ISIS UNVEILED: PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF MADAME BLAVATSKY
ISIS UNVEILED: PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF MADAME BLAVATSKY
SHE was the last of the mammoths.[1]
Only the cave-temples of India can describe her.
She was Elephanta, its sculptured gods in ruins. Ajunta domed with faded frescoes of golden glory.
Why in ruins? That is the tragedy of our present earth-condition. That is what we are fighting for to-day. It will not always be thus. There shall be no more shattered Parthenons, no more devastated Louvains. But the Kingdom of Heaven Within, the much-talked-of League of Nations, will not come till pan-humanity can build a temple beyond destruction—impervious to decay.
I have known many near in stature to the gods—Salvini, Gladstone, Robert Browning, William Morris, Rodin, Sarah Bernhardt—none had her cosmic sweep of power, though all carried the same infantine charm when away from the treadmill. The great always remain children and occasionally let themselves out of the cage.
She was certainly the greatest personality I ever met. Even her enemies—and she had many—acknowledged this. Those of consistent conventionality could not understand her absence of pose. Her instantaneous change from laughing childhood to grave old age. It was indecent. They never dropped the mask. They saw her naked but inscrutable and could not comprehend.
Baba Bharati, now too gone from us, once told me a story of as a boy entering a concealed cavern in the Himalayas and finding three great seated beings, silent, alone, with long beards flowing over their knees like silver streams. One a hundred and fifty feet high who had sat there in holy meditation for thousands of years and forgot to die—one a hundred—one fifty feet. He could never find the entrance to the cave again. She seemed akin to such. One felt in the shadow of the everlasting hills when beside her. Shadow and sadness were in the droop of her chrysoberyl eyes. The ineffable despair of being great and living. She put this aside in her long day of work. She climbed over it in her short evening of frolic. But it was always with her. Alone as Dante—as Victor Hugo or Turner or Wagner.
I occasionally hear of some one who “didn’t like” or was jealous of her. As well not like the Elgin Marbles or be jealous of the Sphinx. She was yet as sweet and radiant in spirit as William Blake, who when a very old man after endless privation and unappreciation, said to a little girl: “My dear, I can only hope that your life may be as beautiful and happy as mine has been.”
Storm and sunshine, source, torrent, and silent pool; tangled grasses and trembling tree, were to be found in the mysteries of her jungle depths; the snarl of savage beasts or hiss of serpents. One felt that her heart held the gem-starred altar of the only God however pan-and-polytheistic the frieze might be. Scarred and mutilated the approach. Of dazzling splendour the hidden arcana. Some called her uncouth and monstrous. Most discovered her kind, interesting, and lovable. Some played on the mountain top and did not penetrate the mystery beneath. Some who had been searching for years crossed the seas and then did not find their idol-dream though all the veils of Isis were lifted for their view.
She looked like man, woman, beast—a lioness—a toad. She was all. Had been all. Outwardly she suggested the monsterism of those strange forms Blake drew; whose clothes, hair, gestures, seem part of the rocks and trees which surround them; who walk girdled with the Zodiac and hold converse with the gods.
The sacred books of India repeatedly state the Jiva has no sex. Only the enveloping sheaths put on from time to time have it. It is indicated also that all jivas must pass through both kinds of sheaths turn by turn, and by action and re-action from one lesson of experience to another.
Those who did not reach the altar were of whom Christ said “Let the dead bury their dead”—meaning of course the living-dead.
Brutal blows have been rained by iconoclasts but her mark is on the world and will stay. She burst the bands which held souls apart. She broke seals only to uncover new beauties. She tore down images only to reveal nobler gods. No woman, no mind of modern times has had wider influence. We must not only count the thirty thousand members of the Theosophical Society. The whole body of the Christian Church is broader from her enlightenment.
In America, that remarkable lady Mary A. Livermore and I happened to be speaking in the same city. A dinner was given in our joint-honour to which most of the clergymen of the town were invited. Of course, Mrs. Livermore went in on the arm of the host. I with the hostess. The table was very long. We were very far apart. The reverend ones were of different denominations. It was dreadfully dull.
The only way to make a big dinner a success is for the conversation to shoot across the table. I let things drift till the middle of the repast, then in a lull:—
“Mrs. Livermore! Did you ever meet Madame Blavatsky?” The effect was magical. All awoke. Every one was brilliant from that moment in attack or defence and I marvelled to find how deeply the leaders of the church had studied her thought. How familiar they were with her work. Though disapproving en bloc her doctrines, her light had penetrated to their very sanctuaries and her "Reply to the Archbishop of Canterbury" had struck home.
