THE SECRET DOCTRINE PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF MADAME BLAVATSKY
THE SECRET DOCTRINE PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF MADAME BLAVATSKY[1]
WELL do I remember the evening I first saw Mrs. Besant. One night I had taken some theosophists from Washington to visit the great seeress. She was sitting in seamless robe before her table. On the floor at her feet crouched a little grey woman who pressed one of the “card dealer’s” hands to her cheek, who only inclined at the introductions, who did not speak, whose name I did not catch. All the evening she held the hand as if this time the shipwrecked mariner was drawing force from the giant octopus to whose tentacle he clung. Walking home I happened to mention the simile.
“Do you know,” said Mrs. Coues, “that your little grey woman was the great Annie Besant?”
In Annie Besant Blavatsky found that power of union which Mrs. Besant possessed to such a marvellous degree and to which she could subordinate all her forces, unfascinated by the temptations of individuality. The world is full of great people dying in misery because they cannot do this. Mr. Gladstone told me Mrs. Besant was one of the finest orators he ever heard—men not excepted. Yet in the few evenings when Madame Blavatsky sat on the platform of the hall in St. John’s Wood and simply said, “No—no, Annie—that is not so,” one felt as if the mountain had spoken.
Sometimes in those days one encountered the beautiful Princess Helena Racovitza—still beautiful, a living Titian of ineffable charm, as when the now forgotten Lassalle duel thrilled all Europe and George Meredith wrote his “Tragic Comedians” around her. I had known her in America, so we met as old friends. “A Princess of a Thousand-and-one Nights,” said Blavatsky.
Sometimes I dined with the then Russian Bishop of London. He spoke of Madame with great affection: “She is too generous. She gives more than she has. When I go with any distress of our people she simply points to a drawer and says: ‘Take what you need if it is there!’” William T. Stead, W. Q. Judge, A. P. Sinnett, of course were often present. Edward Maitland listened with gravity. At home I had been given a most remarkable pamphlet printed for private circulation, and thought to have something to startle him with when I asked: “Did you ever see 'The Keys of the Creeds’?'” “Yes, I wrote it.”
Blavatsky said that every great religious mystery was unlocked with seven golden keys.
Anna Kingsford made a cult of the beautiful as well as the occult. I last met her with Mr. Maitland in St. Peter’s, Rome, on an Easter morning when the handkerchief of Santa Veronica was being shown above the high altar. This interesting pair of collaborateurs were both very distinguished looking. Anna was then near her doom and the waxen pallor of her face showed cameo like against the folds of her black lace mantilla.
The Ganges of Madame Blavatsy’s guests was an ethnological congress—Bengali Brahmins, Italian, French and Russian officers, patriarchs of the Greek Church, mystics of every land. All felt her penetration, her naturalness, her power, though the creed-bound literal Jonah-swallowing-the-whale order who were frightened of symbolic interpretation were uncomfortable in the light of her logic and deep-dredged knowledge.
It was in Thomas Carlyle’s house I heard my first “spirit-rappings.” The Carlyle house before it was turned into a museum. My portrait was being painted by the artist who used as a studio that little retreat with no windows the sage of Cheyne-Chelsea had built for himself on top of the house. I stopped on to dinner. One of the celebrated “Fox Sisters” was visiting the old lady of cats and emeralds who then occupied, and in the evening there was a séance. I don’t remember that the spirit of Thomas Carlyle appeared to remonstrate at this desecration, but Charlotte Cushman told me she always protected me. It was all very unconvincing, though the raps were extraordinary. The next morning I happened to be with Blavatsky at breakfast time and told her I had heard strange things the night before.
“What like?”
“Louder than I could crash my fist on a door.”
“Oh, that was Katie Fox!”
“Madam, is there anything spiritual in such manifestations?”
“Not the slightest. Her baby made them in the cradle. She does not even know herself. For money she professed to make public confession that the rappings were produced by cracking the joint of her big toe.”
“What were they then?”
“There are as many undiscovered forces in the human body as in external nature, but as yet we have no Edison of the body. She automatically controls or is controlled by one of these forces which the future may universally awaken and develop to some use. All possess them now in ignorance. There is nothing not common to all. As we are built on the same structure of bones and muscles, so the gamuts of thought and emotion are the same.”
“And your own phenomena?” I ventured.
