Blavatsky, who gathered about her a few interested people and began the
great work. They held a meeting to frame a constitution (1875), etc., but
before anything had been accomplished a strangely foreign Hindoo, dressed
in the peculiar garb of his country, came before them, and, leaving a
package, vanished, and no one knew whither he came or went. On opening the
package they found the necessary forms of organization, rules, etc., which
were adopted. The inference to be drawn was, that the strange visitor was
a Mahatma, interested in the foundation of the Society."
[Illustration: FIG. 37. WILLIAM Q. JUDGE.
[Reproduced by courtesy of the _New York Herald_.]]
And so Blavatskyism flourished, and the Society gathered in disciples from
all quarters. Men without definite creeds are ever willing to embrace
anything that savors of the mysterious, however absurd the tenets of the
new doctrine may be. The objects of the Theosophical Society, as set forth
in a number of _Lucifer_, the organ of the cult, published in July, 1890,
are stated to be:
"1. To form a nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without
distinction of race, creed, sex, or color.
"2. To promote the study of Aryan and other Eastern literatures, religions
and sciences.
"3. To investigate laws of Nature and the psychical powers of man."
There is nothing of cant or humbug about the above articles. A society
founded for the prosecution of such researches seems laudable enough.
Oriental scholars and scientists have been working in this field for many
years. But the investigations, as conducted under the Blavatsky régime,
have savored so of charlatanism that many earnest, truth-seeking
Theosophists have withdrawn from the Society.
After seeing the Society well established, Madame Blavatsky went to India.
Her career in that country was a checkered one. From this period dates the
exposé of the Mahatma miracles. The story reads like a romance by Marie
Corelli. Let us begin at the beginning. The headquarters of the Society
was first established at Bombay, thence removed to Madras and afterwards
to Adyar. A certain M. and Mme. Coulomb, trusted friends of Madame
Blavatsky, were made librarian and assistant corresponding secretary
respectively of the Society, and took up their residence in the building
known as the headquarters--a rambling East Indian bungalow, such as figure
in Rudyard Kipling's stories of Oriental life. Marvellous phenomena, of an
occult nature, alleged to have taken place there, were attested by many
Theosophists. Mysterious, ghostly appearances of Mahatmas were seen, and
messages were constantly received by supernatural means. One of the
apartments of the bungalow was denominated the Occult Room, and in this
room was a sort of cupboard against the wall, known as the _Shrine_. In
this shrine the ghostly missives were received and from it were sent.
Skeptics were convinced, and occult lodges spread rapidly over India among
the dreamy, marvel-loving natives. But affairs were not destined to sail
smoothly. There came a rift within the lute--Madame Blavatsky quarreled
with her trusted lieutenants, the Coulombs! In May, 1884, M. and Mme.
Coulomb were expelled from the Society by the General Council, during the
absence of the High Priestess and Col. Olcott in Europe. The Coulombs, who
had grown weary of a life of imposture, or were actuated by the more
ignoble motive of revenge, made a complete exposé of the secret working of
the Inner Brotherhood. They published portions of Madame Blavatsky's
correspondence in the _Madras Christian College Magazine_, for September
and October, 1884; letters written to the Coulombs, directing them to
prepare certain impostures and letters written by the High Priestess,
under the signature of Koot Hoomi, the mythical adept.[5] This
correspondence unquestionably implicated the Sibyl in a conspiracy to
fraudulently produce occult phenomena. She declared them to be, in whole,
or in part, forgeries. At this juncture the London Society for Psychical
Research sent Mr. Richard Hodgson, B. A., scholar of St. John's College,
Cambridge, England, to India to investigate the entire matter in the
interest of science.
He left England November, 1884, and remained in the East till April, 1885.
During this period Blavatskyism was sifted to the bottom. Mr. Hodgson's
report covers several hundred pages, and proves conclusively that the
occult phenomena of Madame Blavatsky and her co-adjutors are unworthy of
credence. In his volume he gives diagrams of the trap-doors and machinery
of the shrine and the occult room, and facsimiles of Madame Blavatsky's
handwriting, which proved to be identical with that of Koot Hoomi, or
_Cute_ Hoomi, as the critics dubbed him. He shows that the Coulombs had
told the plain unvarnished truth so far as their disclosures went; and he
stigmatizes the Priestess of Isis in the following language:
"1. She has been engaged in a long continued combination with other
persons to produce by ordinary means a series of apparent marvels for the
support of the Theosophic movement.
