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Theosophy House
Incidents
in the Life
of
Madame Blavatsky
compiled
from information supplied by
her relatives and friends and edited by A P
Sinnett
The Secret Doctrine by H P Blavatsky
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The Theosophical Publishing House,
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
THE first edition of this book, published
in 1886, was issued during
Madame Blavatsky's lifetime as an indirect
protest against the cruel and
slanderous attack on her embodied in the
Report to the Committee of the
Psychical Research Society appointed to
investigate the phenomena connected with
the Theosophical Society. This Report was
very effectually answered at the time,
and the passages in my original book
especially relating to it are hardly worth
reproduction now. But the facts relating to
Madame Blavatsky's life which it
then dealt with are more interesting now
than ever, in view of the gigantic
development of the Theosophical Society; and
the original edition having been
long out of print, the present edition is
prepared to meet a widespread desire.
I need not now reproduce dissertations
which the original edition contained in
deprecation of the incredulity that still
held sway twenty-five years ago in
reference to the reality of occult
phenomena. A great change in this respect has
come over cultivated thinking within that
period, and appeals for tolerance on
behalf of those who give testimony
concerning occult super-psychical phenomena
of which they may have been witness are no
longer necessary.[6]
For the rest, the book is now republished
as written, no attempt having been
made to recast its language to suit the
present time, when the subject of the
memoir is no longer with us; but I have
added some notes where later events or
experience have seemed to claim them.
CONTENTS
Chapter Page
AUTHOR'S PREFACE 5
1CHILDHOOD 9
2MARRIAGE AND TRAVEL 39
3AT HOME IN
4MADAME DE JELIHOWSKY'S NARRATIVE66
5MADAME DE JELIHOWSKY'S NARRATIVE — continued87
6MADAME DE JELIHOWSKY'S NARRATIVE — continued 105
7FROM APPRENTICESHIP TO DUTY 121
8RESIDENCE IN AMERICA132
9ESTABLISHED IN INDIA169
10A VISIT TO EUROPE205
NOTE FOR THE PRESENT EDITION255
MADAME BLAVATSKY
CHAPTER 1
CHILDHOOD
QUOTING the authoritative statement of her
late uncle, General Fadeef,
made at my request in 1881, at a time when
he was Joint-Secretary of State in
the Home Department at
Blavatsky, to give the name at full length)
“ is, from her father's side, the
daughter of Colonel Peter Hahn, and
granddaughter of General Alexis Hahn von
Rottenstern Hahn (a noble family of
and she is, from her mother's side, the
daughter of Helene Fadeef, and
granddaughter of Privy Councillor Andrew
Fadeef and of the Princess Helene
Dolgorouky. She is the widow of the
Councillor of State, Nicephore Blavatsky,
late Vice-Governor of the
Mademoiselle Hahn, to use her family name
in referring to her childhood, was
born at Ekaterinoslaw, in the south of
proper German form of the name, and in
French writing or conversation the name,
as used by Russians, would be De Hahn, but
in its strictly Russian form the
prefix was generally dropped.[10]
For the following particulars concerning
the family I am indebted to some of its
present representatives who have taken an
interest in the preparation of these
memoirs.
“The Von Hahn family is well known in
belong to an old
Countess Ida Hahn-Hahn, the famous
authoress, with whose writings
well acquainted. Settling in
was married to the Countess Proêbstin,
who, after his death, married Nicholas
Wassiltchikof, the brother of the famous
Prince of that name. Mme. Blavatsky's
father left the military service with the
rank of a colonel after the death of
his first wife. He had been married en premières
noces to Mademoiselle H.
Fadeew, known in the literary world between
1830 and 1840 as an authoress — the
first novel-writer that had ever appeared
in
Zenaida R . . . , and who, although dying
before she was twenty-five, left some
dozen novels of the romantic school, most
of which have been translated into the
German language. In 1846 Colonel Hahn
married his second wife — a Baroness Von
Lange, by whom he had a daughter referred
to by Mme. Jelihowsky as ' little
Lisa' in the extracts here given from her
writings, published in St Petersburg.
On her mother's side Mme. Blavatsky is the
granddaughter of Princess Dolgorouky,
with whose death the elder line of that
family became extinct in Russia. Thus
her maternal ancestors belong to the oldest
families of the empire, since they
are the direct descendants of the Prince or
Grand Duke Rurik, the first ruler
called to govern Russia. Several ladies of
that family belonged to the Imperial
house, becoming Czarinas (Czaritiza) by
marriage. For a Princess Dolgorouky
(Maria Nikitishna) had been married to the
grandfather of Peter the Great, the
Czar Michael Fedorovitch, the first
reigning Roman of; another, the Princess
Catherine Alexeévna, was on the
[11] eve of her marriage with Czar Peter
the II when he died suddenly before the
ceremony.
“A strange fatality seems always to have
persecuted this family in connection
with England; and its greatest vicissitudes
have been in some way associated
with that country. Several of its members
died, and others fell into political
disgrace, as they were on their way to
London. The last and most interesting of
all is the tragedy connected with the
Prince Sergeéy Gregoreevitch Dolgorouky,
Mme. Blavatsky's grandmother's grandfather,
who was ambassador in Poland. At the
advent of the Archduchess Anne of Courlang
to the throne of Russia, owing to
their opposition to her favourite of
infamous memory, the Chancellor Biron, many
of the highest families were imprisoned or
exiled; others put to death and their
wealth confiscated. Among these, such fate
befell the Prince Sergèey Dolgorouky.
He was sent in exile to Berezof (Siberia)
without any explanation, and his
private fortune, that consisted of 200,000
serfs, was confiscated. His two
little sons were, the elder placed with a
village smith as an apprentice, the
younger condemned to become a simple
soldier, and sent to Azof. Eight years
later the Empress Anne laxnovna recalled
the exiled father, pardoned him, and
sent him as ambassador to London. Knowing
Biron well, however, the prince sent
to the Bank of England 100,000 roubles to
be left untouched for a century,
capital and accumulated interest, to be
distributed after that period to his
direct descendants. His presentiment proved
correct. He had not yet reached
Novgorod, on his way to England, when he
was seized and put to death by
'quartering' (cut in four). When the Empress
Elizabeth, Peter the Great's
daughter, came to the throne next, her
first care was to undo the great wrongs
perpetrated by her predecessor through her
cruel and crafty favourite Biron.
Among other exiles the two sons and heirs
of Prince Sergeéy were recalled, their
title restored, and their property ordered
to be given back. This, however,
instead of being 200,000 serfs, had
dwindled down to only 8000. The younger son,
after a youth of extreme misery and [12]
hardship, became a monk, and died
young. The elder married a Princess
Romadanovsky; and his son, Prince Paul, Mme.
Blavatsky's great-grandfather, named while
yet in his cradle a Colonel of the
Guards by the Emperor, married a Countess
du Plessy, the daughter of a noble
French Huguenot family, emigrated from
France to Russia. Her father had found
service at the Court of the Empress
Catherine II where her mother was the
favourite dame d'honneur.
“The receipt of the Bank of England for
the sum of 100,000 roubles, a sum that
at the end of the term of one hundred years
had grown to immense proportions,
had been handed by a friend of the
politically murdered prince to the grandson
of the latter, the Prince Paul Dolgorouky.
It was preserved by him with other
family documents at Marfovka, a large
family property in the government of
Penja, where the old prince lived and died
in 1837. But the document was vainly
searched for by the heirs after his death ;
it was nowhere to be found. To their
great horror further research brought to light
the fact that it must have been
burnt, together with the residence, in a
great fire that had some time previous
destroyed nearly the whole village. Having
lost his sight in a paralytic stroke
some years previous to his demise, the
octogenarian prince, old and ill, had
been kept in ignorance of the loss of the
most important of his family
documents. This was a crushing misfortune,
that left the heirs bereft of their
contemplated millions. Many were the
attempts made to come to some compromise
with the bank, but to no purpose. It was
ascertained that the deposit had been
received at the bank, but some mistake in
the name had been made, and then the
bank demanded very naturally the receipt
delivered about the middle of the last
century. In short, the millions disappeared
for the Russian heirs. Mme.
Blavatsky has thus in her veins the blood
of three nations — the Slavonian, the
German, and the French.”
The year of Mademoiselle Hahn's birth,
1831, was fatal for Russia, as for all
Europe, owing to the first visit of the
cholera, that terrible plague that
decimated from [13] 1830 to 1832 in turn
nearly every town of the
continent, and carried away a large part of
its populations. Her birth was
quickened by several deaths in the house.
She was ushered into the world amid
coffins and desolation. The following
narrative is composed from the family
records :—
“Her father was then in the army,
intervals of peace after Russia's war with
Turkey in 1829 being filled with
preparations for new fights. The baby was born
on the night between July 30 and 31 — weak
and apparently no denizen of this
world. A hurried baptism had to be resorted
to, therefore, lest the child died
with the burden of original sin on her
soul. The ceremony of baptism in
'orthodox' Russia is attended with all the
paraphernalia of lighted tapers, and
'pairs' of godmothers and godfathers, every
one of the spectators and actors
being furnished with consecrated wax
candles during the whole proceedings.
Moreover, everyone has to stand during the
baptismal rite, 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 room selected for the
ceremony in the family mansion was large, but
the crowd of devotees eager to
witness it was still larger. Behind the
priest officiating in the centre of the
room, with his assistants, in their golden
robes and long hair, stood the three
pairs of sponsors and the whole household
of vassals and serfs. The child-aunt
of the baby — only a few years older than
her niece aged twenty-four hours, —
placed as ' proxy ' for an absent relative,
was in the first row immediately
behind the venerable protopope. Feeling
nervous and tired of standing still for
nearly an hour, the child settled on the
floor, unperceived by the elders, and
became probably drowsy in the overcrowded
room on that hot July day. The
ceremony was nearing its close. The
sponsors were just in the act of renouncing
the Evil One and his deeds, a renunciation
emphasised in the Greek Church by
thrice spitting upon the invisible enemy,
when the little lady, toying with her
lighted taper at the feet of the crowd,
[14] inadvertently set fire to the
long flowing robes of the priest, no one
remarking the accident until it was too
late. The result was an immediate
conflagration, during which several persons —
chiefly the old priest — were severely
burnt. That was another bad omen,
according to the superstitious beliefs of
orthodox Russia; and the innocent
cause of it — the future Mme. Blavatsky —
was doomed from that day in the eyes
of all the town to an eventful life, full
of vicissitude and trouble.
“Perhaps on account of an unconscious
apprehension to the same effect, the
child became the pet of her grandparents
and aunts, and was greatly spoiled in
her childhood, knowing from her infancy no
other authority than that of her own
whims and will. From her earliest years she
was brought up in an atmosphere of
legends and popular fancy. As far back as
her remembrances go, she was possessed
with a firm belief in the existence of an
invisible world of supermundane and
sub-mundane spirits and beings inextricably
blended with the life of each
mortal. The 'Domovoy' (house goblin) was no
fiction for her, any more than for
her nurses and Russian maids. This
invisible landlord — attached to every house
and building, who watches over the sleeping
household, keeps quiet, and works
hard the whole year round for the family,
cleaning the horses every night,
brushing and plaiting their tails and
manes, protecting the cows and cattle from
the witch, with whom he is at eternal feud
— had the affections of the child
from the first. The Domovoy is to be
dreaded only on March the 30th, the only
day in the year when, owing to some
mysterious reasons, he becomes mischievous
and very nervous, when he teases the
horses, thrashes the cows and disperses
them in terror, and causes the whole
household to be dropping and breaking
everything, stumbling and falling that
whole day — every prevention
notwithstanding. The plates and glasses
smashed, the inexplicable disappearance
of hay and oats from the stables, and every
family unpleasantness in general,
are usually attributed to the fidgetiness
and nervous excitement of the Domovoy.
Alone, those born on the night between July
30th and 31st are exempt from his
freaks. It is from the philosophy [15] of
her Russian nursery that
Mademoiselle Hahn learned the cause of her
being called by the serfs the
Sedmitchka, an untranslatable term, meaning
one connected with number Seven; in
this particular case, referring to the
child having been born on the seventh
month of the year, on the night between the
30th and 31st of July — days so
conspicuous in Russia in the annals of
popular beliefs with regard to witches
and their doings. Thus the mystery of a
certain ceremony enacted in great
secrecy for years during July the 30th, by
the nurses and household, was
divulged to her as soon as her
consciousness could realise the importance of the
initiation. She learned even in her
childhood the reason why, on that day, she
was carried about in her nurse's arms
around the house, stables, and cow-pen,
and made personally to sprinkle the four
corners with water, the nurse repeating
all the while some mystic sentences. These
may be found to this day in the
ponderous volumes of Sacharof's ' Russian
Demonology,' [The Traditions of the
Russian People by J Sacharof in seven
volumes, embracing popular literature,
beliefs, magic, witchcraft, the sub-mundane
spirits, ancient customs and rites,
songs and charms, for the last 1000 years.]
a laborious work that necessitated
over thirty years of incessant travelling
and scientific researches in the old
chronicles of the Slavonian lands, and that
won to the author the appellation of
the Russian Grimm.”
Born in the very heart of the country which
the Roussalka (the Undine) has
chosen for her abode ever since creation —
reared on the shores of the blue
Dnieper, that no Cossack of Southern
Ukraine ever crosses without preparing
himself for death — the child's belief in
these lovely green-haired nymphs was
developed before she had heard of anything
else. The catechism of her Ukraine
nurses passed wholly into her soul, and she
found all these weird poetical
beliefs corroborated to her by what she
saw, or fancied she saw, herself around
her ever since her earliest babyhood.
Legends seem to have [16] lingered in
her family, preserved by the recollections
of the older servants, of events
connected with such beliefs, and they
inspired the early tyranny she was taught
to exercise, as soon as she understood the
powers that were attributed to her by
her nurses. The sandy shores of the rapid
Dnieper encircling Ekaterinoslaw, with
their vegetation of sallows, were her
favorite rambling place, Once there, she
saw a roussalka in every willow tree,
smiling and beckoning to her; and full of
her own invulnerability, impressed upon her
mind by her nurses, she was the only
one who approached those shores fearless
and daring. The child felt her
superiority and abused it. The little
four-year-old girl demanded that her will
should be implicitly recognized by her
nurse, lest she should escape from her
side, and thus leave her unprotected, to be
tickled to death by the beautiful
and wicked roussalka, who would no longer
be restrained by the presence of one
whom she dared not approach. Of course her parents
knew nothing of this side of
the education of their eldest born, and
learned it too late to allow such
beliefs to be eradicated from her mind. It
is only after a tragic event that
would otherwise have passed hardly noticed
by the family, that a foreign
governess was thought of. In one of her
walks by the river side a boy about
fourteen who was dragging the child's
carriage incurred her displeasure by some
slight disobedience. “I will have you
tickled to death by a roussalka ! ”
she screamed. “There's one coming down
from that tree . . . here she comes . .
