She was a massive mountain of a woman, with crinkly brown hair, wide eyes and billowing chins. She lumbered among tier disciples in a dirty wrapper, fumbling endlessly in the tobacco pouch from which she rolled her cigarets. Again & again she was caught red-handed in chicaneries that would have made a carnival rifter blush.
But Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the occult, semi-religious Theosophical Society, had something that brought savants and social leaders to her feet and keeps her memory hallowed by the 50,000-odd Theosophists scattered around the world. What she had and how she used it is expertly told in a new biography, Priestess of the Occult, by ex-journalist Gertrude Marvin Williams (Knopf; $3.50). Loyal Theosophists will wince at this well-documented story of the Society's origins.
Sin & Spirits. Madame Blavatsky began life as an adventuress. Born (1831) in the Ukraine of an aristocratic Russian family, she was married at 16 to General Nicephore Blavatsky, deserted him three months later to spend the next 25 years traipsing through European third-class hotels with a broken-down singer. For a while, she operated a shady spiritualist "society" in Cairo. In 1873, at the age of 41, she decided to try the New World.
During her first struggling year in New York, ex-aristocrat Blavatsky lived at a lower East Side home for working women, picked up what jobs she could, such as designing leatherwork and making artificial flowers in a sweatshop. In October 1874, she read a newspaper account of séances held by the Eddy brothers in Vermont. Spiritualist Blavatsky promptly descended on the Eddys in a scarlet shirt and a whirl of exotic spirit controls.
It was at this haunted houseparty that she made her most brilliant capture— Colonel Olcott, cofounder of the Theosophical Society. Honest, credulous Henry Steel Olcott, part-time journalist, a Civil War colonel who had recently been admitted to the New York bar, was the perfect front man. A year later, he had deserted his wife and three sons to devote his time to serving the dynamic Blavatsky.
Madame and the Colonel surrounded themselves with dabblers in necromancy and occultism, took the imposing title of the Theosophical (i.e., "divine wisdom") Society. Meetings were held in Madame's apartment, nicknamed "The Lamasery," and decorated like a bad dream. Here, for two years, she picked the brains and reference libraries of her more scholarly associates to write her 1,200-page Isis Unveiled, which she claimed was dictated to her by the Masters of Wisdom via astral light and spirit guides. In 1878, Madame, the Colonel and two followers set out for mysterious India to search out "secret doctrines."
Madame & the Masters. It was in India—eventually she set up Theosophy's permanent international headquarters at Adyar, Madras—that the pattern of the Society began to crystallize. Here she accumulated Theosophy's assorted bag of borrowings from Buddhism, Hinduism, yoga, the cabala. Here she incorporated the key Theosophist doctrine of reincarnation and developed to the full her hierarchy of "Masters"—Tibetan superbeings who guide mankind through Theosophy.