks as though
he is startled at seeing us! Now he is there no
longer. How
strange! he seems to have melted away in that sunbeam !
”
“Let us call
them out to-night, and ask them who they are”, I
suggested.
“We may, but
what of that ? Can any one of them be relied upon or
believed ? I
would pay any price to be able to command and control
as they, . . .
some personages I might name, do; but I cannot. I
must fail for
years to come”, she added, regretfully.
“Who are they ?
Whom do you mean ? ”
“Those who know
and can — not mediums”, she contemptuously added.
“But look,
look, what a sight! Oh, see what an ugly monster! Who can
it be ? ”
“Now, what's
the use in your telling me ' look, look' and see ? How
can I look when
I see nothing, not being a clairvoyant as you are. .
. . Tell me,
how does that other figure appear ? Only if it is
something too
dreadful, then you had better stop”, I added, feeling
a cold chill
creeping over me. And, seeing she was going to speak, I
cried out,
“Now, pray do not say anything more if it is too
dreadful”.
Don't be
afraid, there is nothing dreadful in it, it only seemed to
me so. They are
there now — one, however, I can see very hazily; it
is a woman, and
she seems to be always merging into and again
emerging from
that shadow in the corner. Oh, there's an old, old
lady standing
there and looking at me, as though she were alive.
What a nice,
kind, fat old thing she must have been. She has a white
frilled cap on
her head, a white kerchief crossed over her
shoulders, a
short grey narrow dress, and a checked apron.”
“Why, you are
painting some fancy portrait of the Flemish school”,
laughed I.
“Now, look here, I am really afraid that you are
mystifying me.”
“I swear I am
not. But I am so sorry that you cannot see.”
“Thanks; but I
am not at all sorry. Peace be upon all those ghosts !
How horrible !
”
“Not at all
horrible. They are all quite nice and natural, with the
exception,
maybe, of that old man.”
“Gracious !
what old man ? ”
“A very, very
funny old man. Tall, gaunt, and with such a suffering
look upon his
worn-out face. And then it is his nails, that puzzle
me. What
terrible long nails he has, or claws rather; why, they must
be over an inch
long!”
“Heaven help
us! ” I could not help shrieking out. “Whom are you
describing?
Surely it must be” — I was going to say, “the devil
himself”, but
stopped short, overcome by a shudder.
Unable to
control my terror, I hastily left the place under the
window and
stood at a safe distance.
The sun had
gone down, but the gold and crimson flush of its
departing rays
lingered still, tinting everything with gold — the
house, the old
trees of the garden, and the pond in the background.
The colors of the
flowers seemed doubly attractive in this brilliant
light; and only
the angle of the old house, which cut the golden hue
in two, seemed
to cast a gloomy shadow on the glorious scene. H. P.
Blavatsky
remained alone behind that obscure angle, overshadowed by
the thick
foliage of an oak, while I sought a safe refuge in the
glow of the
large open space near the flower-beds, and kept urging
her to come out
of her nook and enjoy instead the lovely panorama,
and look at the
far-off wooded hills, with their tops still glowing
in the golden
hue, on the quiet smooth ponds and the large dormant
lake,
reflecting in its mirror-like waters the green chaotic
confusion of
its banks, and the ancient chapel slumbering in its
nest of birch.
My sister came
out at last, pale and thoughtful. She was determined,
she said, to
learn who it was whom she had just seen. She felt sure
the shadowy
figures were the lingering reflections of people who had
inhabited at
some time those empty rooms. “I am puzzled to know who
the old man can
be”, she kept saying. “Why should he have allowed
his nails to
grow to such an extraordinary Chinese length ? And then
another
peculiarity, he wears a most strange-looking black cap, very
high, and
something similar to the klobouk of our monks.” [The round
tiara, covered
with a long black veil, worn by the orthodox Greek
monks.]
“Do let these
horrid phantoms alone. Do not think of them! ”
“Why ? It is
very interesting, the more so since I now see them so
rarely. I wish
I were still a real medium, as the latter, I am told,
are constantly
surrounded by a host of ghosts, and that I see them
now but
occasionally, not as I used to years ago, when a child. . .
. Last night,
however, I saw in Lisa's room a tall gentleman with
long whiskers.”
“What! in the
nursery room near the children ? Oh, please, drive him
away from
there, at least. I do hope the ghost has only followed you
there, and has
not made a permanent abode of that place. How you can
keep so cool, and
feel no fear when you see, is something I could
never
understand ! ”
“And why should
I fear them ? They are harmless in most cases,
unless
encouraged. Then I am too accustomed to such sights to
experience even
a passing uneasiness. If anything, I feel disgust,
and a
contemptuous pity for the poor spooks! In fact, I feel
convinced that
all of us mortals are constantly surrounded by
millions of
such shadows, the last mortal image left of themselves
by their
ex-proprietors.”
“Then you think
that these ghosts are all of them the reflection of
the dead ? ”
“I am convinced
of it — in fact, / know it ! ”
“ Why, then, in
such a case, are we not constantly surrounded by
those who were
so near and dear to us, by our loved relatives and
friends ? Why
are we allowed to be pestered only by a host of
strangers, to
suffer the uninvited presence of the ghosts of people
whom we never
knew, nor do we care for them ? ”
“A difficult
query to answer! How often, how earnestly, have I tried
to see and
recognize among the shadows that haunted me some one of
our dear
relatives, or even a friend! . . . Stray acquaintances, and
distant
relatives, for whom I care little, I have occasionally
recognized, but
they never seemed to pay any attention to me, and
whenever I saw
them it was always unexpected and independently of my
will. How I
longed from the bottom of my soul, how I have tried —
all in vain !
As much as I can make out of it, it is not the living
who attract the
dead, but rather the localities they have inhabited,
those places
where they have lived and suffered, and where their
personalities
and outward forms have been most impressed on the
surrounding
atmosphere. Say, shall we call some of your old
servants, those
who have been born and lived in this place all their
lives ? I feel
sure that, if we describe to them some of the forms I
have just seen,
that they will recognize in them people they knew,
and who have
died here.”
The suggestion
was good, and it was immediately put to the test; we
took our seats
on the steps of the entrance door, and sent a servant
to inquire who
were the oldest serfs in the compound. An ancient
tailor, named
Timothy, who lived for years exempt from any
obligatory work
on account of his services and old age, and the
chief gardener,
Oulyan, a man about sixty, soon made their
appearance. I
felt at first a little embarrassed, and put some
commonplace
questions, asking who it was who built one of the
outhouses near
by. Then I put the direct query, whether there had
ever lived in
the house an old man, very strange to look at, with a
high black
head-gear, terribly long nails, wearing habitually a long
grey coat,
etc., etc.
No sooner had I
given this description than the two old peasants,
interrupting
each other, and with great volubility, exclaimed
affirmatively
that they “Knew well who it was whom the young
mistress
described.”
“Don't we know
him ? of course we do — why, it is our late barrin
(master)! Just
as he used to be — our deceased master Nikolay
Mihaylovitch !
”
“Statkowsky ? ”
“No, no,
mistress. Statkowsky was the young master, and he is not
dead; he was
our nominal master only, owing to his marriage with
Natalya
Nikolavna — our late master's, Nikolay Mihaylovitch
Shousherin's
granddaughter. And, as you have described him, it is
him, for sure —
our late master, Shousherin.”
My sister and I
interchanged a furtive glance. “We have heard of
him”, said I,
unwilling to take the servants into our confidence, ”
but did not
feel sure it was he. But why was he wearing such a
strange-looking
cap, and, as it seemed, never cut his nails ? ”
“This was owing
to a disease, mistress — an incurable disease, as we
were told, that
the late master caught while in Lithuania, where he
had resided for
years. It is called the Koltoun,[The “plica
polonica”, a
terrible skin complaint, very common in Lithuania, and
contracted only
in its climate. The hair, as is well known, is
grievously
diseased, nor can nails on the fingers and toes be
touched, their
cutting leading to a bleeding to death] if you have
heard of it. He
could neither cut his hair nor pare his nails, and
had to cover
constantly his head with a tall velvet cap, like a
priest's cap.”
“Well, and how
did your mistress, Mrs Shousherin, look ? ”
The tailor gave
a description in no way resembling the Dutch-looking
old lady seen
by Mme. Blavatsky. Further cross-examination elicited,
however, that
the woman, in her semi-Flemish costume, was Mina
Ivanovna, a
German housekeeper, who had resided in the house for
over twenty
years; and the young man, who looked like a German
student in his
velvet blouse, was really such a student who had come
from
Göttingen. He was the youngest brother of Mr Statkowsky, who
had died in Rougodevo,
of consumption, about three years before our
arrival. This
was not all, moreover. We found out that the corner
room in which
H. P. B. had seen on that evening, as she has later
on, on many
other occasions, the phantoms of all these deceased
personages of
Rougodevo, had been made to serve for every one of
them, either as
a death-chamber when they had breathed their last,
or had been
converted for their benefit into a mortuary-chamber when
they had been
laid out awaiting burial. It was from this suite of
apartments, in
which their bodies had invariably passed from three
to five days,
that they had been carried away into yonder old
chapel, on the
other side of the lake, that was so well seen, and
had been
examined by us from the windows of our sitting-room.
Since that day,
not only H. P. B., but even her little sister, Lisa,
a child of nine
years old, saw more than once strange forms gliding
noiselessly
along the corridors of the old house, so full of
lingering
events of the past, and of the images of those who had
passed away
from it. The child, strange to say, feared the restless
ghosts no more
than her elder sister; the former taking them
innocently for
living persons, and concerned but with the
interesting
problem, “where they had come from, who they were, and
why no one
except her ' old' sister and herself ever consented to
notice them.”
She thought
this very rude — the little lady. Luckily for the child,
and owing
perhaps to the efforts of her sister, Mme. Blavatsky, the
faculty left
her very soon, never to return during her subsequent
life. [The
young lady is now over thirty, and was saying but last
year how lucky
it was for her that she no longer saw these
trans-terrestrial
visitors.] As for Helena Petrovna, it never left
her from her
very childhood. So strong is this weird faculty in her
that it is a
rare case when she has to learn of the death of a
relative, a
friend, or even an old servant of the family from a
letter. We have
given up advising her of any such sad events, the
dead invariably
precede the news, and tell her themselves of their
demise; and we
receive a letter in which she describes the way she
saw this or
that departed person, at the same time, and often before
the post
carrying our notification could have reached her, as it
will be shown
further on.
[The pamphlet
already referred to, Personal and Family
Reminiscences,
by Mme. Jelihowsky, may here be laid under
contribution in
reference to incidents taking place at the period we
are now dealing
with.]
Having settled
in our property at Rougodevo, we found ourselves as
though suddenly
transplanted into an enchanted world, in which we
got gradually
so accustomed to see self-moving furniture, things
transferred
from one place to another, in the most inexplicable way,
and to the
strong interference with, and presence in, our
matter-of-fact
daily life of some unknown to us, yet intelligent
power, that we
all ended by paying very little attention to it,
though the
phenomenal facts struck everyone else as being simply
miraculous.
Verily, habit
becomes second nature with men! Our father, who had
premised by
saying that he gave permission to everyone to
incarcerate him
in a lunatic asylum on that day that he would
believe that a
table could move, fly, or become rooted to the spot
at the desire
of those present, now passed his days and parts of his
nights talking
with “Helen's spirits”, as he called it. They
informed him of
numerous events and details pertaining to the lives
of his
ancestors, the Counts Hahn von Rottenstern Hahn; offered to
get back for
him certain title-deeds, and told us such interesting
legends and
witty anecdotes, that unbelievers as well as believers
could hardly help
feeling interested. It often happened that my
sister, being
occupied with her reading, we — our father, the
governess, and
myself — unwilling to disturb her, communicated with
the invisible
power, mentally and in silence, simply thinking out
our questions,
and writing down the letters rapped out either on the
walls or the
table near us. ... I remember having had a remarkable
phenomenon of
this kind, at a station in the Swyatee Goree (Holy
Mountains),
where the poet A. Poushkine is buried, and when my
sister was fast
asleep. Things were told to me, of which positively
no one in this
world could know anything, I alone being the
depositary of
these secrets, together with an old gentleman living
for years on
his far-away property. I had not seen him for six
years; my
sister had never heard of him, as I had made his
acquaintance
two years after she had left Russia. During that mental
conversation,
names, dates, and the appellation of his property were
given to me. I
had thought and asked, Where is he who loved me more
than anyone on
this earth ? Easy to know that I had my late husband
in my mind.
Instead of that, I received in answer a name I had long
forgotten.
First I felt perplexed, then indignant, and finally the
idea became so
comical that I burst out in a fit of laughter, that
awoke my
sister. How can you prove to me that you do not lie ? I
asked my
invisible companions. Remember the second volume of Byron's
poetry, was the
answer I received. I became cold with horror ! No
one had ever
been told of it, and I myself had forgotten for years
that
circumstance which was now told to me in all its details,
namely, that
being in the habit of sending books, and a series of
English
classics for me to read, that gentleman, old enough to be my
grandfather,
had thought of offering marriage to me, and found no
better means
for it than by inserting in Volume II. of Byron's works
a letter to
that effect. ... Of course my “informers”, whoever they
were, played upon
me a wicked trick by reminding me of these facts,
yet their
omniscience had been brilliantly proven to me by them in
this case.