. See, see!” Whether the boy saw the dreaded nymph or
not, he took to his
heels, and, the angry commands of the nurse
notwithstanding, disappeared along
the sandy banks leading homeward. After
much grumbling the old nurse was
constrained to return home alone with her
charge, [17] determined to have
“Pavlik” punished. But the poor lad was never seen alive
again. He ran away
to his village, and his body was found several
weeks later by fishermen, who
caught him in their nets. The verdict of
the police was “drowning by
accident”. It was thought that the lad, having sought to cross
some shallow
pools left from the spring inundations, had
got into one of the many sand pits
so easily transformed by the rapid Dnieper
into whirlpools. But the verdict of
the horrified household — of the nurses and
servants — pointed to no accidental
death, but to the one that had occurred in
consequence of the child having
withdrawn from the boy her mighty
protection, thus delivering the victim to some
roussalka on the watch. The displeasure of
the family at this foolish gossip was
enhanced when they found the supposed
culprit gravely corroborating the charge,
and maintaining that it was she herself who
had handed over her disobedient serf
to her faithful servants the water-nymphs.
Then it was that an English governess
was brought upon the scene.
Miss Augusta Sophia Jeffries did not
believe in the roussalkas or the domovoys;
but this negative merit was insufficient to
invest her with a capacity for
managing the intractable pupil consigned to
her care. She gave up her task in
despair, and the child was again left to
her nurses till about six years old,
when she and her still younger sister were
sent to live with their father. For
the next two or three years the little
girls were chiefly taken care of by their
father's orderlies; the elder, at all
events, greatly preferring these to their
female attendants. They were taken about
with the troops to which their father
was attached, and were petted on all sides
as the enfants du régiment.
Her mother died when Mademoiselle Hahn was
still a child, [18] and at about
eleven years of age she was taken charge of
altogether by her grandmother, and
went to live at Saratow, where her
grandfather was civil governor, having
previously exercised similar authority in
Astrachan. She speaks of having at
this time been alternately petted and
punished, spoiled and hardened; but we may
well imagine that she was a difficult child
to manage on any uniform system.
Moreover, her health was always uncertain
in childhood; she was “ever sick and
dying”, as she expresses it herself, a sleep walker, and
remarkable for
various abnormal psychic peculiarities, set
down by her orthodox nurses of the
Greek Church to possession by the devil, so
that she was drenched during
childhood, as she often says, in enough
holy water to have floated a ship, and
exorcised by priests who might as well have
been talking to the wind for all the
effect they produced on her.
Some notes concerning her childhood have
been furnished, for the service of the
present memoir, by her aunt, a lady who, as
well as Madame Jelihowsky, is known
personally to myself and to many others of
Mme. Blavatsky's friends in Europe.
Her strange excitability of temperament,
still one of her most marked
characteristics, was already manifest in
her earliest youth. Even then she was
liable to ungovernable fits of passion, and
showed a deep-rooted disposition to
rebel against every kind of authority or
control. Her warm-hearted impulses of
kindliness and affection, however, endeared
her to her relatives in childhood,
much as they have operated to obliterate
the irritation caused sometimes by her
want of self-control in regard to the minor
affairs of life with the friends of
a later period. It is justly asserted by
the memoranda before me, “she has no
malice in her nature, no lasting resentment
even against those who [19]
have wronged her, and her true kindness of
heart bears no permanent traces of
momentary disturbances”.
“We who know Madame Blavatsky well”, writes her aunt, speaking for herself
and for another relative who had joined
with her in the preparation of the notes
I am now dealing with — “we who know her
now in age can speak of her with
authority, not merely from idle report.
From her earliest childhood she was
unlike any other person. Very lively and
highly gifted, full of humour, and of
most remarkable daring; she struck everyone
with astonishment by her self-willed
and determined actions. Thus in her
earliest youth and hardly married, she
disposed of herself in an angry mood,
abandoning her country, without the
knowledge of her relatives or husband, who,
unfortunately, was a man in every
way unsuited to her, and more than thrice
her age. Those who have known her from
her childhood would — had they been born
thirty years later — have also known
that it was a fatal mistake to regard and
treat her as they would any other
child. Her restless and very nervous
temperament, one that led her into the most
unheard of, un-girlish mischief; her
unaccountable — especially in those days —
attraction to, and at the same time fear
of, the dead; her passionate love and
curiosity for everything unknown and
mysterious, weird and fantastical; and,
foremost of all, her craving for
independence and freedom of action — a craving
that nothing and nobody could control; all
this, combined with an exuberance of
imagination and a wonderful sensitiveness,
ought to have warned her friends that
she was an exceptional creature, to be
dealt with and controlled by means as
exceptional. The slightest contradiction
brought on an outburst of passion,
often a fit of convulsions. Left alone with
no one near her to impede her
liberty of action, no hand to chain her
down or stop her natural impulses, and
thus arouse to fury her inherent combativeness,
she would spend hours and days
quietly whispering, as people thought, to
herself, and narrating, with no one
near her, in some dark corner, marvellous
tales of travels in bright stars and
other worlds, which her governess [20]
described as 'profane gibberish';
but no sooner would the governess give her
a distinct order to do this or the
other thing, than her first impulse was to
disobey. It was enough to forbid her
doing a thing to make her do it, come what
would. Her nurse, as indeed other
members of the family, sincerely believed
the child possessed 'the seven spirits
of rebellion'. Her governesses were martyrs
to their task, and never succeeded
in bending her resolute will, or
influencing by anything but kindness her
indomitable, obstinate, and fearless
nature.
“Spoilt in her childhood by the adulation
of dependents and the devoted
affection of relatives, who forgave all to
' the poor, motherless child' — later
on, in her girlhood, her self-willed temper
made her rebel openly against the
exigencies of society. She would submit to
no sham respect for or fear of the
public opinion. She would ride at fifteen,
as she had at ten, any Cossack horse
on a man's saddle! She would bow to no one,
as she would recede before no
prejudice or established conventionality.
She defied all and everyone. As in her
childhood, all her sympathies and
attractions went out towards people of the
lower class. She had always preferred to
play with her servants' children rather
than with her equals, and as a child had to
be constantly watched for fear she
should escape from the house to make
friends with ragged street boys. So, later
on in life, she continued to be drawn in
sympathy towards those who were in a
humbler station of life than herself, and
showed as pronounced indifference to
the ' nobility ' to which by birth she
belonged.”
The five years passed in safety with her
grandparents seem to have had an
important influence on her future life.
Miss Jeffries had left the family; the
children had another English governess, a
timid young girl to whom none of her
pupils paid any attention, a Swiss
preceptor, and a French governess, who had
gone through remarkable adventures in her
youth. Madame Henriette Peigneur was a
distinguished beauty in the days of the
[21] first French Revolution. Her
favorite narratives to the children
consisted in the description of those days
of glory and excitement when, chosen by the
“Phrygian red-caps”, the
citoyens rouges of Paris to represent in
the public festivals the Goddess of
Liberty, she had been driven in triumph,
day after day, along the streets of the
grande ville in glorious processions. The
narrator herself was now a weird old
woman, bent down by age, and looked more
like the traditional Fée Carabosse than
anything else. But her eloquence was
moving, and the young girls that formed her
willing audience were greatly excited by
the glowing descriptions — most of all
the heroine of these memoirs. She declared
then and there that she meant to be a
“Goddess of Liberty” all her life. The old governess was a
strange mixture
of severe morality and of that brilliant
flippancy that characterises almost
every Parisienne to her deathbed unless she
is a bigot — which Mme. Peigneur was
not. But while her old husband — the
charming, witty, kind-hearted Sieur
Peigneur, ever ready to screen the young
girls from his wife's pénitences and
severity — taught them the merriest songs
of Béranger, his best bons mots and
anecdotes, his wife had no such luck with
her lesson books. The opening of Noël
and Chopsal became generally the signal for
an escape to the wild woods that
surrounded the large villa occupied by
Mademoiselle Hahn's grandparents during
the summer months. It was only when roaming
at leisure in the forest, or riding
some unmanageable horse on a Cossack's
saddle, that the girl felt perfectly
happy.
For the following interesting reminiscence
of this period I am indebted to Mme.
Jelihowsky: —
“The great country mansion (datche)
occupied by us at Saratow was an old and
vast building, full of subterranean
galleries, long abandoned passages, turrets,
[22] and most weird nooks and corners. It
had been built by a family called
Pantchoolidzef, several generations of whom
had been governors at Saratow and
Penja — the richest proprietors and
noblemen of the latter province. It looked
more like a mediaeval ruined castle than a
building of the past century. The man
who took care of the estate for the
proprietors — of a type now happily rare,
who regarded the serfs as something far
lower and less precious than his hounds
— had been known for his cruelty and
tyranny, and his name was a synonym for a
curse. The legends told of his ferocious
and despotic temper, of unfortunate
serfs beaten by him to death, and
imprisoned for months in dark subterranean
dungeons, were many and thrilling. They
were repeated to us mostly by Mme.
Peigneur, who had been for the last
twenty-five years the governess of three
generations of children in the
Pantchoolidzef family. Our heads were full of
stories about the ghosts of the martyred
serfs, seen promenading in chains
during nocturnal hours; of the phantom of a
young girl, tortured to death for
refusing her love to her old master, which
was seen floating in and out of the
little iron-bound door of the subterranean
passage at twilight; and other
stories that left us children and girls in
an agony of fear whenever we had to
cross a dark room or passage. We had been
permitted to explore, under the
protection of half-a-dozen male servants
and a quantity of torches and lanterns,
those awe-inspiring 'Catacombs'. True, we
had found in them more broken wine
bottles than human bones, and had gathered
more cobwebs than iron chains, but
our imagination suggested ghosts in every
flickering shadow on the old damp
walls. Still Helen (Mme. Blavatsky) would
not remain satisfied with one solitary
visit, nor with a second either. She had
selected the uncanny region as a
Liberty Hall, and a safe refuge where she
could avoid her lessons. A long time
passed before her secret was found out, and
whenever she was found missing, a
deputation of strong-bodied servant-men, headed
by the gendarme on service in
the Governor's Hall, was despatched in
search of her, as it required no less
than one who was not a serf and feared her
little to [23] bring her
up-stairs by force. She had erected for
herself a tower out of old broken chairs
and tables in a corner under an iron-barred
window, high up in the ceiling of
the vault, and there she would hide for
hours, reading a book known as Solomon's
Wisdom, in which every kind of popular
legend was taught. Once or twice she
could hardly be found in those damp
subterranean corridors, having in her
endeavours to escape detection lost her way
in the labyrinth. For all this she
was not in the least daunted or repentant,
for, as she assured us, she was never
there alone, but in the company of ' beings
' she used to call her little '
hunch-backs ' and playmates.
“Intensely nervous and sensitive,
speaking loud, and often walking in her
sleep, she used to be found at nights in
the most out-of-way places, and to be
carried back to her bed profoundly asleep.
Thus she was missed from her room one
night when she was hardly twelve, and, the
alarm having been given, she was
searched for and found pacing one of the
long subterranean corridors, evidently
in deep conversation with someone invisible
for all but herself. She was the
strangest girl one has ever seen, one with
a distinct dual nature in her, that
made one think there were two beings in one
and the same body; one mischievous,
combative, and obstinate — everyway
graceless; the other as mystical and
metaphysically inclined as a seeress of
Prevorst. No schoolboy was ever more
uncontrollable or full of the most
unimaginable and daring pranks and
espiègleries than she was. At the
same time, when the paroxysm of
mischief-making had run its course, no old
scholar could be more assiduous in
his study, and she could not be prevailed
to give up her books, which she would
devour night and day as long as the impulse
lasted. The enormous library of her
grandparents seemed then hardly large
enough to satisfy her cravings.
“Attached to the residence there was a
large abandoned garden, a park rather,
full of ruined kiosks, pagodas, and
out-buildings, which, running up hillward,
ended in a virgin forest, whose hardly
visible paths were covered knee-deep with
moss, and with thickets in it which perhaps
no human foot had disturbed for
centuries. [24] It was reputed the
hiding-place for all the runaway
criminals and deserters, and it was there
that Helen used to take refuge, when
the ' catacombs' had ceased to assure her
safety.”
Her strange temperament and character are
thus described in a work called
Juvenile Recollections Compiled for my
Children, by Mme. Jelihowsky, a thick
volume of charming stories selected by the
author from the diary kept by herself
during her girlhood: —
“Fancy, or that which we all regarded in
these days as fancy, was developed in
the most extraordinary way, and from her
earliest childhood, in my sister Helen.
For hours at times she used to narrate to
us younger children, and even to her
seniors in years, the most incredible
stories with the cool assurance and
conviction of an eye-witness, and one who
knew what she was talking about. When
a child, daring and fearless in everything
else, she got often scared into fits
through her own hallucinations. She felt
certain of being persecuted by what she
called ' the terrible glaring eyes,'
invisible to everyone else, and often
attributed by her to the most inoffensive
inanimate objects; an idea that
appeared quite ridiculous to the
bystanders. As to herself, she would shut her
eyes tight during such visions, and run
away to hide from the ghostly glances
thrown on her by pieces of furniture or
articles of dress, screaming
desperately, and frightening the whole
household. At other times she would be
seized with fits of laughter, explaining
them by the amusing pranks of her
invisible companions. She found these in
every dark corner, in every bush of the
thick park that surrounded our villa during
the summer months ; while in winter,
when all our family emigrated back to town,
she seemed to meet them again in the
vast reception rooms of the first floor,
entirely deserted from midnight till
morning, Every locked door notwithstanding,
Helen was found several times during
the night hours in those dark apartments in
a half-conscious state, sometimes
fast asleep, [25] and unable to say how she
got there from our common
bedroom on the top story. She disappeared
in the same mysterious manner in
daytime also. Searched for, called and
hunted after, she would be often
discovered, with great pains, in the most
unfrequented localities; once it was
in the dark loft, under the very roof, to
which she was traced, amid pigeons'
nests, and surrounded by hundreds of those
birds. She was ' putting them to
sleep ' (according to the rules taught in
Solomon's Wisdom], as she explained.
[And, indeed pigeons were found if not
asleep still unable to move, and as
though stunned in her lap at such times.]
At other times behind the gigantic
cupboards that contained our grandmother's
zoological collection — the old
princess's museum of natural history having
achieved a wide renown in Russia in
those days, — surrounded by relics of
fauna, flora, and historical antiquities,
amid antediluvian bones of stuffed animals
and monstrous birds, the deserter
would be found, after hours of search, in
deep conversations with seals and
stuffed crocodiles. If one could believe
Helen, the pigeons were cooing to her
interesting fairy tales, while birds and
animals, whenever in solitary
tête-à-tête with
her, amused her with interesting stories, presumably from their
own autobiographies. For her all nature seemed
animated with a mysterious life
of its own. She heard the voice of every
object and form, whether organic or
inorganic; and claimed consciousness and
being, not only for some mysterious
powers visible and audible for herself
alone in what was to everyone else empty
space, but even for visible but inanimate
things such as pebbles, mounds, and
pieces of decaying phosphorescent timber.
