Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (76 page)

The apartment covered the entire ground floor of the building. This was considerably more space than Helena needed and the price of a thousand francs for the remainder of the season and a hundred francs a month thereafter was obviously too expensive. “But what can I do?”
¹⁴¹
she sighed. A little elegance was certainly a welcome change especially since Madame rarely went out of her quarters.

By mid-July Vera and her daughter had gone. When Helena tried to get back to writing, she found it difficult to concentrate, and when Alfred Sinnett came for a few days she found it convenient to blame her lack of progress on him. All he wanted to talk about were the memoirs, which H.P.B. now sorely regretted having agreed to. To have to dredge up from her imagination plausible explanations for Agardi Metrovitch and Michael Betanelly, whom Sinnett had somehow learned of and coyly referred to as “the Philadelphia marriage incident,”
¹⁴²
required a major expenditure of time and energy. The more she reflected on the memoirs, the more she felt they should not be labeled as such. What Sinnett had managed to pluck out of her was “neither an autobiography nor a biography, but simply stray facts collected and strung together” and she did not need the gift of prophecy to foresee that she would be “publicly whipped for it by kind and merciful readers and critics.”
¹⁴³

Once Sinnett left, there was no one for company but Louise and the landlady. Madame had found a doctor who seemed intelligent and agreed to visit her once a week; otherwise, she did not know a soul in Ostend, “not one solitary Russian here this season except myself, who would rather be a Turk and go back to India.”
¹⁴⁴
If only she had the use of her legs, she brooded; it was terrible to be alone, ill, and immobile.

On top of all this, she suddenly discovered that she had lost her passport and left her naturalization papers at Adyar; without either of these documents she did not even have the protection of the American consul. Writing to William Judge in great agitation, she asked him to please go at once to City Hall and have copies made, and to see why J. W. Bouton had not sent a check in June as promised. If Bouton had sent the money to Olcott, she planned to cause trouble, because the royalties from
Isis
belonged solely to her. These days she had little good to say for Henry who was “fast turning the Society into a Salvation Army business”
¹⁴⁵
ever since he had been left to his own devices in India. There was nothing she could do about that except dissociate herself from him; at this point, she had no intention of permitting him to profit from her work.

In order to finish
The Secret Doctrine
she felt the need of Countess Wachtmeister. In letter after letter she urged her return: “I am very weak, dear, I feel so poorly and legless as I never did when you were there to care for me.”
¹⁴⁶
As a result of these lamentations, Constance hastened to her side before the end of August, installed herself in the suite across the hall, and once again they settled down together. Throughout the late summer and into the autumn, Helena was content. Occasionally Constance would coerce her into a sunbath on the esplanade, but, once the weather grew chilly, Helena refused to go outdoors. In her own suite the windows were never opened and the rooms kept heated to well over seventy degrees; and she would not venture into the dining room until Louise assured her that the windows had been closed and the room heated. Any temperature under seventy would be fatal, Madame declared.

On the rare occasions when visitors sought them out, Helena found the audiences provided her with small pleasure. Mohini Chatterji’s two-week stay, for instance, left her coiled with rage; she had been slow to recognize and even slower to admit that Mohini had sprouted into another Babaji, but now she could not help noticing the transformation. The real mahatmas, he had come to believe, were unreachable beings who neither communicated by writing letters nor concerned themselves with worldly matters; therefore it followed that Madame’s Masters could not be mahatmas. Of course “Mr. Mohini Babu,” as she now scornfully referred to him, did not have the courage to announce these heresies to her face, but she knew that elsewhere he spoke of them openly and that he had persuaded Francesca Arundale and others. With Helena, his manner was dignified and reserved, as no doubt befitted “a Jesus on wheels & a
Saint”
¹⁴⁷
and for a moment he made her appreciate Olcott who
“is
a conceited ass, but there is no one more faithful and true than he is to the Masters.”
¹⁴⁸
When Mohini told her of his plans to visit America, she trembled at the thought of the trouble he would cause there and suspected it could mean the end of the Society in the United States.

H.P.B. invited other guests that fall: Dr. Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland. It occurred to Madame that Anna might like to return to the Theosophic fold, perhaps even as president of the London Lodge now that Sinnett had allowed the group to wither. So when Anna and Edward arrived in Ostend on the third of October and registered at a nearby hotel, Helena overwhelmed them with reproaches and insisted they check out and move at once into her apartment. Recently Anna had been suffering from severe asthma as well as facial neuralgia, and Maitland, who was currently taking her to southern Italy for the winter, hesitated to leave the privacy of the hotel, where Anna could quietly take her whiffs of chloroform as she needed them. Maitland also objected to the move on the grounds that Anna required a vegetarian diet and that she might be molested by Madame’s powerful and hostile “occult influences.” He did not, of course, mention that final reservation to H.P.B.

In the end, however, Helena prevailed by assuring Anna that the diet was no problem because, while she herself required meat, Countess Wachtmeister was a vegetarian; and besides, she would introduce her to Mahatma Koot Hoomi. This promise Anna found irresistible, and she packed her belongings immediately. In his biography of Anna, Maitland recalled their three-day stay as enjoyable because “the hospitality and geniality of our hostesses was unbounded.” Eager to show herself in the most favorable light, Helena laid out her patience in the evenings and disarmed them with her usual candor, admitting, for example, that her troubles with the Society for Psychical Research had partially resulted from her own foolishness and lack of discretion. If only she had had someone to coddle her, as Anna had Maitland, she would never have done the things that had landed her in trouble; of course there was Henry Olcott, but he had never been of the slightest use as a protector. Now she could not take a step without opposition, and the public prejudice had spilled over onto the Theosophical Society. But if Anna would consider assuming the presidency of the London branch, they would be able to disarm the opposition and create a movement that would be universally accepted. Maitland vetoed the idea on the grounds that their missions were totally different: he and Anna sought to restore the true esoteric Christianity to mankind while Madame’s goal was the total subversion of the Christian ideal.