It is most
extraordinary that our silent conversations with that
intelligent
force that had ever manifested itself in my sister's
presence were
found by us the most successful during her sleep, or
when she was
very ill. Once a young physician, who visited us for
the first time,
got so terribly frightened at the noises, and the
moving about of
things in her room when she was on her bed lying
cold and
senseless, that he nearly fainted himself. Such
tragi-comical
scenes happened very often in our house, but the most
remarkable of
all such have already been told in the pages of the
Rebus, in 1883,
as having taken place during her two years' stay
with us. As an
eye-witness, I can only once more testify to all the
facts
described, without entering upon the question of the agency
that produced
them, or the nature of the agents. But I may recall
some additional
inexplicable phenomena that occurred at that time,
testified to by
other members of our family, though some of them I
have not
witnessed myself. All the persons living on the premises,
with the
household members, saw constantly, often in full noonday,
vague human
shadows walking about the rooms, appearing in the
garden, in the
flower-beds in front of the house, and near the old
chapel. My
father (once the greatest sceptic), Mademoiselle
Leontine, the
governess of our younger sister, told me many a time,
that they had
just met and seen such figures quite plainly.
Moreover,
Leontine found very often in her locked drawers, and her
trunks, some
very mysterious letters, containing family secrets
known to her
alone, over which she wept, reading them incessantly
during whole
weeks; and I am forced to confess that once or twice
the events
foretold in them came to pass as they had been prophesied
to us.
[Some comments
on various parts of the foregoing narrative,
furnished by
Mme. Blavatsky herself, will here be read with
interest. She
says she has tried with the most famous mediums to
evoke and
communicate with those dearest to her, and whose loss she
had deplored,
but could never succeed.“Communications and messages”
she certainly
did receive, and got their signatures, and on two
occasions their
materialized forms, but the communications were
couched in a
vague and gushing language quite unlike the style she
knew so well.
Their signatures, as she has ascertained, were
obtained from
her own brain; and on no occasion, when the presence
of a relation
was announced and the form described by the medium,
who was
ignorant of the fact that Mme. Blavatsky could see as well
as any of them,
has she recognized the “spirit” of the alleged
relative in the
host of spooks and elementaries that surrounded them
(when the
medium was a genuine one of course). Quite the reverse.
For she often
saw, to her disgust, how her own recollections and
brain-images
were drawn from her memory and disfigured in the
confused
amalgamation that took place between their reflection in
the medium's
brain, which instantly sent them out, and the shells
which sucked
them in like a sponge and objectivised them — “a
hideous shape
with a mask on in my sight”, she tells us. “Even the
materialized
form of my uncle at the Eddys' was the picture; it was
I who sent it
out from my own mind, as I had come out to make
experiments
without telling it to anyone. It was like an empty outer
envelope of my
uncle that I seemed to throw on the medium's astral
body. I saw and
followed the process, I knew Will Eddy was a genuine
medium, and the
phenomenon as real as it could be, and therefore,
when days of
trouble came for him, I defended him in the papers. In
short, for all the
years of experience in America, I never succeeded
in identifying,
in one single instance, those I wanted to see. It is
only in my
dreams and personal visions that I was brought in direct
contact with my
own blood relatives and friends, those between whom
and myself
there had been a strong mutual spiritual love”. Her
conviction
therefore, based as much on her personal experience as on
that of the
teachings of the occult doctrine, is as follows: — “For
certain
psycho-magnetic reasons, too long to be explained here, the
shells of those
spirits who loved us best will not, with a very few
exceptions,
approach us. They have no need of it since, unless they
were
irretrievably wicked, they have us with them in Devachan, that
state of bliss
in which the monads are surrounded with all those,
and that, which
they have loved — objects of spiritual aspirations
as well as
human entities. ' Shells ' once separated from their
higher
principles have nought in common with the latter. They are
not drawn to their
relatives and friends, but rather to those with
whom their
terrestrial, sensuous affinities are the strongest. Thus
the shell of a
drunkard will be drawn to one who is either a
drunkard
already or has a germ of this passion in him, in which case
they will
develop it by using his organs to satisfy their craving;
one who died
full of sexual passion for a still living partner will
have its shell
drawn to him or her, etc.. We Theosophists, and
especially
occultists, must never lose sight of the profound axiom
of the Esoteric
Doctrine which teaches us that it is we, the living,
who are drawn
towards the spirits — but that the latter can never,
even though
they would, descend to us, or rather into our sphere.”
CHAPTER 6
MM. DE JELIHOWSKY'S
NARRATIVE - (CONTINUED)
THE quiet life
of the sisters at Rougodevo was brought to an end by
a terrible
illness which befell Mme. Blavatsky. Years before,
perhaps during
her solitary travels in the steppes of Asia, she had
received a
remarkable wound. We could never learn how she had met
with it.
Suffice to say that the profound wound reopened
occasionally,
and during that time she suffered intense agony, often
bringing on
convulsions and a death-like trance. The sickness used
to last from
three to four days, and then the wound would heal as
suddenly as it
had reopened, as though an invisible hand had closed
it, and there
would remain no trace of her illness. But the
affrighted
family was ignorant at first of this strange peculiarity,
and their
despair and fear were great indeed. A physician was sent
for to the
neighboring town; but he proved of little use, not so
much indeed
through his ignorance of surgery, as owing to a
remarkable
phenomenon which left him almost powerless to act through
sheer terror at
what he had witnessed. He had hardly examined the
wound of the
patient prostrated before him in complete
unconsciousness,
when suddenly he saw a large, dark hand between his
own and the
wound he was going to anoint. The gaping wound was near
the heart, and
the hand kept slowly moving at several intervals from
the neck down
to the waist. To make his terror worse, there began
suddenly in the
room such a terrific noise, such a chaos of noises
and sounds from
the ceiling, the floor, window-panes, and every bit
of furniture in
the apartment, that he begged he might not be left
alone in the
room with the insensible patient.
In the spring
of 1860 both sisters left Rougodevo for the Caucasus,
on a visit to their
grandparents, whom they had not seen for long
years.
During the
three weeks' journey from Moscow to Tiflis, performed in
a coach with
post horses, there occurred many a strange
manifestation.
At Zadonsk —
the territory of the Cossack army of the Don, a place
of pilgrimage
in Russia, where the holy relics of St Tihon are
preserved — we
halted for rest, and I prevailed upon my lazy sister
to accompany me
to the church to hear the mass. We had learned that
on that day
church service would be conducted near the said relics
by the then
Metropolitan [One of the three “Popes” of Russia, so to
say, the
highest of the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Orthodox
Greek Church]
of Kiew (at present, in 1884, the Metropolitan of St
Petersburg),
the famous and learned Isidore, [Now a man past ninety
years of age]
whom both of us had well known in our childhood and
youth at
Tiflis, where he was for so many years the Exarch [The
spiritual chief
of all the archbishops, and the head of the Church
in Georgia] of
Georgia (Caucasus). He had been a friend of our
family for
years, and had often visited us. During service the
venerable old
man recognized us, and immediately dispatched a monk
after us, with
an invitation to visit him at the Lord Archbishop's
house. He
received us with great kindness. But hardly had we taken
our seats in
the drawing-room of the Holy Metropolitan than a
terrible
hubbub, noises, and loud raps in every conceivable
direction burst
suddenly upon us with a force to which even we were
hardly
accustomed; every bit of furniture in the big audience room
cracked and
thumped — from the huge chandelier under the ceiling,
every one of
whose crystal drops seemed to become endowed with
self-motion, down
to the table, and under the very elbows of his
holiness who
was leaning on it.
Useless to say
how confused and embarrassed we looked — though truth
compels me to
say that my irreverent sister's embarrassment was
tempered with a
greater expression of fun than I would have wished
for. The
Metropolitan Isidore saw at a glance our confusion, and
understood,
with his habitual sagacity, the true cause of it. He had
read a good
deal about the so-called “spiritual” manifestations, and
on seeing a
huge armchair gliding toward him, laughed, and felt a
good deal
interested in this phenomenon. He inquired which of us two
sisters had
such a strange power, and wanted to know when and how it
had begun to
manifest itself. We explained to him all the
particulars as
well as we could, and after listening very
attentively, he
suddenly asked Mme. Blavatsky if she would permit
him to offer
her “invisible” a mental question. Of course, his
holiness was
welcome to it, she answered. We do not feel at liberty
to publish what
the question was. But when his very serious query
had received an
immediate answer — precise and to the very point he
wanted it to be
— his holiness was so struck with amazement, and
felt so anxious
and interested in the phenomenon, that he would not
let us go, and
detained us with him for over three hours. He had
even forgotten
his dinner. Giving orders not to be interrupted, the
venerable
gentleman continued to hold conversation with his unseen
visitors,
expressing all the while his profound astonishment at
their
“all-knowledge”. [Vseznaïstvo - the word used can hardly be
translated by
the term omniscience; it is an attribute of a less
absolute
character, and refers to the things of the earth.]
When bidding
good-bye to us, the venerable old man blessed the
travelers, and,
turning to Mme. Blavatsky, addressed to her these
parting words:
—
“As for you,
let not your heart be troubled by the gift you are
possessed of,
nor let it become a source of misery to you hereafter,
for it was
surely given to you for some purpose, and you could not
be held
responsible for it. Quite the reverse ! for if you but use
it with
discrimination, you will be enabled to do much good to your
fellow-creatures.”
These are the
authentic words of His Holiness, Isidore, the
Metropolitan of
our Orthodox Greek Church of Russia, addressed by
him in my
presence to my sister Mme. Blavatsky. [The Russian Censor
has not allowed
this letter to appear in the Rebus in the original.]
At one of the
stations where we had to change horses, the
station-master
told us very brutally that there were no fresh horses
for us, and
that we had to wait. The sun had not yet gone down, it
was full moon,
the roads were good, and with all this, we were made
to lose several
hours ! This was provoking. Nevertheless there was
nothing to be
done, the more so as the station-master, who was too
drunk to be
reasoned with, had found fit to disappear, and refused
to come and
talk with us. We had to take the little unpleasantness
as easily as we
could, and settle ourselves as best we knew how for
the night; but
even here we found an impediment. The small
station-house
had but one room for the travelers near a hot and
dirty kitchen,
and even that one was locked and bolted, and no one
would open the
door for us without special orders. Mme. Blavatsky
was beginning
to lose patience.
“Well, this is
fine ! ” she went on. “We are refused horses, and
even the room
we are entitled to is shut for us ! Why is it shut ?
Now, I want to
know and insist upon it”. But there was no one to
tell us the
reason why, for the station-house seemed utterly empty,
and there was
not a soul to be seen about. H. P. B. approached the
little low
windows of the locked room, and flattened her face
against the
window panes. “A-ha!” she suddenly exclaimed; “that's
what it is !
Very well, then, and now I can force the drunken brute
to give us
horses in five minutes.”
And she started
off in search of the station-master. Curious to know
what secret there
was in the mysterious room, I approached the
window in my
turn, and tried to fathom its unknown regions. But
although the
inside of the room was perfectly visible through the
window, yet my
uninitiated eyes could see nothing in it save the
ordinary
furniture of a dirty station-house, dirty as they all are.
Nevertheless,
to my delight and surprise, ten minutes had not passed
when three
excellent and strong post-horses were brought out, under
the supervision
of the station-master himself, who, pale and
confused, had
become, as though by magic, polite and full of
obsequiousness.
In a few minutes our carriage was ready, and we
continued our
journey.
To my question
what sorcery had helped her to achieve such change in
the drunken
station-master, who but a moment before would pay no
attention to
us, Mme. Blavatsky only laughed.
“Profit, and
ask no questions!” she said. “Why should you be so
inquisitive ? ”
It was but on the following day that she
condescended to
tell me that the wretched station-master must have
most certainly
taken her for a witch. It appears that upon finding
him in a
back-yard, she had shouted to him that the person whose
body had been
just standing in a coffin in the “travelers' room” was
there again,
and asked him not to detain us, for we would otherwise
insist upon our
right to enter into the room, and would disturb her
spirit thereby.
And when the man upon hearing this opened his eyes,
without
appearing to understand what she was referring to, Mme.
Blavatsky hastened
then to tell him that she was speaking of his
deceased wife,
whom he had just buried, and who was there, and would
be there, in
that room until we had gone away. She then proceeded to
describe the
ghost in such a minute way that the unfortunate widower
became as pale
as death itself, and hurried away to order fresh
horses !
Some
interesting details concerning Mme. Blavatsky's family home at
Tiflis have
been published quite lately in a Russian memoir,
“Reminiscences
of Prince A. T. Bariatinsky”, by General P. S.
Nikolaeff,
formerly his aide-de-camp at Tiflis. This memoir appears
in the
Historical Vyestnick (Messenger], a Russian magazine of high
repute,
dedicated, as its name shows, to historical Notes, Memoirs,
and
Biographies. Referring to the family of the Fadeefs, General
Nikolaeff,
writing of a period coincident with that of Mme.