“With a view of adding specimens to the
remarkable entomological collection of
our grandmother, as much as for our own
instruction and pleasure, diurnal as
well as nocturnal expeditions were often
arranged. We preferred the latter, as
they were more exciting, and had a
mysterious charm to us about them. We knew of
no greater enjoyment. Our delightful
travels in the neighbouring woods would
last from 9 P.M. till I, and often 2, [26]
o'clock A.M. We prepared for
them with an earnestness that the Crusaders
may have experienced when setting
out to fight the infidel and dislodge the
Turk from Palestine. The children of
friends and acquaintances in town were
invited — boys and girls from twelve to
seventeen, and two or three dozen of young
serfs of both sexes, all armed with
gauze nets and lanterns, as we were
ourselves, strengthened our ranks. In the
rear followed a dozen of strong grown-up
servants, cossacks, and even a gendarme
or two, armed with real weapons for our
safety and protection. It was a merry
procession as we set out on it, with
beating hearts, and bent with unconscious
cruelty on the destruction of the beautiful
large night-butterflies for which
the forests of the Volga province are so
famous. The foolish insects, flying in
masses, would soon cover the glasses of our
lanterns, and ended their ephemeral
lives on long pins and cork burial grounds
four inches square. But even in this
my eccentric sister asserted her
independence. She would protect and save from
death all those dark butterflies — known as
sphynxes —whose dark fur-covered
heads and bodies bore the distinct images
of a white human skull. ' Nature
having imprinted on each of them the
portrait of the skull of some great dead
hero, these butterflies are sacred, and
must not be killed,' she said, speaking
like some heathen fetish-worshipper. She
got very angry when we would not listen
to her, but would go on chasing those '
dead heads' as we called them; and
maintained that by so doing we disturbed
the rest of the defunct persons whose
skulls were imprinted on the bodies of the
weird insects.
“No less interesting were our day-travels
into regions more or less distant.
At about ten versts from the Governor's
villa there was a field, an extensive
sandy tract of land, evidently once upon a
time the bottom of a sea or a great
lake, as its soil yielded petrified relics
of fishes, shells, and teeth of some
(to us) unknown monsters. Most of these
relics were broken and mangled by time,
but one could often find whole stones of
various sizes on which were imprinted
figures of fishes and plants and animals of
kinds now wholly extinct, but [
27] which proved their undeniable
antediluvian origin. The marvellous and
sensational stories that we, children and
schoolgirls, heard from Helen during
that epoch were countless. I well remember
when stretched at full length on the
ground, her chin reclining on her two
palms, and her two elbows buried deep in
the soft sand, she used to dream aloud and
tell us of her visions, evidently
clear, vivid, and as palpable as life to
her! . . . How lovely the description
she gave us of the submarine life of all
those beings, the mingled remains of
which were now crumbling to dust around us.
How vividly she described their past
fights and battles on the spot where she
lay, assuring us she saw it all; and
how minutely she drew on the sand with her
finger the fantastic forms of the
long-dead sea-monsters, and made us almost
see the very colours of the fauna and
flora of those dead regions. While
listening eagerly to her descriptions of the
lovely azure waves reflecting the sunbeams
playing in rainbow light on the
golden sands of the sea bottom, of the
coral reefs and stalactite caves, of the
sea-green grass mixed with the delicate
shining anemones, we fancied we felt
ourselves the cool, velvety waters
caressing our bodies, and the latter
transformed into pretty and frisky
sea-monsters; our imagination galloped off
with her fancy to a full oblivion of the
present reality. She never spoke in
later years as she used to speak in her
childhood and early girlhood. The stream
of her eloquence has dried up, and the very
source of her inspiration is now
seemingly lost! She had a strong power of
carrying away her audiences with her,
of making them see actually, if even
vaguely, that which she herself saw. . . .
Once she frightened all of us youngsters
very nearly into fits. We had just been
transported into a fairy world, when
suddenly she changed her narrative from the
past to the present tense, and began to ask
us to imagine that all that which
she had told us of the cool, blue waves
with their dense populations was around
us, only invisible and intangible, so far.
. . . 'Just fancy! A miracle!' she
said ; ' the earth suddenly opening, the
air condensing around us and rebecoming
sea waves.....Look, look there, they begin
already appearing and moving. [
28] We are surrounded with water, we are
right amid the mysteries and the
wonders of a submarine world ! . . .'
“She had started from the sand, and was
speaking with such conviction, her
voice had such a ring of real amazement,
horror, and her childish face wore such
a look of a wild joy and terror at the same
time, that when, suddenly covering
her eyes with both hands, as she used to do
in her excited moments, she fell
down on the sand screaming at the top of
her voice, 'There's the wave . . . it
has come! . . . The sea, the sea, we are
drowning !' . . . Every one of us fell
down on our faces, as desperately screaming
and as fully convinced that the sea
had engulfed us, and that we were no more!
. .
“It was her delight to gather around
herself a party of us younger children at
twilight, and, after taking us into the
large dark museum, to hold us there,
spell-bound, with her weird stories. Then
she narrated to us the most
inconceivable tales about herself; the most
unheard of adventures of which she
was the heroine, every night, as she
explained. Each of the stuffed animals in
the museum had taken her in turn into its
confidence, had divulged to her the
history of its life in previous
incarnations or existences. Where had she heard
of reincarnation, or who could have taught
her anything of the superstitious
mysteries of metempsychosis, in a Christian
family ? Yet she would stretch
herself on her favourite animal, a gigantic
stuffed seal, and caressing its
silvery, soft white skin, she would repeat
to us his adventures, as told to her
by himself, in such glowing colours and
eloquent style, that even grown-up
persons found themselves interested
involuntarily in her narratives. They all
listened to, and were carried away by the
charm of her recitals, the younger
audience believing every word she uttered.
Never can I forget the life and
adventures of a tall white flamingo, who
stood in unbroken contemplation behind
the glass panes of a large cupboard, with
his two scarlet-lined wings widely
opened as though ready to take flight, yet
chained to his prison cell. He had
been ages ago, she told us, no bird, but a
real man. He had committed fearful
crimes and a murder, for which a great
genius had changed him into [29] a
flamingo, a brainless bird, sprinkling his
two wings with the blood of his
victims, and thus condemning him to wander
for ever in deserts and marshes. . .
.
“I dreaded that flamingo fearfully. At
dusk, whenever I chanced to pass
through the museum to say goodnight to our
grandmother, who rarely left her
study, an adjoining room, I tried to avoid
seeing the blood-covered murderer by
shutting my eyes and running quickly by.
“If Helen loved to tell us stories, she
was still more passionately fond of
listening to other people's fairy tales.
There was, among the numerous servants
of the Fadeef family, an old woman, an
under-nurse, who was famous for telling
them. The catalogue of her tales was
endless, and her memory retained every idea
connected with superstition. During the
long summer twilights on the green
grassy lawn under the fruit trees of the
garden, or during the still longer
winter evenings, crowding around the
flaming fire of our nursery-room, we used
to cling to the old woman, and felt
supremely happy whenever she could be
prevailed upon to tell us some of those
popular fairy tales, for which our
northern country is so famous. The
adventures of' Ivan Zarewitch,' of' Kashtey
the Immortal,' of the 'Gray-Wolf', the
wicked magician travelling in the air in
a self-moving seive; or those of
Meletressa, the Fair Princess, shut up in a
dungeon until the Zarevitch unlocks its
prison door with a gold key, and
liberates her — delighted us all. Only,
while all we children forgot those tales
as easily as we had learned them, Helen
never either forgot the stories or
consented to recognise them as fictions.
She thoroughly took to heart all the
troubles of the heroes, and maintained that
all their most wonderful adventures
were quite natural. People could change
into animals and take any form they
liked, if they only knew how; men could
fly, if they only wished so firmly. Such
wise men had existed in all ages, and
existed even in our own days, she assured
us, making themselves known, of course,
only to those who were worthy of knowing
and seeing them, and who believed in,
instead of laughing at, them. . . .
“As a proof of what she said, she pointed
to an old man, a centenarian, who
lived not far from the villa, in [30] a
wild ravine of a neighbouring
forest, known as 'Baranig Bouyrak'. The old
man was a real magician, in the
popular estimation; a sorcerer of a good,
benevolent kind, who cured willingly
all the patients who applied to him, but
who also knew how to punish with
disease those who had sinned. He was
greatly versed in the knowledge of the
occult properties of plants and flowers,
and could read the future, it was said.
He kept beehives in great numbers, his hut
being surrounded by several hundreds
of them. During the long summer afternoons
he could be always found at his post,
slowly walking among his favourites,
covered as with a living cuirass, from head
to foot, with swarms of buzzing bees,
plunging both his hands with impunity into
their dwellings, listening to their
deafening noise, and apparently answering
them — their buzzing almost ceasing
whenever he addressed them in his (to us)
incomprehensible tongue, a kind of chanting
and muttering. Evidently the
golden-winged labourers and their
centenarian master understood each other's
languages. Of the latter, Helen felt quite
sure. ' Baranig Bouyrak' had an
irresistible attraction for her, and she
visited the strange old man whenever
she could find a chance to do so. Once
there, she would put questions and listen
to the old man's replies and explanations
as to how to understand the language
of bees, birds, and animals with a
passionate earnestness. The dark ravine
seemed in her eyes a fairy kingdom. As to
the centenarian ' wise-man', he used
to say of her constantly to us: ' 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! . . .' ”
It would be impossible to write even a
slight sketch of Mme. Blavatsky's life
without alluding continually to the occult
theories on which her own
psychological development turns, and I
think the narrative will be rendered most
intelligible if I frankly explain some of
[31] these at the outset, without
here being supposed to argue the question
as to whether these theories rest upon
a correct appreciation of natural laws
(operating above and within those of
physical existence), or whether they
constitute an exclusive hallucination to
which her mind has been subject. It will be
seen, at all events, that, according
to such a view, the hallucination has been
very protracted and coherent, so much
so that, as I say, the life which has been
entirely subordinate to the career
marked out for it by those to whom Mme.
Blavatsky believes herself, and always
has believed herself, guided and protected,
would be meaningless without
reference to this vitalising thread running
through it. Of course I have no wish
to disguise my own adhesion to the view of
nature on which Mme. Blavatsky's
theory of life rests, nor my own conviction
concerning the real existence of the
living Adepts of occult science with whom I
believe Mme. Blavatsky, throughout
her life, to have been more or less closely
associated. But to argue the matter
would convert this memoir into a
philosophical treatise going over a great deal
of ground more fitly traversed in works of
a purely theosophical character. It
will be enough for my present purpose to
expound the theory on which, as I say,
Mme. Blavatsky's comprehension of her own
life rests, merely for the sake of
rendering the story which has to be set
forth intelligible to the reader.
The primary conception of oriental
occultism, in reference to the human soul,
recognises it as an entity, a moral and
intellectual centre of consciousness,
which not only survives the death of any
physical body in which it may be
functioning at any given time, but has also
enjoyed many periods of both
physical and spiritual existence before its
incarnation in that body. In fact,
[32] the entity — the real individual
according to this view — may be
identified by persons with psychic
faculties sufficiently developed through a
series of lives, and not merely in
reference to one. The view of Nature I am
describing — the Esoteric Doctrine — quite
sufficiently accounts for the fact
that, from the point of view of any given
body, no incarnated person can command
a prospect of the life-series through which
he may have passed. Each
incarnation, each successive life of the
series, is a descent into matter from
the point of view of the real spiritual
entity: a descent into a new organism in
which the entity — which is only altogether
its true or higher self on the
spiritual plane of Nature — may function
with greater or less success according
to the qualifications of the organism. The
organism only remembers, with
specific detail, the incidents of its own
objective life. The true entity
animating that organism may perhaps retain
the capacity of remembering a great
deal more, but not through the organism.
Moreover, until the organism is
complete — that is to say, until the person
concerned is grown up — the true
entity is only immersed in it — if I may
employ a materialistic illustration to
suggest the idea which would be only fully
expressible m metaphysical language
of great elaboration — to a limited extent.
The quite young child, as we
ordinarily phrase it, is not a morally
responsible being: that is to say, the
organism has not attained a development in
which the moral sense of the true
entity can function through the physical
brain and direct physical acts. But the
young child is already marked out as in
process of becoming the efficient
habitat of the entity or soul that has
begun to function through its organism;
and, therefore, if we imagine that there
are in the world living men — adepts in
the direction of forces on the [33] higher
planes of Nature with which
physical science is not yet acquainted — we
shall readily understand the
peculiar relations that exist between them
and a child in process of growing up,
and gradually taking into itself a soul
that such adepts are already in
relations with.
Let me repeat that this mere statement of
the occult science view of human
nature is not put forward as a proof that
things are so; but simply because that
theory of things will be found a continuous
thread upon which the facts of Mme.
Blavatsky's life are strung. It may be
that, as the story goes on, some readers
will develop other theories to account for
them, but all I have to say would
appear disjointed and incoherent without
this brief explanation, while it
becomes, at all events, clearly
intelligible with that clue to its successive
incidents.
In this way I proceed to assume, as a
working hypothesis, that even in childhood
Mademoiselle Hahn was under the protection
of a certain abnormal agency capable
even of producing results on the physical
plane when in extraordinary
emergencies these were called for. For
example, I have more than once heard her
tell a story of her childhood's days about
a great curiosity she entertained in
reference to a certain picture — the
portrait of one of the ancestors of the
family — which hung up in the castle where
her grandfather lived, at Saratow,
with a curtain before it. It hung at a
great height above the ground in a lofty
room, and Mademoiselle Hahn was a small
mite at the time, though very resolute
when her mind was set upon a purpose. She
had been denied permission to see the
picture, so she waited for an opportunity
when the coast was clear, and
proceeded to take her own measures for
compassing [34] her design. She
dragged a table to the wall, and contrived
to set another small table on that,
and a chair on the top of all, and then
gradually succeeded in mounting up on
this unstable edifice. She could just
manage to reach the picture from this
point of vantage, and leaning with one hand
against the dusty wall, contrived
with the other to draw back the curtain.
The effect wrought upon her by the
sight of the picture was startling, and the
momentary movement back upset her
frail platform. But exactly what occurred
she does not know. She lost
consciousness from the moment she staggered
and began to fall, and when she
recovered her senses she was lying quite
unhurt on the floor, the tables and
chair were back again in their usual
places, the curtain had been run back upon
its rings, and she would have imagined the
whole incident some unusual kind of
dream but for the fact that the mark of her
small hand remained imprinted on the
dusty wall high up beside the picture.
On another occasion again her life seems to
have been saved under peculiar
circumstances, at a time when she was
approaching fourteen. A horse bolted with
her — she fell, with her foot entangled in
the stirrup, and before the horse was
stopped she ought, she thinks, to have been
killed outright but for a strange
sustaining power she distinctly felt around
her, which seemed to hold her up in
defiance of gravitation. If anecdotes of
this surprising kind were few and far
between in Mme Blavatsky's life I should
suppress them in attempting to edit her
memoirs, but, as will be seen later, they
form the staple of the narratives
which each person in turn, who has anything
to say about her, comes forward to
tell. The records of her return to Russia
after her first long wanderings are
full of evidence, [35] given by her
relatives, compared to which these
little anecdotes of her childhood told by
herself sink into insignificance as
marvels. I refer to them, moreover, not for
their own sake, but, as I began by
saying, to illustrate the relations which
appear to have existed in her early
childhood between herself and those whom
she speaks of as her “Masters”,
unseen in body, unknown by her at that time
as living men, but not unknown to
the visions with which her child-life was
filled.
