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Tuesday, October 30, 2012

A MODERN REVIVAL OF ANCIENT WISDOM (Part 1) by Alvin Boyd Kuhn

http://pc93.tripod.com/tsphyraw.htm

A MODERN REVIVAL OF ANCIENT WISDOM

Part 1

by

Alvin Boyd Kuhn

CHAPTER I
In the mind of the general public Theosophy is classed with Spiritualism, New Thought, Unity and Christian Science, as one of the modern cults. It needs but a slight acquaintance with the facts in the case to reveal that Theosophy is amenable to this classification only in the most superficial sense.
Though the Theosophical Society is recent, theosophy, in the sense of an esoteric philosophic mystic system of religious thought, must be ranked as one of the most ancient traditions. It is not a mere cult, in the sense of being the expression of a quite specialized form of devotion, practice, or theory, propagated by a small group. It is a summation and synthesis of many cults of all times. It is as broad and universal a motif, let us say, as mysticism. It is one of the most permanent phases of religion, and as such it has welled up again and again in the life of mankind. It is that "wisdom of the divine" which has been in the world practically continuously since ancient times. The movement of today is but another periodical recurrence of a phenomenon which has marked the course of history from classical antiquity. Not always visible in outward organization--indeed never formally organized as Theosophy under that name until now--the thread of theosophic teaching and temperament can be traced in almost unbroken course from ancient times to the present. It has often been subterranean, inasmuch as esotericism and secrecy have been essential elements of its very constitution. The modern presentation of theosophy differs from all the past ones chiefly in that it has lifted the veil that cloaked its teachings in mystery, and offered alleged secrets freely to the world. Theosophists tell us that before the launching of the latest "drive" to promulgate Theosophy in the world, the councils of the Great White Brotherhood of Adepts, or Mahatmas, long debated whether the times were ripe for the free propagation of the secret Gnosis; whether the modern world, with its Western dominance and with the prevalence of materialistic standards, could appropriate the sacred knowledge without the risk of serious misuse of high spiritual forces, which might be diverted into selfish channels. We are told that in these councils it was the majority opinion that broadcasting the Ancient Wisdom over the Occidental areas would be a veritable casting of pearls before swine; yet two of the Mahatmas settled the question by undertaking to assume all karmic debts for the move, to take the responsibility for all possible disturbances and ill effects.

If we look at the matter through Theosophic eyes, we are led to believe that when in the fall of 1875 Madame Blavatsky, Col. H. S. Olcott, and Mr. W. Q. Judge took out the charter for the Theosophical Society in New York, the world was witnessing a really major event in human history. Not only did it signify that one more of the many recurrent waves of esoteric cultism was launched but that this time practically the whole body of occult lore, which had been so sedulously guarded in mystery schools, brotherhoods, secret societies, religious orders, and other varieties of organization, was finally to be given to the world en pleine lumière! At last the lid of antiquity's treasure chest would be lifted and the contents exposed to public gaze. There might even be found therein the solution to the riddle of the Sphynx! The great Secret Doctrine was to be taught openly; Isis was to be unveiled!

To understand the periodical recurrence of the theosophic tendency in history it is necessary to note two cardinal features of the Theosophic theory of development. The first is that progress in religion, philosophy, science, or art is not a direct advance, but in advance in cyclical swirls. When you view progress in small sections, it may appear to be a development in a straight line; but if your gaze takes in the whole course of history, you will see the outline of a quite different method of progress. You will not see uninterrupted unfolding of human life, but advances and retreats, plunges and recessions. Spring does not emerge from winter by a steady rise of temperature, but by successive rushes of heat, each carrying the season a bit ahead. Movement in nature is cyclical and periodic. History progresses through the rise and fall of nations. The true symbol of progress is the helix, motion round and round, but tending upward at each swirl. But we must have large perspectives if we are to see the gyrations of the helix.

The application of this interpretation of progress to philosophy and religion is this: the evolution of ideas apparently repeats itself at intervals time after time, a closed circuit of theories running through the same succession at many points in history. Scholars have discerned this fact in regard to the various types of government: monarchy working over into oligarchy, which shifts to democracy, out of which monarchy arises again. The round has also been observed in the domain of philosophy, where development starts with revelation and proceeds through rationalism to empiricism, and, in revulsion from that, swings back to authority or mystic revelation once more. Hegel's theory that progress was not in a straight line but in cycles formed by the manifestation of thesis, antithesis, and then synthesis, which in turn becomes the ground of a new thesis, is but a variation of this general theme.

Theosophists, then, regard their movement as but the renaissance of the esoteric and occult aspect of human thought in this particular swing of the spiral.

The second aspect of the occult theory of development is a method of interpretation which claims to furnish a key to the understanding of religious history. Briefly, the theory is that religions never evolve; they always degenerate. Contrary to the assumptions of comparative mythology, they do not originate in crude primitive feelings or ideas, and then transform themselves slowly into loftier and purer ones. They begin lofty and pure, and deteriorate into crasser forms. They come forth in the glow of spirituality and living power and later pass into empty forms and lifeless practices. From the might of the spirit they contract into the materialism of the letter. No religion can rise above its source, can surpass its founder; and the more exalted the founder and his message, the more certainly is degeneration to be looked for. There is always gradual change in the direction of obscuration and loss of primal vision, initial force. Religions tend constantly to wane, and need repeated revivals and reformations. Nowhere is it possible to discern anything remotely like steady growth in spiritual unfolding.

It is the occult theory that what we find when we search the many religions of the earth is but the fragments, the dissociated and distorted units of what were once profound and coherent systems. It is difficult to trace in the isolated remnants the contour of the original structure. But it is this completed system which the Theosophist seeks to reconstruct from the scattered remnants.

Religion, then, is a phase of human life which is alleged to operate on a principle exactly opposite to evolution, and theosophy believes this key makes it intelligible. Religions never claim to have evolved from human society; they claim to be gifts to humanity. They come to man with the seal of some divine authority and the stamp of supreme perfection. Not only are they born above the world, but they are brought to the world by the embodied divinity of a great Messenger, a Savior, a World-Teacher, a Prophet, a Sage, a Son of God. These bring their own credentials in the form of a divine life. Their words and works bespeak the glory that earth can not engender.

The two phases of theosophic explanation can now be linked into a unified principle. Religions come periodically; and they are given to men from high sources, by supermen. The theory of growth from crude beginnings to spirituality tacitly assumes that man is alone in the universe and left entirely to his own devices; that he must learn everything for himself from experience, which somehow enlarges his faculties and quickens them for higher conceptions. This view, says occultism, does unnatural violence to the fundamental economy of the universe, wrenching humanity out of its proper setting and relationship in an order of harmony and fitness. Humankind is made to be the sole manipulator of intelligence, the favored beneficiary of evolution, and as such is severed from its natural connection with the rest of the cosmic scheme. So small and poor a view does pitiable injustice to the wealth of the cosmic resources. Bruno, Copernicus, and modern science have taught us that man is not the darling of creation, nor the only child in the cosmic family, the pampered ward of the gods. Far from it; he is one among the order of beings, occupying his proper place in relation to vaster hierarchies than he has knowledge of, above and below him.1

What is the character of that relationship? It is, says the esoteric teaching, that of guardian and ward; of a young race in the tutelage of an older; of infant humanity being taught by more highly evolved beings, whose intelligence is to that of early man as an adept's to a tyro's. It is the relationship of children to parents or guardians. Throughout our history we have been the wards of an elder race, or at least of the elder brothers of our own race. The members of a former evolutionary school have turned back often, like the guardians in Plato's cave allegory, to instruct us in vital knowledge. The wisdom of the ages, the knowledge of the very Ancient of Days, has at times been handed down to us. The human family has produced some advanced Sages, Seers, Adepts, Christs, and these have cared for the less-advanced classes, and have from time to time given out a body of deeper wisdom than man's own. Theosophy claims that it is the traditional memory of these noble characters, their lives and messages, which has left the ancient field strewn with the legends of its Gods, Kings, Magi, Rishis, Avatars and its great semi-divine heroes. Such wisdom and knowledge as they could wisely and safely impart they have handed down, either coming themselves to earth from more ethereal realms, or commissioning competent representatives. And thus the world has periodically been given the boon of a new religion and a new stimulus from the earthly presence of a savior regarded as divine. And always the gospel contained milk for the babes and meat for grown men. There was both an exoteric and an esoteric doctrine. The former was broadcast among the masses, and did its proper and salutary work for them; the latter, however, was imparted only to the fit and disciplined initiates in secret organizations. Much real truth was hidden behind the veil of allegory; myth and symbol were employed. This aggregate of precious knowledge, this innermost heart of the secret teaching of the gods to mankind, is, needless to say, the Ancient Wisdom--is Theosophy. Or at least Theosophy claims the key to all this body of wisdom. It has always been in the world, but never publicly promulgated until now.

To trace the currents of esoteric influence in ancient religious literature would be the work of volumes. Theosophic or kindred doctrines are to be found in a large number of the world's sacred books or bibles. The lore of IndiaChinaPersiaBabylonEgyptGreece, yields material for Theosophy.

Philosophy, not less than religion, bears the stamp of theosophical ideology. Traces of the occult doctrine permeate most of the thought systems of the past. All histories of philosophy in the western world begin, with or without brief apology to the venerable systems of the Orient, with Thales of Miletus and the early Greek thinkers of about the sixth century B.C. In the dim background stand Homer and Hesiod and Pindar and the myths of the Olympian pantheon. Contemporary religious faiths, too, such as the cult of Pythagoreanism,2  and the Orphic and Eleusinian Mysteries, influenced philosophical speculation.

It needs no extraordinary erudition to trace the stream of esoteric teaching through the field of Greek philosophy. What is really surprising is that the world of modern scholarship should have so long assumed that Greek speculation developed without reference to the wide-spread religious cult systems which transfused the thought of the near-Eastern nations. Esotericism was an ingrained characteristic of the Oriental mind and Greece could no more escape the contagion than could Egypt or Persia. The occultist endeavors to make the point that practically all of early Greek philosophy dealt with material presented by the Dionysiac and Orphic Mysteries and later by the Pythagorean revisions of these.3

Thales' fragments contain Theosophical ideas in his identification of the physis with the soul of the universe, and in his affirmation that "the materiality of physis is supersensible." Thales thought that this physis or natural world was "full of gods."4  Both these conceptions of the impersonal and the personal physis, the latter a reasoning substance approaching Nous, came out of the continuum of the group soul, as a vehicle of magic power.5  Man was believed to stand in a sympathetic relation to this nature or physis, and the deepening of his sympathetic attitude was supposed to give him nothing less than magical control over its elements.

Prominent among the Orphic tenets was that of reincarnation, possibly a transference to man of the annual rebirth in nature. Worship of heavenly bodies as aiding periodical harvests found a place here also.6  The conception of the wheel of Dike and Moira, the allotted flow and apportionment in time as well as place, of all things, nature and man together, was underlying in the ancient Greek mind. Persian occult ideas may have influenced the Orphic systems.7

Anaximander added to the scientific doctrines of Thales the idea of compensatory retribution for the transgression of Moira's bounds which suggests Karma. The sum of Heraclitus' teaching is the One Soul of the universe, in ever-running cycles of expression-"Fire 8 lives the death of air, air lives the death of fire; earth lives the death of water, water lives the death of earth." 9 And interwoven with it is a sort of justice which resembles karmic force.10

Dionysiac influence brought the theme of reincarnation prominently to the fore in metaphysical thinking.11

Socrates, in the Phaedo, speaks of "the ancient doctrine that souls pass out of this world to the other, and there exist, and then come back hither from the dead, and are born again." In Hesiod's Works and Days there is the image of the Wheel of Life. In the mystical tradition there was prominent the wide-spread notion of a fall of higher forms of life into the human sphere of limitation and misery. The Orphics definitely taught that the soul of man fell from the stars into the prison of this earthly body, sinking from the upper regions of fire and light into the misty darkness of this dismal vale. The fall is ascribed to some original sin, which entailed expulsion from the purity and perfection of divine existence and had to be expiated by life on earth and by purgation in the nether world.12

The philosophies of Parmenides, Empedocles, and Plato came directly out of the Pythagorean movement.13  Aristotle described Empedocles' poems as "Esoteric," and it is thought that Parmenides' poems were similarly so. Parmenides' theory that the earth is the plane of life outermost, most remotely descended from God, is re-echoed in theosophic schematism. Also his idea--"The downward fall of life from the heavenly fires is countered by an upward impulse which 'sends the soul back from the seen to the unseen'"--completes the Theosophic picture of outgoing and return. Parmenides "was really the 'associate' of a Pythagorean, Ameinias, son of Diochartas, a poor but noble man, to whom he afterwards built a shrine, as to a hero."14 "Strabo describes Parmenides and Zeno as Pythagoreans."15 Cornford's comment on the philosophy of Empedocles leaves little doubt as to its origin in the Mysteries.16 Strife causes the fall, love brings the return.

Empedocles was a member of a Pythagorean society or school, for Diogenes tells us that he and Plato were expelled from the organization for having revealed the secret teachings.17

Of Pythagoras as a Theosophic type of philosopher there is no need to speak at any length. What is known of Pythagoreanism strongly resembles Theosophy.

As to Socrates, it is interesting to note that Cornford's argument "points to the conclusion that Socrates was more familiar with Pythagorean ideas than has commonly been supposed."18 Socrates gave utterance to many Pythagorean sentiments and he was associated with members of the Pythagorean community at Phlious, near Thebes.

R. D. Hicks comments on Plato's "imaginative sympathy with the whole mass of floating legend, myth and dogma, of a partly religious, partly ethical character, which found a wide, but not universal acceptance, at an early time in the Orphic and Pythagorean associations and brotherhoods."19 

"The Platonic myths afford ample evidence that Plato was perfectly familiar with all the leading features of this strange creed. The divine origin of the soul, its fall from bliss and the society of the gods, its long pilgrimage of penance through hundreds of generations, its task of purification from earthly pollution, its which entailed this exile, is described as 'following Strife,' 'putting trust in Strife.' At the end of the cycle of births, men may hope to 'appear among mortals as prophets, song-writers, physicians and princes; and thence they rise up, as gods exalted in honor, sharing the hearth of the other immortals and the same table, free from human woes, delivered from destiny and harm.' (Frags. 146, 147.) Thus the course of the soul begins with separation from God, and ends in reunion with him, after passing through all the moirai of the elements."--From Religion to Philosophy, p. 228.reincarnation in successive bodies, its upward and downward progress, and the law of retribution for all offences . . ."20

There is evidence pointing to the fact that Plato was quite familiar with the Mystery teachings, if not actually an initiate.21 In the Phaedrus he says:

". . . being initiated into those Mysteries which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all Mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestation of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise in consequence of this divine initiation, we become spectators of entire, simple, immovable and blessed visions resident in the pure light."22

And his immersion in the prevalent esoteric attitude is hinted at in another passage:

"You say that, in my former discourse, I have not sufficiently explained to you the nature of the First. I purposely spoke enigmatically, for in case the tablet should have happened with any accident, either by land or sea, a person, without some previous knowledge of the subject, might not be able to understand its contents."23

Aristotle left the esoteric tradition, and went in the direction of naturalism and empiricism. Yet in him too there are many points of distinctly esoteric ideology. His distinction between the vegetative animal soul and the rational soul, the latter alone surviving while the former perished; his dualism of heavenly and terrestrial life; his belief that the heavenly bodies were great living beings among the hierarchies; and his theory that development is the passing of potentiality over into actualization, are all items of Theosophic belief.

Greek philosophy is said to have ended with Neo-Platonism--which is one of history's greatest waves of the esoteric tendency. It would be a long task to detail the theosophic ideas of the great Plotinus. He, Origen and Herrennius were pupils of Ammonius Saccas, whose teachings they promised never to reveal, as being occult. Plotinus' own teachings were given only to initiated circles of students.24 Proclus25 gives astonishing corroboration to a fragment of Theosophic doctrine in any excerpt quoted in Isis Unveiled:

"After death, the soul (the spirit) continueth to linger in the aerial (astral) form till it is entirely purified from all angry and voluptuous passions . . . then doth it put off by a second dying the aerial body as it did the earthly one. Whereupon the ancients say that there is a celestial body always joined with the soul, and which is immortal, luminous and star-like."26

The esotericist feels that the evidence, a meagre portion of which has been thus cursorily submitted, is highly indicative that beneath the surface of ancient pagan civilization there were undercurrents of sacred wisdom, esoteric traditions of high knowledge, descended from revered sources, and really cherished in secret.

Presumably the Christian religion itself drew many of its basic concepts directly or indirectly from esoteric sources. It was born amid the various cults and faiths that then occupied the field of the Alexandrian East and the Roman Empire, and it was unable to escape the influences emanating from these sources. Its immediate predecessors were the Mystery-Religions, the Jewish faith, and the syncretistic blend of these with Syrian Orientalism and Greek philosophy. Judaism was itself deeply tinctured with Hellenistic and oriental influences. The Mystery cults were more or less esoteric; Judaism had received a highly allegorical formulation at the hands of Philo; the Hermetic Literature was similar to Theosophy; the Syrian faiths were saturated with the strain of "Chaldean" occultism; and Greek rationalism had yielded that final mysticism which culminated in Plotinus. Christianity was indebted to many of these sources and many scholars believe that it triumphed only because it was the most successful syncretism of many diverse elements. Numerous streams of esoteric doctrine contributed to Christianity; we can merely hint at the large body of evidence available on this point.

Christianity grew up in the milieu of the Mysteries,27 and those early Fathers who formulated the body of Christian doctrine did not step drastically outside the traditions of the prevalent faiths. Their work was rather an incorporation of some new elements into the accepted systems of the time. In some cases, as in Alexandria, the two faiths were actually blended, for many Christians in the Egyptian city were at the same time connected with the Mystery cult of Serapis, as many in Greece and Judea were connected with that of Dionysus. But perhaps the most direct and prominent product of the two systems is to be seen in St. Paul, about whose intimate relation to the Mysteries several volumes have been written. Much of his language so strikingly suggests his close contact with Mystery formulae that it is a moot question whether or not he was actually an Initiate.28 At all events many are of the opinion that he must have been powerfully influenced by the cult teachings and practices.29 He mentions some psychic experiences of his own, which are cited as savoring strongly of the character of the mystical exercises taught in the Mysteries.30

When in the third and fourth centuries the Church Fathers began the task of shaping a body of doctrine for the new movement, the same theosophic tendencies pressed upon them from every side. Clement and Origen brought many phases of theosophic doctrine to prominence, a fact which tended later to exclude their writings from the canon. And when Augustine drew up the dogmatic schematism of the new religion, he was tremendously swayed by the work of the Neo-Platonist Plotinus, who, along with Ammonius Saccas, Numenius, Porphyry, and Proclus, had been a member of one or several of the Mystery bodies.31

The presence of powerful currents of Neo-Platonic idealism in the early church is attested by the effects upon it of Manichaeism, Gnosticism and the Antioch heresy, which tendencies had to be exterminated before Christianity definitely took its course of orthodox development. Occult writers 32 have indicated the forces at work in the formative period of the church's dogma which eradicated the theory of reincarnation and other aspects of esoteric knowledge from the orthodox canons. The point remains true, nevertheless, that Christianity took its rise in an atmosphere saturated with ideas resembling those of Theosophy.

Theosophy, the Gnosis, having been to a large extant rejected from Catholic theology, nevertheless did not disappear from history. It possessed an unquenchable vitality and made its way through more or less submerged channels down the centuries. Movements, sects, and individuals that embodied its cherished principles could be enumerated at great length. A list would include Paulicians, the Bogomiles, the Bulgars, the Paterenes, the Comacines, the Cathari; Albigensians, and pietists; Joachim of Floris, Roger Bacon, Robert Bradwardine, Raymond Lully; the Alchemists, the Fire Philosophers; Paracelsus, B. Figulus; the Friends of God, led by Nicholas of Basle; L'Homme de Cuir, in Switzerland in the Engadine; the early Waldenses; the Bohemian tradition given in the Tarot; the great Aldus' Academy at Venice; the Rosicrucians and the Florentine Academy founded by Pletho. Some theosophists have attempted to find esoteric meanings in the literature of the Troubadours, and in such writings as The Romance of the Rose, the Holy Grail legends and the Arthurian Cycle, if read in an esoteric sense; Gower's Confessio Amantis, Spencer's Faërie Queen, the works of Dietrich of Berne, Wayland Smith, the Peredur Stories, and the Mabinogian compilations. German pietism expressed fundamentally Theosophic ideas through Eckhardt, Tauler, Suso, and Jacob Boehme. The names of such figures as Count Rakowczi, Cagliostro, Count St. Germain, and Francis Bacon have been linked with the secret orders. In fact there was hardly a period when the ghosts of occult wisdom did not hover in the background of European thought.

Sometimes its predominant manifestation was mystically religious; again it was cosmological and philosophical; never did it quite lose its attachment to the conceptions of science, which was at times reduced nearly to magic. And it is upon the implications of this scientific interest that the occult theorist bases his claim that science, along with religion and philosophy, has sprung in the beginning from esoteric knowledge. Not overlooking the oldest scientific lore to be found in the sacred books of the East, our attention is called to the astronomical science of the "Chaldeans"; the similar knowledge among the Egyptians, such, for instance, as led them to construct the Pyramids on lines conformable to sidereal measurements and movements; the reputed knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes among the Persian Magi and the "Chaldeans"; the later work of the scientists among the Alexandrian savants, which had so important a bearing upon the direction of the nascent science in the minds of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton; the known achievements of Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste, Agrippa von Nettesheim, and Jerome Cardano in incipient empiricism. It has always been assumed that the strange mixture of true science and grotesque magic found, for instance, in the work of Roger Bacon, justifies the implication that the concern with magic operated as a hindrance to the development of science. It should not be forgotten that the stimulus to scientific discovery sprang from the presuppositions embodied in magical theory. It is now beyond dispute that the magnificent achievements of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo were actuated by their brooding over the significance of the Pythagorean theories of number and harmony. Both science and magic aim, each in its special modus, at the control of nature. Through the gateway of electricity, says theosophy, science has been admitted, part way at least, into the inner sanctum of nature's dynamic heart. Magic has sought an entry to the same citadel by another road.

The Theosophist, then, believes, on the strength of evidence only a fragment of which has been touched upon here, that esotericism has been weaving its web of influence, powerful even if subtle and unseen, throughout the religions, philosophies, and sciences of the world. It makes little difference what names have been attached from time to time to this esoteric tradition; and certainly no attempt is made here to prove an underlying unity or continuity in all this "wisdom literature." Suffice it to point out that in all ages there have been movements analogous to modern Theosophy, and that the modern cult regards itself as merely a regular revelation in the periodic resurgence of an ancient learning.

Footnotes for Chapter One
1 The same idea is voiced by William James (Pragmatism, p. 299): "I thoroughly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history, the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangent to the wider life of things."

2 See in particular such works as From Religion to Philosophy, by F. M. Cornford (London, 1912), and From Orpheus to Paul, by Prof. Vittorio D. Macchioro (New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1930).

3 "The work of philosophy thus appears as an elucidation and clarifying of religious material. It does not create its new conceptual tools; it rather discovers them by ever subtler analysis and closer definition of the elements confused in the original datum."--From Religion to Philosophy, by F. M. Cornford, p. 126.
Ibid., pp. 94 ff.


5 "
Physis was not an object, but a metaphysical substance. It differs from modern ether in being thought actual. It is important to notice that Greek speculation was not based on observation of external nature. It is more easily understood as an echo from the Orphic teachings."--Ibid., pp. 136 ff.


6 "The fate of man was sympathetically related to the circling lights of heaven."--Ibid., p. 171.
Ibid., pp. 176 ff.