Blavatsky's
visit to Tiflis, says: —
“They were
living in those years in the ancient mansion of the
Princes
Tchavtchavadze, the great building itself carrying the
imprint of
something weird or peculiar about it — something that
carried one
back to the epoch of Catherine the Great. A long, lofty,
and gloomy hall
was hung with the family portraits of the Fadeefs
and the Princes
Dolgorouky. Further on was a drawing-room, its walls
covered with
Gobelin tapestry, a present from the Empress Catherine,
and near at
hand was the apartment of Mademoiselle N. A. Fadeef — in
itself one of
the most remarkable of private museums. The collection
gathered into
this museum attracted attention by their great
variety. There
were brought together the arms and weapons from all
the countries
of the world; ancient crockery, cups, and goblets,
archaic house
utensils, Chinese and Japanese idols, mosaics and
images of the Byzantine
epoch, Persian and Turkish carpets, and
fabrics worked
with gold and silver, statues, pictures, paintings,
petrified
fossils, and, finally, a very rare and most precious
library.
“The
emancipation of the serfs had altered in no way the daily life
of the Fadeefs.
The whole enormous host of their valetaille
(ex-serfs),
[Forty men and women; and this for twenty-two years in
Tiflis, where
old General Fadeef was one of the three Imperial
Councillors on
the council under the Viceroys from Prince Porontzoff
to the Grand
Duke Michael] having remained with the family as before
their freedom,
only now receiving wages ; and all went on as before
with the
members of that family — that is to say, luxuriously and
plentifully (it
means in their usual hospitable and open way of
living). I
loved to pass my evenings in that home. At precisely a
quarter to
eleven o'clock, the old general, brushing along the
parquets with
his warmly muffled-up feet, retired to his apartments.
At that same
moment, hurriedly and in silence, the supper was
brought in on
trays, and served in the interior rooms; and
immediately
after this the drawing-room doors would be closely shut,
and an animated
conversation take place on every topic. Modern
literature was
reviewed and criticized, contemporary social
questions from
Russian life discussed; at one time it was the
narratives of
some visitor, a foreign traveler, or an account given
of a recent
skirmish by one of its heroes, some sunburnt officer
just returned
from the battlefield (in the Caucasian Mountains),
would be
eagerly listened to; at another time the antiquated old
Spanish-mason
(then an officer in the Russian army), Quartano, would
drop in and
give us thrilling stories from the wars of Napoleon the
Great. Or,
again, 'Radda Bay' — H. P. Blavatsky, the granddaughter
of General A.
M. Fadeef — would put in an appearance, and was made
to call forth
from her past some stormy episode of her American life
and travels ;
when the conversation would be sure to turn suddenly
upon the mystic
subjects, and she herself commence to ' evoke
spirits.' And
then the tall candles would begin to burn low, hardly
flickering
toward the end, the human figures on the Gobelin tapestry
would seem to
awaken and move, and each of us feel queer from an
involuntary
creeping sensation; and this generally lasted until the
eastern portion
of the sky began itself to pale, on the dark face of
the southern
night.”
Mme. Blavatsky
resided at Tiflis less than two years, and not more
than three in
the Caucasus. The last year she passed roaming about
in Imeretia,
Georgia, and Mingrelia. Throughout the Trans-Caucasian
country, and
all along the coasts of the Black Sea, the various
peoples,
notwithstanding that their Christian persuasion dates from
the fourth
century A.D., are as superstitious as any Pagan,
especially the
half-savage, warlike Apkhasians, the Imeretenes, and
the Mingrelians
— the descendants, perhaps, of those ancient Greeks
who came with
Jason in search of the Golden Fleece; for, according
to historical
legend, it is the site of the archaic Colchide, and
the river Rion
(Pharsis) rolled once upon a time its rapid waves
upon golden
sand and ore instead of the modern gravel and stones.
Therefore it
was but natural that the princes and the landed
“noblemen”, who
live in their “castles” scattered through, and stuck
like nests in
thick foliage, in the dense woods and forests of
Mingrelia and
Imeretia, and who, hardly half a century back, were
nearly all
half-brigands when not full-blown highwaymen, who are
fanatical as
Neapolitan monks, and ignorant as Italian noblemen —
that they
should, we say, have viewed such a character as was then
Mme. Blavatsky
in the light of a witch, when not in that of a
beneficent magician.
As, later in life, wherever she went, her
friends in
those days were many, but her enemies still more
numerous. If
she cured and helped those who believed themselves
sincerely
bewitched, it was only to make herself cruel enemies of
those who were
supposed to have bewitched and spoiled the victims.
Refusing the
presents and “thanks” of those she relieved of the
“evil eye” —
she rejected, at the same time, with equal contempt,
the bribes
offered by their enemies. No one, at any rate, and
whatever her
other faults may be, has succeeded in showing her a
mercenary
character, or one bent upon money-making for any motive.
Thus, while
people of the class of the Princes Gouriel, and of the
Princes Dadiani
and Abashedsé, were ranked among her best friends,
some others —
all those who had a family hatred for the above named
— were, of
course, her sworn enemies. In those days, we believe even
now, these
countries — especially Mingrelia and Imeretia — were
regular
hot-beds of titled paupers; of princes, descendants of
deposed and
conquered sovereigns, and feud raged among them as
during the
Middle Ages. These were and have remained her enemies.,
Some years
later, to these were added all the bigots, church-goers,
missionaries,
to say nothing of American and English spiritualists,
French
spiritists, and their host of mediums. Stories after stories
were invented
of her, circulated and accepted by all, except those
who knew her
well — as facts. Calumny was rife, and her enemies now
hesitate at no
falsehood that can injure her character.
She defied them
all, and would submit to no restraint; would stoop
to adopt no
worldly method of propitiating public opinion. She
avoided
society, showing her scorn of its idols, and was therefore
treated as a
dangerous iconoclast. All her sympathies went toward,
and with, that
tabooed portion of humanity which society pretends to
ignore and
avoid, while secretly running after its more or less
renowned
members — the necromancers, the obsessed, the possessed,
and such like
mysterious personages. The native Koodiani (magicians,
sorcerers),
Persian thaumaturgists, and old Armenian hags — healers
and
fortune-tellers — were the first she generally sought out and
took under her
protection. Finally public opinion became furious,
and society —
that mysterious somebody in general, and nobody in
particular —
made an open levee of arms against one of its own
members who
dared to defy its time-hallowed laws, and act as no
respectable
person would — namely, roaming in the forests alone, on
horseback, and
preferring smoky huts and their dirty inmates to
brilliant
drawing-rooms and their frivolous denizens.
Her occult
powers all this while, instead of weakening, became every
day stronger,
and she seemed finally to subject to her direct will
every kind of
manifestation. The whole country was talking of her.
The
superstitious Gooriel and Mingrelian nobility began very soon to
regard her as a
magician, and people came from afar off to consult
her about their
private affairs. She had long since given up
communication
through raps, and preferred — what was a far more
rapid and
satisfactory method — to answer people either verbally or
by means of
direct writing. [This was done always in full
consciousness,
and simply, as she explained, watching people's
thoughts as
they evolved out of their head in spiral luminous smoke,
sometimes in
jets of what might be taken for some radiant material,
and settled in
distinct pictures and images around them. Often such
thoughts and
answers to them would find themselves impressed in her
own brain,
couched in words and sentences in the same way as
original
thoughts do. But, so far as we are all able to understand,
the former visions
are always more trustworthy, as they are
independent and
distinct from the seer’s own impressions, belonging
to pure
clairvoyance, not “thought transference”, which is a process
always liable
to get mixed up with one’s own more vivid mental
impressions.]
At times, during such process, Mme Blavatsky seemed to
fall into a
kind of coma, or magnetic sleep, with eyes wide open,
though even
then her hand never ceased to move, and continued its
writing.[“Very
naturally”, she explains, “since it was neither
magnetic
sleep", nor coma, but simply a state of intense
concentration,
an attention only too necessary during such
concentration,
when the least distraction leads to a mistake. People
knowing but of
mediumistic clairvoyance, and not of our philosophy
and mode of
operation, often fall into such error”.] When thus
answering
mental questions, the answers were rarely unsatisfactory.
Generally they
astonished the querists — friends and enemies.
Meanwhile
sporadic phenomena were gradually dying away in her
presence. They
still occurred, but very rarely, though they were
always very
remarkable. We give one.
It must,
however, be explained that, some months previous to that
event, Mme.
Blavatsky was taken very ill. From the verbal statements
of her
relatives, recorded under their dictation, we learn that no
doctor could
understand her illness. It was one of those mysterious
nervous
diseases that baffle science, and elude the grasp of
everyone but a
very expert psychologist. Soon after the commencement
of that
illness, she began — as she repeatedly told her friends —
“to lead a
double life”. What she meant by it, no one of the good
people of
Mingrelia could understand, of course. But this is how she
herself
describes that state: —
“Whenever I was
called by name, I opened my eyes upon hearing it,
and was myself,
my own personality in every particular. As soon as I
was left alone,
however, I relapsed into my usual, half-dreamy
condition, and
became somebody else (who, namely, Madame. B. will
not tell). I
had simply a mild fever that consumed me slowly but
surely, day
after day, with entire loss of appetite, and finally of
hunger, as I
would feel none for days, and often went a week without
touching any
food whatever, except a little water, so that in four
months I was
reduced to a living skeleton. In cases when I was
interrupted,
when in my other self, by the sound of my present name
being
pronounced, and while I was conversing in my dream life — say
at half a
sentence either spoken by me or those who were with my
second me at
the time — and opened my eyes to answer the call, I
used to answer
very rationally, and understood all, for I was never
delirious. But
no sooner had I closed my eyes again than the
sentence which
had been interrupted was completed by my other self,
continued from
the word, or even half the word, it had stopped at.
When awake, and
myself, I remembered well who I was in my second
capacity, and
what I had been and was doing. When somebody else,
i.e. the
personage I had become, I know I had no idea of who was H.
P. Blavatsky! I
was in another far-off country, a totally different
individuality
from myself, and had no connection at all with my
actual life.”
Such is Mme.
Blavatsky's analysis of her state at that time. She was
residing then
at Ozoorgetty, a military settlement in Mingrelia,
where she had
bought a house. It is a little town, lost among the
old forests and
woods, which, in those days, had neither roads nor
conveyances, save
of the most primitive kind, and which, to the very
time of the
last Russo-Turkish war, was unknown outside of Caucasus.
The only
physician of the place, the army surgeon, could make
nothing of her
symptoms; but as she was visibly and rapidly
declining, he
packed her off to Tiflis to her friends. Unable to go
on horseback,
owing to her great weakness, and a journey in a cart
being deemed
dangerous, she was sent off in a large native boat
along the river
— a journey of four days to Kutais — with four
native servants
only to take care of her.
What took place
during that journey we are unable to state
precisely; nor
is Mme. Blavatsky herself certain of it, since her
weakness was so
great that she lay like one apparently dead until
her arrival. In
that solitary boat, on a narrow river, hedged on
both sides by
centenarian forests, her position must have been
precarious.
The little
stream they were sailing along was, though navigable,
rarely, if
ever, used as a means of transit, at any rate not before
the war. Hence
the information we have got came solely from her
servants and
was very confused. It appears, however, that as they
were gliding
slowly along the narrow stream, cutting its way between
two steep and
woody banks, the servants were several times during
three
consecutive nights frightened out of their senses by seeing,
what they swore
was their mistress, gliding off from the boat, and
across the
water in the direction of the forests, while the body of
that same
mistress was lying prostrate on her bed at the bottom of
the boat. Twice
the man who towed the canoe, upon seeing the “form”,
ran away
shrieking, and in great terror. Had it not been for a
faithful old
servant who was taking care of her, the boat and the
patient would
have been abandoned in the middle of the stream. On
the last
evening, the servant swore he saw two figures, while the
third — his
mistress, in flesh and bone — was sleeping before his
eyes. No sooner
had they arrived at Koutaïs, where Mme. Blavatsky
had a distant
relative residing, than all the servants, with the
exception of
the old butler, left her, and returned no more.
It was with
great difficulty that she was transported to Tiflis. A
carriage and a
friend of the family were sent to meet her; and she
was brought
into the house of her friends apparently dying.
She never
talked upon that subject with anyone. But, as soon as she
was restored to
life and health, she left the Caucasus, and went to
Italy. Yet it
was before her departure from the country in 1863 that
the nature of
her powers seems to have entirely changed.
One afternoon,
very weak and delicate still, after the illness just
described, Mme.
Blavatsky came in to her aunt's, N. A. Fadeef's,
room. After a
few words of conversation, remarking that she felt
tired and
sleepy, she was offered to rest upon a sofa. Hardly had
her head
touched her cushion when she fell into a profound sleep.
Her aunt had
quietly resumed some writing she had interrupted to
talk with her
niece, when suddenly soft but quite audible steps in
the room behind
her chair made her rapidly turn her head to see who
was the
intruder, as she was anxious that Mme. Blavatsky should not
be disturbed.
The room was empty! there was no other living person
in it but
herself and her sleeping niece, yet the steps continued
audibly, as
though of a heavy person treading softly, the floor
creaking all
the while. They approached the sofa, and suddenly
ceased. Then
she heard stronger sounds, as though someone was
whispering near
Mme. Blavatsky, and presently a book placed on a
table near the
sofa was seen by N. A. Padeef to open, and its pages
kept turning to
and fro, as if an invisible hand were busy at it.
Another book
was snatched from the library shelves, and flew in that
same direction.
More astonished
than frightened — for everyone in the house had been
trained in and
become quite familiar with such manifestations — N.