As a boy I knew her well in the last few years of her life and was often at her house in Lansdowne Road. There I had the opportunity to observe her under every circumstance. I never belonged to her working associates, but was a member of her private Esoteric Circle. Though the youngest of her followers I had already lived much in Europe, I suppose I amused her and she talked very frankly to me. Perhaps nothing more characteristic can be given than the now-historic anecdote of how the famous photograph was taken:—
The Schmeichen portrait at Adyar I have always liked. A suggestion of prophetess in the dim cave. It was just this that did not please her. She thought it made her look too much like a Sybil.
In spite of all testimony to the contrary she was more than honest. Pose detestable to her.
The whole world clamoured for her likeness. I persuaded her to go with me to a photographer. What a day! Wind and rain and scurries of autumn leaves. She had no out-of-door clothes. Everything was given away as soon as brought to her. Once arriving at the Liverpool steamer she sacrificed both her ticket and money in exchange for the steerage-passage of a poor family she found weeping on the wharf who had been robbed of theirs. She might remain till some miracle took her to New York.
I never could have accomplished it without the aid of Countess Wachtmeister. Appointment made, the cab was kept waiting for hours. Unaccustomed to go out she would not move. “You want my death. I cannot step on the wet stones.” Shawls, scarfs, furs were piled on. A sort of Russian turban tied over her head with a veil. Rugs spread from door to carriage. These were lifted and blown about by the storm so the Countess with the help of the coachman had to hold them down while I raised the umbrella over her head and helped her in. Afterwards the Countess told me that when she first came to London, wife of an Ambassador from Sweden, two powdered footmen in livery followed wherever she went. “If my poor husband could know the day had come when I held carpets for another woman to tread upon he would turn in his grave.” This only smiling—she would have lain herself down for Madame to walk over.
Van der Weyde was a friend of mine. There disembarkation even more terrible! They don’t unroll red carpets in Regent Street for nothing. A crowd soon collected. “Come along, Your Majesty!” I said to keep up the illusion.
Once up the stairs she flatly refused to be taken. She was not an actress. What had I brought her to such a place for? Finally she was held as I knew she would be by the story of Van der Weyde’s own experiments in the adaptation of electricity to photography. How he had first attempted with a crystal bowl of water through which the light filtered. One day the intense heat broke the bowl and a fragment of the glass severing an artery of his arm it spouted to the ceiling and he was found senseless on the floor deluged with water and covered with blood.
“I will sit for you—only one—be quick—take me just as I am.”
I bent over her and whispered:—"Now let all the devil in you shine out of those eyes.”
“Why child, there is no devil in me.”
She laughed, so the sitting was spoiled, but then all went well and we got the famous likeness. She was pleased with it. I was not. She is there but not all of her. I would have wished something at her writing table—taken by chance—in the long folds of her seamless garment—vibrations of light all around. She really enjoyed the adventure I think, for she told of being “bossed” and “carried as a bundle” for a long time, especially of the “Come along, your Majesty.”
All was alive to her except herself. As the human body is an aggregation of atoms of which each molecule has a separate consciousness and does its work apart though in perfect co-ordination with directing force—every primordial particle a trinite chord of matter, energy and impulse—so the universe was to her a vast conscious-subconscious-nonconscious organism. The divinity and life of sun and stars as real as the divinity of the soul of man. This soul incarnate was the Logos, but the incarnation extended to every atom and she read the antithetical repetition of the highest in the lowest, and the lowest in the highest—the “Double-Procession” from man to God as well as God to man—Father, Son; Son, Father. She argued and taught this constantly and believed in a continuous chain of intermediate intelligences. Pre-christian hierarchies together with Angels, Archangels, Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; in different orders and with different ranks of recognised labourers.
Still she remained what Dickens called “A flabby mass of mortality.” She had no patience with personal care and personal culture. Her limitation was that of most of our instructors. She could not manifest for herself or Death’s hunters would not have trapped her so soon. The body was only a slave too low for consideration. She seemed to regard herself as a kind of telephonic machine which of course would one day go to pieces. She told me no philosophy worthy of the name had ever taken the slightest notice of the human body. I dared to reply that was the reason why philosophies rot on our bookshelves instead of being our vade-mecums. Brain-consciousness is only a pin-prick compared to the real life of this world, which in future incarnations we may grow fully conscious of. Then, one with the universal soul—body—mind. The real meaning of Nirvana—Holy Ghost—Kingdom-of-Heaven-Within.
No realist could have painted her. She needed rather the jagged rock of sculpture. Mestrovic might best render some suggestion of the incarnations which gleamed through her. Something large—unfinished as a symbol. It need not look at all as she did yet be all she was. George Sand who much resembled Madame may never have been like her statue in the Luxembourg Gardens. But she is that to the lovers who have never seen her. Alfred de Musset, Swinburne, Chopin, Shelley must be sculptured as they are to the Muses not as they were to the mob. Spurgeon would not let his extempore sermons be taken down in shorthand. He always revised as he wittily said— “Altering to keep the same.”