8 The universal soul substance.


9 Quoted by F. M. Cornford, 
From Religion to Philosophy, p. 185.


10 For the Orphic origin of Heraclitus' philosophy consult 
From Orpheus to Paul, by Prof. Vittorio D. Macchioro, pp. 169 ff


11 "The most primitive of these (cardinal doctrines of mysticism) is Reincarnation (palingenesis). This life, which is perpetually renewed, is reborn out of that opposite state called 'death,' into which, at the other end of its arc, it passes again. In this idea of Reincarnation . . . we have the first conception of a cycle of existence, a Wheel of Life, divided into two hemicycles of light and darkness, through which the one life, or soul, continuously revolves."--From Religion to Philosophy, p. 160.

12 "Caught in the wheel of birth, the soul passes through the forms of man and beast and plant."--From Religion to Philosophy, p. 178.

13 From Religion to Philosophy, p. 197. Also From Orpheus to Paul, Chapter VIII.

14 John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (London, 1920), p. 138.

15 Ibid., p. 156.

16 "That the doctrine (exile of the soul from God) . . . was not invented by Empedocles is certain from the fact that the essential features of it are found in Pindar's second Olympian, written for Theron of Acragas, where Empedocles was born, at a date when Empedocles was a boy. Throughout the course of that majestic Ode revolves the Wheel of Time, Destiny and Judgment. The doctrine can be classed unhesitatingly as 'Orphic.' The soul is conceived as falling from the region of light down into the 'roofed-in cave,' the 'dark meadow of Ate.' (Frag. 119, 120, 121.) This fall is a penalty for sin, flesh-eating or oath-breaking. Caught in the Wheel of Time, the soul, preserving its individual identity, passes through all shapes of life. This implies that man's soul is not 'human'; human life is only one of the shapes it passes through. Its substance is divine and immutable, and it is the same substance as all other soul in the world. In this sense the unity of all life is maintained; but, on the other hand, each soul is an atomic individual, which persists throughout its ten thousand years' cycle of reincarnations. The soul travels the round of the four elements: 'For I have been ere now, a body, and a girl, a bush (earth), a bird (air) and a dumb fish in the sea.' (Frag. 117.) These four elements compose the bodies which it successively inhabits.

17 By comparison with the passage expounding Empedocles' theory of rebirth (supra), the following assumes significance: "From these (Golden Verses of Pythagoras) we learn that it had some striking resemblance to the beliefs prevalent in India about the same time, though it is really impossible to assume any Indian influence on Greece at this date. In any case the main purpose of the Orphic observances and rites was to release the soul from the 'wheel of birth,' that is, from reincarnation in animal or vegetable forms. The soul so released became once more a god enjoying everlasting bliss."--John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, p. 82.

18 From Religion to Philosophy, p. 247.

19 R. D. Hicks: Introduction to Aristotle's De Anima, (Cambridge, 1907).



20 Ibid. "It is now generally agreed that we may distinguish a group of early dialogues commonly called 'Socratic' from a larger group in which the doctrines characteristic of Orphism and Pythagoreanism for the first time make their appearance"--From Religion to Philosophy, p. 242.

"Thus, the Megarian and Eleatic doctrines, though they had not satisfied him, had impelled Plato to look for a point of union of the One and the Many; but he was enabled to find it only by a more thorough acquaintance with the Pythagoreans. It is only after his return from Italy that his doctrine appears fully established and rounded off into a complete system."--Johann Edward Erdmann: History of Philosophy(London, 1891), Vol. I, p. 231.

21 "Constantly perfecting himself in perfect Mysteries, a man in them alone becomes truly perfect, says he in the Phaedrus."--Isaac Preston Cory: Ancient Fragments: Plato; Phaedrus, I, p. 328.

22 This passage, from Cory's Ancient Fragments, is in a translation somewhat different from that of Jowett and other editors, though Jowett (Plato's Works, Vol. I, Phaedrus, p. 450) gives the following: ". . . and he who has part in this gift, and is truly possessed and duly out of his mind, is by the use of purifications and mysteries made whole and exempt from evil. . . ." The term "pure light" appears to be a reference to the Astral Light, or Akasha, of the Theosophists. For this term, Astral Light, Madame Blavatsky gives in the Theosophical Glossary the following definition: "A subtle essence visible only to the clairvoyant eye, and the lowest but one (viz., the earth) of the Seven Akashic or Kosmic principles." She further says that it corresponds to the astral body in man.

23 I. P. Cory: Ancient Fragments, Plato, Ep. II, p. 312.


24 Porphyry: Life of Plotinus, in the Introduction to Vol. I, of the Works of Plotinus, edited by Dr. Kenneth S. Guthrie.

25 "Proclus maintained that the philosophical doctrines (chiefly Platonism) are of the same content as the mystic revelations, that philosophy in fact borrowed from the Mysteries, from Orphism, through Pythagoras, from whom Plato borrowed."--Samuel Angus: The Mystery Religions and Christianity (London, J. Murray, 1925), p. 267.

26 Quoted by Madame Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled (New York, J. W. Bouton, 1877), Vol. I, p. 432. Proclus' familiarity with the Mysteries is revealed in the following, also quoted by Madame Blavatsky inIsis Unveiled, Vol. II, p. 113: "In all the Initiations and Mysteries the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes indeed a formless light of themselves is held forth to view; sometimes this light is according to a human form and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape."

27 "For over a thousand years the ancient Mediterranean world was familiar with a type of religion known as Mystery-Religions, which changed the religious outlook of the Western world and which are operative in European philosophy and in the Christian Church to this day. Dean Inge, in his Christian Mysticism, p. 354, says that Catholicism owes to the Mysteries . . . the notions of secrecy, of symbolism, of mystical brotherhood, of sacramental grace, and above all, of the three stages of the spiritual life; ascetic purification, illumination and epopteia as the crown."--Samuel Angus: The Mystery Religions and Christianity: Foreword.


28 See argument in Dr. Annie Besant's Esoteric Christianity (London, 1895).

29 See Samuel Angus: The Mystery Religions and Christianity; and H. A. A. Kennedy: St. Paul and the Mystery Religions (London, New York, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta; Hodder and Stoughton, 1913).

30 As in 2 Corinthians, XII, 1-5.

31 "Plotinus, read in a Latin translation, was the schoolmaster who brought Augustine to Christ. There is therefore nothing startling in the considered opinion of Rudolph Eucken that Plotinus has influenced Christian theology more than any other thinker."--Dean R. W. Inge: The Philosophy of Plotinus (New York, London, 1918), Vol. I.

32 C. W. Leadbeater: The Christian Creed (London, 1897); Dr. Annie Besant: Esoteric Christianity.

CHAPTER II
THE AMERICAN BACKGROUND
An outline of the circumstances which may be said to constitute the background for the American development of Theosophy should begin with the mass of strange phenomena which took place, and were widely reported, in connection with the religious revivals from 1740 through the Civil War period. A veritable epidemic of what were known as the "barks" and the "jerks" swept over the land. They were most frequent in evangelical meetings, but also became common outside. The Kentucky revivals in the early years of the nineteenth century produced many odd phenomena, such as speaking in strange tongues, a condition of trance and swoon frequently attendant upon conversion, occasional illumination and ecstasy, resembling medieval mystic sainthood, and the apparently miraculous reformation of many criminals and drunkards. These phenomena impressed the general mind with the sense of a higher source of power that might be invoked in behalf of human interests.

During this period, too, several mathematical prodigies were publicly exhibited in the performance of quite unaccountable calculations, giving instantaneously the correct results of complicated manipulations of numbers.1 From about 1820, rumors were beginning to be heard of exceptional psychic powers possessed by the Hindus.

But a more notable stir was occasioned a little later when the country began to be flooded with reports of exhibitions of mesmerism and hypnotism. Couéism had not yet come, but the work of Mesmer, Janet, Charcot, Bernheim, and others in France had excited the amazement of the world by its revelations of an apparently supernormal segment of the human mind. "Healing by faith" had always been a widespread tradition; but when such people as Quimby and others added to the cult of healing the practice of mesmerism, and subjoined both to a set of metaphysical or spiritual formulae, the imaginative susceptibilities of the people were vigorously stimulated, and the ferment resulted in cults of "mind healing." Quimby was active with his public demonstrations throughout New England in the fifties and sixties.'

The cult of Swedenborgianism, coming in chiefly from England, survived from the preceding century as a tremendous contribution to the feeling of mystic supernaturalism. Emanuel Swedenborg, who gave up his work as a noted mineralogist to take up the writing of his visions and prophecies, had profoundly impressed the religious world by the publication of his enormous works, the Arcana Coelestia, The Apocalypse Revealed, The Apocalypse Explained, and others, in which he claimed that his inner vision had been opened to a view of celestial verities. His descriptions of the heavenly spheres, and of the relation of the life of the Infinite to our finite existence, and his theory of the actual correspondence of every physical fact to some eternal truth, impressed the mystic sense of many people, who became his followers and organized his Church of the New Jerusalem. Though this following was never large in number, it was influential in the spread of a type of "arcane wisdom." In the first place, Swedenborg's statements that he had been granted direct glimpses of the angelic worlds carried a certain impressiveness in view of his detailed descriptions of what was there seen. He announced that the causes of all things are in the Divine Mind. The end of existence and creation is to bring man into conjunction with the higher spirit of the universe, so that he may become the image of his creator. The law of correspondence is the key to all the divine treasures of wisdom. He declared that he had witnessed the Last Judgment and that he was told of the second coming of the Lord. His teachings influenced among others Coleridge, Blake, Balzac, and, of course, Emerson and the James family. Though not so much of this influence was specifically Theosophic in character, it all served to bring much grist to the later Theosophical mill.

A certain identity of aims and characters between Theosophy and Swedenborgianism is revealed in the fact that "in December, 1783, a little company of sympathizers, with similar aims, met in London and founded the 'Theosophical Society,' among the members of which were John Flaxman, the sculptor, William Sharpe, the engraver, and F. H. Barthelemon, the composer."2 It was dissolved about 1788 when the Swedenborgian churches began to function. Many such religious organizations could well be called theosophical associations, as was the one founded by Brand in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1825.

Another organization which dealt hardly less with heavenly revelations, and which must also be regarded as conducive to theosophical attitudes, was the "Children of the Light," the Friends, or Quakers. With a history antedating the nineteenth century by more than a hundred and fifty years, these people held a significant place in the religious life of America during the period we are delineating. Their intense emphasis upon the direct and spontaneous irradiation of the spirit of God into the human consciousness strikes a deep note of genuine mysticism. In fact, like Methodism, Quakerism was born in the midst of a series of spiritualistic occurrences. George Fox heard the heavenly voices and received inspirational messages directly from spiritual visitants. The report of his supernatural experiences, and of the miracles of healing which he was enabled to perform through spirit-given powers, caused hundreds of people to flock to his banner and gave the movement its primary impetus. His gospel was essentially one of spirit manifestation, and his whole ethical system grew out of his conception of the régime of personal life, conduct and mentality which was best designed to induce the visitations of spirit influence. The spiritistic and mystical experiences of the celebrated Madame Guyon, of France, enhanced the force of Fox's testimony.

Not less inclined than the Friends to transcendental experiences were the Shakers, who had settled in eighteen communistic associations or colonies in the United States. They claimed to enjoy the power of apostolic healing, prophecy, glossolalia, and the singing of inspired songs. They were led by the spirit into deep and holy experiences, and claimed to be inspired by high spiritual intelligences with whom they were in hourly communion. One of their number, F. W. Evans, wrote to Robert Dale Owen, the Spiritualist, that the Shakers had predicted the advent of Spiritualism seven years previously, and that the Shaker order was the great medium between this world and the world of spirits. He asserted that "Spiritualism originated among the Shakers of America; that there were hundreds of mediums in the eighteen Shaker communities, and that, in fact, nearly all the Shakers were mediums. Mediumistic manifestations are as common among us as gold in California."3 He maintained that there were three degrees of spiritual manifestation, the third of which is the "ministration of millennial truths to various nations, tribes, kindred and people in the spirit world who were hungering and thirsting after righteousness."4 He further pronounced a panegyric upon Spiritualism, which is evidence that the Shakers were in sympathy with any phenomena which seemed to indicate a connection with the celestial planes:

"Spiritualism has banished scepticism and infidelity from the minds of thousands, comforted the mourner with angelic consolations, lifted up the unfortunate, the outcast, the inebriate, taking away the sting of death, which has kept mankind under perpetual bondage through fear--so that death is now, to its millions of believers,

The kind and gentle servant who unlocks,
With noiseless hand, life's flower-encircled door,
To show us those we loved."5

Still another movement which had its origin in alleged supernaturalistic manifestations and helped to intensify a general belief in them, was the Church of the Latter Day Saints, or Mormons. In 1820, and again in 1823, Joseph Smith had a vision of an angel, who revealed to him the repository of certain records inscribed on plates of gold, containing the history of the aboriginal peoples of America. The ability to employ the mystic powers of Urim and Thummim, which are embodied in these records, constituted the special attribute of the seers of antiquity. The inscriptions on the gold plates were represented as the key to the understanding of ancient scriptures, and were said to be in a script known as Reformed Egyptian. The Book of Mormon claims to be an English translation of these plates of gold.

It is not necessary here to follow the history of Smith and his church, but it is interesting to point out the features of the case that touch either Spiritualism or Theosophy. We have already noted the origin of Smith's motivating idea in a direct message from the spirit world. We have also a curious resemblance to Theosophy in the fact that an alleged ancient document was brought to light as a book of authority, and that the material therein was asserted to furnish a key to the interpretation of the archaic scriptures of the world. Of the twelve articles of the Mormon creed, seven sections show a spirit not incongruous with the tendency of Theosophic sentiment. Article One professes belief in the Trinity; article Two asserts that men will be punished for their own sins, not for Adam's; Three refers to the salvation of all without exception; Seven sets forth belief in the gift of tongues, prophecy, revelations, visions, healing, etc.; Eight questions the Bible's accurate translation; Nine expresses the assurance that God will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to his kingdom; and Eleven proclaims freedom of worship and the principle of toleration.

Orson Pratt, one of the leading publicists of the Mormon cult, said that where there is an end of manifestation of new phenomena, such as visions, revelations and inspiration, the people are lost in blindness. When prophecies fail, darkness hangs over the people. In a tract issued by Pratt it is stated
that the Book of Mormon has been abundantly confirmed by miracles.

"Nearly every branch of the church has been blessed by miraculous signs and gifts of the Holy Ghost, by which they have been confirmed, and by which we know of a surety that this is the Church of Christ. They know that the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the dumb speak, that lepers are cleansed, that bones are set, that the cholera is rebuked, and that the most virulent diseases give way through faith in the name of Christ and the power of His gospel."6

About 1825, in a meeting at the home of Josiah Quincy in Boston, a philosophic-religious movement was launched which may seem to have had but meagre influence on the advent of Theosophy later in the century, but which in its motive and animating spirit was probably one of the cult's most immediate precursors. The Unitarian faith, courageously agitated from 1812 to 1814 by William E. Channing, Edward Everett, and Francis Parkman, flowered into a religious denomination in 1825 and thenceforth exercised, in a measure out of all proportion to its numerical strength, a powerful influence on American religious thought. Under Emerson and Parker a little later the principle of free expression of opinion was carried to such length that the formulation of an orthodox creed was next to impossible.

They questioned not only the Trinitarian doctrine, as pagan rather than Christian (the identical position taken by Madame Blavatsky in the volumes of Isis Unveiled), but the whole orthodox structure. The Bible was not to be regarded as God's infallible and inspired word, but a work of exalted human agencies. Christ was no heaven-born savior, but a worthy son of man. If he was man and anything more, his life is worthless to mere men. His life was a man's life, his gospel a man's gospel--otherwise inapplicable to us. Salvation is within every person. Death does not determine the state of the soul for all eternity; the soul passes on into spirit with all its earth-won character. In the life that is to be, as well as in the life that now is, the soul must reap what it sows. If there were a Unitarian creed, it might be summarized as follows: The fatherhood of God; the brotherhood of man; the leadership of Jesus; salvation by character; the progress of mankind onward and upward forever. All this, as far it goes, is strikingly harmonious with the Theosophic position. That there was an evident community of interests between the two movements is indicated by the fact that Unitarianism, like Theosophy, sought Hindu connections, and strangely enough made a sympathetic entente with the Brahmo-Somaj Society, while Theosophy later affiliated with the Arya-Somaj.7

No examination of the American background of Theosophy can fail to take account of that movement which carried the minds of New England thinkers to a lofty pitch during the early half of the nineteenth century, Transcendentalism. It has generally been attributed to the impact of German Romanticism, transmitted by way of England through Carlyle, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. French influence was really more direct and dominating, but the powerful effect of Oriental religion and philosophy on Emerson, hitherto not considered seriously, should not be overlooked. "All of Emerson's notes on Oriental scriptures have been deleted from Bliss Perry's Heart of Emerson's Journals." 8 No student conversant with the characteristic marks of Indian philosophy needs documentary corroboration of the fact that Emerson's thought was saturated with typically Eastern conceptions. The evidence runs through nearly all his works like a design in a woven cloth. "Scores upon scores of passages in his Journals and Essays show that he leaned often on the Vedas for inspiration, and paraphrased lines of the Puranas in his poems."9 But direct testimony from Emerson himself is not wanting. His Journals prove that his reading of the ancient Oriental classics was not sporadic, but more or less constant.10 He refers to some of them in the lists of each year's sources. In 1840 he tells how in the heated days he read nothing but the "Bible of the tropics, which I find I come back upon every three or four years. It is sublime as heat and night and the breathless ocean. It contains every religious sentiment. . . . It is no use to put away the book; if I trust myself in the woods or in a boat upon the pond, Nature makes a Brahmin of me presently."11 This was at the age of twenty-seven. In the Journal of 1845 he writes:

"The Indian teaching, through its cloud of legends, has yet a simple and grand religion, like a queenly countenance seen through a rich veil. It teaches to speak the truth, love others as yourself, and to despise trifles. The East is grand--and makes Europe appear the land of trifles. Identity! Identity! Friend and foe are of one stuff . . . Cheerful and noble is the genius of this cosmogony."12

Lecturing before graduate classes at Harvard he later said: "Thought has subsisted for the most part on one root; the Norse mythology, the Vedas, Shakespeare have served the ages." In referring in one passage to the Bible he says:

"I have used in the above remarks the Bible for the ethical revelation considered generally, including, that is, the Vedas, the sacred writings of every nation, and not of the Hebrews alone."13

Elsewhere he says:

"Yes, the Zoroastrian, the Indian, the Persian scriptures are majestic and more to our daily purpose than this year's almanac or this day's newspaper. I owed--my friend and I owed--a magnificent day to the Bhagavat-Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and another climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us. . . . Let us cherish the venerable oracle."14

The first stanza of Emerson's poem "Brahma, Song of the Soul," runs as follows:

"If the red slayer thinks he slays,
Or if the slain thinks he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass and turn again."

Could the strange ideas and hardly less strange language of this verse have been drawn elsewhere than from the 19th verse of the Second Valli, of the Katha Upanishad,15 which reads?:

"If the slayer thinks I slay; if the slain thinks I am slain, then both of them do not know well. It (the soul) does not slay nor is it slain."

His poem "Hamatreya" comes next in importance as showing Hindu influence. In another poem, "Celestial Love," the wheel of birth and death is referred to:

"In a region where the wheel
On which all beings ride,
Visibly revolves."

Emerson argues for reincarnation in the Journal of 1845. "Traveling the path of life through thousands of births."

"By the long rotation of fidelity they meet again in worthy forms." Emerson's "oversoul" is synonymous with a Sanskrit term. He regarded matter as the negative manifestation of the Universal Spirit. Mind was the expression of the same Spirit in its positive power. Man, himself, is nothing but the universal spirit present in a material organism. Soul is "part and parcel of God." He says that "the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all organs; from within and from behind a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, that the light is all."16 This is Vedanta philosophy. In the Journal of 1866 he wrote:

"In the history of intellect, there is no more important fact than the Hindu theology, teaching that the beatitude or supreme good is to be attained through science: namely, by the perception of the real from the unreal, setting aside matter, and qualities or affections or emotions, and persons and actions, as mayas or illusions, and thus arriving at the conception of the One eternal Life and Cause, and a perpetual approach and assimilation to Him, thus escaping new births and transmigrations. . . . Truth is the principle and the moral of Hindu theology, Truth as against the Maya which deceives Gods and men; Truth, the principle, and Retirement and Self-denial the means of attaining it."17

Mr. Christy 18 states that Emerson's concept of evolution must be thought of in terms of emanation; and a detailed examination of his concept of compensation reduces it to the doctrine of Karma.

The Journals are full of quotable passages upon one or another phase of Hinduism. And there are his other poems "Illusions" and "Maya," whose names bespeak Oriental presentations. But Mr. Christy thinks the following excerpt is Emerson's supreme tribute to Orientalism:

"There is no remedy for musty, self-conceited English life made up of fictitious hating ideas--like Orientalism. That astonishes and disconcerts English decorum. For once there is thunder he never heard, light he never saw, and power which trifles with time and space."19

It may seem ludicrous to suggest that Emerson was the chief forerunner of Madame Blavatsky, her John the Baptist. Yet seriously, without Emerson, Madame Blavatsky could hardly have launched her gospel when she did with equal hope of success. There is every justification for the assertion that Emerson's Orientalistic contribution to the general Transcendental trend of thought was preparatory to Theosophy. It must not be forgotten that his advocacy of Brahmanic ideas and doctrines came at a time when the expression of a laudatory opinion of the Asiatic religions called forth an opprobrium from evangelistic quarters hardly less than vicious in its bitterness. Theosophy could not hope to make headway until the virulent edge of that orthodox prejudice had been considerably blunted. It was Emerson's magnanimous eclecticism which administered the first and severest rebuke to that prejudice, and inaugurated that gradual mollification of sentiment toward the Orientals which made possible the welcome which Hindu Yogis and Swamis received toward the end of the century.

The exposition of Emerson's orientalism makes it unnecessary to trace the evidences of a similar influence running through the philosophical thinking of Thoreau and Walt Whitman. The robust cosmopolitanism of these two intellects lifted them out of the provincialisms of the current denominations into the realm of universal sympathies. We know that Thoreau became the recipient of forty-four volumes of the Hindu texts in 1854; but it is evident that he, like Emerson, had had contact with Brahmanical literature previous to that. His works are replete with references to Eastern ideas and beliefs. He could hardly have associated so closely with Emerson as he did and escaped the contagion of the latter's Oriental enthusiasm.

Mr. Horace L. Traubel, one of the three literary executors of Whitman, had in his possession the poet's own copy of the Bhagavad GitaPerry and Binns, in their biographies of Whitman, give lists of the literature with which he was familiar; and many ancient authors are mentioned. Among them are Confucius, the Hindu poets, Persian poets, Zoroaster; portions of the Vedas and Puranas, Alger's Oriental Poetry and other Eastern sources. Dr. Richard M. Bucke, another of the three literary executors, and a close friend and associate of "the good gray poet," was one of the prominent early Theosophists, and it is reasonable to presume that Whitman was familiar with Theosophic theory through the channel of this friendship. Whitman likewise gave form and body to another volume of sentiment which has contributed, no one can say how much, to the adoption of Theosophy. This was America's own native mysticism. It created an atmosphere in which the traditions of the supernatural grew robust and realistic.