A. Fadeef arose
from her arm-chair to awaken her niece, hoping
thereby to put
a stop to the phenomena; but at the same moment a
heavy arm-chair
moved at the other end of the room, and rattling on
the floor,
glided toward the sofa. The noise it made awoke Mme.
Blavatsky, who,
upon opening her eyes, inquired of the invisible
presence what
was the matter. A few more whisperings, and all
relapsed into
quietness and silence, and there was nothing more of
the sort during
the rest of the evening.
At the date at
which we write, every phenomenon independent of her
will, except
such as the one described, and that Mme. Blavatsky
attributes to
quite a different cause than spiritual manifestations,
has for more
than twenty years entirely ceased. At what time this
complete change
in her occult powers was wrought we are unable to
say, as she was
far away from our observation, and spoke of it but
rarely — never
unless distinctly asked in our correspondence to
answer the
question. From her letters we learnt that she was always
traveling,
rarely settling for any length of time in one place. And
we believe her
statements with regard to her powers to have been
entirely true
when she wrote to tell us, “Now (in 1866) I shall
never be
subjected to external influences.” It is not H. P. B. who
was from that
time forth victim to “ influences” which would have
without doubt
triumphed over a less strong nature than was hers;
but, on the
contrary, it is she who subjected these influences —
whatever they
may be — to her will.
“The last
vestige of my psycho-physical weakness is gone, to return
no more”, writes
Mme. Blavatsky in a letter to a relation. “I am
cleansed and
purified of that dreadful attraction to myself of stray
spooks and
ethereal affinities. I am free, free, thanks to THOSE
whom I now
bless at every hour of my life”. “I believe in this
statement”,
said, in a conversation in May 1884 at Paris, her
sister, Mme.
Jelihowsky, “ the more so as for nearly five years we
had a personal
opportunity of following the various and gradual
phases in the
transformations of that force. At Pskoff and Rougodevo
it happened
very often that she could not control, nor even stop,
its
manifestations. After that she appeared to master it more fully
every day,
until after her extraordinary and protracted illness at
Tiflis she
seemed to defy and subject it entirely to her will. This
was proved by
her stopping any such phenomena at her will, and by
previous
arrangement for days and weeks at a time. Then, when the
term was over,
she could produce them at her command, and leaving
the choice of
what should happen to those present. In short, as
already said,
it is the firm belief of all that there, where a less
strong nature
would have been surely wrecked in the struggle, her
indomitable
will found somehow or other the means of subjecting the
world of the invisibles
— to the denizens of which she has ever
refused the
name of “spirits” and souls — to her own control. Let it
be clearly
understood, however, that H. P. B. has never pretended to
be able to
control real spirits, i.e. the spiritual monads, but only
Elementals; as
also to be able to keep at bay the shells of the
dead.”]
CHAPTER 7
FROM
APPRENTICESHIP TO DUTY
PROBABLY the
years 1867 to 1870, if the story of these could be
properly told,
would be found by far the most interesting of Mme.
Blavatsky's
eventful life, but it is impossible for me to do more at
present than
indicate that they were associated with great progress
in the
expansion of her occult knowledge, and passed in the East.
The two or
three years intervening between her residence at Tiflis
and the period
I have named were spent indeed in European travel,
and there would
be no necessity for holding back any information
concerning
these — the latest of her relatively aimless wanderings —
of which I
might have gained possession, but no watchful relatives
were with her
to record what passed, and her own recollections give
us none but
bare outlines of her adventures.
In 1870 she
came back from the East by a steamer via the then
newly-opened
Suez Canal, and after spending a short time in Piraeus
took passage
for Spezzia on board a Greek vessel, which met with a
terrible
catastrophe, and was blown up by an explosion of gunpowder
and fireworks
forming part of the cargo. Mme. Blavatsky was one of a
very small
number of passengers whose lives were saved. The
castaways were
rescued with no more than the clothes they wore when
picked out of
the water, and were momentarily provided for by the
Greek
Government, who forwarded them to various destinations. Mme.
Blavatsky went
to Alexandria and to Cairo, where, amid much
temporary
inconvenience, she waited till supplies of money reached
her from
Russia. I have headed this chapter “From Apprenticeship to
Duty”, because
that is the great transition marked by the date of
Mme. Blavatsky's
return to Europe in 1870. Till that period her life
had altogether
been spent in the passionate search for occult
knowledge, on
which her inborn instincts impelled her from her
earliest youth.
This had now come upon her in ample measure. The
natural-born
faculties of mediumship which had surrounded her
earlier years
with a coruscation of wonders had given place now to
attributes for
which Western students of psychic mysteries at that
date had no
name. The time had not come for even the partial
revelations
concerning the great system of occult initiation as
practised in
the East, which has been embodied in books published
within the last
few years. Mme. Blavatsky already knew that she had
a task before
her — the task of introducing some knowledge
concerning
these mysteries to the world, — but she was sorely
puzzled to
decide how she should begin it. She had to do the best
she could in
making the world acquainted with the idea that the
latent
potentialities in human nature — in connection with which
psychic
phenomena of various kinds were already attracting the
attention of
large classes in both hemispheres — were of a kind
which, properly
directed, would lead to the infinite spiritual
exaltation of
their possessors, while wrongly directed they were
capable of
leading downward towards disastrous results of almost
commensurate
extent. She alone, at the period I refer to,
appreciated the
magnitude of her mission, and if she did not
adequately
appreciate the difficulties in her way, she had at all
events no
companion to share her sense of the fact that these
difficulties
were very great.
Probably she
would be among those most willing to recognise, looking
back now upon
the steps she took in the beginning, that she went to
work the wrong
way, but very few people who have had a long and
arduous battle
in life to fight — especially when that fight has
been chiefly
waged against such moral antagonists as bigotry and
ignorance — would
be in a position at the close of their efforts to
regard their
earliest measures with satisfied complacency.
The only lever
which, as the matter presented itself in the
beginning to
Mme. Blavatsky's mind, seemed available for her to work
with, was the
widespread and growing belief of large numbers of
civilized
people in the phenomena and somewhat too hastily formed
theories of
spiritualism. She set to work in Egypt — finding herself
there for the
moment — to found a society which should have the
investigation
of spiritualistic phenomena for its purpose, and which
she designed to
lead through paths of higher knowledge in the end.
Some, among the
many misrepresentations which have made her life one
long struggle
with calumny from this time onward, arose from this
innocently
intended measure. Because she set on foot her
quasi-spiritualistic
society, she has been regarded as having been
committed at
that date to an acceptance of the theory of psychic
phenomena which
spiritualists hold. It will have been seen, however,
from the
quotations I have given from her sister's narrative that,
even on her
first return from the East in 1858, she was emphatic in
repudiating
this view.
One of the
persons who sought Mme. Blavatsky's acquaintance in
connection with
this abortive society was the subsequently notorious
Mme. Coulomb,
attached at that time to the personnel of a small
hotel at Cairo,
who afterwards finding her way with her husband, in
a state of
painful destitution, to India, fastened herself but too
securely on
Mme. Blavatsky's hospitality at Bombay — only to repay
this in the end
by rendering herself the tool of an infamous attack
made upon the
Theosophical Society in the person of its Founder by a
missionary
magazine at Madras. Of this I shall have occasion to
speak again
later on.The narrative of the period beginning in 1871,
on which I am
now entering, has been prepared, with a good deal of
assistance from
Mme. Blavatsky herself, from writings by relatives
and intimate
friends of her later years. It would be tedious to the
reader if this
were divided into separate fragments of testimony,
and I shall
therefore prefer — except in some special cases later on
— to weld these
narratives into one, and the use of the plural
pronoun “we”
will hereafter sufficiently identify passages which
have a
composite authorship.
In 1871 Mme.
Blavatsky wrote from Cairo to tell her friends that she
had just
returned from India, and had been wrecked somewhere en
passant (near
Spezzia). She had to wait in Egypt for some time
before she
returned home, meanwhile she determined to establish a
Société
Spirite for the investigation of mediums and phenomena
according to
Allen Kardec's theories and philosophy, since there was
no other way to
give people a chance to see for themselves how
mistaken they
were. She would first give free play to an already
established and
accepted teaching and then, when the public would
see that
nothing was coming out of it, she would offer her own
explanations.
To accomplish this object, she said, she was ready to
go to any
amount of trouble — even to allowing
herself to be
regarded for a
time as a helpless medium. “They know no better, and
it does me no
harm — for I will very soon show them the difference
between a
passive medium and an active doer”. she explains.
A few weeks
later a new letter was received. In this one she showed
herself full of
disgust for the enterprise, which had proved a
perfect failure.
She had written, it seems, to England and France
for a medium,
but without success. En désespoir de cause, she had
surrounded
herself with amateur mediums — French female spiritists,
mostly beggarly
tramps, when not adventuresses in the rear of M. de
Lesseps' army
of engineers and workmen on the canal of Suez.
“They steal the
Society's money”, she wrote, “ they drink like
sponges, and I
now caught them cheating most shamefully our members,
who come to
investigate the phenomena, by bogus manifestations. I
had very
disagreeable scenes with several persons who held me alone
responsible for
all this. So I ordered them out. . . . The Société
Spirite has not
lasted a fortnight — it is a heap of ruins,
majestic, but
as suggestive as those of the Pharaoh's tombs. ... To
wind up the
comedy with a drama, I got nearly shot by a madman — a
Greek, who had
been present at the only two public séances we held,
and got
possessed I suppose by some vile spook.” [This literal
translation of
a letter written by Mme Blavatsky to her aunt
fourteen years
back shows that she never changed her way of viewing
communication
with “spirits” for physical phenomena, as she was
accused of
doing when in America.]
She broke off
all connection with the “mediums”, shut up her
Société,
and went to live in Boulak near the Museum. Then it seems,
she came again
in contact with her old friend the Copt of mysterious
fame, of whom
mention has been made in connection with her earliest
visit to Egypt,
at the outset of her travels. For several weeks he
was her only
visitor. He had a strange reputation in Egypt, and the
masses regarded
him as a magician. One gentleman, who knew him at
this time,
declared that he had outlined and predicted for him for
twenty-five
years to come nearly all his (the narrator's) daily
life, even to
the day of his death. The Egyptian high officials
pretending to
laugh at him behind his back, dreaded and visited him
secretly. Ismail
Pasha, the Khedive, had consulted him more than
once, and later
on would not consent to follow his advice to resign.
These visits of
an old man, who was reputed hardly ever to stir from
his house
(situated at about ten miles from town), to a foreigner
were much
commented upon. New slanders and scandals were set on
foot. The
sceptics who had, moved by idle curiosity, visited the
Société
and witnessed the whole failure, made capital of the thing.
Ridiculing the
idea of phenomena, they had as a natural result
declared such
claims to be fraud and charlatanry all round.
Conveniently
inverting the facts of the case, they even went the
length of
maintaining that instead of paying the mediums and the
expenses of the
Society, it was Mme. Blavatsky who had herself been
paid, and had
attempted to palm off juggler tricks as genuine
phenomena. The
groundless inventions and rumors thus set on foot by
her enemies,
mostly the discharged “French-women mediums”, did not
prevent Mme.
Blavatsky from pursuing her studies, and proving to
every honest
investigator that her extraordinary powers of
clairvoyance
and clairaudience were facts, and independent of mere
physical
manifestations, over which she possessed an undeniable
control. Also
that her power, by simply looking at them, of setting
objects in
motion and vibration without any direct contact with
them, and
sometimes at a great distance, instead of deserting her or
even
diminishing, had increased with years. A Russian gentleman, an
acquaintance of
Mme. B., who happened to visit Egypt at that time,
sent his
friends the most enthusiastic letters about Mme. Blavatsky.
Thus he wrote
to a brother-officer in the same regiment a letter now
in the possession
of her relatives, and from which we translate:
“She is a
marvel, an unfathomable mystery. That which she produces
is simply
phenomenal; and without believing any more in spirits than
I ever did, I
am ready to believe in witchcraft. If it is after all
but jugglery,
then we have in Mme. Blavatsky a woman who beats all
the Boscos and
Robert Houdin's of the century by her address. . . .
Once I showed
her a closed medallion containing the portrait of one
person and the
hair of another, an object which I had had in my
possession but
a few months, which was made at Moscow, and of which
very few know,
and she told me without touching it, ' Oh ! it is
your
godmother's portrait and your cousin's hair. Both are dead,'
and she
proceeded forthwith to describe them, as though she had both
before her
eyes. Now, godmother, as you know, who left my eldest
daughter her
fortune, is dead fifteen years ago. How could she know
! ” etc..
In an
illustrated paper of the time there is a story told of Mme.
Blavatsky by
another gentleman. He met her at a table d'hôte with
some friends in
a hotel of Alexandria. Refusing to go with these to
the theatre
after dinner, they remained alone, sitting on a sofa and
talking. Before
the sofa there stood a little tea-tray, on which the
waiter had
placed for Mr N----- a bottle of liqueur, some wine, a
wine-glass, and
a tumbler. As he was carrying the glass with its
contents to his
mouth, without any visible cause, it broke in his
hand into many
pieces. She laughed, appearing overjoyed, and made
the remark that
she hated liqueurs and wine and could hardly
tolerate those
who used them too freely. The story goes on ...