In the narrative quoted above, it will have
been seen that she was often noticed
by her friends sitting apart in corners,
when she was not interfered with,
apparently talking to herself. By her own
account she was at this time talking
with playmates of her own size and apparent
age, who to her were as real in
appearance as if they had been flesh and
blood, though they were not visible at
all to anyone else about her. Mademoiselle
Hahn used to be exceedingly annoyed
at the persistent way in which her nurses
and relatives refused to take any
notice whatever of one little hunchback boy
who was her favourite companion at
this time. Nobody else was able to take
notice of him, for nobody else saw him,
but to the abnormally gifted child he was a
visible, audible, and amusing
companion, though one who seems to have led
her into endless mischief. 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.
Students of spiritualism, of occultism, of
clairvoyance [36] will find this
record strangely confused at the first
glance, but I think, by the light of what
I have said above in reference to the
occult theory of incarnation, people who
hold that theory will be excused for
thinking that they see their way through
the entanglement pretty clearly.
Mademoiselle Hahn was born, of course, with all
the characteristics of what is known in
spiritualism as mediumship in the most
extraordinary degree, also with gifts as a
clairvoyant of an almost equally
unexampled order. And as a child, the time
had not come at which it would have
been possible for the occult protectors of
the entity thus beginning to function
in that organism to set on foot any of
those processes of physical training by
which such natural gifts can be tamed,
disciplined, and utilised. They had to
run wild for a time; thus we find
Mademoiselle Hahn — looking at her childhood's
history from the psychological point of
view — surrounded by all, or a large
number of the usual phenomena of
mediumship, and also visibly under the
observation and occasional guardianship of
the authorities to whose service her
mature faculties were altogether given
over, to the absolute repression in after
life of the casual faculties of mediumship.
Her friends were half-interested,
half-terrified by those of her manifestations
which they could understand sufficiently to
observe. Her aunt says that from the
age of four years “she was a somnambulist
and somniloquent. She would hold, in
her sleep, long conversations with unseen
personages, some of which were
amusing, some edifying, some terrifying for
those who gathered around the
child's bed. On various occasions, while
apparently in the ordinary sleep, she
would answer questions, put by persons who
took hold [37] of her hand,
about lost property or other subjects of
momentary anxiety, as though she were a
sibyl entranced. Sometimes she would be
missing from the nursery, and be found
in some distant room of the mansion, or in
the garden, playing and talking with
companions of her dream-life. For years, in
childish impulse, she would shock
strangers with whom she came in contact,
and visitors to the house, by looking
them intently in the face and telling them
that they would die at such and such
a time, or she would prophesy to them some
accident or misfortune that would
befall them. And since her prognostications
usually came true, she was the
terror, in this respect, of the domestic
circle.”
In 1844, the middle of the period during
which she was growing up from childhood
to girlhood at Saratow, her father took her
on her first journey abroad. She
accompanied him to Paris and London, a
child of fourteen, but a troublesome
charge even then and even for him, though
in her father's hands she was docile
from the point of view of her demeanour in
any other custody. One object of the
visit to London was to get her some good
music lessons, for she showed great
natural talents as a pianist — which indeed
have lingered about her in later
life, though often in total abeyance for
many years together. She had some
lessons from Moscheles, and even, I
understand, played a duet at a private
concert with a then celebrated professional
pianist. Colonel Hahn and his
daughter went to stay for a week in Bath
during this visit to England, but the
only striking feature of this excursion
that I can hear of had to do with a
little difficulty that arose between
mademoiselle and her father on the subject
of riding. She wanted to go on a man's
saddle, Cossack fashion, as she had been
used [38] to, in face of all protests to
the contrary, in Saratow. The
Colonel would not tolerate this, so there
was a scene, and a fit of hysterics on
the part of the young lady, followed by an
attack of some more serious illness.
He is represented as having been well
satisfied to get her home again, and lodge
her once more in the congenial wilds of
Asia Minor. Her pride in another
accomplishment, her knowledge of the
English language, received a rude shock
during this early visit to London. She had
been taught to speak English by her
first governess, Miss Jeffries, but in
Southern Russia people did not make the
fine distinctions between different sorts
of English which more fastidious
linguists are alive to. The English
governess had been a Yorkshire woman, and as
soon as Mademoiselle Hahn began to open her
lips among friends to whom she was
introduced in London, she found her remarks
productive of much more amusement
than their substance justified. The
combination of accents she employed —
Yorkshire grafted on Ekaterinoslow — must
have had a comical effect, no doubt,
but Mdlle Hahn soon came to the conclusion
that she had done enough for the
entertainment of her friends, and would
give forth her “hollow o's and a's”
no more. With her natural talent for
speaking foreign tongues, however, she set
her conversation in another key by the time
she next visited England in
1851.[39]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
CHAPTER 2
MARRIAGE AND TRAVEL
THE marriage by which Mdlle Hahn acquired
the name she has since been known by
took place in 1848. She was then, it will
be seen, about seventeen, and General
Blavatsky to whom she was united — as far
as the ceremonies of the Church were
concerned — was, at all events, a man of
advanced age. Madame herself believed
that he was nearer seventy than sixty. He
was himself reluctant to acknowledge
to more than about fifty. Other matrimonial
opportunities of a far more
attractive character were, as I now learn
from her relatives, open to her really
at the time, but these would have rendered
the marriage state, had she entered
it with some of her younger admirers, a
much more serious matter than she
designed it to be in her case. Her
demeanor, therefore, with the most desirable
of her suitors was purposely intolerable.
The actual adventure on which she
launched herself — for in its precipitation
and brevity it may fairly be
described by that phrase — seems to have
been brought about by a combination of
circumstances that could only have
influenced a girl of Mademoiselle Hahn's wild
temper and irregular training. Her aunt
describes the manner in which the
marriage was arranged as follows : —
“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 [40] 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 plume-less raven' —
that even he would decline her for a
wife! That was enough: three days after 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. Hence the
fatal step. All she knew and
understood was — when too late — that she
had been accepting, and 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 honour 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 — he left her
' husband ' for ever, without giving
him any opportunity to ever even think of
her as his wife.
“Thus Mme. 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.”
At the time the marriage took place,
Mademoiselle Hahn was staying with her
grandmother and some other relatives at
Djellallogly, a mountain retreat
frequented in the summer by the residents
of Tiflis. The young lady herself had
never intended to do more than establish
the [41] fact that General
Blavatsky would be ready to marry her, but
with an engagement regularly set on
foot, announced in the family, proclaimed
to friends, and so forth, with
“congratulations” coming in, and the
bridegroom claiming its fulfilment, a
restoration of the status quo was found by
the reckless heroine of the
complication more easily talked about than
obtained. Her friends protested
against the scandal that would be created
if the engagement were broken off for
no apparent reason. Pressed to go on with
the wedding, she seems to have
consoled herself with the belief that she
would be securing herself increased
liberty of action as a married woman than
ever she could compass as a girl. Her
father was altogether off the scene, far
away with his regiment in Russia, and
though consulted by letter, was not
sufficiently acquainted with the facts of
the case to take up any decided attitude
either way. The ceremony of the
marriage, at all events, duly took place on
the 7th of July 1848.
Of course the theories concerning the
married state entertained by General
Blavatsky and his abnormally natured young
bride differed toto coelo, and came
into violent conflict from the day of the
wedding — a day of unforeseen
revelations, furious indignation, dismay,
and belated repentance. Nothing was
ever imagined in fiction more extravagant
than the progress of the brief and
stormy though imperfect partnership. The
intelligent reader will understand that
a born occultist like Mademoiselle Hahn
could never have plunged into a
relationship so intolerable, so impossible
for her, as that of husband and wife
if she had understood on the ordinary plane
of human affairs what she was about.
The day after the wedding she was conducted
by the General to a place called
Daretchichag, a summer retreat for Erivan
residents. She tried already on this
journey to make [42] her escape towards the
Persian frontier, but the
Cossack she sought to win over as her guide
in this enterprise betrayed her
instead to the General, and she was
carefully guarded. The cavalcade duly
reached the residence of the governor — the
scene of his peculiar honeymoon.
Certainly the position in which he was
placed commands our retrospective
sympathy for some reasons ; but it is
impossible to go into a discussion of
details that might go far to qualify this.
For three months the newly married
couple remained together under the same
roof, each fighting for impossible
concessions, and then at last, in
connection with a quarrel more violent even
than the rest, the young lady took horse on
her own account and rode to Tiflis.
Family councils followed, and it was
settled that the unmanageable bride should
be sent to join her father. He arranged to
meet her at Odessa, and she was
despatched in the care of an old
servant-man and a maid, to catch at Poti a
steamer that would take her to her
destination. But her desperate passion for
adventure, coupled with apprehensions that
her father might endeavour to
refasten the broken links of her nuptial
bond, led her to design in her own mind
an amendment to this programme. She so
contrived matters on the journey through
Georgia, to begin with, that she and her
escort missed the steamer at Poti. But
a small English sailing vessel was lying in
the harbour. Mme. Blavatsky went on
board this vessel — the Commodore she
believes was the name, and, by a liberal
outlay of roubles, persuaded the skipper to
fall in with her plans. The
Commodore was bound first to Kertch, then
to Taganrog in the Sea of Azof, and
ultimately to Constantinople. Mme.
Blavatsky took passage for herself and
servants, ostensibly to Kertch. On arriving
there, she sent the servants ashore
to procure apartments and prepare for her
landing [43] the following
morning. But in the night, having now
shaken herself free of the last restraints
that connected her with her past life, she
sailed away in the Commodore for
Taganrog in the first instance, as the
vessel had business at that port, and
afterwards returning to the Black Sea, for
Constantinople.
The little voyage itself seems to have been
full of adventures, which, in
dealing with a life less crowded with
adventures all through, than Mme.
Blavatsky's one would stop to chronicle.
The harbour police of Taganrog visiting
the Commodore on her arrival, had to be so
managed as not to suspect that an
extra person was on board. The only
available hiding place — amongst the coals —
was found unattractive by the passenger,
and was assigned to the cabin boy,
whose personality she borrowed for the
occasion, being stowed away in a bunk on
pretence of illness. Later on, when the
vessel arrived at Constantinople,
further embarrassments had developed
themselves, and she had to fly ashore
precipitately in a caique with the
connivance of the steward to escape the
persecutions of the skipper. At
Constantinople, however, she had the good
fortune to fall in with a Russian lady of
her acquaintance, the Countess K-----,
with whom she formed a safe intimacy, and
travelled for a time in Egypt, Greece,
and other parts of Eastern Europe.
Unfortunately, it is impossible for me to
do more than sketch the period of her
life that we now approach in the meagrest
outline. For the full details of her
childhood given in the foregoing pages, we
are indebted to her relatives. She
herself, though frequently able to tell
disjointed anecdotes of her childhood,
could never have put together so connected
a narrative as that obtained from
Mme. Jelihowsky, and there was no sister at
hand to keep a record of her
subsequent adventures during her [44]
wanderings all over the world. She
never kept diaries during this period, and
memory at a distance of time is a
very uncertain guide, but if the present
record is uneven in its treatment of
various periods, I can only point in excuse
for this to the obvious
embarrassments of my task.
In Egypt, while travelling with the
Countess K-----, Mme. Blavatsky already
began to pick up some occult teaching,
though of a very different and inferior
order from that she acquired later. At that
time there was an old Copt at Cairo,
a man very well and widely known ; of
considerable property and influence, and
of a great reputation as a magician. The
tales of wonder told about him by
popular report were very thrilling. Mme.
Blavatsky seems to have been a pupil
who readily attracted his interest, and was
enthusiastic in imbibing his
instruction. She fell in with him again in
later years, and spent some time with
him at Boulak, but her acquaintance with
him in the beginning did not last long,
as she was only at that time in Egypt for
about three months. With an English
lady of rank whom she met during this
period she also travelled for a time. Her
relatives at Tiflis had lost all traces of
her from the time the deserted
servants at Kertch reported her
disappearance, but she herself communicated
privately with her father, and secured his
consent to her vague programme of
foreign travel. He realised the
impossibility of inducing her to resume the
broken thread of her married life; and,
indeed, considering all that had passed,
it is not unreasonable to suppose that
General Blavatsky himself was ready to
acquiesce in the separation. He
endeavoured, indeed, to obtain a formal divorce
on the ground that his marriage had never
been more than a form, and that his
wife had run away; but Russian law at the
time was not favourable to divorce,
and the [45] attempt failed. Colonel Hahn,
however, supplied his fugitive
daughter with money, and kept her counsel
in regard to her subsequent movements.
Ten years elapsed before she again saw her
relatives, and her restless eagerness
for travel carried her during this period
to all parts of the world. She kept no
diary, and at this distance of time can
give no very connected story of these
complicated wanderings. Within about a year
of their commencement she seems to
have been in Paris, where she was intimate
with many literary celebrities of the
time, and where a famous mesmerist, still
living as I write, though an old man
now, discovered her wonderful psychic
gifts, and was very eager to retain her
under his control as a sensitive. But the
chains had not yet been forged that
could make her prisoner, and she quitted
Paris precipitately to escape this
influence. She went over to London, and
passed some time in company with an old
Russian lady of her acquaintance, the
Countess B------, at Mivart's Hotel, whom,
however, she out-stayed in London,
remaining there in company with the
Countess's demoiselle de compagnie in a big
hotel, she says, somewhere between
the City and the Strand, “but as to names
or numbers, you might as well ask me
to tell you what was the number of the
house you lived in in your last
incarnation.”
Connected as she was in Russia, she
naturally met a good many of her own
countrymen abroad with whom she was either
already acquainted, or who were glad
to befriend her. Sometimes, when
circumstances were favourable, she would travel
with companions thus thrown in her way, at
other times altogether alone. Her
craving for adventure and for all strange
and outlandish places and people was
quite unsatiable. Her first long flight
abroad was prompted by a passionate
[46] enthusiasm for the North American
Indians, contracted from the perusal
of Fennimore Cooper's novels. After a
little minor touring about Europe with the
Countess B------ in 1850, she welcomed the
New Year of 1851 at Paris, and in the
July of that year went in pursuit of the
Red Indians of her imagination to
Canada. Fortunately her illusion on the
subject of these heroes was destined to
an early dissipation. At Quebec (she
believes it was) a party of Indians were
introduced to her. She was delighted to
encounter the sons of the forest, and
even the daughters thereof, their squaws.
With some of these she settled down
for a long gossip over the mysterious
doings of the medicine men. Eventually
they disappeared, and with them various
articles of Madame's personal property —
especially a pair of boots that she greatly
prized, and which the resources of
Quebec in those days could not replace. The
Red Indian of actual fact thus
ruined the ideal she had constructed in her
fancy. She gave up her search for
their wigwams, and developed a new
programme. In the first instance, she thought
she would try to come to close quarters
with the Mormons, then beginning to
excite public attention; but their original
city, Nauvoo, in Missouri, had just
been destroyed by the unruly mob of their
less industrious and less prosperous
neighbours, and the survivors of the
massacre in which so many of their people
fell were then streaming across the desert
in search of a new home. Mme.