Attention must now be directed to that wide-spread movement in America which has come to be known as New Thought. It came, as has been hinted at, out of the spiritualization, or one might say, doctrinization, of mesmerism. Observation of the surprising effects of hypnotic control, indicating the presence of a psychic energy in man susceptible to external or self-generated suggestion, led to the inference that a linking of spiritual affirmation with the unconscious dynamism would conduce to invariably beneficent results, that might be made permanent for character. If a jocular suggestion by the stage mesmerist could lead the subject into a ludicrous performance; if a suggestion of illness, of pain, of a headache, could produce the veritable symptoms; why could not a suggestion of adequate strength and authority lead to the actualization of health, of personality, of well-being, of spirituality? The task was merely to transform animal magnetism into spiritual suggestion. The aim was to indoctrinate the subconscious mind with a fixation of spiritual sufficiency and opulence, until the personality came to embody and manifest on the physical plane of life the character of the inner motivation. Seeing what an obsession of a fixed abnormal idea had done to the body and mind in many cases, New Thought tried to regenerate the life in a positive and salutary direction by the conscious implantation of a higher spiritual concept, until it, too, became obsessive, and wrought an effect on the outer life coördinate with its own nature. The process of hypnotic suggestion became a moral technique, with a potent religious formula, according to which spiritual truth functioned in place of personal magnetic force. Essentially it reduced itself to the business of self-hypnotization by a lofty conception. Thought itself was seen to possess mesmeric power. "As a man thinketh in his heart" became the slogan of New Thought, and the kindred Biblical adjuration--"Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind"--furnished the needed incentive to positive mental aggression. The world of today is familiar with the line of phrases which convey the basic ideology of the New Thought cults. One hears much of being in tune with the Infinite, of making the at-one-ment with the powers of life, of getting into harmony with the universe, of making contact with the reservoir of Eternal Supply, of getting en rapport with the Cosmic Consciousness, of keeping ourselves puny and stunted because we do not ask more determinedly from the Boundless.

Here is unmistakable evidence of a somewhat diluted Hinduism. Under the pioneering of P. P. Quimby, Horatio W. Dresser, and others, study clubs were formed and lecture courses given. Charles Brodie Patterson, W. J. Colville, James Lane Allen, C. D. Larson, Orison S. Marden, and a host of others, aided in the popularization of these ideas, until in the past few decades there has been witnessed an almost endless brood of ramifications from the parent conception, with associations of Spiritual Science, Divine Science, Cosmic Truth, Universal Light and Harmony carrying the message. So we have been called upon to witness the odd spectacle of what was essentially Hindu Yoga philosophy masquerading in the guise of commanding personality and forceful salesmanship! But grotesque as these developments have been, there is no doubting their importance in the Theosophical background. They have served to introduce the thought of the Orient to thousands, and have become stepping-stones to its deeper investigation.

A concomitant episode in the expansion of New Thought and Transcendentalism was the direct program of Hindu propaganda fathered by Hindu spokesmen themselves. When it became profitable, numerous Yogis, Swamis, "Adepts," and "Mahatmas" came to this country and lectured on the doctrines and principles of Orientalism to audiences of élite people with mystical susceptibilities. Some time in the seventies, Boston was galvanized into a veritable quiver of interest in Eastern doctrines by the eloquent P. C. Mazoomdar, author of The Oriental Christ, whose campaign left its deep impress. His work, in fact, formed one of the links between Unitarianism and Brahmanic thought, already noted. In 1893 Swami Vivekananda, chosen as a delegate to the World Congress of Religions at the Columbian Exposition at Chicago, and author of Yoga Philosophy, began preaching the Yoga principles of thought and discipline, and instituted in New York the Vedanta Society. Almost every year since his coming has brought public lectures and private instruction courses by native Hindus in the large American cities.

Concomitant with the evolution of New Thought came the sensational dissemination of Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science. Offspring of P. P. Quimby's mesmeric science, and erected by Mrs. Eddy's strange enthusiasm into a healing cult based on a reinterpretation of Christian doctrines--the allness of Spirit and the nothingness of matter-the organization has enjoyed a steady and pronounced growth and drawn into its pale thousands of Christian communicants who felt the need of a more dynamic or more fruitful gospel. The conception of the impotence of matter, as non-being, is as old as Greek and Hindu philosophy. Mrs. Eddy's contribution in the matter was her use of the philosophical idea as a psychological mantram for healing, and her adroitness in lining up the Christian scriptures to support the idea.

It would require a fairly discerning insight to mark out clearly the inter-connection of Christian Science and Theosophy. There is basically little similarity between the two schools, or little common ground on which they might meet. On the contrary there is much direct antagonism in their views and dogma. Nevertheless the Boston cult tended indirectly to bring some of its votaries along the path toward occultism. In the first place, like Unitarianism, it had induced thousands of sincere seekers for a new and liberal faith to sever the ties of their former servile attachment to an uninspiring orthodoxy. Secondly, Christian Science does yeoman service in "demonstrating" the spiritual viewpoint. Its emphasis on spirit, as opposed to material concepts of reality, is entirely favorable to the general theses of Theosophy. Thirdly, the intellectual limitations of the system develop the need of a larger philosophy, which Theosophy stands ready to supply. Christian Science, being primarily a Christian healing cult, with a body of ideas adequate to that function, often leads the intelligent and open-minded student in its ranks to become aware that it falls far short of offering a comprehensive philosophy of life. It has little or nothing to say about man's origin, his present rank in a universal order, or his destiny. It leaves the pivotal question of immortality in the same status as does conventional Christianity. Many Christian Science adherents have seen that Theosophy offers a fuller and more adequate cosmograph, and accordingly adopted it. Their experience in the Eddy system brought them to the outer court of the Occult Temple.20

Among major movements that paved the way for Theosophy, the one perhaps most directly conducive to it is Spiritualism, for the founder of the Theosophical Society began her career in the Spiritualistic ranks. On account of this close relationship it is necessary to outline the origin and spread of this strange movement more fully.

The weird behavior of two country girls, the one twelve and the other nine, in the hamlet of Hydesville, near Rochester, New York, in the spring of 1847, was like a spark to power for the release of religious fancy; for Margaret and Kate Fox were supposed to have picked up again the thread of communication between the world of human consciousness and the world of disembodied spirits, and thus to have given fresh reinforcement to man's assurance of immortality. From this bizarre beginning the movement spread rapidly to all parts of America, England, and France. In nearly every town in America groups were soon meeting, eager for manifestations and fervently invoking the denizens of the unseen worlds. Various methods and means were provided whereby the disembodied entities could communicate with dull mundane faculties. Many and varied were the types of response. Besides the simple "raps," there were tinklings of tiny aerial bells, flashings of light, tipping of tables, levitation of furniture and of human bodies, messages through the planchette, free voice messages, trumpet speaking, alphabet rapping, materialization of the hands and of complete forms, trance catalepsis and inspiration, automatic writing, slate writing, glossolalia, and many other variety of phenomena. Mediums, clairvoyants, inspirational speakers sprang forward plentifully; and each one became the focus of a group activity. It is somewhat difficult for us to reconstruct the picture of this flare of interest and activity, the scope of this absorbing passion for spirit manifestation. It attests the eagerness of the human heart for tangible evidence of survival. With periodical ebb and flow it has persisted to the present day, when its vogue is hardly less general than at any former time. In the fifties and sixties the Spiritualistic agitation was in full flush, with many extraordinary occurrences accredited to its exponents.21

Spiritualism encountered opposition among the clergy and the materialistic scientists, yet it has hardly ever been wanting in adherents among the members of both groups. An acquaintance with its supporters would reveal a surprising list of high civil and government officials, attorneys, clergymen, physicians, professors, and scientists.22

One of the first Spiritualistic writers of this country was Robert Dale Owen, whose Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World and The Debatable Land were notable contributions. Two of the most eminent representatives of the movement in its earliest days were Prof. Robert Hare, an eminent scientist and the inventor of the oxyhydrogen blow-pipe, and Judge Edmonds, a leading jurist. Both these men had approached the subject at first in a skeptical spirit, with the intention of disclosing its unsound premises; but they were fair enough to study the evidence impartially, with the result that both were convinced of the genuineness of the phenomena. Both avowed their convictions courageously in public, and Judge Edmonds made extensive lecture tours of the country, the propaganda effect of which was great.23  Before the actual launching of the Theosophical Society in 1875 at least four prominent later Theosophists had played more or less important rôles in the drama of Spiritualism. Madame Blavatsky, as we shall see, had identified herself with its activities; Mr. J. R. Newton was a vigorous worker; and it was Col. Olcott himself who brought the manifestations taking place in 1873 at the Eddy farmhouse near Chittenden, Vermont, to public notice and who put forth one of the first large volumes covering these and other phenomena in 1874, People From the Other WorldThe fourth member was Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten, who had served as a medium with the Bulwer-Lytton group of psychic investigators in England, and who added two books to Spiritualistic literature--Art Magic and Nineteenth Century Miracles. Col. Olcott, Madame Blavatsky, and Mrs. Britten made material contributions to several Spiritualistic magazines, especially The Spiritual Scientist, edited in Boston.

Meantime Spiritualistic investigation got under way and after the sixties a stream of reports, case histories, accounts of phenomena, and books from prominent advocates flooded the country. The Seybert Commission on Spiritualism, composed of leading officers and professors at the University of Pennsylvania, submitted its report in 1888. In the same year R. B. Davenport undertook to turn the world away from what he considered a delusion with his book Deathblow to Spiritualism: The True Story of the Fox Sistersbut he found that Spiritualism had a strange vitality that enabled it to survive many a "deathblow." As a result of studies in psychic phenomena in England came F. W. H. Myers' impressive work, The Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, in which the foundations for the theory of the subliminal or subconscious mind were laid.

But the work of the mediums themselves kept public feeling most keenly alert. A list of some of the most prominent ones includes Mrs. Hayden, Henry Slade, Pierre L. O. A. Keeler, the slate-writer, Robert Houdin (who bequeathed his name and exploits to the later Houdini), Ira and William Davenport, Anna Eva Fay, Charles Slade, Eusapia Paladino, Mrs. Leonara Piper. Robert Dale Owen, already mentioned as author, was a medium of no mean ability. In the same category was J. M. Peebles, of California, whose books, Seers of the Ages and Who Are These Spiritualists? and whose public lecture tours, rendered him one of the most prominent of all the advocates of the cult. A career of inspirational public speaking was staged by Cora V. Richmond, who gave lectures on erudite themes with an uncommon flow of eloquence. W. J. Colville began where she ended, giving unprepared addresses on topics suggested by the audience.

The three most famous American mediums deserve somewhat more extended treatment. The first of the trio is Daniel Dunglas Home, who was a poor Scottish boy adopted in America. While a child, spiritual power manifested itself to him to his terror and annoyance. Raps came around him on the table or desk, on the chairs or walls. The furniture moved about and was attracted toward him. His aunt, with whom he lived was in consternation at these phenomena, and, deeming him possessed, sent for three clergymen to exorcise the spirit; when they did not succeed, she threw his Sunday suit and linen out the window and pushed him out-of-doors. He was thus cast on the world without friends, but the power that he possessed raised him friends and sent him forth from America to be the planter of Spiritualism all over Europe.24

The second of the triumvirate was Andrew Jackson Davis. His function seemed to be that of the seer and the scribe, rather than of the producer of material operations. He was born of poor parents, in 1826, in Orange Country, New York. He seems to have inherited a clairvoyant faculty. He received only five months' schooling in the village, it being "found impossible to teach him anything there."25 During his solitary hours in the fields he saw visions and heard voices. Removing to Poughkeepsie, he became the clairvoyant of a mesmeric lecturer, and in this capacity began to excite wonder by his revelations. This was before the Rochester knockings were heard. He diagnosed and healed diseases, and prescribed for scores who came to him, surprising both patients and physicians by his competence. Then he began to see "into the heart of things," to descry the essential nature of the world and the spiritual constitution of the universe. He could see the interior of bodies and the metals hidden in the earth. Adding his testimony to that of Fox and Swedenborg, he asserted that every animal represented some human quality, some vice or virtue. He gave Greek and Latin names of things, without having a knowledge of these languages. In a vision he beheld The Magic Staff on which he was urged to learn during life; on it was written his life's motto: "Under all circumstances keep an open mind." In 1845 he delivered one hundred and fifty-seven lectures in New York which announced a new philosophy of the universe. They were published under the title, Nature's Divine Revelation, a book of eight hundred pages. Davis then became a voluminous writer.26

Thomas L. Harris, the third great representative, was much attracted by Davis' The Divine Revelations of Nature, but developed spiritistic powers along a somewhat different line, that of poetic inspiration. In his early exhibitions of this supernormal faculty he dictated who epics, containing occasionally excellent verse, under the alleged influence of Byron, Shelley, Keats and others. The interesting manner in which these poems--a whole volume of three or four hundred pages at a time--were created, is more amazing than their poetic merit. Mr. Brittan, an English publisher, tells us that Harris dictated and he wrote down The Lyric of the Golden Age, a poem of 381 pages, in ninety-four hours! The Lyric of the Morning Land and other pretentious works were produced in a similar manner.

"But," says William Howitt in his History of the Supernatural, "the progress of Harris into an inspirational oratory is still more surprising. He claims, by opening up his interior being, to receive influx of divine intuition in such abundance and power as to throw off under its influence the most astonishing strains of eloquence. This receptive and communicative power he attributes to an internal spiritual breathing corresponding to the outer natural breathing. As the body lungs imbibe air, so, he contends, the spiritual lungs inspire and respire the divine aura, refluent with the highest thought and purest sentiment, and that without any labor or trial of brain."27

Spiritualism is one of the most direct lines of approach to Theosophy, since an acceptance of the possibility of spiritistic phenomena is a prerequisite for the adoption of the larger scheme of occult truth. Spiritualism covers a portion of the ground embraced by the belief in reincarnation, and in so far constitutes an introduction to it. Theosophy is further, an endorsement of the primary position of the Spiritualists regarding the survival of the soul entity, and thus commends itself to their approbation. The Spiritualists have been considerably vexed by the question of reincarnation, and their ranks are split over the subject. Some of the message seem to endorse it, others evade it, and some negate the idea. What is significant at this point is that the Spiritualistic agitation prepared the way for Theosophic conceptions. A large percentage of the first membership came from the ranks of the Spiritualists.

But Spiritualism is but one facet of a human interest which has expressed itself in all ages, embracing the various forms of mysticism, occultism, esotericism, magic, healing, wonder-working, arcane science, and theurgy. The growing acquaintance with Yoga practice and Hindu philosophy in this country under the stimulus of many eloquent Eastern representatives has already been mentioned. The demonstrations of mesmeric power lent much plausibility to Oriental pretensions to extraordinary genius for that sort of thing. More than might be supposed, there was prevalent in Europe and America alike a never-dying tradition of magical art, a survival of Medieval European beliefs in superhuman activities and powers both in man and nature. Among the rural and unschooled populations this tradition assumed the form of harmless superstitions. Among more learned peoples it issued in philosophic speculations dealing with the spiritual energies of nature, the hidden faculties of man, such as prophecy, tongues and ecstatic vision, and the extent and possibility of man's control over the external world through the manipulation of a subtle ether possessing magnetic quality. The heritage of Paracelsus, Robert Fludd, Thomas Vaughn and Roger Bacon, Agrippa von Nettesheim, the Florentine Platonists and their German, French, and English heirs still lingered. The Christian scriptures were themselves replete with incidents of the supernatural, with necromancy, witchcraft, miracles, ghost-walking, spirit messages, symbolical dreams, and the whole armory of thaumaturgical exploits. The doctrine of Satan was itself calculated to enliven the imagination with ideas of demoniac possession, and was all the more credible by reason of the prevalence of insanity which was ascribed to spirit obsession. The early nineteenth century was must closer to the Middle Ages than our own time is, not only because education was less general, but also because a far larger proportion of the population was agrarian instead of metropolitan. Such cults were, however, by no means restricted to "backwoods" sections. They were astonishingly prevalent in the larger centers. More enlightened groups accepted a less crude form of the practices. Where knowledge ceases superstition may begin; and the problems of life that press upon us for solution and that are still beyond our grasp, lead the mind into every sort of rationalization or speculation. Perhaps more people than acknowledge God in church pews believe in the existence of intelligences that play a part in life, whether in answer to prayer, in suggestive dreams, in occasional vision and apparitions, in messages through mediums, or in whatever guise; and out of such an unreflective theology arise many of the types of superstitious philosophy. To analyze this situation in its entirety would take us into extensive fields of folk-lore and involve every sort of old wives' tale imaginable. The chief point is that the varieties of chimney-corner legend and omnipresent superstition have had their origin in a larger primitive interpretation of the facts and forces of nature. They must be recognized as the modern progeny of ancient hylozoism and animism. In the childhood of our culture, as well as in the childhood of the race and of the individual, there is a close sympathy between man and nature which leads him to ascribe living quality to the external world. Countryside fables are doubtless the jejune remnant of what was once felt to be a vital magnetic relation between man's spirit and the spirit of the world. They are the distorted forms of some of the ancient rites for effecting magical intercourse between man and nature. While it is not to be inferred that Theosophy itself was built on the material embodied in countryside credulity, it will be seen that the native inclination toward an animistic interpretation of phenomena was in a measure true to the deeper theses which the new cult presented. Madame Blavatsky herself says in Isis Unveiled that the spontaneous responsiveness of the peasant mind is likely to lead to a closer apprehension of the living spirit of Nature than can be attained by the sophistications of reason.

The major tendencies in the direction of Theosophy have now been enumerated. It remains only to mention the scattering of American students before 1875 whose researches were taking them into the realm where the fundamentals of Theosophy itself were to be found. We refer to the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, the Kabalists, Hermeticists, Egyptologists, Assyriologists, students of the Mysteries, of the Christian origins, of the pagan cults, and the small but gradually increasing number of Comparative Religionists and Philologists.28 There were men of intelligence both in Europe and America, who had kept on the track of ancient and medieval esotericism, and the opening up of Sanskrit literature gave a decided impetus to a renaissance of research in those realms. The material that went into Frazer's Golden BoughIgnatius Donnelley's Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, Hargrave Jennings' The Rosicrucians"Labadie's teachings; Boehme's visions; the true Rosicrucianism of the original Kelpius party; the Philadelphian Society, whose chief apostle was Jane Leade; the fraternity which taught the restitution of all things; the mystical fraternity led by Dr. Julian Wilhelm Petersen and his wife Eleanor von Merlau-both members of the Frankfort community-all found a foothold upon the soil of Penn's colony and exercised a much larger share in the development of this country than is accorded to them. It has even been claimed by some superficial writers and historians of the day that there was no strain of mysticism whatever in the Ephrata Community, or, in fact, connected with any of the early German movements in Pennsylvania. Such a view is refuted by the writings of Kelpius, Beissel, Miller, and many others who then lived, sought the Celestial Bridegroom and awaited the millennium which they earnestly believed to be near.

"With the advent of the Moravian Brethren in Pennsylvania the number of these mystical orders was increased by the introduction of two others, viz., The Order of the Passion of Jesus (Der Orden des Leidens Jesu), of which Count Zinzendorf was Grand Commander, and the Order of the Mustard Seed (Der Senfkorn Orden)." and many other compendious works of the sort, was being collated out of the flotsam and jetsam of ancient survival and assembled into a picture beginning to assume definite outline and more than haphazard meaning. The great system of Neo-Platonism, the Gnostics, with Apollonius of Tyana, and Philo Judaeus were coming under inspection. The universality of religious myths and rites was being noted. In short, the large body of ancient thought, so deeply imbued with the occult, was beginning to be scrutinized by the scholars of the nineteenth century.

It was into this situation that Madame Blavatsky came. Her office, she said, was that of a clavigerashe bore a key which would provide students with a principle of integration for the loose material which would enable them to piece together the scattered stones and glittering jewels picked up here and there into a structure of surpassing grandeur and priceless worth. She would show that the gems of literature, whose mystic profundity astonished and perplexed the savants, were but the fragments of a once-glorious spiritual Gnosis.

Footnotes to Chapter 2

1 Paul Morphy, a chess "wizard" of startling capabilities, excited wonder at the time, like the eight-year-old Polish lad of more recent times.

Encyclopedia Britannica: Article, "Swedenborgianism."

3 William Howitt: History of the Supernatural (J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia, 1863), Vol. II, p. 213.

Ibid. Ibid., p. 214.

Ibid


7 As early as 1824 Unitarians in America took a lively interest in the Hindu leader Rammohun Roy, who had "adopted Unitarianism," and also in the work of the Rev. William Adam, a Baptist missionary, who had become converted to Unitarianism in India. A British-Indian Unitarian Association was formed, and the Rev. Chas. H. A. Dall was sent to Calcutta, where he effected the alliance with the Brahmo-Somaj.

8 Article: Emerson's Debt to the Orient, by Arthur E. Christy, in The Monist, January, 1928.

Ibid.24


10 The Journal shows that as early as 1822 he had looked into Zoroaster. In 1823 he refers to two articles in Hindu mathematics and mythology in Vol. 29 of the Edinburgh Review. By 1832 he had dipped into Pythagoras. In 1836 he quotes Confucius, Empedocles, and Xenophanes. By 1838 he had read the Institutes of Menu, and again quoted Zoroaster, Buddha, and Confucius. The first reference to theVedas is made in 1839. In 1841 he had seen the Vishnu Sarna (a corrupt spelling of Vishnu Sharman), together with Hermes Trismegistus and the Neo-Platonists, Iamblichus, and Proclus. The She-King and the Chinese Classics are noted in 1843, and the first reference to the Bhagavad Gita in 1845. In 1847 comes the Vishnu Purana, and in 1849 the Desatir, a supposedly Persian work, and in 1855 the Rig Veda Sanhita.11 This passage is found in Letters of Emerson to a Friend, edited by Charles Eliot Norton.

12 Emerson's Journal for 1845, p. 130.


13 Emerson's Journals, Vol. V, p. 334.

14 Emerson's Journals, Vol. VII, p. 241.

15 Biblioteca Indica, Vol. XV, translated by E. Roer, Calcutta, 1853.


16 Emerson's Works (Centenary Edition), Vol. II, p. 270.

17 Emerson's Journals, Vol. X, p. 162.

18 Article: "Emerson's Debt to the Orient," Arthur E. Christy, The Monist, January, 1928.

19 In 1854 a most significant fact was recorded in New England history. A young Englishman, Thomas Cholmondeley, friend of Arthur Hugh Clough, and nephew of Bishop Heber, came to Concord with letters of introduction to Emerson. The latter sent him to board at Mrs. John Thoreau's. A short time after Cholmondeley's return to England, Henry Thoreau received forty-four volumes of Hindu literature as a gift from the young nobleman. Of these, twenty-three were bequeathed to Emerson at Thoreau's death. The list contained the names of such eminent translators as H. H. Milman, H. H. Wilson, M. E. Burnouff and Sir William Jones. The books were the texts from the Vedas, the Vishnu Purana, the Mahabarhata, with the Bhagavad Gita. Tradition has it that Emerson died with a copy of the Bhagavad Gita (said to have been one of three copies in the country at the time) in his faltering grasp. It is known that he read, besides, numerous volumes of Persian poetry, translations of Confucius and other Chinese philosophers, by James Ligge, Marshman and David Collier, and books on Hindu mathematics and mythology. The poem "Brahma" first appeared in the Journal of July, 1856, and in the Atlantic Monthly, for November, 1867. He did not receive Thoreau's bequest until 1852, but it requires no stretch of imagination to presume that the two friends had access to each other's libraries in the interval between 1854 and 1862.

20 This difference between the two cults may perhaps be best depicted by quoting the words used in the author's presence by a woman of intelligence who had founded two Christian Science churches and had been notably successful as a healing practitioner, but who later united with the Theosophical Society. She said: "Christian Science had rather well satisfied my spiritual needs, but had totally starved my intellect." Her experience is doubtless typical of that of many others, in whom, after the first burst of sensational interest in healing has receded, the yearning for a satisfactory philosophy of life and the cosmos surged uppermost again.