“ ' You do not
mean to infer that it is you who broke my wine-glass
. . . ? It is simply
an accident. . . . The glass is very thin ; it
was perhaps
cracked, and I squeezed it too strongly . . .!' I lied
purposely, for
I had just made the mental remark that it seemed very
strange and
incomprehensible, the glass being very thick and strong,
just as a verre
à liqueur would be.”
But I wanted to
draw her out.“
She looked at
me very seriously, and her eyes flashed. ' What will
you bet,' she
asked, ' that I do not do it again ?'
”' Well, we
will try on the spot. If you do, I will be the first to
proclaim you a
true magician. If not, we will have a good laugh at
you or your
spirits to-morrow at the Consulate. . . .' And saying
so, I
half-filled the tumbler with wine and prepared to drink it.
But no sooner
had the glass touched my lips than I felt it shattered
between my
fingers, and my hand bled, wounded by a broken piece in
my instinctive
act at grasping the tumbler together when I felt
myself losing
hold of it.“
"Entre les
lèvres et la coupe, il y a quelquefois une grande
distance,'' she
observed sententiously, and left the room, laughing
in my face most
outrageously”.
“ During the
latter years”, Mme. de Jelihowsky states, “many were
the changes
that had taken place in our family: our grandfather and
our aunt's husband,
who had both occupied very high official
positions in
Tiflis, had died, and the whole family had left the
Caucasus to
settle permanently in Odessa. H. P. Blavatsky had not
visited the
country for years, and there remained in Tiflis but
myself with my
family and a number of old servants, formerly serfs
of the family,
who, once liberated, could not be kept without wages
in the house
they had been born in, and were gradually being sent
away. These
people, some of whom owing to old age were unable to
work for their
living, came constantly to me for help. Unable to
pension so
many, I did what I could for them ; among other things I
had obtained a
permanent home at the City Refuge House for two old
men, late
servants of the family: a cook called Maxim and his
brother Piotre
— once upon a time a very decent footman, but at the
time of the
event I refer to an incorrigible drunkard, who had lost
his arm in
consequence.”
That summer we
had gone to reside during the hot months of the year
at Manglis —
the headquarters of the regiment of Erivan — some
thirty miles
from town, and Mme. Blavatsky was in Egypt. I had just
received the
news that my sister had returned from India, and was
going to remain
for some time at Cairo. We corresponded very rarely,
at long
intervals, and our letters were generally short. But after a
prolonged
silence I received from H. P. B. a very long and
interesting
letter.“
A portion of it
consisted of fly-sheets torn out from a note-book,
and these were
all covered with pencil-writing. The strange events
they recorded
had been all put down on the spot — some under the
shadow of the
great Pyramid of Cheops, and some of them inside
Pharaoh's
Chamber. It appears that Mme. B. had gone there several
times, once with
a large company, some of whom were
spiritualists.[Some
most wonderful phenomena were described by some
of her
companions as having taken place in broad daylight in the
desert when
they were sitting under a rock; whilst other notes in
Mme Blavatsky’s
writing recorded the strange sight she saw in the
Cimmerian
darkness of the King’s Chamber, when she has passed a
night alone
comfortable settled inside a sarcophagus.]”
'Let me know,
Vera', she wrote, 'whether it is true that the old
Pietro is dead
? He must have died last night or at some time
yesterday' (the
date on the stamp of the envelope showed that it had
left Egypt ten
days previous to the day on which it was received).
'Just fancy
what happened ! A friend of mine, a young English lady,
and a medium,
stood writing mechanically on bits of paper, leaning
upon an old
Egyptian tomb. The pencil had begun tracing perfect
gibberish — in
characters that had never existed here, as a
philologist
told us — when suddenly, and as I was looking from
behind her
back, they changed into what I thought were Russian
letters. My
attention having been called elsewhere, I had just left
her, when I
heard people saying that what she had written was now
evidently in
some existing characters, but that neither she nor
anyone else
could read them. I came back just in time to prevent her
from destroying
that slip of paper as she had done with the rest,
and was
rewarded. Possessing myself of the rejected slip, fancy my
astonishment on
finding it contained in Russian an evident
apostrophe to
myself!”
' “Barishnya
(little or' young miss '), dear baryshnya! ” said the
writer, “help,
oh help me, miserable sinner! ... I suffer: drink,
drink, give me
a drink! . . . I suffer, I suffer!” From this term
baryshnya — a
title our old servants will, I see, use with us two
even after our
hair will have grown white with age — I understood
immediately
that the appeal came from one of our old servants, and
took therefore the
matter in hand by arming myself with a pencil to
record what I
could myself see. I found the name Piotre Koutcherof
echoed in my
mind quite distinctly, and I saw before me an
indistinguishable
mass of grey smoke — a formless pillar — and
thought I heard
it repeat the same words. Furthermore, I saw that he
had died in Dr
Gorolevitch's hospital attached to the City Refuge,
the Tiflis
workhouse where you had placed them both. Moreover, as I
made out, it is
you who placed him there in company with his
brother, our
old Maxim, who had died a few days before him. You had
never written
about poor Maxim's death. Do tell me whether it is so
or not. . . .'
Further on
followed her description of the whole vision as she had
it, later on,
in the evening when alone, and the authentic words
pronounced by '
Piotre's spook' as she called it. The ' spirit' (?)
was bitterly
complaining of thirst and was becoming quite desperate.
It was
punishment, it said — and the spook seemed to know it well, —
for his drunkenness
during the lifetime of that personality ! . . .
'An agony of
thirst that nothing could quench — an ever living
fire,' as she
explained it.”
Mme.
Blavatsky's letter ended with a postscript, in which she
notified her
sister that her doubts had been all settled. She saw
the astral
spooks of both the brothers — one harmless and passive,
the other
active and dangerous. [How dangerous is the latter kind
was proved on
the spot. Miss O - , the medium, a young lady of
hardly twenty,
governess in a rich family of bankers, an extremely
modest and
gentle girl, had hardly written the Russian words
addressed to
Mme Blavatsky, when she was seized with a trembling,
and asked to
drink. When water was brought she threw it away, and
went on asking for
a drink. Wine was offered her - she greedily
drank it, and
began drinking one glass after another until, to the
horror of all,
she fell into convulsions, and cried for “wine-a
drink!” till
she fainted away, and was carried home in a carriage.
She had an
illness after this that lasted several weeks. -
[H.P.B.]Upon
the receipt of this letter, her sister was struck with
surprise.
Ignorant herself of the death of the parties mentioned,
she telegraphed
immediately to town, and the answer received from Dr
Gorolevitch
corroborated the news announced by Mme. Blavatsky in
every
particular. Piotre had died on the very same day and date as
given in H. P.
Blavatsky's letter, and his brother two days earlier.
Disgusted with
the failure of her spiritist society and the gossip
it provoked,
Mme. Blavatsky soon went home via Palestine, and
lingered for
some months longer, making a voyage to Palmyra and
other ruins,
whither she went with Russian friends. Accounts of some
of the
incidents of her journey found their way into the French and
even American
papers. At the end of 1872 she returned in her usual
way without
warning, and surprised her family at Odessa.
CHAPTER 8
RESIDENCE IN
AMERICA
IN the
beginning of 1873 Mme. Blavatsky left Russia and went in the
first instance
to Paris. By this time the psychic relationship
between herself
and her occult teachers in the East was already
established on
that intimate footing which has rendered her whole
subsequent life
subject to its practical direction. It is
unnecessary to
inquire why she adopted this or that course; we shall
rarely discover
commonplace motives for her action, and frequently
she herself
would be no better able to say “why” she might be at any
given moment
arranging to go here or there than the merest stranger
present. The
immediate motive of her proceedings would be the
direction she
would receive through occult channels of perception,
and for
herself, rebellious and uncontrollable though she had been
in earlier
life, “an order” from “her master” was now enough to send
her forward on
the most uninviting errand, in patient confidence
that good
results would ensue, and that whatever might be thus
ordered, would
assuredly prove for the best.
The position is
so unlike any which the experience of ordinary
mundane life
supplies that I may usefully endeavor to explain the
relationship
which exists in connection with, and arising out of,
occult
initiation in the East between a pupil, or chela, of the
esoteric or
occult doctrine and his teacher, master, or guru. I have
known many
chelas within the last few years, and I can speak on the
subject from
information that is not exclusively derived even from
that source.
The primary
motive which governs people who become chelas is the
desire to
achieve moral and spiritual exaltation that may lead
directly to a
higher state of being than can be hoped for by the
unassisted
operation of the normal law of nature. Referring back to
the esoteric
view of the human soul's progress, it will be seen that
people may
often be impelled, as Mme. Blavatsky was, for instance,
from childhood,
by an inborn craving for occult instruction and
psychic
development. Such people seek initiation under the guidance,
as it were, of
a commanding instinct, which is unlike the
intellectually
formed purpose to accomplish a spiritual achievement
that I have
assigned above to chelas as their primary motive. But in
truth the
motive would be regarded by occultists as the same at
different stages
of development. For the normal law of Nature is
that a soul
having accomplished a certain amount of progress — along
the path of
spiritual evolution — in one physical life (one
incarnation),
will be reborn without losing the attributes thus
acquired. All
these constitute what are loosely spoken of as inborn
tendencies,
natural tastes, inclinations, and so forth. And thus,
whether a chela
is then, for the first time, seeking initiation or
watched over by
a guru from his last birth, the primary motive of
his effort is
the same.
And this being
his own spiritual advancement, it may be, that if
circumstances
do not require him to play an active part in any work
in the world,
his duty will, to a large extent, be concentrated on
his own
interior life. Such a man's chief obligation towards the
public at
large, therefore, will be to conceal the fact that he is a
chela, for he
has not yet, by the hypothesis, attained the right to
choose who
shall and who shall not be introduced to the “mysteries”.
He merely has
to keep the secrets entrusted to him as such. On the
other hand, the
exigencies of his service may require him to perform
tasks in the
world which involve the partial explanation of his
relationship
with his masters, and then a very much more
embarrassing
career lies before him. For such a chela — however
perfect his
occult communications may be, through the channel of his
own psychic
faculties, between himself and his masters — is never
allowed to
regard himself for an instant as a blind automaton in
their hands. He
is, on the contrary, a responsible agent who is left
to perform his
task by the light of his own sagacity, and he will
never receive
“orders” which seriously conflict with that principle.
These will be only
of a general character, or, where they refer to
details, will
be of a kind that do not, in occult phrase, interfere
with Karma;
that is to say, that do not supersede the agent's moral
responsibility.
Finally, it
should be understood in regard to “orders” among
initiates in
occultism, that the order of an occult guru to his
chela differs
in a very important respect from the order of an
officer to his
soldier. It is a direction that in the nature of
things would
never be enforced, for the disregard of which there
could be no
positive or prescribed penalty, and which is only
imposed upon
the chela by the consideration that if he gets an order
and does not
obey it, he is unlikely to get any more. It is to be
regarded as an
order because of the ardor of obedience on the side
of the chela,
whose aspirations, by the hypothesis, are wholly
centered on the
masters. The service thus rendered is especially of
the kind which
has been described as perfect freedom.
All this must
be borne in mind by any reader who would understand
Mme. Blavatsky
and the foundation of the Theosophical Society, and
must be
rigorously applied to the narrative of her later life. A
constant
perplexity arises, for people who are slightly acquainted
with the
circumstances of her career, from the indiscretions in
connection with
the management of the Theosophical Society which she
has frequently
fallen into. How can it be that the Mahatmas — her
occult teachers
and masters, whose insight is represented as being
so great, whose
interest in the theosophical movement is said to be
so keen, whose
wisdom is vaunted so enthusiastically by their
adherents —
permit their agent Mme. Blavatsky, with whom it is
alleged they
are in constant communication, to make mistakes which
most people in
her place would have avoided, to trust persons almost
obviously
unworthy of her confidence, to associate herself with
proceedings
that tend to lower the dignity of her enterprise, to
lose temper and
time with assailants who might be calmly ignored,
and to spend
her psychic energy in the wrong places, with the wrong
people, and at
the wrong moments. The solution of the puzzle is to
be found
entirely in the higher spiritual aspects of the
undertaking.
The Theosophical Society is by a great way not the only
instrument
through which the Mahatmas are working in the world to
foster the
growth of spirituality among mankind, but it is the one
enterprise that
has been confided, in a large measure, to Mme.
Blavatsky. If
she were to fail with it, the Mahatma energy concerned
would be spent
not in trying to bolster up her failure, but in some
quite different
direction. If she succeeds with it, the principles
of moral
responsibility are best vindicated by leaving her to
struggle
through with her work in her own way. A general on a
campaign
sending an officer to perform a specific duty is mainly
concerned with
the result to be gained. If he thinks he can promote
this by
interfering with fresh orders, he does so. But by the
hypothesis, a
Mahatma interfering with his officer is throwing into
confusion the
operation of the laws of Nature which have to do with
the causes —
efficient on a plane above this of physical incarnation
— that are
generated by what we call moral responsibility. Of course
it is open to
people who know nothing of Eastern occultism, nor of
superior planes
in Nature and so forth, to put all this aside and
judge Mme.