Here was the chance for Cagliostro—I—young, impressionable, wanting to be duped. She did not drape the mantle of high priestess around her, drawing back with: “How dare you confound my divine powers with these vulgar mummeries. We have nothing in common.”
She replied simply: “Of the same order though different.”
“Were yours spiritual?”
“No, psychic, but on the material plane.”
I then questioned about certain strange impulses which often come over me. To return home suddenly, to let a dozen buses go by, then take a certain number. To cross the middle of a muddy street apparently without reason. How I am always saved in danger by a warning that sometimes arises to a scream. No! No! No! How one can argue with the promptings—no time to turn—impossible now—yet the warning persists—seems to plead—you know we have never sent you wrong—and yet even obeying perhaps nothing happens. If you had gone on your way something evil might have come. Such guidance cannot lead to wrong. Only good can be so far-reaching. The vibrations of harm clash and break in discord. All have these admonitions. Most do not trust, laugh down, disobey, till they no longer knock at the door.[2]
“Your astral bell of which we read so much?”
“The same category.”
“Why do you never now——?”
“I cannot—I am too old—the physical effort of concentration necessary to produce such vibration might kill me.”
“It is true that psychic powers are more closely allied to the physical than to the mental, and belong to youth as do all our talents. It is said that we do not originate after twenty-five years old. Later work is all repetition. Old-fogyism then begins. The poet dies young. Our Swinburnes give us nothing of value in their later years.
She was very cultured in all the arts, as high-class Russians always are. Even sad Maxim Gorky told me once that Russia was the only country having a cultured aristocracy—the others but here-and-there. Very few must be left now. Friends with whom she lived in the “Isis Unveiled” days say she was a wonderful musician, in bursts of savage improvisation like nothing else in the world, foreshadowing the Rimsky-Korsakoff school. She also painted and was excellent in caricatures and sketches which she used to sell to the New York papers when her father’s remittances (he always kept in touch with her during her wanderings) did not arrive in time or were spent the day they came. They said her room was piled with the MSS. of her forthcoming book. If the publishers pressed her and she got angry she would seize a sheaf regardless of sequence and pack it off to them, which may account for the apparent lack of continuity one occasionally finds.
The Countess Constance Wachtmeister presided over the household at Holland Park. A lovely woman of blonde-cendrée hair, and Lost-Lenore expression. She reminded me of Bulwer’s violet-velvet heroines. They kept open house if not Fechter’s and Boucicault’s eternal feast. No one ever saw such hospitality. With five or six in the family the table was spread for twenty. Once-invited-always-invited. One took any vacant seat without ceremony. Came in at any time. Left in the middle of a meal. Sat by some poor student during one course. Moved over beside a duchess for another, or with special delight finished the repast by “the old lady” herself. Cuisine vegetarienne, but no one would have known it, so rich and varied were the magical dishes. The platter of chicken-fricasse or the like, supplied for the carnivorous, was usually carried away untouched.
Commonly addressed as the Old Lady at home, for the public she liked best H. P. B. I could never say it. The meaninglessness of initials seemed not great enough for her. It was like calling Queen Victoria—“Vic.” She loved to catch at the picturesque and popular in words. We all do in foreign tongues. “Flapdoodle” thus became her special pet. It knocked people out of the ring so easily, and when some one gave her its real alliterative meaning she never tired of it—“Flapdoodle: the Food Fed to Fools.” She caught at each novel and rugged expression : mugwump—blatherskite—bamboozle—gyascutum—highcockolorum—used copiously and inappropriately till another came along, just as strangers in Paris pick up apache argot. She was once carried off to a modern problem-play which every one declared she must see, but sat solid-ivory to the Ibsenites of the then, untitled dramatist.
It did not matter much what covered her. She picked up the robe most convenient. Sometimes it was the seamless garment I have spoken of, which greatly became her. It envelopes everything, but requires skilful manipulation of its massive folds such as Ellen Terry gave to the draperies of Lady Macbeth with such-consummate style and art. Square spread, it seems a shapeless rectangle, but drops from chin to foot in lines which become classic in lifting the immense pieces which make the sleeves, and with her dropped to the floor, to be piled three or four times over the arms in most impressive fashion. If one had said the word impressive she would never have worn it again, but in this she was “immense”—like Rodin’s Balzac—like those formless Easter Island statues in the British Museum she often referred to, declaring them antediluvian, even to Lemurian origin.