Blavatsky thought that under these
circumstances Mexico looked an inviting
region in which to risk her life next, and
she made her way, in the meanwhile,
to New Orleans.
This apparently hasty sketch will give the
reader no idea of the difficulty with
which she has, at this long subsequent
period, recalled even so much as is here
set [47] down. It has only been by help of public
events that she can
remember to have heard about at such and
such places that I have been enabled to
construct a skeleton diary of her
wanderings, on which here and there her
recollections enable me to put a little
flesh and blood At New Orleans the
principal interest of her visit centred in
the Voodoos, a sect of negroes,
natives of the West Indies, and
half-castes, addicted to a form of magic
practices that no highly-trained occult
student would have anything to do with,
but which nevertheless presented
attractions to Mme. Blavatsky, not yet far
advanced enough in the knowledge held in
reserve for her, to distinguish
“black” from “white” varieties of
mystic exercise. The Voodoos'
pretensions were of course discredited by the
educated white population of New
Orleans, but they were none the less
shunned and feared. Mme. Blavatsky might
have been drawn dangerously far into
association with them, fascinated as her
imagination was liable to become by occult
mysteries of any kind; but the
strange guardianship that had so often
asserted itself to her advantage during
her childhood — which had by this time
assumed a more definite shape, for she
had now met, as a living man the long
familiar figure of her visions — again
come to her rescue. She was warned in a
vision of the risk she was running with
the Voodoos, and at once moved off to fresh
fields and pastures new.
She went through Texas to Mexico, and
contrived to see a good deal of that
insecure country, protected in these
hazardous travels by her own reckless
daring, and by various people who from time
to time interested themselves in her
welfare. She speaks with special gratitude
of an old Canadian, a man known as
Père Jacques, whom she met in Texas, where
at the time she was quite without
any companionship. He saw her [48] safely
through some perils to which she
was then exposed, and thus by hook or by
crook Madame always managed to scramble
along unscathed; though it seems miraculous
in the retrospect that she should
have been able — young woman at that time
as she was — to lead the wild life on
which she was embarked without actually
incurring disasters. There was no
reliance in her case, as in that of Moore's
heroine, on “Erin's honour and
Erin's pride”. She passed through rough
communities of all kinds, savage as
well as civilised, and seems to have been
guarded from harm, as assuredly she
was guarded, by the sheer force of her own
fearlessness, and her fierce scorn
for all considerations however remotely
associated with the “magnetism of
sex”.
During her American travels, which for this
period lasted about a year, she was
lucky enough to receive a considerable
legacy bequeathed her by one of her
godmothers. This put her splendidly in
funds for a time, though it is much to be
regretted on her account that the money was
not served out to her in moderate
instalments, for the temperament, which the
facts of her life so far even will
have revealed, may easily be recognised as
one not likely to go with habits of
prudent expenditure. Madame, in the course
of her adventures, has often shown
that she can meet poverty with
indifference, and battle with it in any way that
may be necessary, but with her pockets full
of money, her impulse has always
been to throw it away with both hands. She
is wholly unable to explain how she
ran through her 80,000 roubles, except that
amongst other random purchases she
bought land in America, the very situation
of which she has long since totally
forgotten, besides having, as a matter of
course, lost all the papers that had
any reference to the transaction.
She resolved during her Mexican wanderings
that she [49] would go to India,
fully alive already to the necessity of
seeking beyond the northern frontiers of
that country for the further
acquaintanceship of those great teachers of the
highest mystic science, with whom the
guardian of her visions was associated in
her mind. She wrote, therefore, to a
certain Englishman, whom she had met in
Germany two years before, and whom she knew
to be on the same quest as herself,
to join her in the West Indies, in order
that they might go to the East
together. He duly came, but the party was
further augmented by the addition of a
Hindu whom Mme. Blavatsky met at Copau, in
Mexico, and whom she soon ascertained
to be what is called a “chela”, or
pupil of the Masters, or adepts of
oriental occult science. The three pilgrims
of mysticism went out via the Cape
to Ceylon, and thence in a sailing ship to
Bombay, where, as I make out the
dates, they must have arrived at quite the
end of 1852.
A dispersion of the little party soon
followed, each being bent on somewhat
different ends. Madame would not accept the
guidance of the Chela, and was bent
on an attempt of her own to get into Tibet
through Nepal. For the time her
attempt failed, chiefly, she believes, as
far as external and visible
difficulties were concerned, through the
opposition of the British resident then
in Nepal. Mme. Blavatsky went down to
Southern India, and then on to Java and
Singapore, returning thence to England.
1853, however, was an unfortunate year for
a Russian to visit this country. The
preparations for the Crimean War were
distressing to Mme. Blavatsky's
patriotism, and she passed over at the end
of the year again to America, going
this time to New York, and thence out West,
first to Chicago, then an infant
city compared to the Chicago of the present
day, and afterwards to the Far West,
and across the Rocky Mountains with
emigrants' [50] caravans, till
ultimately she brought up for a time in San
Francisco. Her stay in America was
prolonged on this occasion altogether to
something like two years, and she then
made her way a second time to India via
Japan and the Straits, reaching Calcutta
in the course of 1855.
In reference to her prolonged wanderings
her aunt writes: —
“For the first eight years she gave her
mother's family no sign of life for
fear of being traced by her legitimate
'lord and master', Her father alone knew
of her whereabouts. Knowing, however, that
he would never prevail upon her to
return home, he acquiesced in her absence,
and supplied her with money whenever
she came to places where it could safely
reach her.”
During her travels in India in 1856 she was
overtaken at Lahore by a German
gentleman known to her father, who, — in
association with two friends, having
laid out a journey in the East on his own
account, with a mystic purpose in
view, in reference to which fate did not
grant him the success that attended
Mme. Blavatsky's efforts — had been asked
by Colonel Hahn to try if he could
find his errant daughter. The four
compatriots travelled together for a time,
and went through Kashmir to Leli in Ladakh
in company with a Tartar Shaman, who
was instrumental in helping them to witness
some psychological wonders wrought
at a Buddhist monastery. Her companions,
Mme. Blavatsky explains, had all formed
what, referring to the incident in Isis
Unveiled, she calls “the unwise plan
of penetrating into Tibet under various
disguises — none of them speaking the
language, although one of them, a Mr
K------, had picked up some Kasan Tartar,
and thought he did”. The passage in Isis
rather too long for quotation here.
It begins on page 599, vol. ii of that
book, and describes the [51]
animation of an infant by the psychic
principles of the old Lama, the superior
of the monastery. The passage as given in
his is taken from a narrative written
by Mr K-----, and put by him in Mme.
Blavatsky's hands, and corresponds in
outline to similar marvels related by the
Abbé Huc in the first edition of his
Recollections of Travel in Tartary, Tibet,
and China. In the later editions of
that book the testimony the author gives to
the wonders he witnessed in Tibet is
all cut down and mutilated. His story was
found to be too striking in
recognition of “miracles” that were
not, under the direction of the church,
to be tolerated by the authorities in its
earlier form ; but the first edition
of the book can still be seen at the
British Museum, where I have verified the
accuracy of the quotation given in Isis.
In reference to the journey in the course
of which the Russian travellers
witnessed the transaction at the Buddhist
monastery, Mme. Blavatsky writes: —
“Two of them, the brothers N------, were
very politely brought back to the
frontier before they had walked sixteen
miles into the weird land of Eastern
Bod, and Mr K------, an ex-Lutheran
minister, could not even attempt to leave
his miserable village near Leli, as from
the first days he found himself
prostrated with fever, and had to return to
Lahore via Kashmir.”
The Tartar Shaman, referred to above,
rendered Mme. Blavatsky more substantial
assistance in her efforts to penetrate into
Tibet than he was able to afford to
her companions. Investing her with an
appropriate disguise, he conducted her
successfully across the frontier, and far
on into the generally inaccessible
country. It was to this journey that she
vaguely refers in a striking passage
occurring in the last chapter of Isis
Unveiled. As the narrative, though given
in Isis without any of [52] the surrounding
circumstances, fits here into
its proper place in these records, I quote
it at full length. Reference has just
been made to certain talismans which each
shaman carries under his left arm,
attached to a string. Mme. Blavatsky goes
on : —
“ ' Of what use is it to you, and what
are its virtues ? ' was the question we
often offered to our guide. To this he
never answered directly, but evaded all
explanation, promising that as soon as an
opportunity was offered and we were
alone, he would ask the stone to answer for
himself. With this very indefinite
hope we were left to the resources of our
own imagination.
“But the day on which the stone 'spoke'
came very soon. It was during the most
critical hours of our life; at a time when
the vagabond nature of a traveller
had carried the writer to far-off lands
where neither civilisation is known nor
security can be guaranteed for one hour.
One afternoon, as every man and woman
had left the yourta (Tartar tent) that had
been our house for over two months,
to witness the ceremony of the Lamaic
exorcism of Tshoutgour, [An elemental
demon, in which every native of Asia
believes.’] accused of breaking and
spiriting away every bit of the poor
furniture and earthenware of a family
living about two miles distant, the Shaman,
who had become our only protector in
those dreary deserts, was reminded of his
promise. He sighed and hesitated, but
after a short silence, left his place on
the sheepskin, and going outside,
placed a dried-up goat's head with its
prominent horns over a wooden peg, and
then dropping down the felt curtain of the
tent, remarked that now no living
person would venture in, for the goat's
head was a sign that he was ' at work.'
“After that, placing his hand in his
bosom, he drew out the little stone,
about the size of a walnut, and, carefully
unwrapping it, proceeded, as it
appeared, to swallow it. In a few moments
his limbs stiffened, his body became
rigid, and he fell, cold and motionless as
a corpse. But for a slight twitching
of his lips at every question asked, the
scene would have been embarrassing, nay
dreadful. [53] The sun was setting, and
were it not that the dying embers
flickered at the centre of the tent,
complete darkness would have been added to
the oppressive silence which reigned. We
have lived in the prairies of the West,
and in the boundless steppes of Southern
Russia; but nothing can be compared
with the silence at sunset on the sandy
deserts of Mongolia; not even the barren
solitudes of the deserts of Africa, though
the former are partially inhabited,
and the latter utterly void of life. Yet,
there was the writer, alone with what
looked no better than a corpse lying on the
ground. Fortunately this state did
not last long.
“ ' Mahaudû !' uttered a voice
which seemed to come from the bowels of the
earth, on which the Shaman was prostrated,
' Peace be with you. What would you
have me do for you ? '
“Startling as the fact seemed, we were
quite prepared for it, for we had seen
other Shamans pass through similar
performances. 'Whoever you are', we
pronounced mentally, 'go to K-----, and try
to bring that person's thought here.
See what that other party does, and tell
----- what we are doing and how
situated.'
“ ' I am there,' announced the same
voice. ' The old lady (kokona) is sitting
in the garden. . . . she is putting on her
spectacles and reading a letter.'
“ 'The contents of it, and hasten', was
the hurried order, while preparing
note-book and pencil. The contents were
given slowly, as if, while dictating,
the invisible presence desired to put down
the words phonetically, for we
recognised the Vallachian language, of
which we knew nothing beyond the ability
to recognise it. In such a way a whole page
was filled.
“ ' Look west . . . toward the third pole
of the yourta,' pronounced the
Tartar in his natural voice, though it
sounded hollow, and as if coming from
afar. 'Her thought is here.'
“Then with a convulsive jerk the upper
portion of the Shaman's body seemed
raised, and his head fell heavily on the
writer's feet, which he clutched with
both his hands. The position was becoming
less and less attractive, but
curiosity proved a good ally to courage.
[54] In the west corner was
standing, life-like, but flickering
unsteady, and mist-like, the form of a dear
old friend, a Roumanian lady of Vallachia,
a mystic by disposition, but a
thorough disbeliever in this kind of occult
phenomena.
“ 'Her thought is here, but her body is
lying unconscious. We could not bring
her here otherwise', said the voice.
“We addressed and supplicated the
apparition to answer, but all in vain. The
features moved and the form gesticulated as
if in fear and agony, but no sound
broke forth from the shadowy lips; only we
imagined — perchance it was a fancy —
hearing, as if from a long distance, the
Roumanian words, 'Non se pote' ('It
cannot be done' ).
“For over two hours the most substantial,
unequivocal proofs that the Shaman's
astral soul was travelling at the bidding
of our unspoken wish were given us.
Ten months later, we received a letter from
a Vallachian friend in response to
ours, in which we had enclosed the page
from the note-book, inquiring of her
what she had been doing on that day, and
describing the scene in full. She was
sitting, she wrote, in the garden on that
morning,[The hour in Bucharest
corresponded perfectly with that of the
country in which the scene had taken
place.] prosaically occupied in boiling
some conserves; the letter sent to her
was word for word the copy of the one
received by her from her brother; all at
once, in consequence of the heat she
thought, she fainted, and remembered
distinctly dreaming she saw the writer in a
desert place, which she accurately
described, and sitting under a gipsy's
tent,' as she expressed it. '
Henceforth,' she added, 'I can doubt no
longer'.
“But our experiment was proved better
still. We had directed the Shaman's
Inner Eye to the same friend heretofore
mentioned in this chapter, the Kutchi of
Lhassa, who travels constantly to British
India and back. We know that he was
apprised of our critical situation in the
desert; for a few hours later came
help, and we were rescued by a party of
twenty-five horsemen, who had been
directed by their chief to find us at the
place where we were, which no living
man endowed with common powers could have
known. The chief of this [55]
escort was a Shaberon, an 'adept' whom we
had never seen before, nor did we
after that, for he never left his soumay
(lamasary), and we could have no access
to it. ... But he was a personal friend of
the Kutchi.”
This incident put an end for the time to
Mme. Blavatsky's wanderings in Tibet.
She was conducted back to the frontier by
roads and passes of which she had no
previous knowledge, and after further
travels in India, was directed by her
occult guardian to leave the country,
shortly before the troubles which began in
1857.
She went in a Dutch vessel from Madras to
Java, and thence returned to Europe in
1858.
Meanwhile the fate to which she has been so
freely exposed all through her later
life was already asserting itself to her
disadvantage, and without, up to this
time, having challenged the world's
antagonism, by associating her name with
tales of wonder, she, nevertheless, already
found herself — or rather, in her
absence, her friends found her — the mark
for slanders, no less extravagant, in
a different way, than some that have been
aimed at her quite recently by people
claiming to take an interest in psychic
phenomena, but unable to tolerate those
reported to have been brought about by her
agency. Her aunt writes: “ Faint
rumours reached her friends of her having
been met in Japan, China,
Constantinople, and the far East. She
passed through Europe several times, but
never lived in it. Her friends, therefore,
were as much surprised as pained to
read, years afterwards, fragments from her
supposed biography, which spoke of
her as a person well known in the high
life, as well as the low, of Vienna,
Berlin, Warsaw, and Paris, and mixed her
name with events and ancedotes whose
scene was laid in these cities, at various
epochs, when her friends had every
possible proof of her being far [56] away
from Europe. These anecdotes
referred to her indifferently under the
several Christian names of Julie,
Nathalie, etc which were those really of
other persons of the same surname; and
attributed to her various extravagant
adventures. Thus the Neue Freie Presse
spoke of Madame Heloise (?) Blavatsky, a
non-existing personage, who had joined
the Black Hussars — les Huzzards de la Mart
— during the Hungarian revolution,
her sex being found out only in 1849.”
