Born von Hahn, she
was married for 3 month to 40 year old General N. Blavatsky. In fact it were
the Church records that gave his age as 40, Blavatsky would later deny that.
Boarding a steamer on
the Black Sea to return home, she evaded her escort and sailed instead for
Constantinople and freedom, in a caprice which foreshadows her whole career.
Quite how she
supported herself is not clear, though she may have had an allowance from her
father and seems to have set up as an itinerant spirit medium. She also claimed
to have ridden bareback in a circus, toured Serbia as a concert pianist, opened
an ink factory in Odessa and, traded as an importer of ostrich feathers in
Paris.
She may or may not
have had lovers, including the German Baron Meyendorf,
the Polish Prince Wittgenstein and a Hungarian opera singer, Agardi Metrovitch. All these
names were linked with hers, though she sometimes denied the liaisons and
sometimes hinted that they were true - an equivocation which became important
only when her enemies taxed her with promiscuity.
Siv Ellen Kraft in a
lecture Jan. 31, 2002, mentioned that Blavatsky spoke with different voices,
both in her writings and through the gender roles she assumed. Kraft in her PhD
dissertation on the subject describes Blavatsky presenting herself variously as
a woman, a man, an androgyne and a hermaphrodite. Kraft describes how more
often than not, difficult to differentiate between Blavatsky “the interpreter
of myths” and Blavatsky “the myth-maker.”
Apart from
newer students of Religion like Siv Ellen Kraft, scholarship about Theosophy
and Blavatsky is characterized by confusion and discrepancies. And no doubt a
definite biography of Blavatsky still waits to be written.
The first two books
about Blavatsky, besides Isis Unveiled and the Secret Doctrine, that I myself
read as a teenager were Alfred Sinnet’s Biography and Soloview’s
Priestess of Isis, two contrasting books indeed.
However Soloview did include all kind of original letters making
him a better candidate I thought. On the other hand Sinnet has all the
characteristics of a largely synthetic biography.
For example the “von
Hahn family records” in quotation marks to indicate what seems the rather
strong likelihood that they are the creation of Sinnett
himself. Although Sinnett presents various anecdotes
about Blavatsky’s early life in quotation marks, suggesting that he is quoting
directly from the (Russian? French?) originals, there are a number of moments
in the quoted text that call the documents’ authenticity (and, for that matter,
their existence) into question.
In the anecdote about
Madame Blavatsky’s baptism, for example, Sinnett
cites the family record as saying, “everyone has to stand in the baptismal ceremony,
no one being allowed to sit in the Greek religion, as they do in Roman Catholic
and Protestant Churches, during the church and religious service.”. The
comparison to Catholic and Protestant ritual as well as the anthropological
tone assumed in the description of the Greek Orthodox service seems somewhat
improbable in the records of an Orthodox family.
Sinnert further wites that Madame
Blavatsky’s “first long flight abroad was prompted by a passionate enthusiasm
for the North American Indians, contracted from the perusal of Fennimore [sic]
Cooper’s novels” (p.61-2). When Madame Blavatsky at last met a group of Native
Americans, Sinnett goes on, she abandoned her
romantic notions about the noble savages of North America. “At Quebec,” Sinnett writes, “a party of Indians were introduced to her…
Fact is that
Blavatsky came to Ellis Island New York in 1873, and took an apartment in a
predominantly Jewish neighborhood on the Lower East Side. According to her own
later version she was send by an occult group in Paris, immigration records
show she came on a Russian grant to ‘study’.
For a year or so, she
made a living sewing artificial flowers and telling fortunes, and looked in
from time to time on spiritualist meetings in the greater New York area. It was
at one of these spiritualist mcetings-this one at the
home of the Eddy family in Chittenden. Vermont, in 1874- that Blavatsky met
Olcott, a reporter and recently retired Union army colonel.
Olcott later became
the first US citizen of European extraction to convert to Buddhism. Theosophy,
for all of its professions to universal validity, in fact bore the stamp of
distinctly European modes of thought, worldviews that were shaped to no small
extent by imperialism. Further, by setting aside the question of direct
causality, one tan begin to analyze larger cultural pressures that operate
independently of individual textual expressions.
The TS was first
convened rather as a conversation society. First called “The Miracle Club”
engaging in séances that did not meet with great success. Next in a
lecture, variously titled “The Lost Canon of Proportion of the Egyptians” or
simply “The Cabala,” presented before those individuals who were to become the
founders of the Theosophical Society,a certain
George H. Felt disclosed his promise to manifest elementals or “creatures
evolved in the four kingdoms of earth, air, fire, and water.
What this had to do
with the Canon of Proportion, the main topic of the lecture, was unclear, but
there could be no doubt that Felt’s claim impressed and roused his audience, so
much so that Col. Henry Steel Olcott, one of the individuals present at the
lecture suggested the formation of a society to investigate such phenomena.