Helena took the rejection quietly, perhaps because she realized that Anna was an extremely sick woman who had not much longer to live. In fact, on their second evening with Helena, Anna was stricken with a particularly severe asthma attack and begged Maitland for chloroform. Immediately she began to hallucinate, first complaining that the ceiling was too low, then shifting to her favorite subject, anti-vivisection. H.P.B. must have listened in horror while Anna described how she used her psychic ability to “project” killing thoughts against certain doctors and scientists who used animals in their experiments. One of the men against whom she had directed her projections was Claude Bernard, and he had obliged her by dying. If she lived long enough, Anna planned to kill several others, including Louis Pasteur. She suggested that H.P.B. join forces with her.

Declining gently, Helena pointed out that Anna would do better to attack the principle of vivisection rather than personalities, because she did injury to herself and her victims “without much benefitting the poor animals.”
¹⁴⁹

After experiencing Anna’s psychic mad song, H.P.B. was content to spend her time with the countess. During the remainder of the year and through the first months of 1887, the world heard little of Madame Blavatsky; there were no furious letters to magazine and newspaper editors, no disputes with her enemies; what few personal letters she did write were mainly progress reports on
The Secret Doctrine.
By this time she had completed what she believed to be a first volume and was starting on a second in which she planned to deal with Hindu esoteric doctrines; so far she felt enormously pleased with her results. About a year earlier, in a moment of inspiration, she had taken a giant leap forward by devising a unifying theme for the work, and after that everything seemed to have fallen into place.

The device was not only both ingenious and simple but extremely provocative as well: somewhere in this wide, wide world, as she would explain in the introduction to
The Secret Doctrine,
there exists an archaic manuscript known as the
Stanzas of Dzyan.
These fragments of Tibetan sacred writings comprise the oldest book in the world; in fact, an ancient Hebrew document on occultism, the
Siphra Dzeniuta,
had been compiled from them. “A collection of palm leaves made impermeable to water, fire and air, by some specific unknown process,”
¹⁵⁰
the
Stanzas
were written in “Senzar,” a language unknown to philology, and were buried along with similar priceless manuscripts in the secret crypts that formed the library system of the Brotherhood. At one time, according to H.P.B., the human race had been granted a primeval revelation in which the principles of civilization were set forth; and even though this root knowledge basic to all religion, science and philosophy had gradually disappeared from view, it had not been lost. H.P.B.’s stated intention in
The Secret Doctrine
was to translate and reveal that portion of the revelation contained in the
Stanzas of Dzyan,
“that can be given out to the world in this century.”
¹⁵¹

In an obvious effort to forestall objections, she warned in advance that her book would doubtless be regarded by a large section of the public as the wildest sort of romance, “for who has ever even heard of the book of Dzyan”;
¹⁵²
still, she was prepared to face the charge of having invented it. To her judges, she had nothing to say, nor would she condescend to notice “those crack-brained slanderers”
¹⁵³
who maintained she had invented the Mahatmas and plagiarized her previous writings from Eliphas Levi and Paracelsus. To open-minded readers, she repeated the words of Montaigne: “I have here made only a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the string that ties them,” to which she added, “Pull the ‘string’ to pieces, if you will. As for the nosegay of FACTS—you will never be able to make away with these. You can only ignore them, and no more.”
¹⁵⁴

It would be charged, subsequently, that Madame Blavatsky had plagiarized the
Stanzas of Dzyan
from a combination of sources. According to William Emmette Coleman, the sources were mainly from H. H. Wilson’s
Vishnu Purana
and Alexander Winchell’s
World Life,
Other plagiarized works included: Donnelly’s
Atlantis,
Dowson’s
Hindu Classical Dictionary,
Oliver’s
Pythagorean Triangle,
Decharme’s
Mythologie de la Grece Antique,
and Myer’s
Qabbala,
plus some sixteen other works. Reported Coleman, “I find in this ‘oldest book in the world’ statements copied from nineteenth century books and in the usual blundering manner of Madame Blavatsky.”
¹⁵⁵

In comparing
The Secret Doctrine
with the works mentioned by Coleman, it is immediately clear that H.P.B. did in fact use them as references and in many cases lifted sizable chunks of material, with or without accreditation, just as she did in
Isis Unveiled.
But Coleman may have erred in limiting her source material to nineteenth-century writers. As pointed out by Gershom Scholem, today’s greatest living scholar of Jewish mysticism, the
Stanzas
“owe something, both in title and content, to the pompous pages of the Zoharic writing called
Sifra Di-Tseniutha.”
Madame Blavatsky, he goes on to add, “has drawn heavily upon Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata (1677-1684), which contains (vol. II, pp. 347-385) a Latin translation of the
Sifra Di-Tseniutha.
The solemn and magniloquent style of these pages may well have impressed her susceptible mind.”
¹⁵⁶

Whether Helena actually did gain access to this obscure seventeenth century translation is impossible to know for certain; she herself is the last person to consult for enlightenment because from the outset she surrounded the writing of
The Secret Doctrine
with the kind of mystery she adored. She announced in almost every letter she wrote that she would use no reference material whatsoever. To Alfred Sinnett: “Now I am here alone with the Countess for witness. I have no books, no one to help me. And I tell you that the
Secret Doctrine
will be 20 times as learned, philosophical, and better than
Isis...
”
¹⁵⁷
To Henry Olcott: “... I am here quite alone with no books around me...”
¹⁵⁸