21 It has been conservatively estimated that in 1852 there were three hundred mediumistic circles in Philadelphia. The number of mediums in the United States in 1853 was thirty thousand. In 1855 there were two and a half million Spiritualists in the land, with an increase of three hundred each year. The rate of increase far outran those of the Lutheran and Methodist denominations. An interesting feature of this rapid spread of the movement was its political significance and results. Not inherently concerned with politics, its devotees mostly adopted strong anti-slavery tenets. Judge Edmonds, an eminent jurist, converted to Spiritualism by his (at first skeptical) investigations of it, asserted that the Spiritualist vote came near to carrying the election of 1856, and actually did carry that of 1860 for the North against the Democratic party. Another most interesting side-light is the fact that the sweep of Spiritualistic excitement redeemed thousands of atheists to an acceptance of religious verities. (For these and other interesting data see Howitt's History of the Supernatural, Vol. II.)

22 Spiritualists say that Lincoln was eventually moved to emancipate the slaves by his reception of a spirit message through Hattie Colburn, a medium who came to see him about a furlough for her son. Horace Greeley was favorably impressed by the evidence presented. And a later President, McKinley, maintained a deep concern in the phenomena, along with his powerful political manager, Senator Mark Hanna, who seldom undertook a move of any consequence without first consulting a medium, Mrs. Gutekunst, to whom, for purposes of ready availability, he had given a residence in his home. Senators and Cabinet members were by no means immune.

23 Others prominent in the movement at the time were Governor N. P. Tallmadge, of Wisconsin, Rev. Adin Ballou, J. P. Davis and Benjamin Coleman; and Profs. Bush, Mapes, Gray, and Channing from leading universities. Mr. Epes Sargeant, of Boston, added prestige to the cult. A Dr. Gardner, of Boston, and the Unitarian Theodore Parker gave testimony as to the beneficent influence exerted by the Spiritualistic faith.







24 By strange and fortuitous circumstances he became the guest of the Emperor of the French, of the King of Holland, of the Czar of Russia, and of many lesser princes. His demonstrations before these grandees were extensions of the phenomena occurring in his youth. See Howitt's History of the Supernatural, Vol. II, pp. 222 ff.

25 Howitt's History of the Supernatural, Vol. II, p. 225.

26 He published his The Great Harmonia (Boston 1850); The Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse (New York, 1851); The Penetralia (Boston, 1856); The Present Age and Inner Life (New York, 1853); and The Magic Staff (Boston, 1858). He edited a periodical, The Herald of Progress.27 Howitt's The History of the Supernatural, Vol. II, p. 228.


28 That there was much very real theosophy among the early German Pietists who settled north and west of Philadelphia in the Pennsylvania colony is indicated by the following extract from The German Sectarians of Pennsylvania, by Julius Friedrich Sachse (Vol. I, pp. 457 ff.). He says: "Thus far but little attention has been given by writers on Pennsylvania history to the influences exercised by the various mystical, theosophical and cabbalistic societies and fraternities of Europe in the evangelization of this Province and in reclaiming the German settlers from the rationalism with which they were threatened by their contact with the English Quakers.

CHAPTER III
HELENA P. BLAVATSKY: HER LIFE AND PSYCHIC CAREER
Who was Madame Blavatsky? Every new régime of belief or of social organization must be studied with a view to determining as far as possible how much of the movement is a contribution of the individuality of the founder and how much represents a traditional deposit. This inquiry is of first importance in a consideration of the Theosophical Society, because, more than in most systems, the personal endowment of its founder gave it its specific coloring, character and form. It should be said at this point that the career of Madame Blavatsky as outlined here does not purport to be a complete or authoritative biography. It was obviously impossible to undertake such an investigation of her life, as the difficulties of obscure research in three or four continents were practically prohibitive. We have been forced to base our study upon the body of biographical material that has been assembled around her name, emanating, first, from her relatives, secondly, from her followers and admirers, and thirdly, from her critics. Her life, up to the age of forty-two, narrowly escaped consignment to the realm of mythology, if not total oblivion, but was at least partially redeemed to the status of history by the exertions of Mr. A. P. Sinnett, who procured information from members of her own family in Russia. His book, Incidents in the Life of Madame Blavatsky, has been our chief source of information about her youth and early career. The Countess Wachtmeister's Reminiscences, Col. Olcott's Old Diary Leaves, V. Solovyoff's A Modern Priestess of Isis and William Kingsland's The Real Helena P. Blavatsky, together with Madame Blavatsky's own letters, especially those to Mr. And Mrs. A. P. Sinnett, are the main works relied upon to guide our story. If the eventful life of our subject is to be further redeemed from mystery and sheer tradition into which it already seems to be fading, a more thorough critical study of it should be undertaken, based upon authentic data collected from first-hand sources as far as this is possible.

It is to be understood, then, that the aim in this treatise is to present her career as it is told and believed by Theosophists, although it is admittedly already partly legendary. The precise extent it is to be regarded as mythological must be left to the individual reader, and to future study, to determine.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was born in the Ukrainian city of Ekaterinoslaw on the night between the 30th and 31st of July, 1831. Her father was Col. Peter Hahn, and her mother previous to her marriage, Helene Fadeef. The father was the son of Gen. Alexis Hahn von Rottenstern Hahn, from a noble family of Mecklenberg, Germany, settled in Russia. Her mother's parents were Privy Councillor Andrew Fadeef and the Princess Helene Dolgorouky. Madame Blavatsky's grandfather was a cousin of Countess Ida Hahn-Hahn, the authoress. Her own mother was known in the literary world between 1830 and 1840 under the nom de plume of Zenaïda R.--the first novel writer that had ever appeared in Russia, says the account. Though she died before her twenty-fifth year, she left some dozen novels of the romantic school, most of which have been translated into German. The theory of heredity would thus give us, apparently, abundant background for whatever literary propensities the daughter was later to display. On her mother's side she was a scion of the noble lineage of the Dolgorouky's, who could trace direct connections with Russia's founder, Rurik, and the Imperial line.

Madame Blavatsky came on to the Russian scene during a year fatal to the Slavic nation, as to all Europe, owing to the decimation of the population by the first visitation of the cholera. Her own birth was quickened by several deaths in the household. She was ushered into the world amid coffins and sorrowing. The infant was so sickly that a hurried baptism was resorted to in the effort to anticipate death. During the ceremony, which was signalized with elaborate Greek Catholic paraphernalia of lighted tapers, the child-aunt of the baby accidentally set fire to the long robes of the priest, who was severely burned. This incident was interpreted as a bad omen, and in the eyes of the townsfolk the infant was doomed to a life of trouble.

From the very date of her birth, a peculiar tradition operated to invest the life of the growing child with an odor of superstition and mystic awe. In Russia each household was supposed to be under the tutelary supervision of a Domovoy, or house goblin, whose guardianship was propitious, except on March 30th, when, for mysterious reasons, he became mischievous. But the tradition strangely excepted from this malevolent spell of the Domovoy those born on the night of July 30-31, a time closely associated in the annals of popular belief with witches and their doings. The child came early to learn why it was that, on every recurring March 30th, she was carried around the house, stables and cowpen and made personally to sprinkle the four corners with water, while the nurse repeated some mystic incantation. Her first conscious recognition of herself must thus have been tinged with a feeling that she was in some particular fashion set apart, that she was somehow the object of special care and attention from invisible powers.

The Dnieper aided in weaving a spell of enchantment about her infancy. No Cossack of Southern Ukraine ever crosses it without preparing himself for death. Along its banks, where the child strolled with her nurses, the Rusalky (undines, nymphs) haunted the willow trees and the rushes. She was told that she was impervious to their influences, and in this sense of superiority she alone dared to approach those sandy shores. She had heard the servants' tales of these nymphs. Filled with this realization of her favored standing with the Rusalky, she one day threatened a youngster who had roused her displeasure that she would have the nymphs tickle him to death, whereupon the lad ran wildly away and was found dead on the sands--whether from fright or from having stumbled into one of the treacherous sandpits which the swirling waters quickly turn into whirlpools.

Her mother died when Mlle. Hahn was still a child. She and her younger sister were taken to live with her father, in barracks with his regiment, and until the age of eleven, they were entertained, amused and spoiled as les enfants du régiment. After that they went to live at Saratow with their grandmother, where their grandfather was civil governor. The child was "alternately petted and punished, spoiled and hardened," and was difficult to manage. She was of uncertain health, "ever sick and dying," a sleep walker, and given to abnormal psychic peculiarities, ascribed by her orthodox nurses to possession by the devil; so that, as she afterwards said, "she was drenched with enough holy water to float a ship," and exorcised by priests. She was a born rebel against restraint, and went into ungovernable fits of passion, which left her violently shaken; but at the opposite apogee of her disposition she was filled with impulses of the extremest kindliness and affection. Through life she had this dual temper. Those who knew her better nature tolerated the irascible element. She was lively, highly-gifted, full of humor, and of remarkable doing. She had a passionate curiosity for everything savoring of the weird, the uncanny, the mysterious; she was strangely attracted by the theme of death. Her imagination, wildly roaming, appeared to create about her a world of fairy or elfish creatures with whom she held converse in whispers by the hour. She defied all and everything. She had to be watched lest she escape from the house and mingle with ragged urchins. She preferred to listen to the tales of Madame Peigneur (her governess) than do her lessons. She would openly rebel against her text-books and run off to the woods or hide in the dusky corridors of the basement of the great house where her grandfather lived. In a secluded dark recess in the "Catacombs" she had erected a barrier of old broken chairs and tables, and there, up near the ceiling under an iron-barred window, she would secrete herself for hours, reading a book of popular legends known as Solomon's WisdomAt times she bent to her books in a spasm of scholarly devotion to amend for mischief making. Her grandparents' enormous library was then the object of her constant interest. No less passionately would she drink in the wonders of narratives given in her presence. Every fairy-tale became a living event to her.

She would be found speaking to the stuffed animals and birds in the museum in the old house. She said the pigeons were cooing fairy-tales to her. She heard a voice in every natural object; nature was animate and, to her, articulate. She seemed to know the inner life and secrets of every species of insect, bird, and reptile found about the place. She would recreate their past and describe vividly their feelings. At this early date she detailed the events of the past incarnations of the stuffed animals in the museum.

Times without number the little girl was heard conversing with playmates of her own age, invisible to others. There was in particular a little hunchback boy, a favorite phantom companion of her solitude, for whose neglect by the servants and nurses she was often excited to resentment.

"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."1

In the neighborhood of the residence was an old man, a magician, whose doings filled the mind of the young seeress with wonder. The old man, a centenarian, learned to know the young girl and he used to say of her: "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!"

Her whole career is dotted with miraculous escapes from danger and still more miraculous recoveries from wounds, sicknesses and fevers. One of the first appearances of a protective hand in her life came far back in her childhood. She had always entertained a marked curiosity about a curtained portrait in her grandfather's castle at Saratow. It was hung so high that it was far beyond her reach. Denied permission to see it, she awaited her opportunity to catch a glimpse of it by stealth; and when left alone on one occasion she dragged a table to the wall, set another table on that, and a chair on top, and managed to clamber up. On tiptoe she just contrived to pull back the curtain. The sight of the picture was so startling that she made an involuntary movement backwards, lost her balance and toppled with her pyramid to the floor. In falling she lost consciousness; but when she came to her senses some moments afterwards, she was amazed to see the tables, chairs, and everything in proper order in the room. The curtain was slipped back again on the rings, and no mark of the episode was left except the imprint of her small hand on the wall high up beside the picture.

At another time, when she was nearing the age of fourteen, her riding horse bolted and flung her, with her foot caught in the stirrup. As the animal plunged forward she expected to be dragged to death, but felt herself buoyed up by a strange force, and escaped without a scratch.

It was not many years more until the young girl's possession of gifts and extraordinary faculties, commonly classed as mediumistic, became an admitted fact among her relatives and close associates. She would answer questions locating lost property, or solving other perplexities of the household. She sometimes blurted out to visitors that they would die, or meet with misfortune or accident; and her prophecies usually came true.

In 1844 the father, Col. Hahn, took Helena for her first journey abroad. She went with him to Paris and London, but proved a troublesome charge.

Her youthful marriage deserves narration with some fulness, if only because it precipitated the lady out of her home and into that phase of her career which has been referred to as her period of preparation and apprenticeship. As her aunt, Madame Fadeef, describes her marriage:

"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 'plumeless raven,' that even he would decline her for his wife. That was enough; three days afterwards 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. All she knew and understood was--when too late--that she 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 honor 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--she left her husband forever, without giving him an opportunity to ever even think of her as his wife.

"Thus Madame 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."2

True, before taking this drastic step she acceded to her father's plea to do the conventional thing; and she let the old General take her, though even then not without attempts to escape, on what may by courtesy of language be called a honeymoon, which drawled out, amid bickerings, to a length of three months, and was terminated after a bitter quarrel by the bride's dash for freedom on horseback. Gen. Blavatsky by this time saw the impossibility of the situation and acceded to the inevitable.

Tracing the life of Madame Blavatsky from this event through her personally-conducted globe-roaming becomes difficult, owing to the meagreness of information. Her relatives and her later Theosophic associates have done their best to piece together the crazy-quilt design of her wanderings and attendant events of any significance. She herself kept no chronicle of her journeys, and it was only at long intervals, when she emerged out of the deserts or jungles of a country to visit its metropolis, or when she needed to write for money, that she sent letters back home. The family was at first alarmed by her defection from the fireside, but were constrained to acquiesce in the situation by their recognition of her immitigable distaste for her veteran husband. If no other tie kept her attached to the home circle, her need of funds obliged her to keep in touch with her father, who supplied her with money without betraying her confidences as to her successive destinations. He acceded to her plans because he had tried in vain to secure a Russian divorce; and he felt that a few years of travel for his daughter might best ease the family situation. Ten years elapsed before the fugitive saw her relatives again.

Her first emergence after her disappearance was in Egypt. She seems to have traveled there with a Countess K------, and at that time began to pick up some occult teaching of a poorer sort. She encountered an old Copt, a man with a great reputation as a magician. She proved an apt pupil, and the instructor became so much interested in her that when she revisited Egypt years later, the special attention he (then a retired ascetic) showed her, attracted the notice of the populace at Bulak.

After her appearance in Egypt she seems to have bobbed up in Paris, where she made the acquaintance of many literary people, and where a famous mesmerist, struck with her psychic gifts, was eager to put her to work as a sensitive. To escape his importunities she appears to have gone to London. There she stayed for a time with an old Russian lady, a Countess B., at Mivart's Hotel. She remained for some time after her friend's departure, but could not afterwards recall where she resided.

Occasionally in her travels she fell in with fellow Russians who were glad to accompany her and sometimes to befriend her. She indulged in a tour about Europe in 1850 with the Countess B., but was again in Paris when the New Year of 1851 was acclaimed. Her next move was actuated by a passionate interest in the North American Indians, which she had acquired from a perusal of Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking TalesHer zeal in this pursuit took her to Canada in July of 1851. At Quebec her idealizations suffered a rude shock, when, being introduced to a party of Indians, both the noble Redskins and some articles of her property disappeared while she was trying to pry from the squaws a recital of the secret powers of their medicine men. Dropping the Indians, she turned her interest to the rising sect of the Mormons, being attracted doubtless by their possession of an alleged Hermetic document obtained through psychic revelation. But the destruction of the original Mormon city of Nauvoo, Missouri, by a mob, scattered the sect across the plains, and Madame Blavatsky thought the time propitious for exploring the traditions and arcana of Mexico. She came to New Orleans. Here the Voodoo practices of a settlement of Negroes from the West Indies engaged her interest, and her reckless curiosity might have led her into dangerous contact with these magicians; but her protective power reappeared to warn her in a vision of the risk she was running, and she hastened on to new experiences.

Through Texas she reached Mexico, protected only by her own reckless daring and by the occasional intercession of some chance companion. She seems to have owed much in this way to an old Canadian, Père Jacques, who steered her safely through many perils.

At Copau in Mexico she chanced to meet a Hindu, who styled himself a "chela" of the Masters (or adepts in Oriental occult science), and she resolved to seek that land of mystic enchantment and penetrate northward into the very lairs of the mystic Brotherhood. She wrote to an Englishman, whom she had met two years before in Germany, and who shared her interest, to join them in the West Indies. Upon his arrival the three pilgrims took boat for India. The party arrived at Bombay, via the Cape to Ceylon, near the end of 1852. Madame's own headstrong bent to enter Tibet via Nepal in search of her Mahatmas broke up the trio. She made the hazardous attempt to enter the Forbidden Land of the Lamas, but was prevented, she always believed, by the opposition of a British resident then in Nepal. Baffled, she returned to Southern India, thence to Java and Singapore and thence back to England.

But that country's embroilment in the Crimean War distressed her sense of patriotism, and about the end of the year 1853 she passed over again to America, going to New York, thence west to Chicago and on to the Far West across the Rockies with emigrant caravans. She halted a while at San Francisco. Her stay in America this time lengthened to nearly two years. She then once more made her way to India, via Japan and the Straits. She reached Calcutta in 1855.

In India, in 1856, she was joined at Lahore by a German gentleman who had been requested by Col. Hahn to find his errant daughter. With him and his two companions Madame Blavatsky traveled through Kashmir to Leli in Ladakh in company with a Tatar Shaman, who was instrumental in procuring for the party the favor of witnessing some magic rites performed at a Buddhist monastery. Her experiences there she afterwards described in Isis,3  and they are too long for recital here. One of the exploits of the old priest was the psychic vivification of the body of an infant who (not yet of walking age) arose and spoke eloquently of spiritual things and prophesied, while dominated by a magnetic current from the operator.4 The psychic feat performed by her Shaman guide was even more wonderful. Yielding to Madame's importunities at a time when she was herself in grave danger, he released himself from his body as he lay in a tent, and carried a message to a friend of the young woman residing in Wallachia, from whom he brought back an answer.5  Shortly after this incident, perceiving their danger, the Shaman, by mental telepathy apprised a friendly tribal ruler of their situation, and a band of twenty-five horsemen was sent to rescue the two travelers, finding them in a locality to which they had been directed by their chief, yet of which the two had had no possible earthly means of informing him.

Safely out of the Tibetan wilds--and she came out by roads and passes of which she had no previous knowledge--she was directed by her occult guardian to leave the country, shortly before the troubles which began in 1857. In 1858 she was once more in Europe.

By this time her name had accumulated some renown, and it was freely mentioned in connection with both the low and the high life of Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw, and Paris. Her alleged absence from these places at the times throws doubt on the accuracy of these reports. After spending some months in France and Germany upon her return from India, she finally ended her self-imposed exile and rejoined her own people in Russia, arriving at Pskoff, about 180 miles from St. Petersburg, in the midst of a family wedding party on Christmas night. Her reason for going to Pskoff was that her sister Vera--then Madame Yahontoff--was at the time residing there with the family of her late husband, son of the General N. A. Yahontoff, Marechal de Noblesse of the place.

Soon afterwards, early in 1859, Madame Blavatsky and her sister went to reside with their father in a country house belonging to Madame Yahontoff. This was at Rougodevo, about 200 versts from St. Petersburg. About a year later, in the spring of 1860, both sisters left Rougodevo for the Caucasus on a visit to their grandparents, whom they had not seen for years. It was a three weeks' journey from Moscow to Tiflis, in coach with post horses. Madame Blavatsky remained in Tiflis less than two years, adding another year of roaming about in Imeretia, Georgia, and Mingrelia, exciting the superstitious sensibilities of the inhabitants of the Mingrelia region to an inordinate degree and gaining a reputation for witchcraft and sorcery. She was there taken down with a wasting fever, which an old army surgeon could make nothing of; but he had the good sense to send her off to Tiflis to her friends. Recovering after a time, she left the Caucasus and went to Italy. Here, the legend goes, she, with some other European women, volunteered to serve with Garibaldi and was under severe fire in the battle of Mentana.6

The four years intervening between 1863 and 1867 seem to have been spent in European travel, though the records are barren of accurate detail. But the three from 1867 to 1870 were passed in the East,7 and were quite fruitful and eventful.

In 1870 she returned from the Orient, coming through the newly opened Suez Canal, spent a short time in Piraeus, and from there took passage for Spezzia on board a Greek vessel. On this voyage she was one of the very few saved from death in a terrible catastrophe, the vessel being blown to bits by an explosion of gunpowder and fireworks in the cargo. Rescued with only the clothes they wore, the survivors were looked after by the Greek government, which forwarded them to various destinations. Madame Blavatsky went to Alexandria and to Cairo, tarrying at the latter place until money reached her from Russia.

While awaiting the arrival of funds, the energetic woman determined to found a Société Spirite, for the investigation of mediums and manifestations according to the theories and philosophy of Allen Kardec. The latter was an outstanding advocate of Spiritualistic philosophy on the Continent. He had correlated the commonly reported spiritistic exploits to a more profound and involved theory of cosmic evolution and a higher spirituality in man. His work, Life and Destiny, written under the pseudonym of Leon Denis, unfolded a comprehensive system of spiritual truth identical in its main features with Theosophy itself. His interests were not primarily in spiritistic phenomena for themselves, but for what they revealed of the inner spiritual capacities and potentialities of our evolving Psyche.

It required but a few weeks to disgust Madame Blavatsky with her fruitless undertaking. Some French female spiritists, whom she had drafted for service as mediums, in lack of better, proved to be adventuresses following in the wake of M. de Lesseps' army of engineers and workmen, and they concluded by stealing the Society's funds. She wrote home:

"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."8

She terminated the affairs of her Société and went to Bulak, where she renewed her previous acquaintance with the old Copt. His unconcealed interest in his visitor aroused some slanderous talk about her. Disgusted with the growing gossip, she went home by way of Palestine, making a side voyage to Palmyra and other ruins, and meeting there some Russian friends. At the end of 1872 she returned without warning to her family, then at Odessa.

In 1873 she again abandoned her home, and Paris was her first objective. She stayed there with a cousin, Nicholas Hahn, for two months. While in Paris she was directed by her "spiritual overseers" to visit the United States, "where she would meet a man by the name of Olcott," with whom she was to undertake an important enterprise. Obedient to her orders she arrived at New York on July 7th, 1873.9 She was for a time practically without funds; actually, as Col. Olcott avers, "in the most dismal want, having . . . to boil her coffee-dregs over and over again for lack of pence for buying a fresh supply; and to keep off starvation, at last had to work with her needle for a maker of cravats."10 During this interval she was lodged in a wretched tenement house in the East Side, and made cravats for a kindly old Jew, whose help at this time she never forgot.11 In her of her time in writing occult, mystic, and scientific articles for Russian periodicals. This constituted her main source of income. Col. Olcott states that her Russian articles were so highly prized that "the conductor of the most important of their reviews actually besought her to write constantly for it, on terms as high as they gave Turgenev."13

A chronicle of her life during this epoch may not omit her second marriage, which proved ill-fated at the first. It came about as follows: A Mr. B., a Russian subject, learning of her psychic gifts through Col. Olcott, asked the Colonel to arrange for him a meeting with his countrywoman. He proceeded to fall into a profound state of admiration for Madame Blavatsky, which deepened though he was persistently rebuffed, and he finally threatened to take his life unless she would relent. He proclaimed his motives to be only protective, and expressly waived a husband's claims to the privileges of married life. In what appears to have been madness or some sort of desperation, she agreed finally, on these terms, to be his wife. Even then it was specified that she retain her own name and be free from all restraint, for the sake of her work. A Unitarian clergyman married them in Philadelphia, and they lived for some few months in a house on Sansom Street. When taken to task by her friend Olcott, she explained that it was a misfortune to which she was doomed by an inexorable Karma; that it was a punishment to her for a streak of pride which was hindering her spiritual development; but that it would result in no harm to the young man. The husband forgot his earlier protestations of Platonic detachment, and became an importunate lover. Madame Blavatsky developed a dangerous illness at this time as a result of a fall upon an icy sidewalk in New York the previous winter, and her knee became so violently inflamed that a partial mortification of the leg set in. The physician declared that nothing but instant amputation could save her life; but she discarded his advice, called upon that source of help which had come to her in a number of exigencies, recovered immediately and left her husband's "bed and board." He, after some months of waiting, saw her obduracy and procured a divorce on the ground of desertion.14

During the latter part of her stay in New York she and Col. Olcott took an apartment of seven rooms at the corner of 47th Street and 8th Avenue, which came to be called "The Lamasery," in jocular reference to her Tibetan connections. "The Lamasery" became a social and intellectual center during her residence there. Col. Olcott says:

". . . her mirthfulness, epigrammatic wit, brilliance of conversation, careless friendliness to those she liked . . ., her fund of anecdote, and, chiefest attraction to most of her callers, her amazing psychical phenomena, made the 'Lamasery' the most attractive salon of the metropolis from 1876 to the close of 1878."15

Madame spent her day-hours in writing, her custom for years; and held open house for visitors in the evening. There was always discussion of one or another aspect of occult philosophy, in which she naturally took the commanding part. She would pour out an endless flow of argument and supporting data, augmented at favorable times by a sudden exhibition of magical power. She seemed tireless in her psychic energy.