Similar stories, equally groundless,
were circulated at a later date.
Anticipating this, her aunt goes on : —
“Another journal of Paris narrated the
story of Mme. Blavatsky, 'a Pole from
the Caucasus' (?), a supposed relative of
Baron Hahn of Lemberg, who, after
taking an active part in the Polish
Revolution of 1863 (during the whole of
which time Mme. H. P. Blavatsky was quietly
living with her relatives at
Tiflis), was compelled, from lack of means,
to serve as a female waiter in a '
restaurant du Faubourg St Antoine'. ”
These, and many other infamous stories
circulated by idle gossips, were laid at
the door of Mme. Blavatsky, the heroine of
our narrative.
On her return from India in 1858, Mme.
Blavatsky did not go straight to Russia,
but, after spending some months in France
and Germany, rejoined her own people
at last in the midst of a family
wedding-party at Pskoff, in the north-west of
Russia, about 180 miles from St Petersburg.
Concerning the next few years of Mme.
Blavatsky's life, we are furnished with
ample details by means of narrative written
at the time by her sister, Mme. V.
P.de Jelihowsky, and published in 1881 in a
Russian periodical — the Rebus — as
a series of papers, headed, “The Truth
about H. P. Blavatsky”. To this
source of information we may now turn. [57]
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CHAPTER 3
AT HOME IN RUSSIA, 1858
IN the course of certain Personal and
Family Reminiscences, put together by Mme
de Jelihowsky, she explains the attitude of
mind in which she was brought up,
interesting both as bearing on the
narrative she has to relate and also as
connected with the family history of the
subject of this memoir. She writes: —
“I was born and bred in a strictly
orthodox, sincerely religious, yet far from
being mystically-inclined, family. But if
the spirit of mysticism had failed to
influence its members, it was not in
consequence of any predetermined policy of
an a priori denial of everything unknown,
or of a tendency to sneer at the
incomprehensible only because it is far
beyond one's capacities and nature to
take it in; but as ' highly educated and
polished people' can hardly be expected
to confess their mental and intellectual
failings, hence the conscious efforts
of playing at incredulity and esprits
forts. Nothing of the sort was to be found
in our family. Nor was there any great
superstition or bigotry amongst them —
two feelings the best calculated to
generate and develop faith in the
supernatural. But when, at the age of
sixteen, I had to part with my mother's
family, in which I had been brought up
since her death, and went to live with my
father, I met in him a man of quite a
different 'nature. He was an extreme
sceptic, a deist, if anything, and one of a
most practical turn of mind; a
highly intellectual and even a scientific
man, one who [58] knew and had
seen a great deal in life, but whose
erudition and learning had been developed
in full accordance with his own personal
views, and not at all in any spirit of
humility before the truths of Christianity,
or blind belief in man's immortality
and life beyond the grave.”
In 1858, when Mme. Blavatsky returned to
Russia, her sister, the writer of the
reminiscences from which I have just
quoted, bore the name of Yahontoff — that
of her first husband, who had died shortly
before that date. She was staying at
Pskoff with General N. A. Yahontoff —
Maréchal de Noblesse of that place — her
late husband's father. A wedding-party,
that of her sister-in-law, was in
progress, and Colonel Hahn was amongst the
guests. On Christmas night, Mme. de
Jelihowsky writes, “They were all sitting
at supper, carriages loaded with
guests were arriving one after the other,
and the hall bell kept ringing without
interruption. At the moment when the
bridegroom's best men arose, with glasses
of champagne in their hands, to proclaim
their good wishes for the happy couple
— a solemn moment in Russia — the bell was
again rung impatiently. Mme.
Yahontoff, Mme. Blavatsky's sister, moved
by an irrepressible impulse, and
notwithstanding that the hall was full of
servants, jumped up from her place at
the table, and, to the amazement of all,
rushed herself to open the door. She
felt convinced, she said afterwards, though
why she could not tell, that it was
her long lost sister! ”
For some time this memoir will closely
follow Mme. de Jelihowsky's narrative,
now translated into English for the first
time, but it will be unnecessary to
load every page with quotation marks. Where
the first person is used, it will be
understood that Mme de [59] Jelihowsky is
speaking, although she also
frequently refers to herself in the third
person, as the narrative was
originally published in Russia anonymously.
When I, the present editor, have
occasion to intervene with comments, such
passages will be enclosed in brackets.
Spiritism (or spiritualism) was then just
looming on the horizon of Europe,
During her travels, the psychological
peculiarities of Mme. Blavatsky's
childhood and girlhood had developed, and
she returned already possessed of
occult powers, which were in those days
attributed to mediumship.
These powers asserted themselves in strange
incessant knocks and raps and
sounds, which many hearers mistook for the
esprits frappeurs; in the moving of
furniture without contact, in the increase
and the decrease of the weight of
various objects, in her faculty of seeing
herself (and occasionally of
transferring that faculty to others) things
invisible to ordinary sight, and
living but absent persons who had resided
years ago in the places where she
happened to be, as well as spectral images
of personages dead at various epochs.
Well acquainted with a number of facts of
the most striking character which have
happened at that period of her life (which,
however, has not lasted very long,
as she succeeded very soon in conquering
and even obtaining mastery over the
influence of forces that surrounded her), I
will describe only those phenomena
of which I was an eye-witness.
For this I must return to the night of Mme.
Blavatsky's arrival.
From that time all those who were living in
the house remarked that strange
things were taking place in it. Raps and
whisperings, sounds, mysterious and
[60] unexplained, were now being constantly
heard wherever the newly
arrived inmate went. Not only did they
occur in her presence and near her, but
knocks were heard, and movements of the
furniture perceived nearly in every room
in the house, on the walls, the floor, the
windows, the sofa, cushions, mirrors,
and clocks ; on every piece of furniture,
in short, about the rooms. However
much Mme. Blavatsky tried to conceal these
facts, laughing at them and trying to
turn these manifestations into fun, it was
useless for her to deny the fact or
the occult significance of these sounds. At
last, to the incessant questions of
her sister, she confessed that those
manifestations had never ceased to follow
her everywhere as in the early days of her
infancy and youth. That such raps
could be increased or diminished, and at
times even made to cease altogether, by
the mere force of her will, she also
acknowledged, proving her assertion
generally on the spot. Of course the good
people of Pskoff, like the rest of the
world, knew what was then occurring, and
had heard of spiritualism and its
manifestations. There had been mediums in
Petersburg, but they had not
penetrated as far as Pskoff, and its
guileless inhabitants had never heard the
rappings of the so-called spirit.
[All who have become acquainted with Mme.
Blavatsky in the present phase of her
development will be aware of the eagerness
with which she repudiates the least
trace of mediumship as entering into the
phenomena with which she had been
associated in recent years. In 1858 she appears
to have been in a transition
state, already invested with occult
will-power, which put her in a position to
repress the manifestations of mediumship in
emergencies, but still liable to
their spontaneous occurrence when they were
not thus under repression. [61]
Expressly asked the question, she would
always deny that she was a medium —
which, indeed, she would appear no longer
to have been, in the strict sense of
the term — for she does not seem to have
been controlled by the agencies
recognised in spiritualism, even when
sometimes acquiescing in casual
manifestations on their part. Mme. de
Jelihowsky, questioned on this subject
recently, says: “I remember that when
addressed as a medium, she (Mme.
Blavatsky) used to laugh and assure us she
was no medium, but only a. mediator
between mortals and beings we knew nothing
about. But I could never understand
the difference.”
This may be the best opportunity for
bringing to the reader's notice some
passages from Mme. Jelihowsky's Personal
and Family Reminiscences which bear on
the point, an important one as regards all
psychic students of Mme. Blavatsky's
phenomena and characteristics.
Her sister says :—
“Although everyone had supposed that the
manifestations occurring in H. P.
Blavatsky's presence were the results of a
mediumistic power pertaining to her,
she herself had always obstinately denied
it. My sister H. P. Blavatsky had
passed most of her time, during her many
years' absence from Russia, travelling
in India, where, as we are now informed,
spiritual theories are held in great
scorn, and the so-called (by us)
mediumistic phenomena are said to be caused by
quite another agency than that of spirits;
mediumship proceeding, they say, from
a source, to draw from which, my sister
thinks it degrading to her human
dignity; in consequence of which ideas she
refuses to acknowledge such a force
in herself. From letters received by me
from my sister, I found she had been
dissatisfied with much that I had said of
her in my ' Truth about H. P.
Blavatsky.' She still maintains, now as
then, that in those days (of 1860) she
was influenced as well as she is now by
quite [62] another kind of power —
namely, that of the Indian sages, the
Raj-Yogis — and that even the shadows
(figures) she sees all her life, are no
phantoms, no ghosts of the deceased, but
only the manifestations of her powerful
friends in their astral envelopes.
However it may be, and whatever the power
that produced her phenomena only,
during the whole time that she lived with
us at the Yahontoff such phenomena
happened constantly before the eyes of all,
believers and unbelievers (relatives
and outsiders) — and they plunged everyone
equally into amazement.”
As this memoir is a narrative and not an
occult treatise, I refrain from any
minute analysis of the psychological
problem involved, and would only point out
that the condition of things Mme. de
Jelihowsky refers to, chimes in with the
rough explanation I gave in the first
chapter as to the occult theory of Mme.
Blavatsky's development, which would
recognise her natural born, physical
attributes as only coming under control
when the higher faculties of her real
self, entering into union with the bodily
organism as this reached maturity, put
her in a position to be taught how to
eradicate the weed-growth of her
abnormally fertile psychic faculties.]
With the arrival of Mme. Blavatsky at
Pskoff, the news about the extraordinary
phenomena produced by her spread abroad
like lightning, turning the whole town
topsy-turvy.
The fact is, that the sounds were not
simple raps, but something more, as they
showed extraordinary intelligence,
disclosing the past as well as the future to
those who held converse through them with
those Mme. Blavatsky called her
kikimorcy (or spooks). More than that, for
they showed the gift of disclosing
unexpressed thoughts, i.e. penetrating
freely into the most secret recesses of
[63] the human mind, and divulging past
deeds and present intentions.
The relatives of Mme. Blavatsky's sister
were leading a very fashionable life,
and received a good deal of company in
those days. Her presence attracted a
number of visitors, no one of whom ever
left her unsatisfied, for the raps which
she evoked gave answers, composed of long
discourses in several languages, some
of which were unknown to the medium, as she
was called. The poor “medium”
became subjected to every kind of test, to
which she submitted very gracefully,
no matter how absurd the demand, as a proof
that she did not bring about the
phenomena by juggling. It was her usual
habit to sit very quietly and quite
unconcerned on the sofa, or in an
arm-chair, engaged in some embroidery, and
apparently without taking the slightest
interest or active part in the hubbub
which she produced around herself. And the
hubbub was great indeed. One of the
guests would be reciting the alphabet,
another putting down the answers
received, while the mission of the rest was
to offer mental questions, which
were always and promptly answered. It so
happened, however, that the unknown and
invisible things at work favoured some
people more than others, while there were
those who could obtain no answers whatever.
In the latter case, instead of
replying to queries asked aloud, the raps
would answer the unexpressed mental
thought of some other person, first calling
him by name. During that time,
conversations and discussions in a loud
tone were carried on around her.
Mistrust and irony were often shown, and
occasionally even a doubt expressed, in
a very indelicate way, as to the good faith
of Mme. Blavatsky. But she bore it
all very coolly and patiently, a strange
and puzzling smile or an ironical
shrugging of the [64] shoulders being her
only answer to questions of very
doubtful logic offered to her over and over
again.
“But how do you do it, and what is it
that raps ? ” people kept on asking.
Or again, “but how can you so well guess
people's thought ? How could you know
that I had thought of this or that ? ”
At first H. P. B. sought very zealously to
prove to people that she did not
produce the phenomena, but very soon she
changed her tactics. She declared
herself tired of such discussions, and
silence and a contemptuous smile became
for some time her only answer. Again she
would change as rapidly; and in moments
of good-humour, when people would be
foolishly and openly expressing the most
insulting doubts of her honesty, instead of
resenting them she used to laugh
aloud in their faces. Indeed, the most
absurd hypotheses were offered by the
sceptics. For instance, it was suggested
that she might produce her loud raps by
the means of a machine in her pocket, or
that she rapped with her nails; the
most ingenious theory being that “when
her hands were visibly occupied with
some work, she did it with her toes.”
To put an end to all this, she allowed
herself to be subjected to the most
stupid demands ; she was searched, her
hands and feet were tied with string, she
permitted herself to be placed on a soft
sofa, to have her shoes taken off and
her hands and feet held fast against a soft
pillow, so that they should be seen
by all, and then she was asked that the
knocks and rappings should be produced
at the further end of the room. Declaring
that she would try, but would promise
nothing, her orders were, nevertheless,
immediately accomplished, especially
when the people were seriously interested.
These raps were produced at her
command on the ceiling, on the [65] window
sills, on every bit of furniture
in the adjoining room, and in places quite
distant from her.
At times she would wickedly revenge herself
by practical jokes on those who so
doubted her. Thus, for example, the raps
which came one day inside the glasses
of the young Professor M------, while she
was sitting at the other side of the
room, were so strong that they fairly
knocked the spectacles off his nose, and
made him become pale with fright. At
another time, a lady, an esprit fort, very
vain and coquettish, to her ironical
question of what was the best conductor for
the production of such raps, and whether
they could be done everywhere, received
a strange and very puzzling answer. The
word, “Gold”, was rapped out, and
then came the words, “We will prove it to
you immediately”.
The lady kept smiling with her mouth
slightly opened. Hardly had the answer
come, than she became very pale, jumped
from her chair, and covered her mouth
with her hand. Her face was convulsed with
fear and astonishment. Why ? Because
she had felt raps in her mouth, as she
confessed later on. Those present looked
at each other significantly. Previous even
to her own confession all had
understood that the lady had felt a violent
commotion and raps in the gold of
her artificial teeth! And when she rose
from her place and left the room with
precipitation, there was a homeric laugh
among us at her expense.[66]
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CHAPTER 4
MM DE JELIHOWSKY'S NARRATIVE
IT is impossible to give in detail even a
portion of what was produced in the
way of such phenomena during the stay of
Mme. Blavatsky amongst us in the town
of Pskoff. But they may be mentioned under
general classification as follows : —
1. Direct and perfectly clear written and
verbal answers to mental questions —
or “thought-reading”.
2. Prescriptions for different diseases, in
Latin, and subsequent cures.
3. Private secrets, unknown to all but the
interested party, divulged,
especially in the case of those persons who
mentioned insulting doubts.
4. Change of weight in furniture and of persons
at will.