Obviously the above
topics were supporting the belief in a work of fiction. In 1680 an English
translation of “The Count of Cabalis” appeared in
London, claiming to be published by “the Cabalistical Society of the Sages, at
the Sign of the Rosycrucian.” In the novella, the
narrator recounts how through use of magical crystals, mirrors, and magnets,
the initiate can learn to communicate both spiritually and physically, with his
celestial partner. The universe is filled with intermediary
spirits-Gnomes, Sylphs, Salamanders, and Undines who become immortalized through
sacramental intercourse with human sages. More relevant, perhaps, was Gabalis’s claim that Cabala provided a scientific key to
the secrets of natural philosophy. “The Cabalist acts solely according to the
principles of Nature.” (Schuchard ”Restoring The
Temple of Vision” 2002 p.714)
H.P. Blavatsky in
“Isis Unveiled” but much more so in “The Secret Doctrine” shifted the “Invented
Egypt” Myth gradually to India underpinned mythologically by the assumption
that the Egyptians were actually descendants of the Aryans (that according to
Blavatsky invaded India), whose spiritual traditions should thus represent a
purer form of the ancient wisdom religion.
William Q Judge
co-founder of the Theosophical Society claimed India and Egypt supposed to have
had regular contacts, and therefore the perennial philosophy was equally well
preserved by both nations.
Due to a series of
historical accidents, these contacts were severed and Egyptian civilization
foundered. The ancient wisdom was retained in India, whereas judge claims that
most of Egyptian philosophy was lost in the process of transmission to the
“Jews”.
Next in “Old Diary
Leaves”, 1:46-69, Olcott President of the Theosophical Society then wrote that
the idea of the founding of the TS then was to be a repetition of Cagliostro’s
Egyptian Lodge in the eighteenth century. (See The Phoenix Conspirachy)
Olcott also wrote:
Mr. Felt told us in his lecture that, while making his Egyptological studies,
he had discovered that the old Egyptian priests were adepts in magical science,
had the power to evoke and employ the spirits of the elements, and had left the
formularies on record; he had deciphered and put them to the test, and had
succeeded in evoking the elementals. (G.H. Felt in Theosopical
History July 1997, p.245.)
It is just in this
area of “Spiritology” and “spiritintercourse,”
as part of the hidden laws of nature, that moved Olcott to propose a society
for this sort of study.
Esoteric texts from
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century may refer to all three: hermetica, rosicrucian lore and
Atlantean wisdom. Modern Theosophical and pseudo-scientific texts have adapted
this to our times and present adjusted legends. Fifteen years
later, the ‘magnum opus’ of the TS, The Secret Doctrine would freely
combine imaginary others such as the Atlanteans with the merely semi
fictitious, e.g. concepts of a generalized Orient, with references to existing
Neoplatonic and Gnostic sources that actually seem to have been used to
construct theosophical doctrines.
In the esoteric field
as Lawton amply shows with “Genesis Unveiled,” released July 15, 2003, on the
one hand, doctrinal and ritual elements are taken from the most diverse
sources. On the other, considerable effort is spent on showing that these
seemingly disparate elements in fact point to the same underlying reality. The
same can be said of The Phoenix Conspirachy by
Hancock/Bauval, to come out next.
There is the process
that transformed Plato’s literary device Atlantis into a place that Blavatsky,
Bailey, Steiner, Cayce and others treated as literal fact. And a new attempted
synthesis among these lines will be the The
Phoenix Conspiracy, Talisman.
At the time of
Blavatsky’s writings a rapid advance of a rational, scientific world-view was
taking place, and this presented itself as a challenge with which the esoteric
views had difficulty to compete.
Esotericism was not
seen anymore as an integrative framework that
explained the “hidden” (“true”) meaning of the world, as it was in the time
when for example alchemy and astrology were accepted sciences, but more and
more as a viewpoint outside the accepted norms. When the hopes of
constructing an alternative esoteric world view lost itself during the early
part of the 20th century, anti-scientific attitudes became predominant within
esoteric thought.
In Isis Unveiled
Blavatsky erroneously claimed that Aristotle had been initiated into Egyptian wisdom,
Pythagoras and Plato had learned all their philosophy from the books of Hermes
Trismegistus (Isis Unveiled: 1, 144)
The Renaissance hermeticists however worked within a view of history in
which their tradition was represented as an ancient philosophy, contemporary
with Moses, only to have this legend gradually undermined by scholarly studies
such as the philological work of Isaac Casaubon long before
Blavatsky constructed her first major work “Isis Unveiled.”
In “Genesis Unveiled”
Lawton writes in his chapter “The Divine Atlanteans”: Whatever we may think of
the Atlantis myth itself, how can we ask for a clearer elucidation of our theme
of a highly spiritual former race that became debased? It has often been
suggested that Plato himself spent a number of years in the company of Egyptian
priests becoming an initiate into their sacred mysteries, and that his writings
were a coded “story” version of what he learned, coded because, like other
initiates, he was not allowed to reveal the full extent of his knowledge to the
common people. (Genesis Unveiled: The Secret Legacy of a Forgotten Race.)
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July 25, 2003