Several persons have left good word-pictures of her. Col. Olcott graphically describes her appearance upon the occasion of their first meeting in the old Eddy farmhouse, in Vermont, where they both came in '74 to study the "spooks." Col. Olcott had been on the scene for some time, as a representative of the New York Daily Graphic, when Madame Blavatsky arrived. He was struck by her general appearance, and he contrived to introduce himself to her through the medium of a gallant offer of a light for her cigarette.

"It was a massive Kalmuc face," he writes, "contrasting in its suggestion of power, culture and impressiveness, as strangely with the commonplace visages about the room, as her red garment did
with the gray and white tones of the wall and the woodwork, and the dull costumes of the rest of the guests. All sorts of cranky people were continually coming and going at Eddy's, and it only struck me, on seeing this eccentric lady, that this was but one more of the sort. Pausing on the doorstep I whispered to Kappes, 'Good Gracious! Look at that specimen, will you!'"16

In her autobiography the Princess Helene von Racowitza makes some interesting references to Madame Blavatsky, whom she knew intimately.

"I discovered in her the most remarkable being (for one hardly dare designate her with the simple name of woman). She gave me new life; . . . she brought new interest into my existence. Regarding her personal appearance, the head, which rose from the dark flowing garments, was immensely characteristic, although far more ugly than beautiful. A true Russian type, a short thick nose, prominent cheek bones, a small clever mobile mouth, with little fine teeth, brown and very curly hair, and almost like that of a negro's; a sallow complexion, but a pair of eyes the like of which I had never seen; pale blue, grey as water, but with a glance deep and penetrating, and as compelling as if it beheld the inner heart of things. Sometimes they held an expression as though fixed on something afar, high and immeasurably above all earthly things. She always wore long dark flowing garments and had ideally beautiful hands.

"But how shall I attempt to describe . . . her being, her power, her abilities and her character? She was a combination of the most heterogeneous qualities. By all she was considered as a sort of Cagliostro or St. Germain. She conversed with equal facility in Russian, English, French, German, Italian and certain dialects of Hindustani; yet she lacked all positive knowledge--even the most superficial European school training.

"In matters of social life she . . . joined an irresistible charm in conversation, that comprised chiefly an intense comprehension of everything noble and great, with the most original and often coarse humor, a mode of expression which was the comical despair of prudish Anglo-Saxons.

"Her contempt for and rebellion against all social conventions made her appear sometimes even coarser than was her wont, and she hated and fought conventional lying with real Don Quixotic courage. But whoever approached her in poverty or rags, hungry and needing comfort, could be sure to find in her a warm heart and an open hand. . . . No drop of wine, beer or fermented liquors ever passed her lips, and she had a most fanatical hatred of everything intoxicating. Her hospitality was genuinely Oriental. She placed everything she possessed at the disposal of her friends."17

Mr. J. Ranson Bridges, a none too kindly critic, who had considerable correspondence with her from 1888 till her death, says:

"Whatever may be the ultimate verdict upon the life and work of this woman, her place in history will be unique. There was a Titanic display of strength in everything she did. The storms that raged within her were cyclones. Those exposed to them often felt, with Solovyoff, that if there were holy and sage Mahatmas, they could not remain holy and sage and have anything to do with Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Yet she could be as tender and sympathetic as any mother. Her mastery of some natures seemed complete. . . . To these disciples she was the greatest thaumaturgist known to the world since the time of Christ."18

In a moment of gayety she once dashed off the following description of herself:

"An old woman, whether 40, 50, 60 or 90 years old, it matters not; an old woman whose Kalmuco-Buddhisto-Tartaric features, even in youth, never made her appear pretty; a woman whose ungainly garb, uncouth manners, and masculine habits are enough to frighten any bustled and corseted fine lady of fashionable society out of her wits."19

For all her psychic insight, she seemed unable to protect herself against those who fawned upon her, cultivated her society, and then repaid her by desertion or slander. She was open to any one who professed occult interest, and she readily took up with many such persons who later became bitter critics.

Much ado was made by delicate ladies in her day of her cigarette addiction. Her evident masculinity, her lack of many of the niceties which ladies commonly affect, her scorn of conventions, her failure to put on the airs of a woman of noble rank, her occasional coarse language, and her violence of temper over petty things, have led many people to infer that the message that she brought could not have been pure and lofty.

Theosophists put forward an explanation of her irascibility and nervous instability, in a theory which must sound exotic to the uninitiated. They state that when she studied in Tibet under her Masters, and was initiated into the mysteries of their occult knowledge, they extricated, by processes in which they are alleged to be adepts, one of her astral bodies and retained it so as to be able to maintain, through an etheric radio vibration, a constant line of communication with her in any part of the world. This left her in a state of unstable equilibrium nervously, and rendered her subject to a greater degree of irritation than would normally have been the case.

Madame Blavatsky's life story, covered now in its outward phases, is not complete without consideration of that remarkable series of psychic phenomena which give inner meaning to her career. In and of themselves they form a narrative of great interest, on a par with the legendary lives of many other saints. The story is a long one; a complete record of all her wonder-working, as told in the Theosophic accounts, would alone fill the space of this volume. A digest of this material must be made here, though a critical examination is, as said above, not attempted.

When, in 1858, she returned home from her first exile of ten years, Spiritualism was just looming on the horizon of Europe. Nothing seems to be mentioned in the several biographical sketches, of her coming in contact with the sweep of the Spiritualistic wave that was at full height in the United States during the early fifties, when she passed through that country. However the case may be, she returned home in 1858 with her occult powers already fully developed, and proceeded to make frequent display of them.

At Pskoff, with her sister's husband's family, the Yahontoff's, raps, knocks, and other sounds occurred incessantly; furniture moved without any contact; particles changed their weight; and either absent living folk or the dead were seen both by herself and her relatives many times. Wherever the young woman went "things" happened. Laughing at the continued recurrence of these mysterious activities, she averred to her sisters that she could make them cease or redouble their frequency and power, by the sheer force of her own will.20  The psychic demonstrations supposedly took place in entire independence of her coöperation, but she could, if she chose, interject her will and assume control. Her sister, Madame de Jelihowsky, remembers Helena's laughing when addressed as a medium, and assuring her friends that "she was no medium, but only a mediator between mortals and beings we know nothing about."21  The reports of her wonderful exploits following her arrival at Pskoff in 1858 threw that town into a swirl of excited gossip. There was a great deal of fashionable company at the Yahontoff home in those days. Madame's presence itself attracted many. Seldom did any of the numerous callers go away unsatisfied, for to their inquiries the raps gave answer, often long ones in different languages, some of which were not in Madame Blavatsky's repertoire. The willing "medium" was subjected to every kind of test, to which she submitted gracefully.

An instance of her power was her mystification of her own brother, Leonide de Hahn. A company was gathered in the drawing room, and Leonide was walking leisurely about, unconcerned with the stunts which his gifted sister was producing for the diversion of the visitors. He stopped behind the girl's chair just as some one was telling how magicians change the avoirdupois of objects. "And you mean to say that you can do it?" he asked his sister ironically. "Mediums can, and I have done it occasionally," was the reply. "But would you try?" some one asked. "I will try, but promise nothing." Hereupon one of the young men advanced and lifted a light chess table with great ease. Madame then told them to leave it alone and stand back. She was not near it herself. In the expectant silence that ensued she merely looked intently at the table. Then she invited the same young man who had just lifted it to do so again. He tried, with great assurance of his ability, but could not stir the table an inch. He grew red with the effort, but without avail. The brother, thinking that his sister had arranged the play with his friend as a little joke on him, now advanced. "May I also try?" he asked her. "Please do, my dear," she laughed. He seized the table and struggled; whereat his smile vanished. Try as he would, his effort was futile. Others tried it with the same result. After a while Helena urged Leonide to try it once more. He lifted it now with no effort.

A few months later, Madame Blavatsky, her father and sister, having left Pskoff and lodging at a hotel in St. Petersburg, were visited by two old friends of Col. Hahn, both now much interested in Spiritualism. After witnessing some of Helena's performances, the two guests expressed great surprise at the father's continued apathy toward his daughter's abilities. After some bantering they began to insist that he should at least consent to an experiment, before denying the importance of the phenomena. They suggested that he retire to an adjoining room, write a word on a slip of paper, conceal it and see if his daughter could persuade the raps to reveal it. The old gentleman consented, believing he could discredit the foolish nonsense, as he termed it, once for all. He retired, wrote the word and returned, venturing in his confidence the assertion that if this experiment were successful, he "would believe in the devil, undines, sorcerers, and witches, in the whole paraphernalia, in short, of old woman's superstitions; and you may prepare to offer me as an inmate of a lunatic asylum."22  He went on with his solitaire in a corner, while the friends took note of the raps now beginning. The younger sister was repeating the alphabet, the raps sounding at the desired letter; one of the visitors marked it down.
Madame Blavatsky did nothing apparently. By this means one single word was got, but it seemed so grotesque and meaningless that a sense of failure filled the minds of the experimenters. Questioning whether that one word was the entire message, the raps sounded "Yes--yes--yes!" The younger girl then turned to her father and told them that they had got but one word. "Well what is it?" he demanded. "Zaïchik."23 It was a sight indeed to witness the change that came over the old man's face at hearing this one word. He became deadly pale. Adjusting his spectacles with a trembling hand, he stretched it out, 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 "Zaïchik." Yes; Zaïchik; so it is. How very strange!" Taking out of his pocket the paper he had written on in the next room, he handed it in silence to his daughter and guests. On it they found he had written: "What was the name of my favorite horse which I rode during my first Turkish campaign?" And lower down, in parenthesis, the answer,--" Zaïchik."

The old Colonel, now assured there was more than child's play in his daughter's pretensions, rushed into the region of phenomena with great zeal. He did not matriculate at an asylum; instead he set Helena to work investigating his family tree. He was stimulated to this inquiry by having received the date of a certain event in his ancestral history of several hundred years before, which he verified by reference to old documents. Scores of historical events connected with his family were now given him; names unheard of, relationships unknown, positions held, marriages, deaths; and all were found on painstaking research to have been correct in every item! All this information was given rapidly and unhesitatingly. The investigation lasted for months.

In the spring of 1858 both sisters were living with their father in the country-house in a village belonging to Mme. Yahontoff. In consequence of a murder committed near their property, the Superintendent of the District Police passed through the villages and stopped at their house to make some inquiries. No one in the village knew who had committed the crime. During tea, as all were sitting around the table, the raps came, and there were the usual disturbances around the room. Col. Hahn suggested to the Superintendent that he had better try his daughter's invisible helpers for information. He laughed incredulously. He had heard of "spirits," he said, but was derisive of their ability to give information in "a real case." This scorn of her powers caused the young girl to desire to humble the arrogant officer. She turned fiercely upon him. "And suppose I prove to you the contrary?" she defiantly asked him. "Then," he answered, "I would resign my office and offer it to you, Madame, or, better still, 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 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 shall even leave the room." She went out, with a book, to read. The inquiry in the next room produced the name of the murderer, the fact that he had crossed over into the next district and was then hiding in the hay in the loft of a peasant, Andrew Vlassof, in the village of Oreshkino. Further information was elicited to the effect that the murderer was an old soldier on leave; he was drunk and had quarreled with his victim. The murder was not premeditated; rather a misfortune than a crime. The Superintendent rushed precipitately out of the house and drove off to Oreshkino, more than 30 miles distant. A letter came by courier the following morning saying that everything given by the raps had proved absolutely correct. This incident produced a great uproar in the district and Madame's work was viewed in a more serious light. Her family, however, had some difficulty convincing the more distant authorities that they had no natural means of being familiar with the crime.

One evening while all sat in the dining room, loud chords of music were struck on the closed piano in the next room, visible to all through the open door. On another occasion Madame's tobacco pouch, her box of matches and her handkerchief came rushing to her through the air, upon a mere look from her. Many visitors to her apartment in later years witnessed this same procedure. Again, one evening, all lights were suddenly extinguished, an amazing noise was heard, and though a match was struck in a moment, all the heavy furniture was found overturned on the floor. The locked piano played a loud march. The manifestations taking place when the home circle was unmixed with visitors were usually of the most pronounced character.

Sometimes there were alleged communications from the spirits of historical personages, not the inevitable Napoleon and Cleopatra, but Socrates, Cicero and Martin Luther, and they ranged from great power and vigor of thought to almost flippant silliness. Some from the shade of the Russian poet Pushkin were quite beautiful.

While the family read aloud the Memoirs of Catherine Romanovna Dashkoff, they were interrupted many times by the alleged spirit of the authoress herself, interjecting remarks, making additions, offering explanations and refutations.

In the early part of 1859 the sister, Madame Jelihowsky, inherited a country village from the estate of her late husband at Rougodevo, and there the family, including Helena, went to reside for a period. No one in the party had ever known any of the previous occupants of the estate. Soon after settling down in the old mansion, Madame discerned the shades of half a dozen of the former inhabitants in one of the unoccupied wings and described them to her sister. Seeking out several old servants, she found that every one of the wraiths could be identified and named by the aged domestics. The young woman's description of one man was that he had long finger nails, like a Chinaman's. The servant stated that one of the former residents had contracted a disease in Lithuania, which renders cutting of the nails a certain road to death through bleeding.

Sometimes the other members of the family would converse with the rapping forces without disturbing Helena at all. The forces played more strongly than every, it seemed, when Madame was asleep or sick. A physician once attending her illness was almost frightened away by the noises and moving furniture in the bedroom.

A terrible illness befell her near the end of the stay at Rougodevo. Years before, her relatives believed during her solitary travels over the steppes of Asia, she had received a wound. This wound reopened occasionally, and then she suffered intense agony, which lasted three or four days and then the wound would heal as suddenly as it had opened, and her illness would vanish. On one occasion a physician was called; but he proved of little use, because the prodigious phenomena which he witnessed left him almost powerless to act. Having examined the wound, the patient being prostrated and unconscious, he saw a large dark hand between his own and the wound he was about to dress. The wound was near the heart, and the hand moved back and forth between the neck and the waist. To make the apparition worse, there came in the room a terrific noise, from ceiling, floor, windows, and furniture, so that the poor man begged not to be left alone in the room with the patient.

In the spring of 1860 the two sisters left Rougodevo for a visit to their grandparents in the south of Russia, and during the long slow journey many incidents took place. At one station, where a surly, half-drunken station-master refused to lend them a fresh relay of horses, and there was no fit room for their accommodation over the night, Helena terrified him into sense and reason by whispering into his ear some strange secret of his, which he believed no one knew and which it was to his interest to keep hidden.

At Jadonsk, where a halt was made, they attended a church service, where the prelate, the famous and learned Isidore, who had known them in childhood, recognized them and invited them to visit him at the Metropolitan's house. He received them when they came with great kindliness; but hardly had they entered the drawing room than a terrible hubbub of noise and raps burst forth in every direction. Every piece of furniture strained and cracked, rocked and thumped. The women were confused by this demoniacal demonstration in the presence of the amazed Churchman, though the culprit in the case was hardly able to repress her sense of humor. But the priest saw the embarrassment of his guests and understood the cause of it. He inquired which of the two women possessed such strange potencies. He was told. Then he asked permission to put to her invisible guide a mental question. She assented. His query, a serious one, received an instant reply, precise and to the point; and he was so struck with it all that he detained his visitors for over three hours. He continued his conversation with the unseen presences and paid unstinted tribute to their seeming all-knowledge. His farewell words to his gifted guest were:

"As for you, let not your heart be troubled by the gift you are possessed of . . . 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."

Her occult powers grew at this period to their full development, and she seemed to have completed the subjection of every phase of manifestation to her own volitional control. Her fame throughout the Caucasus increased, breeding both hostility and admiration. She had risen above the necessity of resorting to the slow process of raps, and read people's states and gave them answers through her own clairvoyance. She seemed able, she said, to see a cloud around people in whose luminous substance their thoughts took visible form. The purely sporadic phenomena were dying away.

Her illness at the end of her stay in Mingrelia has already been noted. A psychic experience of unusual nature even for her, through which she passed during this severe sickness, seems to have marked a definite epoch in her occult development. She apparently acquired the ability from that time to step out of her physical body, investigate distant scenes or events, and bring back reports to her normal consciousness. Sometimes she felt herself as now one person, H. P. Blavatsky, and again some one else. Returning to her own personality she could remember herself as the other character, but while functioning as the other person she could not remember herself as Madame Blavatsky. She later wrote of these experiences: "I was in another far-off country, a totally different individuality from myself, and had no connection at all with my actual life."24  The sickness, prostrated her and appears to have brought a crisis in her inner life. She herself felt that she had barely escaped the fate that she afterwards spoke of as befalling so many mediums. She wrote in a letter to a relative:

"The last vestige of my psycho-physical weakness is gone, to return no more. 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." (Her Guardians in Tibet.)25

Madame Jelihowsky writes too:

"After her extraordinary and protracted illness at Tiflis she seemed to defy and subject the manifestations entirely to her will. In short, 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 had ever refused the name of 'spirits' and souls--to her own control."26

As a sequel to this experience her conception of a great and definite mission in the world formulated itself before her vision. It is seen to provide the motive for her abortive enterprise in Cairo in 1871; it is again seen to be operative in her propagation of Theosophy in 1875. It will be considered more at length in the discussion of her connection with American Spiritualism.

By 1871 her power in certain phases had been greatly enhanced. She was able, merely by looking fixedly at objects, to set them in motion. In an illustrated paper of the time there was a story of her by a gentleman, who met her with some friends in a hotel at Alexandria. After dinner he engaged her in a long discussion. Before them stood a little tea tray, on which the waiter had placed a bottle of liquor, some wine, a wine glass and a tumbler. As the gentleman raised the glass to his lips it broke to pieces in his hands. Madame Blavatsky laughed at the occurrence, remarking that she hated liquor and could hardly tolerate those who drank. He knew the glass was thick and strong, but, to draw her out, declared it must have been an accidental crumbling of a thin glass in his grasp. "What do you bet I do not do it again?" she flashed at him. He then half-filled another tumbler. In his own words:

"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 of 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, and left the room, laughing in his face "most outrageously."27

Another gentleman, a Russian, who encountered her in Egypt, sent the most enthusiastic letters to his friends about her wonders.

"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 Madame Blavatsky a woman who beats all the Boscos and Robert Houdin's of the country by her address. . . . Once I showed her a closed medallion containing a 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 knew, 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. How could she know?"28

At Cairo she wrote her sister Vera that she had seen the astral forms of two of the family's domestics and chided her sister for not having written her about their death during her absence. She described the hospital in which one of them had passed away, and other circumstances connected with their history since she had last been in touch with them. It was only afterwards that she learned that when her letter from Egypt was received by Madame Jelihowsky, the latter was herself not aware of the death of the two servants. Upon inquiry she found every circumstance in relation to their late years and their death precisely as Helena had depicted it.

Upon Madame Blavatsky's arrival in America her open espousal of the cause of Theosophy was prefaced by much work done in and for the Spiritualistic movement. Col. Olcott has brought out the fact that the phenomena taking place at the Eddy farmhouse in Vermont in 1873 changed character quite decidedly the day she entered the household. Up to the time of her appearance on the scene the figures that had shown themselves were either Red Indians or Americans or Europeans related to some one present. But on the first evening of her stay spirits of other nationalities came up. A Georgian servant body from the Caucasus, a Mussulman merchant from Tiflis, a Russian peasant girl, and others, appeared. Later a Kurdish cavalier and a devilish-looking Negro sorcerer from Africa joined the motley group.

From the Vermont homestead Madame Blavatsky went to New York, where Col. Olcott joined her shortly afterwards. Rappings and messages were much in evidence during this sojourn in the metropolis, the disembodied intelligence in the background purporting to be one "John King," a name familiar to all spiritists for many years before. The spirit finally declared itself to be the earth-haunting soul of Sir Henry Morgan, famous buccaneer, and so showed itself to the sight of Col. Olcott during the séances with the Holmes mediums some months later in Philadelphia. From him as ostensible source came many messages both grave and gay.

All the while Madame Blavatsky posed as a Spiritualist and mingled in the Holmes séances in Philadelphia for the purpose of lending some of her own power to the rather feeble demonstrations effected by Mr. and Mrs. Holmes to bolster their reputation in the face of Robert Dale Owen's public denunciation of them as cheats. She says that on one occasion Mrs. Holmes was herself frightened at the real appearance of spirits summoned by herself.

One of the first indications Col. Olcott was to have of the interest of her distant sages in his own career was shown during the time that Madame Blavatsky was in Philadelphia. At her urgent invitation the Colonel determined quite suddenly to run over and spend a few days with her. On the evening of the same day on which he left his address at the Philadelphia Post Office the postman brought him several letters from widely distant places, all bearing the stamp of the sending station, but none that of the receiving station, New York. They were addressed to him at his New York office address, yet had come straight to him at Philadelphia without passing through the New York office. And nobody in New York knew his Philadelphia address. He took them himself from the postman's hand; so they could not have been tampered with by his occult friend. But the marvel did not end there. Upon opening them he found inside each something written in the same handwriting as that in letters he had received in New York from the Masters, the writing having been made either in the margins or on any other space left blank by the writers.

"These were the precursors of a whole series of those phenomenal surprises during the fortnight or so that I spent in Philadelphia. I had many, and no letter of the lot bore the New York stamp, though all were addressed to me at my office in that city."29

The series of vivid phenomena which took place during the Philadelphia visit may be listed briefly as follows:

1.--Col. Olcott purchased a note-book in which to record the rap messages. On taking it out of the store wrapper he found inside the first cover: "John King, Henry de Morgan, his book, 4th of the fourth month in A.D. 1875." And underneath this was a whole pictorial design of Rosicrucian symbols, the word Fate, the name Helen, the phrase "Way of Providence," a monogram, a pair of compasses, and various letters and signs. No one had touched it since its purchase at the stationary shop.

2.--Madame Blavatsky caused a photograph on the wall to disappear suddenly from its frame and give place to a sketch portrait of "John King" while a spectator was looking at it.

3.--Col. Olcott had bought a dozen unhemmed towels. As his companion was no seamstress, he bantered her to let an elemental do the hemstitching on the lot. She told him to put the towels, needle and thread inside a bookcase, which had glass doors curtained with green silk. He did so. After twenty minutes she announced that the job was finished. He found them actually, if crudely, hemmed. It was four P.M., and no other persons were in the room.

4.-- Madame Blavatsky once suddenly disappeared from the Colonel's sight, could not be seen for a period, and then as suddenly reappeared. She could not explain to him how she did it.

5.--The increase overnight in the length of her hair, of about four to five inches, and its later recession to its normal length.

6.--The projection of a drawing of a man's head on the ceiling above the Colonel's head, where he had seen nothing a minute before.