The Real of the Real is the Sun-behind-the-Sun. In India a shrine may contain but a shapeless stone daubed with paint. It is God to the worshipper. If red, Mahadeo-Shiva stands in awful glory. If blue, Shri-Krishna, night-born, lifts his enchanted flute and calls to enchantment.
She was of noble birth and relation. Her grandmother one of the celebrated Princess Dolgoroukys. Five of her uncles at court. I remember well her sister Madame Jelihowsky who used to visit her for long periods. Très grande dame, a grey-haired woman of aristocratic poise and dignity well-known to the highest Russian society. Madame herself could be most elegant of manner when she chose, but seldom gave herself the trouble. She had the simplicity of those who knowing they are royal do as they please.
It is said that as a child she could mount the fiercest Cossack horse. A dramatic raconteuse, she lived the events she related and would have been a great actress, but enjoyed holding a sceptre more personal. Once she told me some stories of her childhood days. Her relatives owned a chateau where the children of the different families used to spend the summer. The central hall was a museum of Natural History. At night when they were all tucked in their dormitory cots they would beg little Hélène to “make the animals talk.” Bringing to life the forms below, she would speak as from their mouths: “I swam the frozen deep—I roved the jungles of Assam—And I——” “Mlle. Hélène! Mlle. Hélène!” the voice of the governess in the next room would cry: “If you do not stop exciting the children I will come in and punish you.” Silence for a time, then the man-eating tiger would begin to prowl again, the little heads cover beneath the sheets in terror. Once she dragged the polar bear from the hall and propped him up against the door so when the governess opened he would fall on her, then talked her worst—and waited.
In the Park their favourite game was bandits and captive-maiden. “I always wanted to be one of the bandits. One day they said I must be captive-maiden sometimes. Bandits never had such work to capture a maiden. I fought, I kicked, I bit, and after that they were glad enough to cast me for bandit the rest of the year. As a child I loved to fight. You know the Russian hatred of the Jews. How often have I crossed the street to slap some Jew boy in the face, saying — ‘How dare you look at me, a Christian?’ I wish I could find that little boy to beg his pardon and tell him how short lived was my secular pride after I went out into the world.”
Conflict and combat were always with her. She would have been a great force in the new awakening of this war to-day. Legend said she fought with Garibaldi dressed as a man through his campaign for the liberation of Italy—even that she carried a never-healing wound in her breast.
I have read many articles about Helen Petrovna Hahn-Blavatsky and from most of them would never dream the writers had so much as seen her. They write with as little appreciation of personal qualities as the African hunter for the quarry he slaughters, mad in the endeavour to trap the beast. Everything suppressed in the effort to prove her a charlatan. Which emphatically she was not. Or a divinity which as emphatically she refused to be. She was indeed big game. It is easy to glean from books. Especially with a nature of many facets like hers one is tempted to have recourse to apocryphal stories. Of these there are thousands.
She worked like a Balzac. At her desk six o'clock in the morning she wrote till six at night—lunch being brought to her there. Often she did not go out of the house for half a year. Not even for a walk in her garden. The influence of such example was the secret of the astonishing growth and expansion of the Theosophical Society. Four or five magazines of which she sometimes wrote the contents, cover-to-cover, as many books and her great Secret Doctrine piled their proofs around her.
After dinner she would move to the big drawing-room and spread her cards. She always played the game of “Patience.” I do not quite understand this accompaniment to thought, but very great people play it and I have never known an insignificant one to do so. Does it occupy the manas that the buddhi be left free to soar.
Thus she welcomed a constant stream of guests every night of her life. Saturday afternoons were more general receptions. Thursday evenings reserved for her personal Esoteric Circle, of which I was a member.
She analysed with keen-probing scalpel, not maliciously, mere vivisection. She only interpreted good and evil as pairs of opposites, from the teachings of Krishna in the Bhagavadgita, and had no conventional idea of “sin.”
Utterly indifferent to gossip, she never bothered to deny. She once said to me:— “Mud has rained down so long I do not attempt even to open an umbrella.” On a lady remonstrating that she let some damaging stories go on without denial she replied:— “I have never posed as an example of feline cleanliness." Questioned about the so-called exposé at Madras, she simply said:— “I asked the gods to perform for him and they refused.”
I am careful only to record what I heard from her own lips, instead of miracles reported by others. Whatever her purpose or interest in the material wonders of early years when dazzled by the glamour of symbolism, in later days she took a very different and definite stand, and my testimony must be only as I knew her. She changed and grew and outgrew mystification for mystery, neither apologised for mistake, nor change, nor growth. “Magic was, and is, an endeavour to recover the state of primitive-consciousness once prevalent in the dawn of the world.” What we call unitive-consciousness belongs to the dawn of the church. In grasping one we lost the other. She searched the secrets of both. Creative-consciousness she did not claim, or even attribute to man.