Blavatsky's action by commonplace prosaic standards; but
it is not
reasonable for the considerable number of people who in
various ways
are quite ready to profess belief in the Mahatmas, and
in the reality
of that occult world in which Mme. Blavatsky is
regarded by
most theosophists as having been initiated, to say, in
spite of these beliefs,
that the action of the Mahatmas in leaving
Mme. Blavatsky
to make mistakes and trust the wrong people and so
forth is
unintelligible. It is not unintelligible in principle, even
though, as I
have indicated a page or two back, Mme. Blavatsky will
sometimes
receive orders the immediate motive of which she does not
understand, but
obeys none the less. This condition of things does
not violate the
rule about not converting a responsible chela into a
blind
automaton. Such interferences would never be found to take
place under
conditions which would discharge the agent of moral
responsibility
for the manner in which he might resume the guidance
of his
enterprise from the point to which obedience to the order
received might
have carried on or diverted him.
No special
interest attaches to Mme. Blavatsky's brief residence in
Paris in 1873,
where she stayed with a cousin of hers, Nicolas Hahn,
Rue de
I'Université, for two months. She was directed to visit the
United States,
and make that place for a time the scene of her
operations.
She arrived at
New York on 7th July 1873, and resided in that city —
with the
exception of a few weeks and months when she had to visit
other cities
and places — for over six years, after which time she
got her
naturalization papers.
Although, as
will have been seen from Mme. de Jelihowsky's
testimony, she
was emphatic, even in 1858, in claiming for most of
the phenomena
that took place in her presence a very different
origin from
that usually assigned to such phenomena by
spiritualists,
the experience of spiritualism and mediumship that
she acquired in
America greatly enlarged her views on this subject.
In 1875 she
wrote home: —
“The more I see
of mediums — for the United States are a true
nursery, the most
prolific hot-bed for mediums and sensitives of all
kinds, genuine
and artificial — the more I see the danger humanity
is surrounded
with. Poets speak of the thin partition between this
world and the
other. They are blind: there is no partition at all
except the
difference of states in which the living and the dead
exist, and the
grossness of the physical senses of the majority of
mankind. Yet,
these senses are our salvation. They were given to us
by a wise and
sagacious mother and nurse — Nature; for, otherwise,
individuality
and even personality would have become impossible: the
dead would be
ever merging into the living, and the latter
assimilating
the former. Were there around us but one variety of
'spirits' — as
well call the dregs of wine, spirits — the reliquae
of those
mortals who are dead and gone, one could reconcile oneself
with it. We
cannot avoid, in some way or other, assimilating our
dead, and
little by little, and unconsciously to ourselves, we
become they —
even physically, especially in the unwise West, where
cremation is
unknown. We breathe and devour the dead — men and
animals — with
every breath we draw in, as every human breath that
goes out makes
up the bodies and feeds the formless creatures in the
air that will be
men some day. So much for the physical process; for
the mental and
the intellectual, and also the spiritual, it is just
the same; we
interchange gradually our brain-molecules, our
intellectual
and even spiritual auras, hence — our thoughts,
desires, and
aspirations, with those who preceded us. This process
is common to
humanity in general. It is a natural one, and follows
the economy and
laws of nature, insomuch that one's son may become
gradually his
own grandfather, and his aunt to boot, imbibing their
combined atoms,
and thus partially accounting for the possible
resemblance, or
atavism. But there is another law, an exceptional
one, and which
manifests itself among mankind sporadically and
periodically: the
law of forced post-mortem assimilation, during the
prevalence of
which epidemic the dead invade the domain of the
living from
their respective spheres — though, fortunately, only
within the
limits of the regions they lived in, and in which they
are buried. In
such cases, the duration and intensity of the
epidemic
depends upon the welcome they receive, upon whether they
find the doors
opening widely to receive them or not, and whether
the necromantic
plague is increased by magnetic attraction, the
desire of the
mediums, sensitives, and the curious themselves; or
whether, again,
the danger being signaled, the epidemic is wisely
repressed.
“Such a
periodical visitation is now occurring in America. It began
with innocent
children — the little Misses Fox — playing
unconsciously
with this terrible weapon. And, welcomed and
passionately
invited to ' come in,' the whole of the dead community
seemed to have
rushed in, and got a more or less strong hold of the
living. I went
on purpose to a family of strong mediums — the Eddys
— and watched
for over a fortnight, making experiments, which, of
course, I kept
to myself. . . . You remember, Vera, how I made
experiments for
you at Rougodevo, how often I saw the ghosts of
those who had
been living in the house, and described them to you,
for you could
never see them. . . . Well, it was the same daily and
nightly in
Vermont. I saw and watched these soulless creatures, the
shadows of
their terrestrial bodies, from which in most cases soul
and spirit had
fled long ago, but which throve and preserved their
semi-material
shadows at the expense of the hundreds of visitors
that came and
went, as well as of the mediums. And I remarked, under
the advice and
guidance of my Master, that (I) those apparitions
which were
genuine were produced by the ' ghosts' of those who had
lived and died
within a certain area of those mountains; (2) those
who had died
far away were less entire, a mixture of the real shadow
and of that
which lingered in the personal aura of the visitor for
whom it
purported to come; and (3) the purely fictitious ones, or as
I call them,
the reflections of the genuine ghosts or shadows of the
deceased
personality. To explain myself more clearly, it was not the
spooks that
assimilated the medium, but the medium, W. Eddy, who
assimilated
unconsciously to himself the pictures of the dead
relatives and
friends from the aura of the sitters. . . .
“It was ghastly
to watch the process! It made me often sick and
giddy; but I
had to look at it, and the most I could do was to hold
the disgusting
creatures at arm's length. But it was a sight to see
the welcome
given to these umbroe by the spiritualists! They wept
and rejoiced
around the medium, clothed in these empty materialized
shadows; rejoiced
and wept again, sometimes broken down with an
emotion, a
sincere joy and happiness that made my heart bleed for
them. 'If they
could but see what I see', I often wished. If they
only knew that
these simulacra of men and women are made up wholly
of the
terrestrial passions, vices, and worldly thoughts, of the
residuum of the
personality that was; for these are only such dregs
that could not
follow the liberated soul and spirit, and are left
for a second
death in the terrestrial atmosphere, that can be seen
by the average
medium and the public. At times I used to see one of
such phantoms,
quitting the medium's astral body, pouncing upon one
of the sitters,
expanding so as to envelop him or her entirely, and
then slowly
disappearing within the living body as though sucked in
by its every
pore.
Under the
influence of such ideas and thoughts, Mme. Blavatsky came
out finally
quite openly with her protest against being called a
medium. She
stoutly rejected the application of "Spiritist" that was
being forced
upon her by her foreign correspondents. Thus in 1877
she says in one
of her letters:
"What kind
of Spiritist can you see in, or make of me, pray? I I
have worked to
join the Theosohical Society, in alliance offensive
and defensive
with the Arya Samaj of India (of which we are now
forming a
section within the parent Theosophical Society), it is
because in
India all the Brahmins, whether orthodox or otherwise,
are terribly
against the bhoots, [The simulacra or ghost of a
deceased
person, - an "Elementary", or spook. ] the mediums, or any
necromantic
evocations or dealings with the dead in any way or
shape. That we
have established our Society in order to combat,
under the
banner of Truth and Science, every kind of superstitious
and preconceived
hobbies. That we mean to fight the prejudices of
the Sceptics,
as well as the abuse of power of the false prophets,
ancient or
modern, to put down the high priests, the Calchases, with
their false
Jupiterean thunders, and to show certain fallacies of
the Spiritists.
If we are anything, we are Spiritualists, only not
on the modern
American fashion, but on that of ancient Alexandria,
with its
Theodadiktoi, Hypatias, and Porphyries...."
[For the new
edition of this book I must here interpolate a note
warning the
reader against too submissive an acceptance of the views
set forth in
the letter quoted above. I do not think Mme. Blavatsky
would have
endorsed them at a later stage of her occult education.
However frequently
it may happen that communication from the astral
world may be
confused and corrupted by the unconscious influence of
imperfectly
developed mediums, it does not by any means follow that
in all cases
the “spirits” of the seance room are “empty
materialized
shadows” or “simulacra of men and women made up of
terrestrial
passions and vices, etc..“It was not till long after the
date of the
letter quoted that Mme. Blavatsky shared with myself in
India the
fuller teaching concerning life on the astral and higher
planes of
consciousness which put an intelligible face on the
variegated and
often bewildering experiences of spiritualism. That
great movement
was as definitely designed by higher wisdom for the
illumination of
civilized mankind, as the far greater movement that
has since put
us in touch with the mysteries of the higher occultism
— that it was
simply designed to break down the materialistic drift
of thinking
that was prevalent in the middle of the last century.
It; was
designed simply to show us that there was another life for
human beings
after the death of the physical! body. Those who had
passed on, and
were living on the astral plane, were furnished with
a means of
making their continued existence known to friends still
in incarnation.
Of course these opportunities were available for
great numbers
of astral entities surviving from the ignoble
varieties of
mankind, and many of these may have flocked in during
Mme.
Blavatsky's investigations of current spiritualism, confirming
impressions she
had acquired concerning the characteristics of the
astral plane
life; but multitudes of spiritualists knew perfectly
well that they
often had touch with departed friends still
maintaining the
personalities of the earth life, and in this way it
unfortunately
happened that Mme. Blavatsky's sweeping condemnation
of all
spiritualism as delusive and unwholesome alienated large
numbers of
people who ought to have been the most ardent
sympathizers with
the Theosophical movement. All later students of
occultism know
now that the astral plane plays a much more important
part in the
future life of most people “passing on” than the
misleading old
“shell” theory led us to suppose in the beginning.]
The
Theosophical Society was founded in October 1875 at New York,
with Colonel
Olcott as life president — Mme. Blavatsky preferring to
invest herself
with the relatively insignificant title of
corresponding
secretary.
Colonel
Olcott's acquaintance with Mme. Blavatsky was formed at a
farmhouse in
Vermont — the house of two brothers, spiritualist
mediums named
Eddy, famous in the annals of American spiritualism —
in October
1874. Referring to her in his book, called People from
the other World
, published in 1875, he says: —
“This lady has
led a very eventful life. . . .
The adventures
she has encountered, the strange people she has seen,
the perils by
sea and land she has passed through would make one of
the most
romantic stories ever told by a biographer. In the whole
course of my
experience I never met so interesting and, if I may say
it without
offence, eccentric a character.”
In the year
that elapsed between his first introduction to Mme.
Blavatsky and
the inauguration of their joint enterprise, his
intercourse
with her was intimate and his personal experiences
remarkable.
These need not be reviewed here in detail, except so far
as some of them
will throw light upon the circumstances of Mme.
Blavatsky's
life at this period, and for the moment it is enough to
say that they
induced him to throw up his professional career as a
“lawyer” (the
distinctions between the different branches of the
profession in
England, it will be remembered, do not hold good in
America) and devote
his life to the pursuit of occult development as
a “chela” of
the same master to whom Mme. Blavatsky's allegiance is
owing, and to
the service of the theosophical movement.
As Colonel
Olcott has shared some of the obloquy directed against
Mme. Blavatsky
in recent years, it may be worth while to add a
paragraph
concerning him written by Mr A. O. Hume, C.B., late
Secretary to
the Government of India in the Agricultural Department.
This passage
occurs in a letter by Mr Hume addressed to an English
paper, and is
quoted in the preface to The Occult World: —
As regards
Colonel Olcott's title, the printed papers which I send
by this same
mail will prove to you that this gentleman is an
officer of the
American army, who rendered good service during the
war (as will be
seen from the letter of the Judge Advocate-General,
the Secretary
of the Navy, and the Assistant Secretaries of War and
of the
Treasury), and who was sufficiently well known and esteemed
in his own
country to induce the President of the United States to
furnish him
with an autograph letter of introduction and
recommendation
to all Ministers and Consuls of the United States on
the occasion of
his leaving America for the East at the close of
1878.”
In introducing
some notes put together for the service of the
present memoir,
Colonel Olcott writes :—
“A strange
concatenation of events brought us together, and united
our lives for
this work, under the superior direction of a group of
Masters,
especially of One, whose wise teaching, noble example,
benevolent
patience, and paternal solicitude have made us regard him
with the
reverence and love that a true Father inspires in his
children. I am
indebted to H. P. Blavatsky for making me know of the
existence of these
Masters and their Esoteric Philosophy; and later,
for acting as
my mediator before I had come into direct personal
intercourse
with them.”
The earliest
records of the Theosophical Society reveal the motives
for its
formation which the fuller information since made public
concerning the
character of Mme. Blavatsky's mission show to have
been present in
her mind from the first, though the means by which
she should work
them out lay before her then in a very nebulous and
hazy condition.
She seems to have been embarrassed by the difficulty
of making her
position intelligible to people who knew nothing of
the existence
even, still less of the nature and powers, of those
proficients in
occult science since so widely talked about — the
Adepts and Mahatmas.
Her policy seems to have been to imitate, by
means of the
occult powers which she either possessed herself or
could borrow
from her masters from time to time, the phenomena of
spiritualism
which then seemed to absorb the attention of all
persons in
America having any natural leanings towards mysticism,
trusting to the
sagacity of observers to show them that the
circumstances
with which she would surround such phenomena were
quite unlike
those to which they were used. In this way she seems to
have aimed at
cutting the ground from under the feet of people
inclined to
theorize too hastily on the basis of spiritualistic
observation —
at persuading them that the evidence on which they
relied for the
maintenance of their opinions did not afford adequate
justification
for these, and at leading them into the path of a more
legitimate
philosophical or theosophical research. The policy was
undeniably a
bad one, and was carried out with little discretion and
with a waste of
psychic energy which cannot but be deplored in the
retrospect by
occult students who realize the consequences of such
waste. However,
I merely wish to be sufficiently critical of Mme.