7.--The precipitation by "John King," in answer to the Colonel's challenge to duplicate a letter he had in his pocket, of the said duplicate, correct in every word.

8.--The precipitation of a letter into the traveling bag of a Mr. B. while on the train, the letter not having been packed there originally.

9.--The same Mr. B. begged Madame Blavatsky to create for him a portrait of his deceased grandmother. She went to the window, put a blank piece of paper against the pane, and handed it to him in a moment with the portrait of a little old woman with many wrinkles and a large wart, which Mr. B. declared a perfect likeness of his ancestor.

10.--The actual production by an Italian artist, through "his control of the spirits of the air," during one evening of entirely clear sky, of a small shower of rain, sufficient to wet the sidewalks. Previously Madame Blavatsky had created a butterfly, following a similar production by the Italian visitor.

11.--The materialization by Madame Blavatsky of a heavy gold ring in the heart of a rose which had been "created" shortly before by Mrs. Thayer, a medium whom Col. Olcott was testing with a view to sending her to Russia for experimentation at a university there.

12.--The Colonel's own beard grew in one night from his chin down to his chest.30

After the return from Philadelphia psychic events continued with great frequency at the apartments in New York. In December of 1875, Madame Blavatsky, having invited a challenge to reproduce the portrait of the Chevalier Louis, reputed Adept author of Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten's Art Magic, rubbed her hand over a sheet of paper and the desired photograph appeared on the under side. She had laid the bare sheet on the surface of the table. Col. Olcott had the opportunity nine years later of comparing this reproduction with the original photograph of the Chevalier Louis, and found the likeness perfect, yet the lines would not meet precisely when the one was superimposed on the other. It could not have been a lithographic reproduction.

Early in 1878, Mr. O'Sullivan asked Madame Blavatsky for one of a chaplet of large wooden beads which she was wearing. She placed one in a bowl and produced the bowlful of them.

For the same gentleman in plain sight of several people, she triplicated a beautiful handkerchief which he had admired.

To amuse the child of a caller, an English Spiritualist, one day she produced a large toy sheep mounted on wheels. Col. Olcott claimed it had not been there a moment before.

On Christmas eve of that year when she and the Colonel, went to his sister's apartment, Madame expressed regret that she had brought nothing for the youngsters. But saying, "Wait a minute," she took her bunch of keys from her pocket, clutched three of them together in one hand, and a moment later showed the party a large iron whistle hanging on the ring instead of the three keys. Col. Olcott had to get three new keys from a locksmith.

Another time to placate a little girl Madame promised her "a nice present," and indicated to Col. Olcott that he should take it out of their luggage bag in the hall. He unlocked the already stuffed bag and immediately on top was a harmonica, or glass piano, about fifteen inches by four in size, with its cork mallet beside it. Colonel had himself packed the bag, having to use all his strength to close it, had reopened it on the train, and there was not a moment when his friend could have slipped an object of such size into it.

It was in New York at this epoch that she took Col. Olcott's large signet ring, rubbed it in her hands and presently handed him his original and another like it except that the new one was mounted with a dark green bloodstone, whereas the original was set with a red carnelian. That ring she wore till her death, and it has since been the valued possession of Mrs. Annie Besant.

Once, in Boston, Madame walked through the streets in a pelting rain and reached her lodgings without the trace of dampness or mud on her dress or shoes. Similarly the Colonel found a handsome velvet-covered chair entirely dry, not even damp, after being left out all night in a driving rain.

One time when the two were talking about three members of the Colonel's family, a crash was heard in the next room. Rushing in he found that the photograph of one of the three had been turned face inward, the large water-color picture of another lay smashed on the floor, while the photograph of the third was unmolested.

Madame once made instantly a copy of a scurrilous letter received by the Colonel from a person who had done him an injustice. Again she duplicated a five-page letter from the eminent Spiritualist, W. Stainton Moses. There was not time for the receipt of the letter until its duplication for any one to have copied it. The second sheets were copies, but not strictly duplicate, as the lines would not match when the two were placed together and held before the light.

At "The Lamasery" she produced an entire set of water colors, which Mr. W. Q. Judge needed in making an Egyptian drawing. Next he needed some gold paint, whereupon she took a brass key, scraped it over the bottom of an empty saucer, and found the required paint instantly. The brass key was not consumed in the process, but was needed, she explained, to help aggregate the atomic material for the gold color.

When Olcott stated one evening that he would like to hear from one of the Adepts (in India) upon a certain subject, Madame told him to write his questions, seal them in an envelope, and place it where he could watch it. He did so, putting it behind the clock on the mantel, with one end projecting in plain view. The two went on talking for an hour, when she announced that the answer had come. He drew out his own envelope, the seal unbroken, found inside it his own letter, and inside that the Mahatma's answer in the script familiar to him, written on a sheet of green paper, such as he had not had in the house.

Through her agency the portrait of the Rev. W. Stainton Moses was precipitated on satin. It was a distinct likeness, and the head was rayed around with spiculae of light. It was surrounded with rolling clouds of vapor, his astral vehicle.

Olcott, Judge and a Dr. Marquette one evening asked her to produce the portrait of a particular Hindu Yogi on some stationery of the Lotus Club that the Colonel had brought home that same evening. She scraped some lead from a pencil on a half sheet of the paper, laid the other half-sheet over it, placed them between her hands, and showed the result. The likeness to the original could not be verified, but it was pronounced by Le Clear, the noted portrait painter, to be one "that no living artist within his knowledge could have produced."

Once Col. Olcott desired a picture of his Guru, or Hindu teacher, as yet unseen by him, and Madame essayed to have it painted through the hand of a French artist, M. Herisse. The artist's only instructions were that his subject was a Hindu. Madame concentrated, and he painted. The features, finished in an hour, were afterwards vouched for by Col. Olcott as being the likeness of his Guru, whom he met years later.

The Colonel testified to having seen Madame Blavatsky's astral form in a New York street while she was in Philadelphia; also that of a friend of his then in the South; again that of one of the Adepts, then in Asia, in an American railway train and on a steamboat. He stated that he took from the hand of another Mahatma at Jummu a telegram from H.P.B.31 who was in Madras, the messenger vanishing a moment later; and that he, H.P.B. and Damodar, a young Hindu devotee of hers, were greeted by one of these Teachers one evening in India. But the occurrence of this kind which he regarded as the most striking, affecting as it did his whole future career, happened at the close of one of his busy days, when his evening's toil with the composition of Isis was finished. He had retired to his own room and was reading, the room door locked. Suddenly he perceived a white radiance at his side and turning saw towering above him the great stature of an Oriental, clad in white garments and wearing a head-cloth of amber-striped fabric, hand-embroidered in yellow floss silk.

"Long raven hair hung from under his turban to the shoulders; his black beard, parted vertically on the chin in the Rajput fashion, was twisted up at the ends and carried over the ears; his eyes were alive with soul-fire; eyes which were at once benignant and piercing in glance; the eyes of a mentor and judge, but softened by the love of a father who gazes on a son needing counsel and guidance. He was so grand a man, so imbued with the majesty of moral strength, so luminously spiritual, so evidently above average humanity, that I felt abashed in his presence, and bowed my head and bent my knee as one does before a god or a god-like personage. A hand was laid lightly on my head, a sweet though strong voice bade me be seated, and when I raised my eyes the Presence was seated in the other chair beyond the table. He told me that he had come at the crisis when I needed him; that my actions had brought me to this point; that it lay with me alone whether he and I should meet often in this life as coworkers for the good of mankind; that a great work was to be done for humanity and I had the right to share in it if I wished; that a mysterious tie, not now to be explained to me, had drawn my colleague and myself together; a tie which could not be broken, however strained it might be at times."32

Then he arose and reading the Colonel's sudden but unexpressed wish that he might leave behind him some token of his visit, he untwisted the fehta from his head, laid it on the table, saluted benignantly and was gone.

Many a time, according to the Colonel's version, they were regaled with most exquisite music, or single bell sounds, coming from anywhere in the room and softly dying away.

Olcott tells of the deposit of one thousand dollars to his bank account by a person described by the bank clerk as a Hindu, while he (Olcott) was absent from the city for two months on business which he had undertaken at the behest of the Master through H.P.B. He had told her that his errand would cost him about five hundred dollars per month through his neglect of his business for the time.

In 1878 the Countess Paschkoff brought to light an adventure which she had had years before while traveling with Madame Blavatsky in the Libanus. The two women encountered each other in the desert and camped together one night near the river Orontes. Nearby stood a great monument on the border of the village. The Countess asked Madame to tell her the history of the monument. At night the thaumaturgist built a fire, drew a circle about it and repeated several "spells." Soon balls of white flame appeared on the monument, then from a cloud of vapor emerged the spirit of the person to whom it had been dedicated. "Who are you?" asked the woman. "I am Hiero, one of the priests of the temple," said the voice of the spirit.

He then showed them the temple in the midst of a vast city. Then the image vanished and the priest with it.

To round out the story of her phenomena it is necessary to relate with the utmost brevity the incidents of the kind that transpired from the time of the departure from America to India at the end of 1878 until the latter days of her life. This narrative will include occurrences taking place in India, France, Germany, and England.

It was in India that the so-called Mahatma Letters were precipitated, upon which the basic structure of Theosophy is seen to rest. Mr. A. P. Sinnett, British journalist, editor of "The Pioneer," living in India, is the main authority for the events of the Indian period in Madame Blavatsky's life.

During the first visit of six weeks to Mr. Sinnett's home at Allahabad there were comparatively few incidents, apart from raps. A convincing exploit of her power was granted, however, for one evening while the party was sitting in the large hall of the house of the Maharajah of Vizianagaram at Benares, three or four large cut roses fell from the ceiling. The ceiling was bare and the room well lighted.

About the beginning of September 1880 she visited the Sinnetts at their home in Simla. Here some more striking incidents took place. During an evening walk with Mrs. Sinnett to a neighboring hilltop, Madame, in response to a suddenly-expressed wish of her companion, obtained for her a little note from one of the "Brothers." Madame had torn off a blank corner of a sheet of a letter received that day and held it in her hand for the Master's use. It disappeared. Then Mrs. Sinnett was asked where she would like the paper to reappear. She whimsically pointed up into a tree a little to one side. Clambering up into the branches she found the same little corner of pink paper sticking on a sharp twig, now containing a brief message and signed by some Tibetan characters.

A little later the most spectacular of the marvels said to have been performed by the "Messenger of the Great White Brotherhood" took place. A picnic party to the woods some miles distant was planned one morning and six persons prepared to set off. Lunches were packed for six, but a seventh person unexpectedly joined the group at the moment of departure. As the luncheon was unpacked for the noontide meal, there was a shortage of a coffee cup and saucer. Some one laughingly suggested that Madame should materialize an extra set. Madame Blavatsky held a moment's mental communication with one of her distant Brothers and then indicated a particular spot, covered with grass, weeds, and shrubbery. A gentleman of the party, with a knife, undertook to dig at the spot. A little persistence brought him shortly to the rim of a white object, which proved to be a cup, and close to it was a saucer, both of the design matching the other six brought along from the Sinnett cupboard. The plant roots around the China pieces were manifestly undisturbed by recent digging such as would have been necessary if they had been "planted" in anticipation of their being needed. Moreover, when the party reached home and Mrs. Sinnett counted their supply of cups and saucers of that design, the new ones were found to be additional to their previous stock. And none of that design could have been purchased in Simla.33

Before this same party had disbanded it was permitted to witness another feat of equal strangeness. The gentleman who had dug up the buried pottery was so impressed that he decided then and there to join the Theosophical Society. As Col. Olcott, President of the Society, was in the party, all that was needed was the usual parchment diploma. Madame Blavatsky agreed to ask the Master to produce such a document for them. In a moment all were told to search in the underbrush. It was soon found and used in the induction ceremony.

This eventful picnic brought forth still another wonder.

Every one of the water bottles brought along had been emptied when the need for more coffee arose. The water in a neighborhood stream was unfit. A servant, sent across the fields to obtain some at a brewery, stupidly returned without any. In the dilemma Madame Blavatsky took one of the empty bottles, placed it in one of the baskets, and in a moment took it out filled with good water.

Some days later the famous "brooch" incident occurred. The Sinnett party had gone up the hill to spend an evening with Mr. and Mrs. A. O. Hume, who were likewise much interested in the Blavatskian theories. Eleven persons were seated around the table and some one hinted at the possibility of a psychic exploit. Madame appeared disinclined, but suddenly gave a sign that the Master was himself present. Then she asked Mrs. Hume if there was anything in particular that she wished to have. Mrs. Hume thought of an old brooch which her mother had given her long ago and which had been lost. Neither she nor Mr. Hume had thought of it for years. She described it, saying it contained a lock of hair. The party was told to search for it in the garden at a certain spot; and there it was found. Mrs. Hume testified that it was the lost brooch, or one indistinguishable from it.

According to the statements of Alice Gordon, a visitor at the Sinnett home, Madame Blavatsky rolled a cigarette, and projected it ethereally to the house of a Mrs. O'Meara in another part of Simla, in advance of Miss Gordon's going thither. To identify it she tore off a small corner of the wrapper jaggedly, and gave it to Miss Gordon. The latter found it at the other home and the corner piece matched.

Captain P. J. Maitland recites a "cigarette" incident which occurred in Mr. Sinnett's drawing room. Madame took two cigarette papers, with a pencil drew several parallel lines clear across the face of both, then tore off across these lines a piece of the end of each paper and handed the short end pieces to Captain Maitland; then she rolled cigarettes out of the two larger portions, moistened them on her tongue, and caused them to disappear from her hands. The Captain was told he would find one on the piano and the other on a bracket. He found them there, still moist along the "seam," and unrolling them found that the ragged edges of the torn sections and the pencil lines exactly matched.

Some days later came the "pillow incident." Mr. Sinnett had the impression that he had been in communication with the Master one night. During the course of an outing to a nearby hill the following day, Madame Blavatsky turned to him (he had not mentioned his experience to her) and asked him where he would like some evidence of the Master's visit to him to appear. Thinking to choose a most unlikely place, he thought of the inside of a cushion against which one of the ladies was leaning. Then he changed to another. Cutting the latter open, they found among the feathers, inside two cloth casings, a little note in the now familiar Mahatma script, in the writing on which were the phrases--"the difficulty you spoke of last night" and "corresponding through--pillows!" While he was reading this his wife discovered a brooch in the feathers. It was one which she had left at home.

Perhaps it was these cigarette feats which assured Madame Blavatsky that she now had sufficient power to dispatch a long letter to her Mahatma mentors. Mr. Sinnett first suggested the idea to her, and her success in that first attempt was the beginning of one of the most eventful and unique correspondences in the world's history. It began his exchange of letters with the Master Koot Hoomi Lal Singh (abbreviated usually to K.H.), on which Theosophy so largely rests.

On several telegrams received by Mr. Sinnett were snatches of writing in K.H.'s hand speaking of events that transpired after the telegram had been sent. Replies were received a number of times in less time than it would have taken Madame Blavatsky to write them (instantaneously in a few cases), yet they dealt in specific detail with the material in his own missives. More than once his unexpressed doubts and queries were treated. In many cases his own letter in a sealed envelope would remain in sight and within a very short interval (thirty seconds in one instance) be found to contain the distant Master's reply, folded inside his own sheets, with an appropriate answer,--the seal not even having been broken. Sometimes he would place his letter in plain view on the table, and shortly it would be gone. For a time when the Master K.H. was called away to other business, Mr. Sinnett continued to receive communications from the brother Adept, Master Morya, while Madame Blavatsky was hundreds of miles away. They continued in the distant absence of both H.P.B. and Col. Olcott. And not only were such letters received by Mr. Sinnett, and Mr. Hume, but by other persons as well. The list includes Damodar K. Mavalankar; Ramaswamy, an educated English-speaking native of Southern India in Government service; Dharbagiri Nath; Mohini Chatterji; and Bhavani Rao. Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden received a missive of the kind later on a railway train in Germany. Mr. Sinnett would frequently find the letters on the inside of his locked desk drawers or would see them drop upon his desk. Their production was attended with all manner of remarkable circumstances.

Then there was the notable episode of the transmission by the Master of a mental message to a Mr. Eglinton, a Spiritualist, on board a vessel, the Vega, far out at sea, and the instantaneous transmission of the letter's response, written on board ship, to some of his friends in India, the whole thing done in accordance with an arrangement made by letter to Mr. Sinnett by the Adept two days before. This incident has a certain importance from the fact that the Master had said in the preliminary letter that he would visit Mr. Eglinton on the ship on a certain night, impress him with the untenability of the general Spiritualistic hypothesis regarding communications, and if possible lead him to a change of mind on the point. Mr. Eglinton's reply recorded the visit of the Mahatma on the ship and admitted the desirability of a change to the Theosophic theory of the existence of the Brothers.

An interesting chapter of events in the sojourn of the two Theosophic leaders in India is that of the thousands of healings made by Col. Olcott, who states that he was given the power by the Overlords of his activities for a limited time with a special object in view. He is said to have cured some eight thousand Hindus of various ailments by a sort of "laying on of hands." Like Christ he felt "virtue" go out of his body until exhaustion ensued; and he stated that he was instructed to recharge his nervous depletion by sitting with his back against the base of a pine tree.

In 1885 Madame Blavatsky herself experienced the healing touch of her Masters when she was ordered to meet them in the flesh north of Darjeeling. Going north on this errand, she was in the utmost despondency and near the point of death. After two days spent with the Adepts she emerged with physical health and morale restored, her dynamic self once more.

The last sheaf of "miracles" takes us from India to France, Germany, Belgium, and England. In Paris, in 1884, her rooms were the resort of many people who came if haply they might get sight of a marvel, her thaumaturgic fame being now world-wide. A Prof. Thurmann reported that in his presence she filled the air of the room with musical sounds, from a variety of instruments. She demonstrated that darkness was not necessary for such manifestations.

Madame Jelihowsky is authority for the account of the appearance and disappearance of her sister's picture in a medallion containing only the small photograph of K.H.

A most baffling display of Madame's gifts took place in the reception room of the Paris Theosophical Society on the morning of June 11th, 1884. Madame Jelihowsky, Col. Olcott, W. Q. Judge, V. Solovyoff and two others were present and attested the bona fide nature of the incident in a public letter. In sight of all a servant took a letter from the postman and brought it directly to Madame Jelihowsky. It was addressed to a lady, a relative of Madame Blavatsky, who was then visiting her, and came from another relative in Russia. Madame Blavatsky, seeing that it was a family letter, remarked that she would like to know its contents. Her sister ventured the suggestion that she read it before it was opened. Helena held the letter against her forehead and proceeded to read aloud and then write down what she said were the contents. Then, to demonstrate her power further, she declared that she would underscore her own name, wherever it occurred within the letter, in red crayon, and would precipitate in red a double interlaced triangle, or "Solomon's Seal," beneath the signature. When the addressee opened the letter, not only was H.P.B.'s version of its contents correct to the word, but the underscoring of her name and the monogram in red were found, and oddly enough, the wavering in several of the straight lines in the triangle, as drawn first by Madame Blavatsky outside the letter, were precisely matched by the red triangle inside. Postmarks indicated it had actually come from Russia.34

While at Elberfeld, Germany, with her hospitable benefactress, Madame Gebhard, some of the usual manifestations were in evidence. Mr. Rudolph Gebhard, a son, recounts several of them. One was the receipt of a letter from one of the Masters, giving intelligence about an absent member of the household, found to be correct.

The Countess Constance Wachtmeister, who became Madame Blavatsky's guardian angel, domestically speaking, during the years of the composition of The Secret Doctrine in Germany and Belgium, has printed her account of a number of extraordinary occurrences of the period. She speaks of a succession of raps in H.P.B.'s sleeping room when there was special need of her Guardians' care. She also tells of the thrice-relighted lamp at the sleeper's bedside, she herself having twice extinguished it. She tells of her receiving a letter from the Master, inside the store-wrapper of a bar of soap which she had just purchased at a drug store.

It was under the Countess Wachtmeister's notice that there occurred the last of Madame Blavatsky's "miraculous" restorations to health. She had suffered for years from a dropsical or renal affection, which in those latter days had progressed to such an alarming stage that her highly competent physicians at one crisis were convinced that she could not survive a certain night. The great work she was writing was far from completed; the Countess was heart-broken to think that, after all, that heroic career was to be cut off just before the consummation of its labors for humanity; and she spent the night in grief and despair. Arising in the morning she found Madame at her desk, busy as before at her task. She had been revivified and restored during the night, and would not say how.

The Countess records the occasion of an intercession of the Masters in her own affairs, on behalf of their messenger. At her home in Sweden, while she was packing her trunks in preparation for a journey to some relatives in Italy, she clairaudiently heard a voice, which told her to place in her trunk a certain note-book of her containing notes on the Bohemian Tarot and the Kabala. It was not a printed volume but a collection of quotations from the above works in her own hand. Surprised, and not knowing the possible significance of the order, she nevertheless complied. Before reaching Italy she suddenly changed her plans, and postponed the trip to Italy and visited Madame Blavatsky in Belgium instead. Upon arriving and shortly after greeting her beloved friend, she was startled to hear Madame say to her that her Master had informed her that her guest was bringing her a book dealing with the Tarot and the Kabala, of which she was to make use in the writing of The Secret Doctrine.

This must end, but does not by any means complete, the chronicle of "the Blavatsky phenomena." The list, long as it has become, is but a fragment of the whole. Without the narration of these phenomena an adequate impression of the personality and the legend back of them could not be given. Moreover they belong in any study of Theosophy, and their significance in relation to the principles of the cult is perhaps far other than casual or incidental. If her own display of such powers was made as a demonstration of what man is destined to become capable of achieving in his interior evolution, these things are to be regarded as an integral part of her message. They became, apparently in spite of herself, a part of her program and furnished a considerable impetus toward its advancement. Theosophy itself re-publishes the theory of man's inherent theurgic capacity. It can hardly be taken as an anomaly or as an irrelevant circumstance, then, that its founder should have been regarded as exemplifying the possession of that capacity in her own person.

Footnotes to Chaper 3

Incidents in the Life of Madame Blavatsky, by A. P. Sinnett (Theosophical Publishing Society, London, 1913), p. 35. See also footnote at bottom of page 155, in Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett (New York, Frederick A. Stokes Co.,

Incidents in the Life of Madame Blavatsky, by A. P. Sinnett, pp. 39-40.

3 Vol. II, p. 599.


4 Her recital of marvels seen in Tibet corresponds in the main with similar narratives related by the Abbé Huc in the first edition of his Recollections of Travel in TartaryTibet and China. Mr. Sinnett makes the statement, without giving his evidence, that the "miracles" related by the Abbé in his first edition were expurgated by Catholic authority in the later editions of the work.

5 Madame Blavatsky later verified the long distance phenomenon by receiving in writing, in response to an inquiry by mail, a letter from the Rumanian friend stating that at the identical time of the Shaman's concentration she had swooned, but dreamed she saw Madame Blavatsky in a tent in a wild country among menacing tribes, and that she had communicated with her. Madame Blavatsky states that the friend's astral form was visible in the tent.


6 In 1873 while at the Eddy farmhouse with her new friend Col. Olcott, she revealed to him this chapter in her life, proving it by showing him where her left arm had been broken in two places by a saber stroke, and having him feel a musket ball in her right shoulder and another in her leg, revealing also a scar just below the heart where she had been stabbed by a stiletto.

7 It must have been about this time that Madame did some traveling in an altogether different capacity than occult research. She is known by her family to have made tours in Italy and Russia under a pseudonym, giving piano concerts. She had been a pupil of Moscheles, and when with her father in London as a young girl she had played at a charity concert with Madame Clara Schumann and Madame Arabella Goddard in a piece for three pianos.

Incidents in the Life of Madame Blavatsky, by A. P. Sinnett, p. 125.