She sometimes dwelt on that great mystery, the origin of the Aryan race. A picnic party of angels, not fallen but willing to fall, must have visited this planet. For it is a missing touch rather than a missing link that we should seek. They looked upon the daughters of man and found them fair. Loved a day and flew away. From that time divine light shone in savage eyes. Men rose and stood erect with sense of wings. They saw the star in the east and followed it.
She talked much, too, these Thursday evenings of the separation of the sexes, for the first, pre-Adamic spirit race which is described as falling into matter when the Elohim “gave them coats of skin” was bi-sexual. “The Lord made man. He made them male-and-female.” (This was long before the account of the creation story of Adam and Eve.) I remember how she would laugh as I used to say: “Yes, I understand that, Madame, but I am sure that when the cutting in two came the knife sometimes slipped. You are all a woman, but have more than your share too of man.” Somewhere a poor little creature wanders. A mere slice of humanity. We should not call him effeminate. He is merely demi-masculine. He is the left-over scrap of Blavatsky.
When the separate sex first came men did not know what to do with it. They caught great reptiles. Thence mammals which are really half man. That is why we seem to have such relation with them. Why our eyes look out of dogs and cows and deer. Why they love us in more or less degree and would cling to us though we beat them away.
Once at a Parisian garden-party I entered the cage of a lion-tamer on a wager. Afterwards a friend asked: “Why did you smile so when you gazed into the eyes of the lioness?” I nearly laughed at that lioness. She looked like Blavatsky. Her eyes were the eyes I saw when I said: “Now let all the devil in you shine out.” I almost expected her to turn—there is no devil in me. Those eyes were the eyes of Blavatsky—eternal—pitiless—loving.
Her own were amber flecked with gold and streaked with turquoise. Her hair ashy African wool. Her one real beauty her hands. Oriental hands with long subtle fingers which bent back till they almost touched her wrist. A sign of psychic pliancy.
A fashionable woman of New York who thought she highered higher thought by being really quite interested in it, once said to me: “I shall never invite Baba Bharati to a dinner party again—he snuffles.” The great ones often retain signs of their avatars of boar and tortoise, so she returned to her lower thought friends who did not snuffle.
The “culture” of most people was to our jogini only a joke. To their repetition of scarce-comprehended phrases she listened as would a Himalayan rishi. She knew they would say anything as they would wear anything thought at the moment to be proper, imagining themselves spiritual if repeating scraps of spiritual jargon.
One evening we were discussing that strange vision of Anna Kingsford about the burning of the library at Alexandria. One of the seven wonders of the ancient world, history declares it destroyed by iconoclastic Saracenic zeal, but the beautiful blonde-star-soul found an unknown reason for this holocaust. For years the framers of the new had been building from the seven hundred thousand accumulated manuscripts of the royal Ptolemys the hope to offer to the world. Co-ordinating the virtues—throwing out the faults of older faiths—then hurling the torch to destroy all evidence of former haloes and older Christs. Madame said it was and is still to-day a pious crime in the Roman Catholic church to remove such trace. In spirit with the famous answer of Caliph Omar: “If those Greek writings agree with the Koran they are useless and need not be preserved. If they disagree they are pernicious and should be destroyed.”
A little later I had a strange corroboration of this. Visiting Professor Magnusson at Cambridge University, that learned Icelander who used to accompany William Morris in his northern rambles, I surprised him one day writing an essay on a most wonderful subject—“The Man who Discovered the Edge.” An awakening so fraught with good and evil to mankind! Later he took me over the great college library and opened the cases holding their priceless volumes of ancient days. Asking if one were left alone with free access to such treasures: “Yes, if you are not a Roman Catholic.” How then? “Then you would be given a little table in the middle of the room by yourself, and watched all the time. A page might be torn out—a sentence changed—a single word erased—a drop of acid let fall to alter a turn of phrase if disagreeing with——”
Reverence was a broad facet of her nature, but to her Christian and Pagan were meaningless terms. Things were respected only when real in the sense of being fundamental, immutable, cosmic. If a cross shone to her on the faultless Parthenon of truth, it was because it was an eternal symbol which has existed for ever and not a modern invention. The esoteric meaning of God on His Throne meant only to her that man must build his temple in his own heart. She said the suffragettes could not be considered consistent till they put the Virgin Mary back in heaven.