Blavatsky's
proceedings, as this narrative advances, to elucidate
the operations in
which we find her engaged, and I refrain from the
consideration
here of the policies that might have been more
triumphant.
A vast array of
unattainable purposes was set before themselves by
the little
group of friends who organized the new society in 1875.
These were
enumerated in one of the earlier codes of rules as
follows:—
(a) To keep
alive in man his spiritual intuitions.
(b) To oppose
and counteract — after due investigation and proof of
its irrational
nature — bigotry in every form, whether as an
intolerant
religious sectarianism or belief in miracles or anything
supernatural.
(c) To promote
a feeling of brotherhood among nations, and assist in
the
international exchange of useful arts and products, by advice,
information,
and co-operation with all worthy individuals and
associations;
provided, however, that no benefit or percentage shall
be taken by the
Society for its corporate services.
(d) To seek to
obtain knowledge of all the laws of Nature, and aid
in diffusing
it; and especially to encourage the study of those laws
least
understood by modern people, and so termed the occult
sciences.
Popular superstition and folk-lore, however fantastical
when sifted,
may lead to the discovery of long-lost but important
secrets of
Nature. The Society, therefore, aims to pursue this line
of inquiry in
the hope to widen the field of scientific and
philosophical
observation.
(e) To gather
for the Society's library and put into written forms
correct information
upon the various ancient philosophic traditions
and legends,
and, as the council shall decide it permissible,
disseminate the
same in such practicable ways as the translation and
publication of
original works of value, and extracts from and
commentaries
upon the same, or the oral instruction of persons
learned in
their respective departments.
(f) To promote
in every practicable way in countries where needed
the spread of
non-sectarian education.
(g) Finally and
chiefly, to encourage and assist individual fellows
in
self-improvement, intellectual, moral, and spiritual. But no
fellow shall
put to his selfish use any knowledge communicated to
him by any
member of the First Section: violation of this rule being
punished by
expulsion. And before any such knowledge can be
imparted, the
person shall bind himself by a solemn oath not to use
it to selfish
purposes, nor to reveal it except with the permission
of the teacher.
One can readily
discern in this formidable array of objects the
inarticulate
purpose which Mme. Blavatsky had really in view — the
communication
to the world at large of some ideas concerning the
Esoteric
Doctrine or great “Wisdom Religion” of the East, shining
obscurely
through the too ambitious programme of her new disciples,
which might be
summed up as contemplating the reformation and
guidance of all
nations generally — a programme which could hardly
have been
floated in sober earnest elsewhere than in America, where
the mere
magnitude of undertakings seems neither to daunt the
courage of
their promoters nor touch their sense of the ludicrous.
This volume is
indebted to Mr W. Q. Judge, one of the friends Mme.
Blavatsky made
in the early part of her residence in America, for an
account of the
miscellaneous marvels of which he was a witness
during the
period with which we are now dealing. He writes: —
“My first
acquaintance with H. P. Blavatsky began in the winter of
the year 1874.
She was then living in apartments in Irving Place,
New York City, United
States. She had several rooms en suite. The
front rooms
looked out on Irving Place, and the back upon the
garden. My
first visit was made in the evening, and I saw her there
among a large
number of persons who were always attracted to her
presence.
Several languages were to be heard among them, and Mme.
Blavatsky,
while conversing volubly in Russian, apparently quite
absorbed, would
suddenly turn round and interject an observation in
English into a
discussion between other persons upon a different
topic to the
one she was engaged with. This never disturbed her, for
she at once
returned to her Russian talk, taking it up just where it
had been
dropped.
“Very much was
said on the first evening that arrested my attention
and enchained
my imagination. I found my secret thoughts read, my
private affairs
known to her. Unasked, and certainly without any
possibility of
her having inquired about me, she referred to several
private and
peculiar circumstances in a way that showed at once that
she had a
perfect knowledge of my family, my history, my
surroundings,
and my idiosyncrasies. On that first evening I brought
with me a
friend, a perfect stranger to her. He was a native of the
Sandwich
Islands, who was studying law in New York, and who had
formed all his
plans for a lifelong stay in that city. He was a
young man, and
had then no intention of marrying. But she carelessly
told him,
before we left for home, that before six months he would
cross the
continent of America, then make a long voyage, and,
stranger yet to
him, that before all of this he would marry. Of
course, the
idea was pooh-poohed by him. Still fate was too much for
him. In a few
months he was invited to fill an official position in
his native land,
and before leaving for that country he married a
lady who was
not in America at the time the prophecy was uttered.
“The next day I
thought I would try an experiment with Mme.
Blavatsky. I
took an ancient scarabaeus that she had never seen, had
it wrapped up
and sent to her through the mails by a clerk in the
employment of a
friend. My hand did not touch the package, nor did I
know where it
was posted. But when I called on her at the end of the
week the second
time, she greeted me with thanks for the scarabaeus.
I pretended
ignorance. But she said it was useless to pretend, and
then informed
me how I had sent it, and where the clerk had posted
it. During the
time that elapsed between my seeing her and the
sending of the
package no one had heard from me a word about the
matter.
“Very soon
after I met her, she moved to 34th Street, and while
there I visited
her very often. In those rooms I used to hear the
raps in
furniture, in glasses, mirrors, windows, and walls, which
are usually the
accompaniment of dark 'spiritist' séances. But with
her they
occurred in the light, and never except when ordered by
her. Nor could
they be induced to continue once that she ordered
them to stop.
They exhibited intelligence also, and would at her
request change
from weak to strong, or from many to few at a time.
“She remained
in 34th Street only a few months, and then removed to
47th Street,
where she stayed until her departure to India in
December 1878.
I was a constant visitor, and know, as all others do
who were as
intimate with her as I was, that the suspicions which
had been
breathed about her, and the open charges that have from
time to time
been made, are the foulest injustice or the basest
ingratitude. At
times she has been incensed by these things, and
declared that
one more such incident would forever close the door
against all
phenomena. But over and over again she has relented and
forgiven her
enemies.
“After she had
comfortably settled herself in 47th Street, where, as
usual, she was
from morning till night surrounded by all sorts of
visitors,
mysterious events, extraordinary sights and sounds,
continued to
occur. I have sat there many an evening, and seen in
broad gas
light, large luminous balls creeping over the furniture,
or playfully
jumping from point to point, while the most beautiful
liquid bell
sounds now and again burst out from the air of the room.
These sounds
often imitated either the piano or a gamut of sounds
whistled by
either myself or some other person. While all this was
going on, H. P.
Blavatsky sat unconcernedly reading or writing at
Isis Unveiled.
“It should be
remarked here that Madame. Blavatsky never exhibited
either hysteria
or the slightest appearance of trance. She was
always in the
full possession of all her faculties — and apparently
of more than
those of average people — whenever she was producing
any phenomena.
“In the month
of November or the beginning of December of the same
winter, a
photograph was received from a correspondent at Boston by
Colonel Olcott,
which was the occasion of two very striking
phenomena. It
purported to be the portrait of a person said to have
written the
books called Art Magic and Ghost Land. The sender
required
Colonel Olcott to return it almost immediately; which he
did on the
following evening, and I myself, being there as a caller,
posted it in
the nearest post-box. Two or three days later a demand
was made upon
Mme. Blavatsky for a duplicate of the picture, in the
belief that it
would be beyond even her powers, since she had no
model to copy
from. But she actually did it; the process consisting
merely in her
cutting a piece of cardboard to the requisite size,
laying it under
a blotting-paper, placing her hand upon it, and in a
moment producing
the copy demanded. Colonel Olcott took possession
of this
picture, and laid it away in a book that he was then
reading, and
which he took to bed with him. The next morning the
portrait had
entirely faded out, and only the name, written in
pencil, was
left. A week or two later, seeing this blank card lying
in Colonel
Olcott's room, I took it to Mme. Blavatsky, and requested
her to cause
the portrait to reappear. Complying, she again laid the
card under
another sheet of paper, placed her hand upon it, and
presently the
face of the man had come back as before; this time
indelibly
imprinted.
“In the front
room where she wrote, there was a bookcase that stood
for some time
directly opposite her writing-desk. Upon its top stood
a stuffed owl, whose
glassy, never - closing eye frequently seemed
to follow your
movements. Indeed, I could relate things a propos of
that same
defunct bird, but — in the words of Jacolliot — ' We have
seen things
such as one does not relate for fear of making his
readers doubt
his sanity. . . . Still we have seen them.' Well, over
the top of the
doors of the bookcase was a blank space, about three
inches wide,
and running the breadth of the case. One evening we
were sitting
talking of magic as usual, and of 'the Brothers', when
Madame said,
'Look at the bookcase!'
“We looked up
at once, and as we did so, we could see appear, upon
the blank space
I have described, several letters apparently in
gold, that came
out upon the surface of the wood. They covered
nearly all of
the space. Examination showed that they were in gold,
and in a
character that I had often seen upon some of her papers.
This
precipitation of messages or sentences occurred very
frequently, and
I will relate one which took place under my own hand
and eyes, in
such a way as to be unimpeachable for me.
“I was one day,
about four o'clock, reading a book by P. B.
Randolph, that
had just been brought in by a friend of Colonel
Olcott. I was
sitting some six feet distant from H. P. Blavatsky,
who was busy
writing. I had carefully read the title-page of the
book, but had
forgotten the exact title. But I knew that there was
not one word of
writing upon it. As I began to read the first
paragraph I heard
a bell sound in the air, and looking saw that Mme.
Blavatsky was
intently regarding me.
“ 'What book do
you read ? ' said she.
“Turning back
to the title-page, I was about to read aloud the name,
when my eye was
arrested by a message written in ink across the top
of the page
which, a few minutes before, I had looked at and found
clear. It was a
message in about seven lines, and the fluid had not
yet quite dried
on the page — its contents were a warning about the
book. I am
positive that when I took the volume in my hand, not one
word was
written in it.
“On one
occasion the address of a business firm in Philadelphia was
needed for the
purpose of sending a letter through the mail, and no
one present
could remember the street or number, nor could any
directory of
Philadelphia be found in the neighborhood. The business
being very
urgent, it was proposed that one of us should go down
nearly four
miles to the General Post Office, so as to see a
Philadelphia
directory. But H. P. B. said: ' Wait a moment, and
perhaps we can
get the address some other way.' She then waved her
hand, and
instantly we heard a signal bell in the air over our
heads. We
expected no less than that a heavy directory would rush at
our heads from the
empty space, but no such thing took place. She
sat down, took
up a flat tin paper-cutter japanned black on both
sides and
without having any painting on it. Holding this in her
left hand, she
gently stroked it with her right, all the while
looking at us
with an intense expression. After she had rubbed thus
for a few
moments, faint outlines of letters began to show
themselves upon
the black, shining surface, and presently the
complete
advertisement of the firm whose address we desired was
plainly
imprinted upon the paper-cutter in gilt letters, just as
they had had it
done on slips of blotting paper such as are widely
distributed as
advertising media in America — a fact I afterwards
found out. On a
close examination, we saw that the street and
number, which
were the doubtful points in our memories, were
precipitated
with great brilliancy, the other words and figures
being rather
dimmer. Mme. Blavatsky said that this was because the
mind of the
operator was directed almost entirely to the street and
number, so that
their reproduction was brought about with much
greater
distinctness than the rest of the advertisement, which was,
so to speak,
dragged in in a rather accidental way.
“About any
object that might be transported mysteriously around her
room, or that
came into it through the air by supermundane means,
there always
lingered for a greater or less space of time, a very
peculiar though
pleasant odour. It was not always the same. At one
time it was
sandal-wood mixed with what I thought was otto of roses;
at another time
some unknown Eastern perfume, and again it came like
the incense
burnt in temples.
“One day she
asked me if I would care to smell again the perfume.
Upon my
replying affirmatively, she took my handkerchief in her
hand, held it
for a few moments, and when she gave it back to me it
was heavy with
the well-known odour. Then, in order to show me that
her hand was
not covered with something that would come off upon the
handkerchief,
she permitted me to examine both hands. They were
without
perfume. But after I had convinced myself that there was no
perfumery or
odoriferous objects concealed in her hands, I found
from one hand
beginning to exhale one peculiar strong perfume, while
from the other
there rolled out strong waves of the incense.
“On the table
at which Isis Unveiled was written stood a little
Chinese cabinet
with many small drawers. A few of the drawers
contained some
trifles, but there were several that were always kept
empty. The
cabinet was an ordinary one of its class, and repeated
examination
showed that there were no devices or mechanical
arrangements in
it, or connected with it; but many a time has one of
those empty
drawers become the vanishing point of various articles,
and as often,
on the other hand, was the birthplace of some object
which had not
before been seen in the rooms. I have often seen her
put small coins
or a ring or amulet, and have put things in there
myself, closed
the drawer, almost instantly reopening it, and
nothing was
visible. It had disappeared from sight Clever conjurers
have been known
to produce such illusions, but they always require
some
confederacy, or else they delude you into believing that they
had put the
object in, when in reality they did not. With H. P. B.
there was no
preparation. I repeatedly examined the cabinet, and
positively say
that there was no means by which things could be
dropped out of
sight or out of the drawer ; it stood on four small
legs, elevated
about two inches above the desk, which was quite
clear and
unbroken underneath. Several times I have seen her put a
ring into one
of the drawers and then leave the room. I then looked
in the drawer,
saw the ring in it, and closed it again. She then
returned, and without
coming near the cabinet showed me the same
ring on her
finger. I then looked again in the drawer before she
again came near
it, and the ring was gone.