9 An incident highly characteristic of her nature marked her coming to this country, and her followers would hardly pardon our omitting it. Having purchased her steamer ticket, she was about to board the vessel when her attention was attracted to a peasant woman weeping bitterly on the wharf. Her quick sympathies touched, Madame Blavatsky approached her and inquired the trouble. She soon gathered that a "sharp" had sold the woman a worthless ticket, and that she was stranded without funds. Madame Blavatsky's finances had barely sufficed to procure her own passage, she having sent a dispatch to Russia instructing her father to forward her additional money in New York. In the emergency she did not hesitate. Going to the office of the Company, she arranged to exchange her cabin ticket for two steerage ones, and packed the grateful emigrant on board along with her.--See Old Diary Leaves, by Col. H. S. Olcott (New York and London, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1895), pp. 28-29.

10 Old Diary Leaves, by Col. H. S. Olcott, Vol. I, p. 440.

11 Col. Olcott (Old Diary Leaves, Vol. I, p. 440) states that during this period of her own need she held in custody the sum of about 23,000 francs, which she later told him her "guardians" had charged her to deliver a person in the United States whose definite location would be given her after her arrival here. The order came after a time, and she went to Buffalo, was given a name and street number, squalid quarters she was sought out by a veteran journalist, Miss Anna Ballard, in search of copy for a Russian story. She received, in late October, a legacy from the estate of her father, who had died early in that month. A draft of one thousand rubles was first sent her, and later the entire sum bequeathed to her. Then in affluence she moved to better quarters, first to Union Square, then to East 16th Street, then to Irving Place. But her money did not abide in her keeping long. In regard to the sources of her income after her patrimony had been flung generously to the winds, we are told, upon Col. Olcott's pledged honor, that both his and her wants, after the organization of the Theosophical Society, were frequently provided for by the occult ministrations of the Masters. He claims that during the many years of their joint campaigns for Theosophy, especially in India, the treasure-chest at headquarters, after having been depleted, would be found supplied with funds from unknown sources. Shopping one day in New York with Colonel, she made purchases to the amount of about fifty dollars. He paid the bills. On returning home she thrust some banknotes into his hand, saying: "There are your fifty dollars." He is certain she had no money of her own, and no visitor had come in from whom she could have borrowed. Once during this period she created the duplicate of a thousand dollar note while it was held in the hand of the Hon. John L. O'Sullivan, formerly Ambassador to Portugal; but it faded away during the two following days. Its serial number was identical with that of its prototype. The knowledge that financial help would come at need, however, did not dispose Madame Blavatsky to relax her effort toward her own sustenance.During this time, and for nearly all the remainder of her life, the Russian noblewoman spent large stretches where she delivered the money without question to a man who was on the point of committing suicide. It was understood that she had been made the agent of rectifying a great wrong done him.

12 Mr. O'Sullivan rallied her about her possession of so easy a road to wealth. "No, indeed," she answered, "'tis but a psychological trick. We who have the power of doing this, dare not use it for our own or any other's interests, any more than you would dare commit the forgery by methods of the counterfeiters. It would be stealing from the government in either case."--Old Diary Leaves, Vol. I, p. 435.

13 Old Diary Leaves, Vol. I., p. 106.


14 Mr. W. Q. Judge as her counsel and the decree was granted on May 25, 1878. Col. Olcott had retained the original papers in the case.

15 Old Diary Letters, Vol. I, p. 417.

16 Ibid., p. 4.


17 Published by The Constables, London, 1910.

18 The Arena, April, 1895.

19 Quoted in Old Diary Leaves, Vol. I, p. 4 (footnote), from a letter written by her entitled "The Knout" to the R. P. Journal of March 16, 1878.


20 Mr. Sinnett (Incidents in the Life of Madame Blavatsky, Chapter VI) emphasizes the fact that she was about this time in a transition state from passive mediumship to active control over her phenomena. He doubtless wishes to make this matter clear in view of its important bearing upon the divergence between Spiritualism and Theosophy which was accentuated when the latter put forth claims somewhat at variance with the usual theses presented by the former.

21 Incidents in the Life of Madame Blavatsky, p. 61.


22 Ibid., p. 72.

23 In Russian, "little hare."


24 Incidents in the Life of Madame Blavatsky, p. 116.

25 Ibid., p. 120

26 Ibid., p. 120

27 Ibid., p. 128.

28 Ibid., p. 127

29 Old Diary Leaves, Vol. I, p. 36. In this work Col. Olcott undertakes to classify the various types of phenomena produced by Madame Blavatsky.

30 Ibid., Vol. I, Chapter III, pp. 40 ff.

31 Theosophists are so much in the habit of referring to their leader by her three initials that we may be pardoned for falling into the same convenient usage at times.

22 Old Diary Leaves, Vol. I, p. 380.

33 Mr. Sinnett devotes some pages of his little volume, The Occult World, to a critical examination of every conceivable possibility of this incident's being other than it ostensibly was, and he is unable to find a loophole for the admission of any theory of deception. All the witnesses to the event made affidavit to the effect of its evident genuineness. The reader is referred to his analysis of the case, to be found on pages 64-71 in the work just mentioned. For close scrutiny of the other events of the same period the same volume should be consulted.

34 Vlesevold Solovyoff, who afterwards sought to discredit Madame Blavatsky's genuine status, himself witnessed this scene. In fact he wrote out his own statement of the occurrence and sent it for publication to the St. Petersburg Rebus, which printed it on July 1, 1884, over his signature. He closes that account with the following paragraph: "The circumstances under which the phenomenon occurred in its smallest details, carefully checked by myself, do not leave in me the smallest doubt as to its genuineness and reality. Deception or fraud in this particular case are really out of the question."










CHAPTER IV
FROM SPIRITUALISM TO THEOSOPHY
Nothing seems more certain than that Madame Blavatsky had no definite idea of what the finished product was to be when she gave the initial impulse to the movement. She knew the general direction in which it would have to move and also many objectives which it would have to seek. In her mind there had been assembled a body of material of a unique sort. She had spent many years of her novitiate in moving from continent to continent 1 in search of data having to do with a widespread tradition as to the existence of a hidden knowledge and secret cultivation of man's higher psychic and spiritual capabilities. Supposedly the wielder of unusual abilities in this line, she was driven by the very character of her endowment to seek for the deeper science which pertained to the evolution of such gifts, and at the same time a philosophy of life in general which would explain their hidden significance. To establish, first, the reality of such phenomena, and then to construct a system that would furnish the possibility of understanding this mystifying segment of experience, was unquestionably the main drive of her mental interests in early middle life. Already well equipped to be the exponent of the higher psychological and theurgic science, she aimed to become its philosophic expounder.

But the philosophy Madame Blavatsky was to give forth could not be oriented with the science of the universe as then generally conceived. To make her message intelligible she was forced to reconstruct the whole picture of the cosmos. She had to frame a universe in which her doctrine would be seen to have relevance and into whose total order it would fall with perfect articulation. She felt sure that she had in her possession an array of vital facts, but she could not at once discern the total implication of those facts for the cosmos which explained them, and which in turn they tended to explain. We may feel certain that her ideas grow more systematic from stage to stage, whether indeed they were the product of her own unaided intellect, or whether she but transcribed the knowledge and wisdom of more learned living men, the Mahatmas, as the Theosophic legend has it.

Guided by the character of the situation in which she found herself, and also, it seems, by the advice of her Master, she chose to ride into her new venture upon the crest of the Spiritualist waves. America was chosen to be the hatching center of Theosophy because it was at the time the heart and center of the Spiritualist movement. It was felt that Theosophy would elicit a quick response from persons already imbued with spiritistic ideas. It cannot be disputed that Madame Blavatsky and Col. Olcott worked with the Spiritualists for a brief period and launched the Society from within the ranks of the cult. As a matter of fact it was the work of this pair of Theosophists that gave Spiritualism a fresh impetus in this country after a period of waning interest about 1874. Col. Olcott's letters in the Daily Graphic about the Eddy phenomena, and his book, People From the Other World, did much to revive popular discussion, and his colleague's show of new manifestations was giving encouragement to Spiritualists. But the Russian noblewoman suddenly disappointed the expectations thus engendered by assigning a different interpretation and much lower value to the phenomena. Before this she and Col. Olcott not only lent moral support to a leading Spiritualist journal, The Spiritual Scientist, of Boston, edited by Mr. E. Gerry Brown, but contributed its leading editorials and even advanced it funds.

The motive behind their participation in a movement which they so soon abandoned has been misconstrued.

Spiritualists, and the public generally, assumed that of course their activity indicated that they subscribed to the usual tenets of the sect; that they accepted the phenomena for what they purported to be, i.e., actual communications in all cases from the spirits of former human beings. However true this estimate may have been as appertaining to Col. Olcott--and even to him it had a fast diminishing applicability after his meeting with H.P.B.--it was certainly not true of her. Madame Blavatsky shortly became the mark of Spiritualistic attack for the falsification of her original attitude toward the movement and her presumed betrayal of the cause.

Her ill-timed attempt to launch her Société Spirite at Cairo in 1871 foreshadowed her true spirit and motive in this activity. It is evident to the student of her life that she felt a contempt for the banal type of séance phenomena. She so expressed herself in writing from Cairo at the time. She felt that while these things were real and largely genuine, they were insignificant in the view that took in a larger field of psychic power. But the higher phenomena of that more important science were known to few, whereas she was constantly encountering interest in the other type. If she was to introduce a nobler psychism to the world, she seemed driven to resort to the method of picking up people who were absorbed in the lower modes of the spiritual science and leading them on into the higher. She would gather a nucleus of the best Spiritualists and go forward with them to the higher Spiritualism. To win their confidence in herself, it was necessary for her to start at their level, to make a gesture of friendliness toward their work and a show of interest in it.

Her own words may bring light to the situation:

"As it is I have only done my duty; first, toward Spiritualism, that I have defended as well as I could from the attacks of imposture under the too transparent mask of science; then towards two helpless slandered mediums [the Holmeses]. . . . But I am obliged to confess that I really do not believe in having done any good--to Spiritualism itself. . . . It is with a profound sadness in my heart that I acknowledge this fact, for I begin to think there is no help for it. For over fifteen years have I fought my battle for the blessed truth; have traveled and preached it--though I never was born for a lecturer--from the snow-covered tops of the Caucasian Mountains, as well as from the sandy valleys of the Nile. I have proved the truth of it practically and by persuasion. For the sake of Spiritualism2 I have left my home, an easy life amongst a civilized society, and have become a wanderer upon the face of the earth. I had already seen my hopes realized, beyond my most sanguine expectations, when my unlucky star brought me to America. Knowing this country to be the cradle of modern Spiritualism, I came over here from France with feelings not unlike those of a Mohammedan approaching the birthplace of his Prophet."3

After her death Col. Olcott found among her papers a memorandum in her hand entitled "Important Note." In it she wrote:

"Yes, I am sorry to say that I had to identify myself, during that shameful exposure of the Holmes mediums, with the Spiritualists. I had to save the situation, for I was sent from Paris to America on purpose to prove the phenomena and their reality, and show the fallacy of the spiritualistic theory of spirits. But how could I do it best? I did not want people at large to know that I could produce the same thing at will. I had received orders to the contrary, and yet I had to keep alive the reality, the genuineness and the possibility of such phenomena in the hearts of those who from Materialists had turned Spiritualists, but now, owing to the exposure of several mediums, fell back again and returned to their scepticism. . . . Did I do wrong? The world is not prepared yet to understand the philosophy of Occult Science; let them first assure themselves that there are beings in an invisible world, whether 'spirits' of the dead or elementals; and that there are hidden powers in man which are capable of making a god of him on earth."

"When I am dead and gone people will, perhaps, appreciate my disinterested motives. I have pledged my word to help people on to Truth while living and I will keep my word. Let them abuse and revile me; let some call me a medium and a Spiritualist, others an impostor. The day will come when posterity will learn to know me better."4

As long as it was a question of the actuality of the phenomena, she was alert in defence of Spiritualism. In the Daily Graphic of November. 13, 1874, she printed one of her very first newspaper contributions in America, replying to an attack of a Dr. George M. Beard, an electropathic physician of New York, on the validity of the Eddy phenomena. She went so far in this article as to wager five hundred dollars that he could not make good his boast that he could imitate the form-apparitions "with three dollars' worth of drapery." She refers to herself as a Spiritualist. In her first letter to Co. Olcott after leaving Vermont she wrote as follows:

"I speak to you as a true friend to yourself and as a Spiritualist anxious to save Spiritualism from a danger."5

A little later she even mentioned to her friend that the outburst of mediumistic phenomena had been caused by the Brotherhood of Adepts as an evolutionary agency. She could, of course, not believe the whole trend maleficent if it was in the slightest degree engineered by her trusted Confederates. She added later, however, that the Master soon realized the impracticability of using the Spiritualistic movement as a channel for the dissemination of the deeper occult science and instructed her to cease her advocacy of it.

Along with her reply and challenge to Beard in the Graphic there was printed an outline of her biography from notes furnished by herself. In it she says:

"In 1858 I returned to Paris and made the acquaintance of Daniel Home, the Spiritualist. . . . Home converted me to Spiritualism. . . . After this I went to Russia. I converted my father to Spiritualism."

Elsewhere she speaks of Spiritualism as "our belief" and "our cause." In an article in the Spiritual Scientist of March eighth she uses the phrases "the divine truth of our faith (Spiritualism) and the teachings of our invisible guardians (the spirits of the circles)."

Madame Blavatsky's apparently double-faced attitude toward Spiritualism is reflected in the posture of most Theosophists toward the same subject today. When Spiritualism, as a demonstration of the possibility and actuality of spiritistic phenomena, is attacked by materialists or unbelievers, they at once bristle in its defense; when it is a question of the reliability and value of the messages, or the dignity and wholesomeness of the séance procedure, they respond negatively.

It is the opinion of some Theosophic leaders, like Sinnett and Olcott, that Madame Blavatsky made a mistake in affiliating herself actively with Spiritualism, inasmuch as the early group of Spiritualistic members of her Theosophic Society, as soon as they were apprised of her true attitude, fell away, and the incipient movement was beset with much ill-feeling.

The controversy between the two schools is important, since Madame Blavatsky's dissent from Spiritualistic theory gave rise to her first attempts to formulate Theosophy. To justify her defection from the movement she was led to enunciate at least some of the major postulates and principles of her higher science. Theosophy was born in this labor. It is necessary, therefore, to go into the issues involved in the perennial controversy.

To Spiritualists the phenomena which purported to be communications from the still-living spirits of former human beings with those on the earth plane, were assumed to be genuinely what they seemed. As such they were believed to be far the most significant data in man's religious life, as furnishing a practically irrefutable demonstration of the truth of the soul's immortality. They were regarded as the central fact in any attempt to formulate an adequate religious philosophy. Spiritualists therefore elevated this assumption to the place of supreme importance and made everything else secondary.

Not so Madame Blavatsky. To her the Spiritistic phenomena were but a meagre part of a larger whole. Furthermore--and this was her chief point of divergence,--she vigorously protested their being what Spiritualists asserted them to be. They were not at all genuine messages from genuine spirits of earth people--or were not so in the vast majority of cases. And besides, they were not any more "divine" or "spiritual" than ordinary human utterances, and were even in large part impish and elfin, when not downright demoniacal. They were mostly, she said, the mere "shells" or wraiths of the dead, animated not by their former souls but by sprightly roving nature-spirits or elementals, if nothing worse,--such, for instance, as the lowest and most besotted type of human spirit that was held close to earth by fiendish sensuality or hate. There were plenty of these, she affirmed, in the lower astral plane watching for opportunities to vampirize negative human beings. The souls of average well-meaning or of saintly people are not within human reach in the séance. They have gone on into realms of higher purity, more etherealized being, and can not easily descend into the heavy atmosphere of the near-earth plane to give messages about that investment or that journey westward or that health condition that needs attention. At best it is only on rare and exceptional occasions that the real intelligence of a disembodied mortal comes "through." There are many types of living entities in various realms of nature, other than human souls. Certain of these rove the astral plane and take pleasure in playing upon gullible people who sit gravely in the dark. Most of the occurrences at circles are so much astral plane rubbish; and, besides, séance-mongering is dangerous to all concerned and eventually ruinous to the medium. If the mediums, she bantered, were really in the hands of benevolent "guides" and "controls," why do not the latter shield their protégés from the wrecked health and insanity so frequent among them? She affirmed that she had never seen a medium who had not developed scrofula or a phthisical affection.6

What Madame Blavatsky aimed to do was to teach that the phenomena of true Spiritualism bore not the faintest resemblance to those of table-tipping. True Spiritualism should envisage the phenomena of the divine spirit of man in their higher manifestations, the cultivation of which by the ancients and the East has given man his most sacred science and most vital knowledge. She wrote in a letter to her sister about 1875 that one of the purposes of her new Society was "to show certain fallacies of the Spiritualist. If we are anything we are Spiritualists, only not in the modern American fashion, but in that of the ancient Alexandria with its Theodidaktoi, Hypatias and Porphyries."7 In one of the letters of Mahatma K.H. to A. P. Sinnett the Master writes:

"It was H.P.B. who, acting under the orders of Atrya (one whom you do not know) was the first to explain in the 'Spiritualist' the difference between psyche and nous, nefesh and ruach--Soul and Spirit. She had to bring the whole arsenal of proofs with her quotations from Paul to Plato, from Plutarch and James before the Spiritualists admitted that the Theosophists were right."8

In 1879 she wrote in the magazine which she had just founded in India:

"We can never know how much of the mediumistic phenomena we must attribute to the disembodied until it is settled how much can be done by the embodied human soul, and to blind but active powers at work within those regions which are yet unexplored by science."9

In other words Spiritualism should be a culture of the spirits of the living, not a commerce with the souls of the dead. To a statement to the same effect to Col. Olcott in 1875. See Old Diary Leaves, Vol. I, p. 83. live the life of the immortal spirit while here in the body is true Spiritualism. We can readily see that with such a purpose in mind she would not be long in discerning that the Spiritualistic enterprise could not be used to promulgate the type of spiritual philosophy that she had learned in the East.

When this conclusion had fully ripened in her mind, she began the undisguised formulation of her own independent teaching. Her new philosophy was in effect tantamount to an attack on Spiritualism, and that from a quarter from which Spiritualism was not prepared to repulse an assault. It came not from the old arch-enemy, materialistic scepticism, but from a source which admitted the authenticity of the phenomena.

Her first aim was to set forth the misconceptions under which the Spiritualists labored. She says:

"We believe that few of those physical phenomena which are genuine are caused by disembodied human spirits."10

Again she "ventures the prediction that unless Spiritualists set about the study of ancient philosophy so as to learn to discriminate between spirits and to guard themselves against the baser sort, twenty-five years will not elapse before they will have to fly to the Romish communion to escape these 'guides' and 'controls' that they have fondled so long. The signs of this catastrophe already exhibit themselves."11

Again she declares that "it is not mediums, real, true and genuine mediums, that we would ever blame, but their patrons, the Spiritualists."12

In Isis Unveiled she rebukes Spiritualists for claiming that the Bible is full of phenomena just like those of modern mediums. She asserts that there were Spiritualistic phenomena in the Bible, but not mediumistic,--a distinction of great import to her. She declares that the ancients could tell the difference between mediums who harbored good spirits and those haunted by evil ones, and branded the latter type unclean, while reverencing the former. She positively asserts that "pure spirits will not and cannot show themselves objectively; those that do are not pure spirits, but elementary and impure. Woe to the medium that falls a prey to such!"13

Col. Olcott quotes her as writing:

"Spiritualism in the hands of an Adept becomes Magic, for he is learned in the art of blending together the laws of the universe without breaking any of them. . . . In the hands of an inexperienced medium Spiritualism becomes unconscious sorcery, for . . . he opens, unknown to himself, a door of communication between the two worlds through which emerges the blind forces of nature lurking in the Astral Light, as well as good and bad spirits."14

In The Key to Theosophy 15 written near the end of her life, she states what may be assumed to be the official Theosophic attitude on the subject:

"We assert that the spirits of the dead cannot return to earth--save in rare and exceptional cases--nor do they communicate with men except by entirely subjective means. That which does appear objectively is often the phantom of the ex-physical man. But in psychic and, so to say, 'spiritual' Spiritualism we do believe most decidedly."16

One of her most vigorous expressions upon this issue occurs toward the end of Isis.

According to Olcott the Hon. A. Aksakoff, eminent Russian Professor, states that "Prince A. Dolgorouki, the great authority on mesmerism, has written me that he has ascertained that spirits which play the most prominent part at séances are elementaries,--gnomes, etc. His clairvoyants have seen them and describe them thus."

"The totally insufficient theory of the constant agency of disembodied human spirits in the production of Spiritualistic phenomena has been the bane of the Cause. A thousand mortifying rebuffs have failed to open their reason or intuition to the truth. Ignoring the teachings of the past, they have discovered no substitute. We offer them philosophical deduction instead of unverifiable hypothesis, scientific analysis and demonstration instead of indiscriminating faith. Occult philosophy gives them the means of meeting the reasonable requirements of science, and frees them from the humiliating necessity to accept the oracular teachings of 'intelligences' which, as a rule, have less intelligence than a child at school. So based and so strengthened, modern phenomena would be in a position to command the attention and enforce the respect of those who carry with them public opinion. Without invoking such help Spiritualism must continue to vegetate, equally repulsed--not without cause--both by science and theologians. In its modern aspect it is neither science, a religion nor a philosophy."17

In 1876, the writing of Isis was committing her to a stand which made further compromise with Spiritualism impossible. Her statement reveals what she would ostensibly have labored to do for that movement had it shown itself more plastic in her hands. She would have striven to buttress the phenomena with a more historical interpretation and a more respectable rationale.

In this context, however, the following passage from Isis is a bit difficult to understand. It seems to make a gesture of conciliation toward the Spiritualistic hypothesis after all. She says:

"We are far from believing that all the spirits that communicate at circles are of the classes called 'Elemental' and 'Elementary.' Many--especially among those who control the medium subjectively to speak, write and otherwise act in various ways--are human disembodied spirits. Whether the majority of such spirits are good or bad, largely depends on the private morality of the medium, much on the circle present, and a good deal on the intensity and object of their purpose. . . . But in any case, human spirits can never materialize themselves in propria persona."18

If this seems a recession from her consistent position elsewhere assumed, it must be remembered that she never, before or after, denied the possibility of the occasional descent of genuinely human spirits "in rare and exceptional cases."

Before 1875 she wrote to her sister that there was a law that sporadically, though periodically, the souls of the dead invade the realms of the living in an epidemic, and the intensity of the epidemic depends on the welcome they receive. She called it "the law of forced post-mortem assimilation." She elsewhere clarified this idea by the statement that our spirits here and now, being of kindred nature with the totality of spirit energy about us, unconsciously draw certain vibrations or currents from the life of the supermundane entities, whether we know it or not. Through this wireless circuit we sometimes drink in emanations, radiations, thought effluvia, so to speak, from the disembodied lives. The veil, she affirmed, between the two worlds is so thin that unsuspected messages are constantly passing across the divide, which is not spatial but only a discrepancy in receiving sets. And both she and the Master K.H. stated that during normal sleep we are en rapport with our loved ones as much as our hearts could desire. The reason we do not ordinarily know it is that the rate and wave length of that celestial communication can not be registered on the clumsy apparatus of our brains. It takes place through our astral or spiritual brains and can not arouse the coarser physical brain to synchronous vibration.

Her critique of the Spiritualistic thesis in general would be that something like ninety per cent of all ordinary "spirit" messages contain nothing to which the quality of spirituality, as we understand that term in its best significance, can in any measure be ascribed.