She knew her Bible well, though to her it was only one of many sacred books, all sacred to her; for through her theosophy—god-wisdom or good-wisdom—she taught us to drop the finals from religions, and that little letter seems at last to be losing its grip. A deep student of universal analogies, some of her interpretations were electrical. The last words of Christ, “Eli! Eli! Lama Sabachthani,” a sorrow to many and which some make with George Moore a renunciation of his mission, she turned into a joy: “My God! My God! How Thou hast glorified me!” In most oriental languages vowels are left to the imagination or only indicated by easily-confused dots and dashes. Some overlooked or missing sign brought back the lost and precious significance.
Opinion varies as to the individual and the personal. She said all souls in essence and entity are alike. And declared them with equal rights and equal powers to be more different in a future state than here. This is quite possible. Every keyboard is alike. It is the music that varies. Varies in delight, not rivalry. Pre-eminence ever more pronounced. Angels and archangels. A spiritualist told me that Sarah Bernhardt is eagerly awaited in heaven. Blavatsky will always have her regnant place there. Here she was the keystone of an arch and felt her perilous position. G. K. Chesterton speaks of the “foundation stones on either side, which might fancy they were two buildings; but the stones nearest the keystone would know there was only one.” Those who lived near her realized all that her dominant power was building and unselfishly seeking to build. She would have enjoyed the wit of Chesterton, so like her own in vision and frankness, his: “In a universe without God there is not room enough for man”; “The funeral of God is always a premature burial.” With him she felt that snobbishness was in danger of becoming our only religion, that it has turned rich men into a mythology and changed the tragedy of choice into a tragedy of chance. She would have enjoyed too H. G. Wells, though she might have scarcely appreciated his juggling with the planets, feeling that an intrusion on the sports of her own realm. Cryptograms were writ for her on every flower and gem—the irised sphere of every drop of dew. Each chapter of the Secret Doctrine she went over and over again with us. To her it was an open book where all who flew might read.
To-day the crash of cathedrals would not have dismayed her. She knew that the universal awakening was soon to come. She accepted the ascending and the descending—the twin processions of the Milky Way whose streams of stars sweep in opposite directions, and so was deeply held by the foretelling by the Vedic seers of a new race to appear about this time, and which she felt to be already on the ascending arc.
It was in America she said the thrill would be first perceived. From the congeries of all Europe the streams had been poured into the melting-pot. The pure gold now flamed in the crucible. In far Western cradles the dawn had already come. Sub-races overlap without cataclysm. Some of the parents who bend over these cradles have vaguely felt premonitions and draw the new ones to them by their own longings. We all thrill with the rising of the sun; and will all have our part in the full light later on. Those who understand transmigration and reincarnation know that there are no such things as parents in the sense of creators, though none the less dear and closely related they and we may be. She said parents resemble children, not children parents.
These babes speak with a new note. They will experience new joys and lift themselves above ancestral tradition of sorrow. They are the race and soon will all close together in their beauty till we, now so proud, will be but mongrels of the past, the left over remnants, the plates of cold rice (as the Japanese say) of a former feast—morituri te salutamus.
This coming together will be the further awakening of god-consciousness, and the multiplex mind of the individual ego will then realize the experiences of previous births and profit by them. We are now working out Adam’s primal curse which was self-created and not of God. Man painted the terrible Cain picture of the Paris Luxembourg. The lessons of karma will have been learned. Every man shall be his own priest and fashion his own altar, and the “living Vedas” again return to earth. Maxim Gorky once told me real man has not yet appeared on this planet.
Those suddenly taken away in the late war—who have “gone west,” as the English Tommies say—to follow the sun and dawn, again we might interpret—have “flown to another tree,” which is the Indian warrior’s expression—will be speedily brought back to play their part, with greater power to guide and help in the new light which is coming to all and for all.
I saw him from you crucifix, and came with noiseless tread (Private J. B. Nicholson, who fell on the field July 12, 1915.) |
Footnotes
- ↑ Portions of these reminiscences have appeared in The Herald of the Star. May, 1916; January, 1917.
- ↑ See “My Escape from Paris,” Edmund Russell, Occult Review, Dec. 1916. “The Finding of the Jewel,” Edmund Russell, Occult Review, Feb. 1917. “Mr. Isaacs of Simla,” Edmund Russell, Occult Review, Mar. 1917. “More about Mr. Isaacs,” Edmund Russell, Occult Review. “Magic Weapons of India,” Edmund Russell, Occuly Review, Aug. 1918.