"2. That in particular the shrine at Adyar through which letters
purporting to come from Mahatmas were received, was elaborately arranged
with a view to the secret insertion of letters and other objects through a
sliding panel at the back, and regularly used for the purpose by Madame
Blavatsky or her agents.
"3. That there is consequently a very strong general presumption that all
the marvellous narratives put forward in evidence of the existence of
Mahatmas are to be explained as due either (_a_) to deliberate deception
carried out by or at the instigation of Madame Blavatsky, or (_b_) to
spontaneous illusion or hallucination or unconscious misrepresentation or
invention on the part of the witnesses."
The mysterious appearances of the ghostly Mahatmas at the headquarters was
shown, by Mr. Hodgson, to be the work of confederates, the cleverest among
them being Madame Coulomb. Sliding panels, secret doors, and many
disguises were the _modus operandi_ of the occult phenomena. In regard to
the letters and alleged precipitated writing, Mr. Hodgson says:
"It has been alleged, indeed, that when Madame Blavatsky was at Madras,
instantaneous replies to mental queries had been found in the shrine (at
Adyar), that envelopes containing questions were returned absolutely
intact to the senders, and that when they were opened replies were found
within in the handwriting of a Mahatma. After numerous inquiries, I found
that in all cases I could hear of, the mental query was such as might
easily have been anticipated by Madame Blavatsky; indeed, the query was
whether the questioner would meet with success in his endeavor to become a
pupil of the Mahatma, and the answer was frequently of the indefinite and
oracular sort. In some cases the envelope inserted in the Shrine was one
which had been previously sent to headquarters for that purpose, so that
the envelope might have been opened and the answer written therein before
it was placed in the Shrine at all. Where sufficient care was taken in the
preparation of the inquiry, either no specific answer was given or the
answer was delayed."
A certain phenomenon, frequently mentioned by Theosophists as having
occurred in Madame Blavatsky's sitting-room, was the dropping of a letter
from the ceiling, supposed to be a communication from some Mahatma. In all
such cases conjuring was proved to have been used--the _deus ex machina_
being either a silk thread or else a cunningly secreted trap door hidden
between the wooden beams of the bungalow ceiling, operated of course by a
concealed confederate.
Madame Blavatsky's favorite method of impressing people with her occult
powers was the almost immediate reception of letters from distant
countries, in response to questions asked. These feats were the result of
carefully contrived plans, preconcerted weeks in advance. She would
telegraph in cipher to one of her numerous correspondents, East Indian,
for example, to write a letter in reply to a certain query, and post it at
a particular date. Then she would calculate the arrival of the letter,
often to a nicety. Her ability as a conversationalist enabled her to
adroitly lead people into asking questions that would tally with the
Mahatma messages. But sometimes she failed, and a ludicrous fiasco was the
result. Mr. Hodgson's report contains accounts of many such mystic letters
that would arrive by post from India in the nick of time, or too late for
use.
Among other remarkable things reported of the Madame was her power of
producing photographs of people far away by a sort of spiritual
photography, involving no other mechanical process than the slipping of a
sheet of paper between the leaves of her blotting pad.
When stories of this spirit-photography were rife in London, a scientist
published the following explanation of a method of making such Mahatma
portraits:
"Has the English public never heard of 'Magic photography?' Just a few
years ago small sheets of white paper were offered for sale which on being
covered with damp blotting paper developed an image as if by magic. The
white sheets of paper seemed blanks. Really, however, they were
photographs, not containing gold, which had been bleached by immersing
them in a solution of mercuric chloride. The latter gives up part of its
chlorine, and this chlorine bleaches the brown silver particles of which
the photograph consists, by changing them to chloride of silver. The
mercuric chloride becomes mercurous chloride. This body is white, and
therefore invisible on white paper. Now, several substances will color
this white mercurous chloride black. Ammonia and hypo-sulphite of soda
will do this. In the magic photographs before mentioned the blotting paper
contained hypo-sulphite of soda. Consequently when the alleged blank
sheets of white note paper were placed between the sheets of blotting
paper and slightly moistened, the hypo-sulphite of soda in the blotting
paper acted chemically on the mercurous chloride in the white note paper,
and the picture appeared. As this was known in 1840 to Herschel,
Blavatsky's miracle is nothing but a commonplace conjuring experiment."