In rebuttal, Spiritualists point to many previsions, admonitory dreams, verified prophecies and other messages of great beauty and lofty spirituality, some of them leading to genuine reform of character, and they advance the claim, that genuine transference of intelligence from the spirit realms to earth is vastly more general than that fraction of experience which could be subsumed under her "rare and exceptional cases of "spirituality."

In one of the last works issued by Mr. Sinnett 19 he deplores the unfortunate clash that has come between the two cults, points out that it is foolish and unfounded, and reminds both parties of the broad bases of agreement which are found in the two systems. He feels that there can be no insurmountable points of antagonism, inasmuch as Spiritualism, too, he asserts, is under the watch and ward of a member of the Great White Brotherhood, the Master known as Hilarion; and that it would be illogical to assume that members of that same spiritual Fraternity could foster movements among mankind that work at cross purposes with each other. But Mr. Sinnett does not give any authority for his statement as to Hilarion's regency over Spiritualism, and many Theosophists are inclined to doubt it. He feels that there is every good reason why Spiritualism should go forward with Theosophy in such a unity of purpose as would render their combined influence the most potent force in the world today against the menace of materialism. Whenever Spiritualists display an interest in the formulation of some scheme of life or cosmology in which their phenomena may find a meaningful allocation, they can hardly go in any other direction than straight into Theosophy. This is shown by their Articles of Faith, in which the idea of Karma, the divine nature of man, his spiritual constitution and other conceptions equally theosophic have found a place.

Perhaps Theosophists and Spiritualists alike may discern the bases of harmony between their opposing faiths in a singular passage from The Mahatma Letters, an utterance of the Master K.H.

"It is this [sweet blissful dream of devachanic Maya] during such a condition of complete Maya that the Souls or actual Egos of pure loving sensitivities, laboring under the same illusion, think their loved ones come down to them on earth, while it is their own Spirits that are raised towards those in the Devachan. Many of the subjective spiritual communications--most of them when the sensitives are pure-minded--are real; but it is most difficult for the uninitiated medium to fix in his mind the true and correct pictures of what he sees and hears. Some of the phenomena called psychography (though more rarely) are also real. The spirit of the sensitive getting idylized, so to say, by the aura of the Spirit in the Devachan, becomes for a few minutes that departed personality, and writes in the handwriting of the latter, in his language and in his thoughts, as they were during his life-time. The two spirits become blended in one; and, the preponderance of one over the other during such phenomena determines the preponderance of personality in the characteristics exhibited in such writings and 'trance-speaking.' What you call 'rapport' is in plain fact an identity of molecular vibration between the astral part of the incarnate medium and the astral part of the discarnate personality . . . there is rapport between medium and 'control' when their astral molecules move in accord. And the question whether the communication shall reflect more of the one personal idiosyncrasy or the other, is determined by the relative intensity of the two sets of vibrations in the compound wave of Akasha. The less identical the vibratory impulses the more mediumistic and less spiritual will be the message. So then measure your medium's moral state by that of the alleged 'controlling' Intelligence, and your tests of genuineness leave nothing to be desired."20

This plank in the Theosophic platform not having been laid down in 1875 to bridge the chasm between the two movements, Madame Blavatsky drew away from her Spiritualistic associates, and it became but a matter of time until some propitious circumstance should give to her divergent tendency a body and a name.

The break with Spiritualism and the launching of the Theosophical Society were practically contemporary. The actual formation of the new organization does not on the surface appear to have been a deliberate act of Madame Blavatsky. While it would never have been organized without her presence and her influence, still she was not the prime mover in the steps which brought it into being. She seems merely to have gone along while others led. However her Society grew out of the stimulus that had gone forth from her.

It was Col. Henry Steele Olcott who assumed the rôle of outward leader in the young movement. He gave over (eventually) a lucrative profession as a corporation lawyer, an agricultural expert, and an official of the government, to expend all his energies in this enterprise. He had acquired the title of colonel during the Civil War in the Union army's manoeuvres in North Carolina. At the close of the war he had been chosen by the government to conduct some investigations into conditions relative to army contracts in the Quartermaster's Department and had discharged his duties with great efficiency, receiving the approbation of higher officials. He was regarded as an authority on agriculture and lectured before representative bodies on that subject. He had established a successful practice as a corporation counsel, numbering the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company among his clients. In addition to these activities he had done much reportorial work for the press, notably in connection with his Spiritualistic researches. His authorship of several works on the phenomena has already been mentioned. His career had achieved for him a record of high intelligence, great ability, and a character of probity and integrity.

It is the belief of Theosophists that he was expressly chosen by the Mahatmas to share with Madame Blavatsky the honor and the labor of spreading her message in the world. A passage from the Mahatma Letters puts this in clear light. The Master K.H. there says:

"So, casting about, we found in America the man to stand as leader--a man of great moral courage, unselfish, and having other good qualities. He was far from being the best, but--he was the best one available. . . . We sent her to America, brought them together--and the trial began. From the first both she and he were given to understand that the issue lay entirely with themselves."

In spite of difficulties, caused by the clash of temperaments and policies, this odd, "divinely-constituted" partnership held firmly together until the end. Their relationship was one of a loyal camaraderie, both being actuated by an uncommon devotion to the same cause.

As early as May, 1875, the Colonel had suggested the formation of a "Miracle Club," to continue spiritistic investigation. His proposal was made in the interest of psychic research. It was not taken up. But Madame Blavatsky's sprightly evening chatter and her reported magical feats continued to draw groups of intelligent people to her rooms. Among those thus attracted was Mr. George H. Felt, who had made some careful studies in phases of Egyptology. He was asked to lecture on these subjects and on the 7th of September, 1875, a score of people had gathered in H.P.B.'s parlors to hear his address on "The Lost Canon of Proportion of the Egyptians." Dr. Seth Pancoast, a most erudite Kabbalist was present, and after the lecture he led the discussion to the subject of the occult powers of the ancient magicians. Mr. Felt said he had proven those powers and had with them evoked elemental creatures and "hundreds of shadowy forms." As the tense debate proceeded, acting on an impulse, Col. Olcott wrote on a scrap of paper, which he passed over to Madame Blavatsky through the hands of Mr. W. Q. Judge, the following: "Would it not be a good thing to form a Society for this kind of study?" She read it and indicated assent.

Col. Olcott arose and "after briefly sketching the present condition of the Spiritualistic movement; the attitude of its antagonists, the Materialists; the irrepressible conflict between science and the religious sectaries; the philosophical character of the ancient theosophies and their sufficiency to reconcile all existing antagonisms; . . . he proposed to form a nucleus around which might gather all the enlightened and brave souls who are willing to work together for the collection and diffusion of knowledge. His plan was to organize a Society of Occultists and begin at once to collect a library; and to diffuse information concerning those secret laws of Nature which were so familiar to the Chaldeans and Egyptians, but are totally unknown to our modern world of science."21

It was a plain proposal to organize for occult research, for the extension of human knowledge of the esoteric sciences, and for a study of the psychic possibilities in man's nature. No religious or ethical or even philosophical interest can be detected in the first aims. The Brotherhood plank was a later development, and the philosophy was an outgrowth of the necessity of rationalizing the scientific data brought to light. The very nature of the movement committed it, of course, to an anti-materialistic view. Col. Olcott was still predominantly concerned to get demonstrative psychic displays. He was made Chairman, and Mr. Judge, Secretary.

It is interesting to note the personnel of this first gathering of Theosophists.

"The company included several persons of great learning and some of wide personal influence. The Managing Editors of two religious papers; the co-editors of two literary magazines; an Oxford LL.D.; a venerable Jewish scholar and traveler of repute; an editorial writer of one of the New York morning dailies; the President of the New York Society of Spiritualists; Mr. C. C. Massey an English barrister at law; Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten and Dr. Britten; two New York lawyers besides Col. Olcott; a partner in a Philadelphia publishing house; a well-known physician; and . . . Madame Blavatsky herself."22

At a late hour the meeting adjourned until the following evening, when organization could be more fully effected. Those who were present at the Sept. 8th meeting, and who thus became the actual formers (Col. Olcott insists on the word instead of Founders, reserving that title to Madame Blavatsky and himself) of the Theosophical Society, were: Col. Olcott, H. P. Blavatsky, Chas. Sotheran, Dr. Chas. E. Simmons, H. D. Monachesi, C. C. Massey, of London, W. L. Alden, G. H. Felt, D. E. deLara, Dr. W. Britten, Mrs. E. H. Britten, Henry J. Newton, John Storer Cobb, J. Hyslop. W. Q. Judge, H. M. Stevens. A By-Law Committee was named, other routine business attended to, a general discussion held and adjournment taken to Sept. 13th. Mr. Felt gave another lecture on Sept. 18th, after which several additional members were nominated, the name, "The Theosophical Society," proposed, and a committee on rooms chosen. Several October meetings were held in furtherance of the Society; and on the 17th of November, 1875, the movement reached the final stage of constitutional organization. Its President was Col. Henry Olcott; Vice-Presidents, Dr. Seth Pancoast and G. H. Felt; Corresponding Secretary, Madame H. P. Blavatsky; Recording Secretary, John S. Cobb; Treasurer, Henry J. Newton; Librarian, Chas. Sotheran; Councillors, Rev. H. Wiggin, R. P. Westbrook, LL. D., Mrs. E. H. Britten, C. E. Simmons, and Herbert D. Monachesi; Counsel to the Society, W. Q. Judge. Mr. John W. Lovell, the New York publisher, has the distinction of having paid the first five dollars (initiation fee) into the treasury, and is at the present writing the only surviving member of the founding group. At the November 17th meeting the President delivered his inaugural address. It was an amplification of his remarks made at the meeting of Sept. 7th, with some prognostications of what the work of the Society was destined to mean in the changing conceptions of modern thought.

The infant Society did not at once proceed to grow and expand. The chief reason for this was that Mr. Felt, whose theories had been the immediate object of strongest interest, and who was expected to be the leader and teacher in their quest of the secrets of ancient magic, for some unaccountable reason failed them utterly. His promised lectures were never scheduled, his demonstrations of spirit-evocation never shown. This disappointment weighed heavily upon some of the members. Mrs. Britten, Mr. Newton, and the other Spiritualists in the group, finding that Madame Blavatsky was not disposed to investigate mediums in the conventional fashion, or in any way to make the Society an adjunct of the Spiritualistic movement, suffered another disappointment and became inactive or openly withdrew. Mr. Judge and Col. Olcott were busy with their professional labors, and Madame Blavatsky had plunged into the writing of Isis UnveiledThe Society fell into the state of "innocuous desuetude," and was domiciled solely in the hearts of three persons, Olcott, Judge, and Madame Blavatsky. However dead it might be to all outward appearance, it still lived in the deep convictions of this trio. True, an occasional new recruit was admitted, two names in particular being worthy of remark. On April 5th, 1878, Col. Olcott received the signed application for membership from a young inventor, one Thomas Alva Edison, and near the same time General Abner W. Doubleday, veteran Major-General in the Union Army, united with the Society. Edison had been attracted by the objects of the Society, largely because of certain experiences he had had in connection with the genesis of some of his ideas for inventions. They had seemed to come to him from an inner intelligence independent of his voluntary thought control. Also he had experimented to determine the possibility of moving physical objects by exertion of the will. He was doubtless in close sympathy with the purposes of the Society, but the main currents of his mechanical interests drew him away from active coöperation with it. As for Major-General Doubleday, Theosophy gave articulate voice to theories as to life, death, and human destiny which he had long cherished without a formal label. He stated that it was the Theosophic idea of Karma which had maintained his courage throughout the ordeals of the Civil War and he testified that his understanding of this doctrine nerved him to pass with entire fearlessness through those crises in which he was exposed to fire. 23 When Theosophy was brought to his notice he cast in his lot with the movement and was a devoted student and worker while he lived. When the two Founders left America at the end of 1878 for India, Col. Olcott constituted General Doubleday the President of the American body.24

Concerning Mr. W. Q. Judge, there is only to be said that he was a young barrister at the time, practicing in New York and making his home in Brooklyn, where until about 1928 a brother, John Judge, survived him. He was a man of upright character and had always manifested a quick interest in such matters as Theosophy brought to his attention. It is reported among Theosophists that Madame Blavatsky immediately saw in him a pupil upon whose entire sympathy with her own deeper aims and understanding of her esoteric situation she could rely implicitly. He is believed always to have stood closer to her in a spiritual sense than Col. Olcott; in fact it is hinted that there was a secret understanding between them as to the inner motivations behind the Society. Later developments in the history of the movement seem to give weight to this theory.

Mr. Judge and General Doubleday were the captains of the frail Theosophic craft in America during something like four years, from 1878 to 1882, following the sailing of the two Founders for India. If little activity was displayed by the Society during this period, it was not in any measure the fault of those left in charge. They were not lacking in zeal for the cause. It is to be attributed chiefly to a state of suspended animation in which it was left by the departure of the official heads. This condition itself was brought about by the long protracted delay in carrying out a measure which in 1878 Col. Olcott had designed to adopt for the future expansion of the Society. Madame Blavatsky's work in Isis had disclosed the fact that there was an almost complete sympathy of aims in certain respects between the new Society and the Masonic Fraternity; that the latter had been the recipient and custodian down the ages of much of the ancient esoteric tradition which it was the purpose of Theosophy to revive. The idea of converting the Theosophical Society into a Masonic body with ritual and degrees had been under contemplation for some time, and overtures toward that end had been made to persons in the Masonic order. In fact the plan had been so favorably regarded that on his departure Col. Olcott left Mr. Judge and General Doubleday under instructions to hold all other activities in abeyance until he should prepare a form of ritual that would properly express the Society's spiritual motif and aims. It happened, however, that on reaching India both his and his colleague's time was so occupied with other work and other interests that for three years they never could give attention to the matter of the ritual. By that time they found the Society beginning to grow so rapidly without the support they had intended for it in the union with an old and respected secret order, that the project was abandoned. But it was this tentative plan that was responsible for the apparent lifelessness of the American organization during those years. A number of times the two American leaders telegraphed Olcott in India to hasten the ritual and hinted that its non-appearance forced them to keep the Society here embalmed in an aggravated condition of status quo. When the scheme was definitely abandoned, straightforward Theosophic propaganda was initiated and a period of healthy expansion began.

It is of interest in this connection to note that on March 8, 1876, on Madame Blavatsky's own motion, it was "resolved, that the Society adopt one or more signs of recognition, to be used among the Fellows of the Society or for admissions to the meetings." This might indicate her steady allegiance to the principle of esotericism. The practice fell into disuse after a time. Yet it was this idea of secrecy always lurking in the background of her mind that eventually led to the formation of a graded hierarchy in the Theosophical Society when the Esoteric School was formally organized.

Another development that Col. Olcott says "I should prefer to omit altogether if I could" from the early history of the Society was the affiliation of the organization with a movement then being inaugurated in India toward the resuscitation of pure Vedic religion. This proceeded further than the contemplated union with Masonry, and it led to the necessity of a more succinct pronouncement of their creed by Col. Olcott and Madame Blavatsky.

Naturally Madame Blavatsky's accounts of the existence of the great secret Brotherhood of Adepts in North India and her glorification of "Aryavarta" as the home of the purest occult knowledge, had served to engender a sort of nostalgia in the hearts of the two Founders for "Mother India." It seemed quite plausible that, once the aims of the Theosophical Society were broadcast in Hindustan, its friendly attitude toward the ancient religions of that country would act as an open sesame to a quick response on the part of thousands of native Hindus. It was not illogical to believe that the young Theosophical Society would advance shortly to a position of great influence among the Orientals, whose psychology, ideals, and religious conceptions it had undertaken to exalt, particularly in the eyes of the Western nations. India thus came to be looked upon as the land of promise, and the "return home," as Madame Blavatsky termed it, became more and more a consummation devoutly to be wished. With Isis completed and published the call to India rang ever louder, and finally in November, 1878, came the Master's orders to make ready. It was not until the 18th of December that the ship bearing the two pilgrims passed out of the Narrows.

There had seemed to be no way opened for them to make an effective start in India, no appropriate channel of introduction to their work there, until 1878. Then Col. Olcott chanced to learn of a movement recently launched in India, whose aims and ideals, he was given to believe, were identical with those of his own Society. It was the Arya Samaj, founded by one Swami Dhyanand, who was reputed to be a member of the same occult Brotherhood as that to which their own Masters, K.H. and M., belonged. This latter allegation was enough to win the immediate interest of the two devotees in its mission, and through intermediaries Col. Olcott was put in touch with the Swami, to whom he made overtures to join forces. The Arya Samaj was represented to the Colonel as world-wide in its eclecticism, devoted to a revival of the ancient purity of Vedantism and pledged to a conception of God as an eternal impersonal principle which, under whatever name, all people alike worshipped. An
official linking of the two bodies was formally made in May, 1878, and the title of the Theosophical Society was amended to "The Theosophical Society of the Arya Samaj." But before long the Colonel received a translation of the rules and doctrines of the Arya Samaj, which gave him a great shock. Swami Dhyanand's views had either radically changed or had originally been misrepresented. His cult was found to be drastically sectarian--merely a new sect of Hinduism--and quite narrow in certain lines. Even then the Colonel endeavored to bridge the gap, drawing up a new definition of the aims of his Society in such an open fashion that the way was left clear for any Theosophists to associate with the Samaj if they should so desire. It was not until several years after the arrival in India that final disruption of all connection between the two Societies was made, the Founders having received what Col. Olcott calls "much evil treatment" from the learned Swami.

When the first discovery of the real character of the Arya Samaj was made in 1878, it was deemed necessary to issue a circular defining the Theosophical Society in more explicit terms than had yet been done. Olcott does not quote from this circular of his own, but gives the language of the circular issued by the British Theosophical Society, then just organized, as embodying the essentials of his own statement. This enables us to discern how far the originally vague Theosophical ideals had come on their way to explicit enunciation.

1. The British Theosophical Society is founded for the purpose of discovering the nature and powers of the human soul and spirit by investigation and experiment.

2. The object of the Society is to increase the amount of human health, goodness, knowledge, wisdom, and happiness.

3. The Fellows pledge themselves to endeavor, to the best of their powers, to live a life of temperance, purity, and brotherly love. They believe in a Great First Intelligent Cause, and in the Divine Sonship of the spirit of man, and hence in the immortality of that spirit, and in the universal brotherhood of the human race.

4. The Society is in connection and sympathy with the Arya Samaj of Aryavarta, one object of which Society is to elevate, by a true spiritual education, mankind out of degenerate, idolatrous and impure forms of worship wherever prevalent.25

In his own circular, Olcott, with the concurrence of H.P.B., made the first official statement of the threefold hierarchical constitution of the Theosophical Society. This grouping naturally arose out of the basic facts in the situation itself. There were, first, at the summit of the movement, the Brothers or Adepts; then there were persons, like H.P.B., Olcott himself and Judge, with perhaps a few others, who were classified in the category of "chelas" or accepted pupils of the Masters; then there were just plain members of the Society, having no personal link as yet with the great Teachers. A knowledge of this graduation is essential to an understanding of much in the later history of the Society.

In the same circular the President said:

"The objects of the Society are various. It influences its Fellows to acquire an intimate knowledge of natural law, especially its occult manifestations."

Then follow some sentences penned by Madame Blavatsky:

"As the highest development, physically and spiritually, on earth of the creative cause, man should aim to solve the mystery of his being. He is the procreator of his species, physically, and having inherited the nature of the unknown but palpable cause of his own creation, must possess in his inner psychical self this creative power in lesser degree. He should, therefore, study to develop his latent powers, and inform himself respecting the laws of magnetism, electricity and all other forms of force, whether of the seen or unseen universes."

The President proceeds:

"The Society teaches and expects its Fellows to personally exemplify the highest morality and religious aspirations; to oppose the materialism of science and every form of dogmatic theology . . .; to make known, among Western nations, the long-suppressed facts about Oriental religious philosophies, their ethics, chronology, esotericism, symbolism . . . ; to disseminate a knowledge of the sublime teachings of the pure esoteric system of the archaic period which are mirrored in the oldest Vedas and in the philosophy of Gautauma Buddha, Zoroaster, and Confucius; finally and chiefly, to aid in the institution of a Brotherhood of Humanity, wherein all good and pure men of every race shall recognize each other as the equal effects (upon this planet) of one Uncreate, Universal, Infinite and Everlasting Cause."26

He sums up the central ideas as being:

1. The study of occult science.

2. The formation of a nucleus of universal brotherhood.

3. The revival of Oriental literature and philosophy.

And these three became later substantially the permanent platform of the Society. In their final and present form they stand:

1. To form a nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color.

2. To encourage the study of Comparative Religion, Philosophy, and Science.

3. To investigate the unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in man.

The inclusion of a moral program to accompany occult research and comparative religion was seen to be necessary. Madame Blavatsky's disapprobation of Spiritualism had as its prime motivation that movement's lack of any moral bases for psychic progress. Therefore the ethical implications which she saw as fundamental in any true occult system were embodied in the Theosophic platform in the Universal Brotherhood plank. Brotherhood, a somewhat vague general term, was made the only creedal or ethical requirement for fellowship in the Society. At that it is, as a moral obligation, a matter of the individual's own interpretation, and it is the Society's only link with the ethical side of religion. Not even the member's clear violation of accepted or prevalent social codes can disqualify him from good standing. The Society refuses to be a judge of what constitutes morality or its breach, leaving that determination to the member himself. At the same time through its literature it declares that no progress into genuine spirituality is possible "without clean hands and a pure heart." It adheres to the principle that morality without freedom is not morality. Thus the movement which began with an impulse to investigate the occult powers of ancient magicians, was moulded by circumstances into a moral discipline, which placed little store in magic feats.

Footnotes from Chapter 4

1 It seems that she had been in Peru and Brazil in 1857, according to her later statement to A. P. Sinnett as found on page 154 of the Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett. A sentence in Vol. I, of Isis Unveiled makes mention of her personal knowledge of great underground labyrinths in Peru.

2 Not assuredly of the séance-room type. She is obviously using the term here in the wider sense that it came to have in her larger Theosophic system, as expounded in this chapter.

Old Diary Leaves, Vol. I, p. 12.

Ibid., p. 13.

Ibid., p. 68.

6 Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten, herself a medium and among the foremost Spiritualists of her day--also a charter member of the Theosophical Society--made Inevitably the Spiritualists were stunned by their one-time champion's sudden and amazed reversal of her position. A campaign of abuse and condemnation began in their ranks, echoes of which are still heard at times.


7 Quoted in William Kingsland's The Real H. P. Blavatsky (J. M. Watkins, London, 1928), p. 123.

Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett (New York, Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1924), p. 289.

The Theosophist, Vol. I, 1879.


10 Isis Unveiled, Vol. I, p. 13.

11 Ibid., p. 53.

12 Ibid., p. 489.


13 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 586.

14 Old Diary Leaves, Vol. I, p. 110.

15 Page 27.

16 That H. P. B. was by no means alone in predicating the existence of other than human spirits denizening the astral world is shown by Col. Olcott, who (Old Diary Leaves, Vol. I, p. 438), cites Mrs. Britten's statement printed in an article in The Banner of Light, as follows: "I know of the existence of other than human spirits and have seen apparitions of spiritual or elementary existences evoked by cabalistic words and practices."




17 Isis Unveiled, Vol. II, p. 636. 18 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 67

19 Collected Fruits of Occult Teaching (London, T. F. Unwin, Ltd., 1919).

20 Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett, p. 101.

21 Old Diary Leaves, Vol. I, p. 119. From notes taken at the meeting by Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten, and published a day or two later in a New York daily.

22 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 119.


23 He was in active command of the Army of the Potomac at the Battle of Gettysburg, following the death of General Reynolds on the 1st of July until the arrival of General Meade.

24 He devised the modern game of baseball.

25 Old Diary Leaves, Vol. I, p. 399.

26 Ibid., Vol. I., p. 400.