5. Letters from unknown correspondents, and
immediate answers written to queries
made, and found in the most out-of-the-way
mysterious places.[Thus a governess,
named Leontine, who wanted to know the fate
of a certain young man she had hoped
to be married to, learnt what had become of
him ; his name, that she had
purposely withheld, being given in full —
from a letter written in an unknown
handwriting she found in one of her locked
boxes, placed inside a trunk equally
locked.]
6. Appearances and apport of objects
unclaimed by any one present. [67]
7. Sounds as of musical notes in the air
wherever Mme. Blavatsky desired they
should resound.
All these surprising and inexplicable
manifestations of an intelligent, and at
times, I should almost say, an omniscient
force, produced a sensation in Pskoff,
where there yet remain many who remember it
well. Truth compels us to remark
that the answers were not always in perfect
accord with the facts, but seemed
purposely distorted as though for the
purpose of making fun, especially of those
querists who expected infallible
prophecies.
Nevertheless, the fact remains of the
manifestation of an intelligent force,
capable of perceiving the thoughts and
feelings of any person; as also of
expressing them by rappings and motions in
inanimate objects. The following two
occurrences took place in the presence of
many eye-witnesses during the stay of
Mme. Blavatsky with us.
As usual, those nearest and dearest to her
were, at the same time, the most
skeptical as to her occult powers. Her
brother Leonide and her father stood out
longer than all against evidence, until at
last the doubts of the former were
greatly shaken by the following fact.
The drawing-room of the Yahontoffs was full
of visitors. Some were occupied with
music, others with cards, but most of us,
as usual, with phenomena. Leonide de
Hahn did not concern himself with anything
in particular, but was leisurely
walking about, watching everybody and
everything. He was a strong, muscular
youth, saturated with the Latin and German
wisdom of the University, and
believed, so far, in no one and nothing. He
stopped behind the back of his
sister's chair, and was listening to her
narratives of how some persons, who
called themselves mediums, made light
objects become so heavy that it was
impossible to lift them; and others which
were naturally heavy became again
remarkably light.[68]
“And you mean to say that you can do it ?
” ironically asked the young man
of his sister.
“Mediums can, and I have done it
occasionally; though I cannot always answer
for its success”, coolly replied Mme.
Blavatsky.
“But would you try ? ” asked somebody
in the room; and immediately all
joined in requesting her to do so.
“I will try”, she said, “but I beg of
you to remember that I promise
nothing. I will simply fix this chess-table
and try. ... He who wants to make
the experiment, let him lift it now, and
then try again after I shall have fixed
it.”
“After you shall have fixed it ? ” said
a voice, “ and what then ? Do you
mean to say that you will not touch the
table at all ? ”
“Why should I touch it ? ” answered
Mme. Blavatsky, with a quiet smile.
Upon hearing the extraordinary assertion,
one of the young men went determinedly
to the small chess-table, and lifted it up
as though it were a feather.
“All right”, she said. “Now kindly
leave it alone, and stand back! ”
The order was at once obeyed, and a great
silence fell upon the company. All,
holding their breath, anxiously watched for
what Mme. Blavatsky would do next.
She apparently, however, did nothing at
all. She merely fixed her large blue
eyes upon the chess-table, and kept looking
at it with an intense gaze. Then,
without removing her gaze, she silently,
with a motion of her hand, invited the
same young man to remove it. He approached,
and grasped the table by its leg
with great assurance. The table could not
be moved !
He then seized it with both his hands. The
table stood as though screwed to the
floor.
Then the young man, crouching down, took
hold of [69] it with both hands,
exerting all his strength to lift it by the
additional means of his broad
shoulders. He grew red with the effort, but
all in vain! The table seemed rooted
to the carpet, and would not be moved.
There was a loud burst of applause. The
young man, looking very much confused,
abandoned his task en désespoir de cause,
and stood aside.
Folding his arms in quite a Napoleonic way,
he only slowly said, “Well, this
is a good joke ! ”
“Indeed, it is a good one ! ” echoed
Leonide.
A suspicion had crossed his mind that the
young visitor was acting in secret
confederacy with his sister and was fooling
them.
“May I also try ? ” he suddenly asked
her,
“Please do, my dear”, was the laughing
response.
Her brother upon this approached, smiling,
and seized, in his turn, the
diminutive table by its leg with his strong
muscular arm. But the smile
instantly vanished, to give place to an
expression of mute amazement. He stepped
back a little and examined again very
carefully the, to him, well-known
chess-table. Then he gave it a tremendous
kick, but the little table did not
even budge.
Suddenly applying to its surface his
powerful chest he enclosed it within his
arms, trying to shake it. The wood cracked,
but would yield to no effort. Its
three feet seemed screwed to the floor.
Then Leonide Hahn lost all hope, and
abandoning the ungrateful task, stepped
aside, and frowning, exclaimed but these
two words, “How strange! ” his eyes
turning meanwhile with a wild expression
of astonishment from the table to his
sister.
We all agreed that this exclamation was not
too strong.
The loud debate had meanwhile drawn the
attention of several visitors, and they
came pouring in from the drawing-room into
the large apartment where we were.
[70]
Many of them, old and young, tried to lift
up, or even to impart some slight
motion to, the obstinate little
chess-table. They failed, like the rest of us.
Upon seeing her brother's astonishment, and
perchance desiring finally to
destroy his doubts, Mme. Blavatsky,
addressing him with her usual careless
laugh, said, “Try to lift the table now,
once more I ”
Leonide H. approached the little thing very
irresolutely, grasped it again by
the leg, and, pulling it upwards, came very
near to dislocating his arm owing to
the useless effort: the table was lifted
like a feather this time [Madame
Blavatsky has stated that this phenomenon
could only be produced in two
different ways:
1st.. Through the exercise of her own will
directing the magnetic currents so
that the pressure on the table became such
that no physical force could move it
; and
2nd. Through the action of those beings
with whom she was in constant
communication, and who, although unseen,
were able to hold the table against all
opposition.]
And now to our second case. It occurred in
St Petersburg, a few months later,
when Mme. Blavatsky had already left Pskoff
with her father and sister, and when
all three were living in a hotel. They had
come to St Petersburg on business on
their way to Mme. Yahontoff’s property, in
the district of Novorgeff, where they
had decided to pass the summer. All their
forenoons were occupied with business,
their afternoons and evenings with making
and receiving visits, and there was no
time for, or even mention of, phenomena.
One night they received a visit from two
old friends of their father; both were
old gentlemen, one of them a school-fellow
of the Corps des Pages, Baron
M------, the other the well-known K------w.
[ Sceptics who insist upon having
the full names are invited to apply to the
writer of the above, Mme de
Jelihowsky, St Petersburg, Zabalkansky
Prospect, No. 10 house, r.31 apartment’]
Both were much [71] interested in recent
spiritualism, and were, of course,
anxious to see something.
After a few successful phenomena, the
visitors declared themselves positively
delighted, amazed, and quite at a loss what
to make of Mme. Blavatsky's powers.
They could neither understand nor account,
they said, for her father's
indifference in presence of such
manifestations. There he was, coolly laying out
his “grande patience” with cards, while
phenomena of such a wonderful nature
were occurring around him. The old
gentleman, thus taken to task, answered that
it was all bosh, and that he would not hear
of such nonsense; such occupation
being hardly worthy of serious people, he
added. The rebuke left the two old
gentlemen unconcerned. They began, on the
contrary, to insist that Colonel Hahn
should, for old friendship's sake, make an
experiment, before denying the
importance, or even the possibility of his
daughter's phenomena. They offered
him to test the intelligences and their
power by writing a word in another room,
secretly from all of them, and then asking
the raps to repeat it. The old
gentleman, more probably in the hope of a
failure that would afford him the
opportunity of laughing at his two old
friends, than out of a desire to humour
them, finally consented. He left his cards,
and proceeding into an adjoining
room, wrote a word on a bit of paper; after
which, conveying it to his pocket,
he returned to his patience, and waited
silently, laughing behind his grey
moustache.
“Well, our dispute will now be settled in
a few moments”, said K------w.
“What shall you say, however, old friend,
if the word written by you is
correctly repeated? Will you not feel
compelled to believe in such a case ? ”
“What I might say, if the word were
correctly [72] guessed, I could not
tell at present”, he skeptically replied.
“One thing I could answer,
however, from the time I can be made to
believe your alleged spiritism and its
phenomena, I shall be ready to believe in
the existence of the devil, undines,
sorcerers, and witches — in the whole
paraphernalia — in short, of old women's
superstitions; and you may prepare to offer
me as an inmate of a lunatic
asylum.”
Upon delivering himself thus, he went on
with his patience, and paid no further
attention to the proceedings. He was an old
“Voltarian”, as the positivists
who believed in nothing are called in
Russia. But we, who felt deeply interested
in the experiment, began to listen to the
loud and unceasing raps coming from a
plate brought there for the purpose.
The younger sister was repeating the
alphabet; the old general marked the
letters down; while Mme. Blavatsky did
nothing at all — apparently.
She was what would be called, in our days,
a “good writing medium”; that is
to say, she could write out the answers
herself while talking with those around
her upon quite indifferent topics. But
simple and more rapid as this mode of
communication may be, she would never
consent to use it.
She was too afraid to employ it, fearing as
she explained, uncalled-for
suspicion from foolish people who did not
understand the process.
[From the first, that is to say, almost
from her childhood, and certainly in the
days mentioned above, Mme. Blavatsky, as
she tells us, would, in such cases, see
either the actual present thought of the
person putting the questions, or its
paler reflection — still quite distinct for
her — of an event, or a name, or
whatever it was, in the past, as though
hanging in a shadow world around the
[73] person, generally in the vicinity of
the head. She had but to copy it
consciously, or allow her hand to do so
mechanically. At any rate, she never
felt herself helped or led on by an
external power, i.e. no “spirits” helped
her in this process after she returned from
her first voyage, she avers. It
seemed an action entirely confined to her
own will, more or less consciously
exercised by her, more or less premeditated
and put into play.
Whenever the thought of a person had to be
communicated through raps, the
process changed. She had to read, first of
all, sometimes to interpret the
thought of the querist, and having done so,
to remember it well after it had
often disappeared; watch the letters of the
alphabet as they were read or
pointed out, prepare the will-current that
had to produce the rap at the right
letter, and then have it strike at the
right moment the table or any other
object chosen to be the vehicle of sounds
or raps. A most difficult process, and
far less easy than direct writing.']
By the means of raps and alphabet we got
one word, but it proved such a strange
one, so grotesquely absurd as having no
evident relation to anything that might
be supposed to have been written by her
father, that all of us who had been in
the expectation of some complicated
sentence looked at each other, dubious
whether we ought to read it aloud. To our
question, whether it was all, the raps
became more energetic in the affirmative
sounds. We had several triple raps,
which meant in our code — Yes ! . . . yes,
yes, yes !!!
Remarking our agitation and whispering,
Madame Blavatsky's father looked at us
over his spectacles, and asked:
“Well! Have you any answer ? It must be
something very elaborate and profound
indeed! ”
He arose and, laughing in his moustache,
approached [74] us. His youngest
daughter, Mme. Yahontoff, then went to him
and said, with some little confusion
:
“We only got one word.”
“And what is it?”
“Zaïtchik! ” [Zaïchik
means, literally,”a little hare”, while Zaïtz is the
Russian term for any hare. In the Russian
language every substantive and
adjective may be made to express the same
thing, only in the diminutive. Thus a
house is dom, while small house is
expressed by the word domik, etc.]
It was a sight indeed to witness the
extraordinary change that came over the old
man's face at this one word! He became
deadly pale. Adjusting his spectacles
with a trembling hand, he stretched it out
while hurriedly 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, — “ 'Zaïtchik'.
Yes, Zaïtchik; so it is. How very
strange!”
Taking out of his pocket the paper he had
written upon in the adjoining room, he
handed it in silence to his daughter and
guests.
They found on it both the question offered
and the answer that was anticipated.
The words read thus:
“What was the name of my favorite
war-horse which I rode during my first
Turkish campaign ? ” and lower down, in
parenthesis (“ Zaïtchik ”).
We felt fully triumphant, and expressed our
feelings accordingly.
This solitary word, Zaïtchik, had
an enormous effect upon the old gentleman. As
it often happens with inveterate sceptics,
once he had found out that there was
indeed something in his eldest daughter's
claims, and that it had nothing to do
whatever with deceit or juggling, [75]
having been convinced of this one
fact, he rushed into the region of
phenomena with all the zeal of an ardent
investigator. As a matter of course, once
he believed he felt no more inclined
to doubt his own reason.
Having received from Mme. Blavatsky one
correct answer, her father became
passionately fond of experimenting with his
daughter's powers. Once he inquired
of the date of a certain event in his
family that had occurred several hundred
of years before. He received it. From that
time he set himself and Mme.
Blavatsky the difficult task of restoring
the family chronology. The
genealogical tree, lost in the night of the
first crusades, had to be restored
from its roots down to his day.
The information was readily promised, and
he set to work from morning to night.
First, the legend of the Count von
Rottenstern, the Knight Crusader, was given
him. The year, the month, and the day on
which a certain battle with the
Saracens had been fought; and how, while
sleeping in his tent, the Knight
Crusader was awakened by the cry of a cock
(Hahn) to find himself in time to
kill, instead of being stealthily killed by
an enemy who had penetrated into his
tent. For this feat the bird, true symbol
of vigilance, was raised to the honor
of being incorporated in the coat of arms
of the Counts of Rottenstern, who
became from that time the Rottenstern von
Rott Hahn; to branch off later into
the Hahn-Hahn family and others.
Then began a regular series of figures,
dates of years and months, of hundreds
of names by connection and side marriages,
and a long line of descent from the
Knight Crusaders down to the Countess Ida
Hahn-Hahn — Mme. Blavatsky's father's
cousin, and her father's family names and
dates, as well as a mass of
contemporary events which had taken place
in connection with that [76]
family's descending line, were given
rapidly and unhesitatingly. The greatest
historian, endowed with the most phenomenal
memory, could never be equal to such
a task. How then could one who had been on
cold terms from her very youth with
simple arithmetic and history be suspected
of deliberate deceit in a work that
necessitated the greatest chronological
precision, the knowledge very often of
the most unimportant historical events,
with their involved names and dates, all
of which upon the most careful verification
were found to be correct to a day.
True, the family immigrants from Germany
since the days of Peter III. had a good
many missing links and blanks in their genealogical
tables, yet the few
documents that had been preserved among the
various branches of the family in
Germany and Russia — whenever consulted,
were found to be the originals of those
very exact copies furnished through Mme.
Blavatsky's raps.
Her uncle, a high official at the General
Post Office at St Petersburg, whose
great ambition in those days was to settle
the title of a Count on his eldest
sons permanently, took the greatest
interest in this mysterious work. Over and
over again he would, in his attempts to
puzzle and catch his niece in some
historical or chronological inaccuracy,
interrupt the regular flow of her raps,
and ask for information about something
which had nothing to do with the
genealogy, but was only some
contemporaneous fact. For instance :
“You say that in the year 1572 Count Carl
von Hahn-Hahn was married to the
Baroness Ottilia, so and so. This was in
June at the castle of — — at
Mecklenburg. Now, who was the reigning
Kurfuerst at that time; what Prince
reigned at ----- (some small German state);
and who was the confessor of the
Pope, and the Pope himself in that year ?