3. Madame Blavatsky's Confession.
The individual to whom the world is most indebted for a critical analysis
of Madame Blavatsky's character and her claims as a producer of occult
phenomena is Vsevolod S. Solovyoff, a Russian journalist and _litterateur_
of considerable note. He has ruthlessly torn the veil from the Priestess
of Isis in a remarkable book of revelations, entitled, "A Modern Priestess
of Isis." In May, 1884, he was in Paris, engaged in studying occult
literature, and was preparing to write a treatise on "the rare, but in my
opinion, real manifestations of the imperfectly investigated spiritual
powers of man." One day he read in the _Matin_ that Madame Blavatsky had
arrived in Paris, and he determined to meet her. Thanks to a friend in St.
Petersburg, he obtained a letter of introduction to the famous
Theosophist, and called on her a few days later, at her residence in the
Rue Notre Dame des Champs. His pen picture of the interview is graphic:
"I found myself in a long, mean street on the left bank of the Seine, _de
l'autre cote de l'eau_, as the Parisians say. The coachman stopped at the
number I had told him. The house was unsightly enough to look at, and at
the door there was not a single carriage.
"'My dear sir, you have let her slip; she has left Paris,' I said to
myself with vexation.
"In answer to my inquiry the concierge showed me the way. I climbed a
very, very dark staircase, rang, and a slovenly figure in an Oriental
turban admitted me into a tiny dark lobby.
"To my question, whether Madame Blavatsky would receive me, the slovenly
figure replied with an '_Entrez, monsieur_,' and vanished with my card,
while I was left to wait in a small low room, poorly and insufficiently
furnished.
"I had not long to wait. The door opened, and she was before me; a rather
tall woman, though she produced the impression of being short, on account
of her unusual stoutness. Her great head seemed all the greater from her
thick and very bright hair, touched with a scarcely perceptible gray, and
very slightly frizzed, by nature and not by art, as I subsequently
convinced myself.
"At the first moment her plain, old earthy-colored face struck me as
repulsive; but she fixed on me the gaze of her great, rolling, pale blue
eyes, and in these wonderful eyes, with their hidden power, all the rest
was forgotten.
"I remarked, however, that she was very strangely dressed, in a sort of
black sacque, and that all the fingers of her small, soft, and as it were
boneless hands, with their slender points and long nails, were covered
with great jewelled rings."
Madame Blavatsky received Solovyoff kindly, and they became excellent
friends. She urged him to join the Theosophical Society, and he expressed
himself as favorably impressed with the purposes of the organization.
During the interview she produced her astral bell "phenomenon." She
excused herself to attend to some domestic duty, and on her return to the
sitting-room, the phenomenon took place. Says Solovyoff: "She made a sort
of flourish with her hand, raised it upwards and suddenly, I heard
distinctly, quite distinctly, somewhere above our heads, near the
ceiling, a very melodious sound like a little silver bell or an Aeolian
harp.
"'What is the meaning of this?' I asked.
"'This means only that my master is here, although you and I cannot see
him. He tells me that I may trust you, and am to do for you whatever I
can. _Vous etes sous sa protection_, henceforth and forever.'
"She looked me straight in the eyes, and caressed me with her glance and
her kindly smile."
This Mahatmic phenomenon ought to have absolutely convinced Solovyoff, but
it did not. He asked himself the question:
"'Why was the sound of the silver bell not heard at once, but only after
she had left the room and come back again?'"
A few days after this event, the Russian journalist was regularly enrolled
as a member of the Theosophical Society, and began to study Madame
Blavatsky instead of Oriental literature and occultism. He was introduced
to Colonel Olcott, who showed him the turban that had been left at the New
York headquarters by the astral Koot Hoomi. Solovyoff witnessed other
"phenomena" in the presence of Madame Blavatsky, which did not impress him
very favorably. Finally, the High Priestess produced her _chef d'
oeuvre_, the psychometric reading of a letter. Solovyoff was rather
impressed with this feat and sent an account of it to the _Rebus_, but
subsequently came to the conclusion that trickery had entered into it.