“One day Mrs
Elizabeth Thompson, the philanthropist, who had a great
regard for H.
P. B., called to see her. I was present. When about to
leave, the
visitor asked Madame to lend her some object which she
had worn, as a
reminder and as a talisman. The request being acceded
to, the choice
was left to the lady, who hesitated a moment; Madame
then said, '
Take this ring,' immediately drawing it off and handing
it to her
friend, who placed it upon her finger, absorbed in
admiring the
stones. But I was looking at H. P. B.'s fingers, and
saw that the
ring was yet on her hand. Hardly believing my eyes, I
looked at the
other. There was no mistake. There were now two rings;
but the lady
did not observe this, and went off satisfied she had
the right one.
In a few days she returned it to Madame, who then
told me that
one of the rings was an illusion, leaving it to me to
guess which
one. I could not decide, for she pushed the returned
ring up along
her finger against the old one, and both merged into
one.
“One evening
several persons were present after dinner, all, of
course, talking
about theosophy and occultism. H. P. B. was sitting
at her desk.
While we were all engaged in conversation somebody said
that he heard
music, and went out into the hall where he thought it
came from.
While he was examining the hall, the person sitting near
the fireplace
said that instead of being in the hall, the music,
which was that
of a musical box, was playing up in the chimney. The
gentleman who
had gone into the passage then returned and said that
he had lost the
music, but at once was thoroughly amazed to find us
all listening
at the fireplace, when he in turn heard the music
plainly. Just
as he began to listen, the music floated out into the
room, and very
distinctly finished the tune in the air over our
heads. I have on
various occasions heard this music in many ways,
and always when
there was not any instrument to produce it.
“On this
evening, a little while after the music, Madame opened one
of the drawers
of the Chinese cabinet and took from it an Oriental
necklace of
curious beads. This she gave to a lady present. One of
the gentlemen
allowed to escape him an expression of regret that he
had not
received such a testimonial. Thereupon H. P. B. reached over
and grasped one
of the beads of the necklace which the lady was
still holding
in her hands, and the bead at once came off in
Madame's hand.
She then passed it to the gentleman, who exclaimed
that it was not
merely a bead but was now a breast-pin, as there was
a gold pin
fastened securely in it. The necklace meanwhile remained
intact, and its
recipient was examining it in wonder that one of its
beads could
have been thus pulled off without breaking it.
“I have heard
it said that when H. P. B. was a young woman, after
coming back to
her family for the first time in many years, everyone
in her company
was amazed and affrighted to see material objects
such as cups,
books, her tobacco pouch and match-box, and so forth,
come flying
through the air into her hand, merely when she gazed
intently at
them. The stories of her early days can be readily
credited by
those who saw similar things done at the New York
headquarters.
Such aerial flights were many times performed by
objects at her
command in my presence. One evening I was in a hurry
to copy a
drawing I had made, and looked about on the table for a
paper-cutter
with which to rub the back of the drawing so as to
transfer the
surplus carbon to a clean sheet.
“As I searched,
it was suggested by someone that the round smooth
back of a spoon
bowl would be the best means, and I arose to go to
the kitchen at
the end of the hall for a spoon. But Mme. Blavatsky
said, 'Stop,
you need not go there; wait a moment.' I stopped at the
door, and she,
sitting in her chair, held up her left hand. At that
instant a large
table-spoon flew through the air across the room
from out of the
opposite wall and into her hand. No one was there to
throw it to
her, and the dining-room from which it had been
transported was
about thirty feet distant; two brick walls
separating it
from the front room.
“In the next
room — the wall between being solid — there hung near
the window a
water-color portrait in a frame with glass. I had just
gone into that
room and looked at the picture. No one was in the
room but myself,
and no one went there afterwards until I returned
there. When I
came into the place where H. P. B. was sitting, and
after I had
been sitting down a few moments, she took up a piece of
paper and wrote
upon it a few words, handing it over to me to put
away without
looking at it. This I did. She then asked me to return
to the other
room. I went there, and at once saw that the picture
which, a few
moments before, I had looked at, had in some way been
either moved or
broken. On examining it I found that the glass was
smashed, and
that the securely fastened back had been opened,
allowing the
picture within to fall to the floor. Looking down I saw
it lying there.
Going back to the other room I opened and read what
had been
written on the slip of paper, it was :—
“ ' The picture
of ------ in the dining-room has just been opened;
the glass is
smashed and the painting is on the floor.'
“One day, while
she was talking with me, she suddenly stopped and
said,
'So-and-so is now talking of me to -----, and says, etc.' I
made a note of
the hour, and on the first opportunity discovered
that she had
actually heard the person named saying just what she
told me had
been said at the very time noted.
“My office was at
least three miles away from her rooms”: One day,
at about 2
P.M., I was sitting in my office engaged in reading a
legal document,
my mind intent on the subject of the paper. No one
else was in the
office, and in fact the nearest room was separated
from me by a
wide opening, or well, in the building, made to let
light into the
inner chambers. Suddenly I felt on my hand a peculiar
tingling
sensation that always preceded any strange thing to happen
in the presence
of H. P. B., and at that moment there fell from the
ceiling upon
the edge of my desk, and from there to the floor, a
triangularly-folded
note from Madame to myself. It was written upon
the clean back
of a printed Jain sutra or text. The message was in
her
handwriting, and was addressed to me in her writing across the
printed face.
“I remember one
phenomenon in connection with the making of a
water-color
drawing of an Egyptian subject for her, which also
illustrates
what the Spiritualists call apport, or the bringing
phenomenally of
objects from some distant place. I was in want of
certain dry
colors which she could not furnish me from her
collection, and
as the drawing must be finished at that sitting, and
there was no
shop nearby where I could purchase them, it seemed a
dilemma until
she stepped towards the cottage piano, and, holding up
the skirt of
her robe de chambre with both hands, received into it
seventeen
bottles of Winsor & Newton dry colors, among them those I
required. I
still wanted some gold-paint, so she caused me to bring
her a saucer
from the dining-room, and to give her the brass key of
the door. She
rubbed the key upon the bottom of the saucer for a
minute or two,
and then, returning them to me, I found a supply of
the paint I required
coating the porcelain.”
I should hardly
venture to communicate the foregoing narrative to
the public if
it were not for the obvious impossibility, in editing
memoirs of Mme.
Blavatsky, of keeping the various experiences
recorded of her
within the limits of that which is generally held to
be credible.
Certainly no one person of those who have had
opportunities
of observing the phenomena occurring in her presence
could hope to
be regarded by the world at large as both sane and
truthful in
relating his experience. But fortified as each witness
is in turn by
the testimony of all the others, the situation must be
recognised as
involving difficulties for critics who contend that
one and all,
near relations, old friends, casual acquaintances, or
intimates of
her later years, are all possessed with a mania for
trumping up
fictitious stories about Mme. Blavatsky, or all in
different parts
of the world, and at widely different periods,
sharing in an
epidemic hallucination in regard to her, while in no
other respects
exhibiting abnormal conditions of mind.
The first
incident during her stay in America which seems to have
drawn the
attention of the newspapers to Mme. Blavatsky was the
death and
cremation, under the auspices of the Theosophical Society,
of an eccentric
personage known in New York as “the Baron de Palm”.
Among other
eccentricities that he committed, he made a will shortly
before his
death professing to bequeath a considerable fortune to
the
Theosophical Society, but on inquiry it turned out that the
property
referred to in this document existed in his imagination
alone. The
newspapers credited the Society with having acquired
great wealth by
seducing the sympathies of this guileless
millionaire,
when in reality his effects did not meet the cost of
the ceremonies
connected with burning his body. However, the Society
and Mme.
Blavatsky suddenly sprang into local notoriety.
“Fancy my
surprise . . .” she wrote about this time to her sister.
“I am — heaven help
us ! — becoming fashionable, as it seems I am
writing
articles on Esotericism and Nirvana, and paid for them more
than I could
have ever expected, though I have hardly any time for
writing for
money. . . . Believe me, and you will, for you know me,
I cannot make
myself realize that I have ever been able to write
decently. ...
If I were unknown, no publisher or editor would have
ever paid any
attention to me. . . . It's all vanity and fashion. .
. . Luckily for
the publishers, I have never been vain.”
In the course
of another family letter she writes: —
“Upon my word,
I can hardly understand why you and people generally
should make
such a fuss over my writings, whether Russian or
English! True,
during the long years of my absence from home, I have
constantly
studied and have learned certain things. But when I wrote
"/sis",
I wrote it so easily that it was certainly no labor, but a
real pleasure.
Why should I be praised for it? Whenever I am told to
write, I sit
down and obey, and then I can write easily upon almost
anything —
metaphysics, psychology, philosophy, ancient religions,
zoology,
natural sciences, or what not. I never put myself the
question: ' Can
I write on this subject? . . .' or, ' Am I equal to
the task ?' but
I simply sit down and write. Why ? Because somebody
who knows all
dictates to me. . . . My MASTER, and occasionally
others whom I
knew in my travels years ago. . . . Please do not
imagine that I
have lost my senses. I have hinted to you before now
about them . .
. and I tell you candidly, that whenever I write upon
a subject I
know little or nothing of, I address myself to Them, and
one of Them
inspires me, i.e. He allows me to simply copy what I
write from
manuscripts, and even printed matter that pass before my
eyes, in the
air, during which process I have never been unconscious
one single
instant. ... It is that knowledge of His protection and
faith in His
power that have enabled me to become mentally and
spiritually so
strong . . . and even He (the Master) is not always
required; for,
during His absence on some other occupation, He
awakens in me
His substitute in knowledge. At such times it is no
more / who
write, but my inner Ego, my ' luminous self,' who thinks
and writes for
me. Only see . . . you who know me. When was I ever
so learned as
to write such things? . . . Whence all this knowledge?
. . .”
On another
occasion again she wrote also to her sister: —
“You may
disbelieve me, but I tell you that in saying this I speak
but the truth;
I am solely occupied, not with writing Isis, but with
"Isis"
herself. I live in a kind of permanent enchantment, a life of
visions and
sights with open eyes, and no trance whatever to deceive
my senses! I
sit and watch the fair goddess constantly. And as she
displays before
me the secret meaning of her long lost secrets, and
the veil,
becoming with every hour thinner and more transparent,
gradually falls
off before my eyes, I hold my breath and can hardly
trust to my
senses! . . . For several years, in order not to forget
what I have
learned elsewhere, I have been made to have permanently
before my eyes
all that I need to see. Thus night and day, the
images of the
past are ever marshaled before my inner eye. Slowly,
and gliding
silently like images in an enchanted panorama, centuries
after centuries
appear before me, . . . and I am made to connect
these epochs
with certain historical events, and I know there can be
no mistake.
Races and nations, countries and cities, emerge during
some former
century, then fade out and disappear during some other
one, the
precise date of which I am then told by ... Hoary antiquity
gives room to
historical periods; myths are explained by real events
and personages
who have really existed ; and every important, and
often
unimportant event, every revolution, a new leaf turned in the
book of life of
nations — with its incipient course and subsequent
natural results
— remains photographed in my mind as though
impressed in
indelible colours. . . . When I think and watch my
thoughts, they
appear to me as though they were like those little
bits of wood of
various shapes and colors in the game known as the
casse
tête: I pick them up one by one, and try to make them fit each
other, first
taking one, then putting it aside, until I find its
match, and
finally there always comes out in the end something
geometrically
correct. ... I certainly refuse point-blank to
attribute it to
my own knowledge or memory, for I could never arrive
alone at either
such premises or conclusions. ... I tell you
seriously I am
helped. And He who helps me is my GURU. . . .”
As belonging to
the period of Mme. Blavatsky's residence in America,
mention may
here be made of a remarkable incident with which she was
closely
concerned, though it was not accomplished by the exercise of
her own
abnormal powers.
Prince Emile
Wittgenstein, a Russian officer, and an old friend who
had known her
from childhood, was in correspondence with her at the
time of the
formation of the Theosophical Society. In consequence of
certain
warnings addressed to him at spiritual seances concerning
fatalities
which would menace him if he took part in the war on the
Danube then
impending, Mme. Blavatsky was instructed by her unseen
spiritual chief
to inform him that on the contrary he would be
specially taken
care of during the campaign, and that the
spiritualistic
warning would be confuted. The course of subsequent
events will
best be described by the quotation of a letter
afterwards addressed
by the Prince to an English journal devoted to
spiritualism.
This was as follows: —
“ TO THE EDITOR OF THE ' SPIRITUALIST'.
“Allow me, for the sake of those who believe
in spirit
predictions, to tell you a story about
incidents which happened to
me last year, and about which I, for months
past, have wished to
talk to you, without, till now, finding time
to do so. The