Samadhi or god-consciousness was her ideal. She knew all yogas. In the Jnana-yoga or right-discrimination she had attained the first state of super-consciousness. She was the bar of iron heated red-hot which becomes as fire, forgetting its own nature. Most people occupy themselves with the needs or pleasures of the lower all the time. She seemed not to have needs or pleasures of her own. To live only in the glow of the furnace by which she gave light.
To the fashion of the moment in thought or form she was indifferent. It mattered not to her if the bow were pinned high or low. If one wore one bead or forty. All she cared for was truth.
It seemed as if she were holding three threads. That game of Patience. The chatter of life around. Some deeper communion within. She was like a Marconi wire, all the time receiving vibrations others knew nothing of, though the waves played around all.
At her work she was very serious. There she battled for and throned with the gods—the conquering heroine. But in her play-time all the world was a joke and the joke began at 6 p.m. She felt deeply the tragedy of life. How little we have really learned in this existence. How little our much-striped-for attainments can possibly count. This because they are not based on anything in the divine spiral of ascent. They are mere tangents—flea jumps. She liked nonsense for a change, and never going out or taking any form of physical exercise, the evening gatherings were her only form of relaxation and diversion. Then she seemed to say with Disraeli: “I’m not thinking now, I am enjoying my-self.” She frolicked as in the château-park of her childhood. Let off steam in profane explosions. Rode on all the merry-go-rounds of the village fair and was her own Charlie Chaplin. Per-haps she was cruel. The dog tears the object he plays with. But she contradicted the saying that the great leader laughs never or seldom. The pendulum swings both ways. The world should not weep all the time.
Some left thinking they had passed an hour with the devil, but their vision was ever after clearer, their hearts more open. One of the worst enemies “knowledge” ever had, she carried little respect for the corpus dogmaticum and was indeed a saccageuse de rêves and pitiless in these evening gambols. Especially when some keen journalist or foxy professor thought he could play with her. He found a greater openness of mind than he had allowed for. I have seen her stop suddenly, strike her forehead with her fist, and cry: “What an old fool I am! Dear friend [she had never met him before perhaps] you are right and I am wrong. Forgive me and come to dinner to-morrow.” She might shake the rat, but for anything she took she more than gave. Her roars were only part of the game. She enjoyed the whipping, whichever side got it. We used to revel in her parry with the lean mental cross-examiner who had come to trap her. At such times she would put on that stupid look Loie Fuller uses so effectively, as if only a little brighter she might be called half-witted. Then, leading him to play out all his rope, she would regain her trenches step by step, dropping her bombs till she wiped up the floor with him! She forgave everything but stupidity. With that the gods them-selves contend in vain. She had the quick transition of the Oriental from radiant sunshine to convulsive storm. But there was nothing mental and evil in her tempests. With some a passion reveals undreamed-of depths of malignity. You never think the same of them again. She was the child who lays on the hearth-rug and screams and kicks. One picks it up, kisses, and all is as before.
Self-control is neither of animals nor of angels. She was both. Our respect for the artificial and the arbitrary was not for her. It would have stunted her powers, and it stunts ours, while perhaps keeping us more useful members of society. Her rages—tantrums one might better say—were purely animal and physical. She ruled by love not fear. The recipient of a blast might be shell-shocked for the moment. He soon found it was quite impersonal. She appreciated the real affection she aroused and expected her friends to understand her slabs of comic relief.
In her first public years she gave herself up to the charm of lifting veils, but as I have said, much was changed, for she realised that the more veils lifted the more secret do the mysteries become.
One Thursday evening I witnessed an explosion before her Esoteric devotees which should set at rest for ever her attitude towards vulgar mystery-making. The words are exact and never to be forgotten. They ring in my ears as if of yesterday. Some one had tried to recall the materialization, the yogamaya of earlier days. Blavatsky arose in her Isis robes, apoplectic, apocalyptic:—
“I beg of you never to repeat those stories in this circle. They have done me enough harm already. If at that time you had given my explanations instead of your impressions I should not stand before the world the old fool I do now. I told you they were tricks on the psychic plane, as the juggler performs his tricks on the material plane. But no, you wanted to make me out a goddess which I never pretended to be. I may as well let you know though that there were spiritual things happening too at that moment which passed right under your nose and you could not see them.”
Frank, brutal—Blavatsky!
Footnotes
- ↑ Portions of these reminiscences have appeared in The Herald of the Star, May 1916, January 1917.