When the Coulomb exposures came, he did not see much of Madame Blavatsky.
She was overwhelmed with letters and spent a considerable time anxiously
travelling to and fro on Theosophical affairs. In August, 1885, she was at
Wurzburg sick at heart and in body, attended by a diminutive Hindoo
servant, Bavaji by name. She begged Solovyoff to visit her, promising to
give him lessons in occultism. With a determination to investigate the
"phenomena," he went to the Bavarian watering place, and one morning
called on Madame Blavatsky. He found her seated in a great arm chair:
"At the opposite end of the table stood the dwarfish Bavaji, with a
confused look in his dulled eyes. He was evidently incapable of meeting my
gaze, and the fact certainly did not escape me. In front of Bavaji on the
table were scattered several sheets of clean paper. Nothing of the sort
had occurred before, so my attention was the more aroused. In his hand
was a great thick pencil. I began to have ideas.
"'Just look at the unfortunate man,' said Helena Petrovna suddenly,
turning to me. 'He does not look himself at all; he drives me to
distraction'.... Then she passed from Bavaji to the London Society for
Psychical Research, and again tried to persuade me about the 'master.'
Bavaji stood like a statue; he could take no part in our conversation, as
he did not know a word of Russian.
"'But such incredulity as to the evidence of your own eyes, such obstinate
infidelity as yours, is simply unpardonable. In fact, it is wicked!'
exclaimed Helena Petrovna.
"I was walking about the room at the time, and did not take my eyes off
Bavaji. I saw that he was keeping his eyes wide open, with a sort of
contortion of his whole body, while his hand, armed with a great pencil,
was carefully tracing some letters on a sheet of paper.
"'Look; what is the matter with him?' exclaimed Madame Blavatsky.
"'Nothing particular,' I answered; 'he is writing in Russian.'
"I saw her whole face grow purple. She began to stir in her chair, with an
obvious desire to get up and take the paper from him. But with her swollen
and almost inflexible limbs, she could not do so with any speed. I made
haste to seize the paper and saw on it a beautifully _drawn_ Russian
phrase.
"Bavaji was to have written, in the Russian language with which he was not
acquainted: 'Blessed are they that believe, as said the Great Adept.' He
had learned his task well, and remembered correctly the form of all the
letters, but he had omitted two in the word 'believe,' [The effect was
precisely the same as if in English he had omitted the first two and last
two letters of the word.]
"'Blessed are they that _lie_,' I read aloud, unable to control the
laughter which shook me. 'That is the best thing I ever saw. Oh, Bavaji!
you should have got your lesson up better for examination!'
"The tiny Hindoo hid his face in his hands and rushed out of the room; I
heard his hysterical sobs in the distance. Madame Blavatsky sat with
distorted features."
As will be seen from the above, the Hindoo servant was one of the Madame's
Mahatmas, and was caught in the act of preparing a communication from a
sage in the Himalayas, to Solovyoff.
"After this abortive phenomena," remarks the Russian journalist, "things
marched faster, and I saw that I should soon be in a position to send very
interesting additions to the report of the Psychical Society."... "Every
day when I came to see the Madame she used to try to do me a favor in the
shape of some trifling 'phenomenon,' but she never succeeded. Thus one day
her famous 'silver bell' was heard, when suddenly something fell beside
her on the ground. I hurried to pick it up--and found in my hands a pretty
little piece of silver, delicately worked and strangely shaped. Helena
Petrovna changed countenance, and snatched the object from me. I coughed
significantly, smiled and turned the conversation to indifferent matters."
On another occasion he was conversing with her about the "Theosophist,"
and "she mentioned the name of Subba Rao, a Hindoo, who had attained the
highest degree of knowledge." She directed Mr. Solovyoff to open a drawer
in her writing desk, and take from it a photograph of the adept.
"I opened the drawer," says Solovyoff, "found the photograph and handed it
to her--together with a packet of Chinese envelopes (See Fig. 34), such
as I well knew; they were the same in which the 'elect' used to receive
the letters of the Mahatmas Morya and Koot Hoomi by 'astral post.'
"'Look at that, Helena Petrovna! I should advise you to hide this packet
of the master's envelopes farther off. You are so terribly absent-minded
and careless.'
"It was easy to imagine what this was to her. I looked at her and was
positively frightened; her face grew perfectly black. She tried in vain to
speak; she could only writhe helplessly in her great arm-chair."
Solovyoff with great adroitness gradually drew from her a confession.
"What is one to do," said Madame Blavatsky, plaintively, "when in order to
rule men it is necessary to deceive them; almost invariably the more
simple, the more silly, and the more gross the phenomenon, the more likely
it is to succeed." The Priestess of Isis broke down completely and
acknowledged that her phenomena were not genuine; the Koot Hoomi letters
were written by herself and others in collusion with her; finally she
exhibited to the journalist the apparatus for producing the "astral bell,"
and begged him to go into a co-partnership with her to astonish the
world. He refused! The next day she declared that a black magician had
spoken through her mouth, and not herself; she was not responsible for
what she had said. After this he had other interviews with her; threats
and promises; and lastly a most extraordinary letter, which was headed,
"My Confession," and reads, in part, as follows:
"Believe me, _I have fallen because I have made up my mind to fall_, or
else to bring about a reaction by telling all God's truth about myself,
_but without mercy on my enemies_. On this I am firmly resolved, and from
this day I shall begin to prepare myself in order to be ready. I will fly
no more. Together with this letter, or a few hours later, I shall myself
be in Paris, and then on to London. A Frenchman is ready, and a well-known
journalist too, delighted to set about the work and to write at my
dictation something short, but strong, and what is most important--a true
history of my life. _I shall not even attempt to defend_, to justify
myself. In this book I shall simply say: "In 1848, I, hating my husband,
N. V. Blavatsky (it may have been wrong, but still such was the nature
_God_ gave me), left him, abandoned him--_a virgin_. (I shall produce
documents and letters proving this, although he himself is not such a
swine as to deny it.) I loved one man deeply, but still more I loved
occult science, believing in magic, wizards, etc. I wandered with him here
and there, in Asia, in America, and in Europe. I met with So-and-so. (You
may call him a _wizard_, what does it matter to him?) In 1858 I was in
London; there came out some story about a child, not mine (there will
follow medical evidence, from the faculty of Paris, and it is for this
that I am going to Paris). One thing and another was said of me; that I
was depraved, possessed with a devil, etc.
"I shall tell everything as I think fit, everything I did, for the twenty
years and more, that I laughed at the _qu'en dira-t-on_, and covered up
all traces of what I was _really_ occupied in, i. e., the _sciences
occultes_, for the sake of my family and relations who would at that time
have cursed me. I will tell how from my eighteenth year I tried to get
people to talk about me, and say about me that this man and that was my
lover, and _hundreds_ of them. I will tell, too, a great deal of which no
one ever dreamed, and _I will prove it_. Then I will inform the world how
suddenly my eyes were opened to all the horror of my _moral suicide_; how
I was sent to America to try my psychological capabilities; how I
collected a society there, and began to expiate my faults, and attempted
to make men better and to sacrifice myself for their regeneration. _I will
name all_ the Theosophists who were brought into the right way, drunkards
and rakes, who became almost saints, especially in India, and those who
enlisted as Theosophists, and continued their former life, as though they
were doing the work (and there are many of them) and _yet were the first_
to join the pack of hounds that were hunting me down, and to bite me....
"No! The devils will save me in this last great hour. You did not
calculate on the cool determination of _despair_, which _was_ and has
_passed over_.... And to this I have been brought by you. You have been
the last straw which has broken the camel's back under its intolerably
heavy burden. Now you are at liberty to conceal nothing. Repeat to all
Paris what you have ever heard or know about me. I have already written a
letter to Sinnett _forbidding him_ to publish my _memoirs_ at his own
discretion. I myself will publish them with all the truth.... It will be a
Saturnalia of the moral depravity of mankind, this _confession_ of mine, a
worthy epilogue of my stormy life.... Let the psychist gentlemen, and
whosoever will, set on foot a new inquiry. Mohini and all the rest, even
_India_, are dead for me. I thirst for one thing only, that the world may
know all the reality, all the _truth_, and learn the lesson. And then
_death_, kindest of all.
H. BLAVATSKY.
"You may print this letter if you will, even in Russia. It is all the same
now."