”[77]
And the answer, always correct, would
invariably come without a moment's pause.
It was often found far more difficult to
verify the correctness of such names
and dates than to receive the information.
Mr J. A. Hahn, then Post Director at
St Petersburg, Mme. Blavatsky's uncle, had
to plunge for days and weeks
sometimes into dusty old archives, write to
Germany, and apply for information
to the most out-of-the-way places, that
were designated to him, when he found
difficulties in his way to obtain the
knowledge he sought for in easily
obtainable books and records.
This lasted for months. Never during that
time were Mme. Blavatsky's invisible
helper or helpers found mistaken in any
single instance. [Indeed not; for it was
neither a “spirit” nor “spirits” but living
men who can draw before their eyes
the picture of any book or manuscript
wherever existing, and in case of need
even that of any long-forgotten and
unrecorded event, who helped “Mme
Blavatsky”, The astral light is the
storehouse and the record book of all
things, and deeds have no secrets for such
men. And the proof of it may be found
in the production of Isis Unveiled.(Note by
H.P. Blavatsky)] They only asked
occasionally for a day or two to get at the
correct information.
Unfortunately, these records, put down on
fly-leaves and then copied into a
book, are probably lost. The papers
remained with Mme. Blavatsky's father, who
treasured them, and with many other far
more valuable documents were stolen or
lost after his death. But his
sister-in-law, Mme. Blavatsky's aunt, has in her
possession letters from him in which he
speaks enthusiastically of his
experiments.
One of the most startling of her phenomena
happened very soon after Mme.
Blavatsky's return, in the early spring of
1858. Both sisters were then living
with [78] their father, in their country
house in a village belonging to
Mme. Yahontoff.
In consequence of a crime committed not far
from the boundaries of my property,
she writes — (a man having been found
killed in a gin shop, the murderers
remaining unknown) — the superintendent of
the district police passed one
afternoon through our village, and stopped
to make some inquiries.
The researches were made very secretly, and
he had not said one word about his
business to anyone in the house, not even
to our father. As he was an
acquaintance who visited our family, and
stopped at our house on his district
tour, no one asked him why he had come, for
he made us very frequent visits, as
to all the other proprietors in the
neighborhood.
It was only on the following morning, after
he had ordered the village serfs to
appear for examination (which proved
useless), that the inmates learned anything
of his mission.
During tea, as they were all sitting around
the table, there came the usual
knocks, raps, and disturbance on the walls,
the ceiling, and about the furniture
of the room.
To our father's question why the
police-superintendent should not try to learn
something of the name and the whereabouts
of the murderer from my sister's
invisible agents, the officer Captain O
only incredulously smiled.
He had heard of the “all-knowing”
spirits, but was ready to bet almost
anything that these “horned and hoofed
gentlemen” would prove insufficient
for such a task. “They would hardly
betray and inform against their own”, he
added, with a silly laugh.
This fling at her invisible “powers”,
and laugh, as she thought, at her
expense, made Mme. Blavatsky [79] change
color, and feel, as she said, an
irrepressible desire to humble the ignorant
fool, who hardly knew what he was
talking about. She turned fiercely upon the
police-officer.
“And suppose I prove to you the contrary
?” she defiantly asked him.
“Then”, he answered, still laughing,
“I would resign my office, and offer
it to you, Madame ; or, still better, 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 a 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 will even leave the room.”
She went away, and taking a book, placed
herself on the balcony, apparently
quite unconcerned with what was going on.
Colonel Hahn, anxious to make a convert,
began repeating the alphabet. The
communication received was far from
complimentary in its adjectives to the
address of the police-superintendent.
The outcome of the message was, that while
he was talking nonsense at Rougodevo
(the name of our new property), the
murderer, whose name was Samoylo Ivanof, had
crossed over before daylight to the next
district, and thus escaped the
officer's clutches.
“At present he is hiding under a bundle
of hay in the loft of a peasant, named
Andrew Vlassof, of the village of
Oreshkino. By going there immediately you will
secure the criminal.”
The effect upon the man was tremendous! Our
[80] Stanovoy (district
officer) was positively nonplused, and
confessed that Oreshkino was one of the
suspected villages he had on his list.
“But — allow me, however, to inquire”,
he asked of the table from which the
raps proceeded, and bending over it with a
suspicious look upon his face, “how
come you — whoever you are — to know
anything of the murderer's name, or of that
of the confederate who hides him in his
loft ? And who is Vlassof, for I know
him not ? ”
The answer came clear and rather
contemptuous.
“Very likely that you should neither know
nor see much beyond your own nose.
We, however, who are now giving you the
information, have the means of knowing
everything we wish to know. Samoylo Ivanof
is an old soldier on leave. He was
drunk, and quarreled with the victim. The
murder was not premeditated; it is a
misfortune, not a crime.”
Upon hearing these words the superintendent
rushed out of the house like a
madman, and drove off at a furious rate
towards Oreshkino, which was more than
thirty miles distant from Rougodevo. The
information agreeing admirably with
some points he had laboriously collected,
and furnishing the last word to the
mystery of the names given — he had no
doubt in his own mind that the rest would
prove true, as he confessed some time
after.
On the following morning a messenger on
horseback, sent by the Stanovoy, made
his appearance with a letter to her father.
Events in Oreshkino had proved every word
of the information to be correct. The
murderer was found and arrested in his
hiding place at Andrew Vlassofs cottage,
and identified as a soldier on leave named
Samoylo Ivanof.
This event produced a great sensation in
the district, and henceforward the
messages obtained, through the [81] instrumentality
of my sister, were
viewed in a more serious light. [Madame
Blavatsky denies, point blank, any
intervention of spirits in this case. She
tells us she had the picture of the
whole tragedy and its subsequent
developments before her from the moment the
Stanovoy entered the house. She knew the
names of the murderers, the
confederate, and of the village, for she
saw them interested, so to say, with
the visions. Then she guided the raps, and
thus gave the information.] But this
brought, a few weeks after, very
disagreeable complications, for the police of
St Petersburg wanted to know how could one,
and that one a woman who had just
returned from foreign countries, know
anything of the details of a murder.
It cost Colonel Hahn great exertion to
settle the matter and satisfy the
suspicious authorities that there had been
no fouler play in the business than
the intervention of supernatural powers, in
which the police pretended, of
course, to have no faith.
The most successful phenomena took place
during those hours when we were alone,
when no one cared to make experiments or
sought useless tests, and when there
was no one to convince or enlighten.
At such moments the manifestations were
left to produce themselves at their own
impulse and pleasure, none of us — not even
the chief author of the phenomena
under observation, at any rate as far as
those present could see and judge from
appearances — assuming any active part in
trying to guide them.
We very soon arrived at the conviction that
the forces at work, as Mme,
Blavatsky constantly told us, had to be
divided into several distinct
categories. While the lowest on the scale
of invisible beings produced most of
the physical phenomena, the very highest
among the agencies at work condescended
but rarely to a communication or
intercourse with strangers. The [82]
last-named “invisibles” made themselves
manifestly seen, felt, and heard
only during those hours when we were alone
in the family, and when great harmony
and quiet reigned among us.
It is said that harmony helps wonderfully
toward the manifestation of the
so-called mediumistic force, and that the
effects produced in physical
manifestations depend but little on the
volition of the “medium”. Such feats
as that accomplished with the little
chess-table at Pskoff were rare. In the
majority of the cases the phenomena were
sporadic, seemingly quite independent
of her will, apparently never heeding
anyone's suggestion, and generally
appearing in direct contradiction with the
desires expressed by those present.
We used to feel extremely vexed whenever
there was a chance to convince some
highly intellectual investigator, but
through H. P. Blavatsky's obstinacy or
lack of will nothing came out of it. For
instance :
If we asked for one of those highly
intellectual, profound answers we got so
often when alone, we usually received in
answer some impertinent rubbish; when
we begged for the repetition of some
phenomena she had produced for us hundreds
of times before, our wish was only laughed
at.
I well remember how, during a grand evening
party, when several families of
friends had come from afar off, in some
cases from distances of hundreds of
miles on purpose to witness some phenomena,
to “hear with their ears and see
with their eyes” the strange doings of
Mme. Blavatsky, the latter, though
mockingly assuring us she did all she
could, gave them no result to ponder upon.
This lasted for several days. [ She
explains this by describing herself as tired
and disgusted with the ever-growing public
thirst for “miracles”.] [83]
The visitors had left dissatisfied and in a
spirit as skeptical as it was
uncharitable. Hardly, however, had the
gates been closed after them, the bells
of their horses yet merrily tinkling in the
last alley of the entrance park,
when everything in the room seemed to
become endowed with life. The furniture
acted as though every piece of it was
animated and gifted with voice and speech,
and we passed the rest of the evening and
the greater part of the night as
though we were between the enchanted walls
of the magic palace of some
Scheherazade.
It is far easier to enumerate the phenomena
that did not take place during these
forever memorable hours than to describe
those that did. All those weird
manifestations that we had observed at
various times seemed to have been
repeated for our sole benefit during that
night. At one moment as we sat at
supper in the dining-room, there were loud
accords played on the piano which
stood in the adjoining apartment, and which
was closed and locked, and so placed
that we could all of us see it from where
we were through the large open doors.
Then at the first command and look of Mme.
Blavatsky there came rushing to her
through the air her tobacco-pouch, her box
of matches, her pocket-handkerchief,
or anything she asked, or was made to ask
for.
Then, as we were taking our seats, all the
lights in the room were suddenly
extinguished, both lamps and wax candles,
as though a mighty rush of wind had
swept through the whole apartment; and when
a match was instantly struck, there
was all the heavy furniture, sofas,
arm-chairs, tables, cupboards, and large
sideboard standing upside down, as though
turned over noiselessly by some
invisible hands, and not an ornament of the
fragile carved work nor even a plate
broken. Hardly had we gathered [84] our
senses together after this
miraculous performance, when we heard again
someone playing on the piano a loud
and intelligible piece of music, a long
marche de bravoure this time. As we
rushed with lighted candles to the
instrument (I mentally counting the persons
to ascertain that all were present), we
found, as we had anticipated, the piano
locked, the last sounds of the final chords
still vibrating in the air from
beneath the heavy closed lid.
After this, notwithstanding the late hour,
we placed ourselves around our large
dining-table, and had a séance. The huge
family dining-board began to shake
with great force, and then to move, sliding
rapidly about the room in every
direction, even raising itself up to the
height of a man. In short, we had all
those manifestations that never failed when
we were alone, i.e. when only those
nearest and dearest to H. P. B. were
present, and none of the strangers who came
to us attracted by mere curiosity, and
often with a malevolent and hostile
feeling.
Among a mass of various and striking
phenomena that took place on that memorable
night, I will mention but two more.
And here I must notice the following
question made in those days whenever my
sister, Madame B sat, to please us, for
“communications through raps”. We
were asked by her to choose what we would
have. “Shall we have the mediumistic
or spook raps, or the raps by clairvoyant
proxy ? ” she asked.
[To make this clearer and intelligible, I
must give her (Mme. Blavatsky's)
explanation of the difference.
She never made a secret that she had been,
ever since her childhood, and until
nearly the age of twenty-five, a very
strong medium; though after that period,
owing to a regular psychological and
physiological training, she [85] was
made to lose this dangerous gift, and every
trace of mediumship outside her
will, or beyond her direct control, was
overcome. She had two distinct methods
of producing communications through raps.
The one consisted almost entirely in
her being passive, and permitting the
influences to act at their will, at which
time the brainless Elementals, (the shells
would rarely, if ever, be allowed to
come, owing to the danger of the
intercourse) chameleon-like, would reflect more
or less characteristically the thoughts of
those present, and follow in a
half-intelligent way the suggestions found
by them in Madame Blavatsky's mind.
The other method, used very rarely for
reasons connected with her intense
dislike to meddle with really departed
entities, or rather to enter into their
“currents of thought” is this: — She
would compose herself, and seeking out,
with eyes shut, in the astral light, that
current that preserved the genuine
impress of some well-known departed entity,
she identified herself for the time
being with it, and guiding the raps made
them to spell out that which she had in
her own mind, as reflected from the astral
current. Thus, if the rapping spirit
pretended to be a Shakespeare, it was not
really that great personality, but
only the echo of the genuine thoughts that
had once upon a time moved in his
brain and crystallized themselves, so to
say, in his astral sphere whence even
his shell had departed long ago — the
imperishable thoughts alone remaining. Not
a sentence, not a word spelt by the raps that
was not formed first in her brain,
in its turn the faithful copier of that
which was found by her spiritual eye in
the luminous Record Book of departed
humanity. The, so to express it,
crystallized essence of the mind of the
once physical brain was there before her
spiritual vision; her living brain
photographed it, and her will dictated its
expression by guiding the raps which thus
became intelligent.]
And though few, if any, of us then
understood clearly [86] what she meant,
yet she would act either one way or the
other, never uniting the two methods.
We chose the former in this instance — the
“spook-raps” — as the easiest to
obtain, and affording us more amusement,
and to her less trouble.
Thus, out of the many invisible and “
distinguished ” phantom visitors of
that night, the most active and prominent
among them was the alleged spirit of
Poushkine.
I beg the reader to remember that we never
for a moment believed that spook to
be really the great poet, whose earthly
remains rest in the neighbourhood of our
Rougodevo, in the monk's territory known as
the “holy mountain”.
We had been warned by Mme. Blavatsky, and
knew well how much we could trust to
the communications and conversation of such
unseen visitors. But the fact of our
having chosen for that séance the “spook
raps”, does not at all interfere
with the truth of that other assertion of
ours, namely, that, whenever we wanted
something genuine, and resorted to the
method of “clairvoyant proxy”, we had
very often communications of great power
and vigor of thought, profoundly
scientific and remarkable in every way;
made not by but in the spirit of the
great defunct personage in whose name they
were given.
It is only when we resorted to the “spook
raps” that, notwithstanding the
world-known names of the eminent personages
in which the goblins of the
séance-room love to parade, we got
answers and discourses that might do honor to
a circus clown, but hardly to a Socrates, a
Cicero, or a Martin Luther. Page 87]
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206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
CHAPTER 5
MM. DE JELIHOWSKY'S NARRATIVE -CONTINUED-
I REMEMBER that we were deeply interested
in those days in reading aloud in our
little family circle, the Memoirs of
Catherine Romanovna Dashkoff, just then
published. The interest of this remarkable
historical work was greatly enhanced
to us owing to the fact that our reading
was very often interrupted by the
alleged spirit of the authoress herself.
The gaps and hiatuses of a publication,
severely disfigured and curtailed by the
censor's pen and scissors, were
constantly filled up by comparing notes
with her astral records.
By the means of guided raps — Mme. B.
refusing, as usual, to help us by direct
writing, preferring lazily to rest in her
arm-chair — we received, in the name
of the authoress, innumerable remarks,
additions, explanations, and refutations.
In some cases, her apparent and mistaken
views in the days when she wrote her
memoirs were corrected and replaced by more
genuine thoughts. [ The fact that
many of the remarks and notes were
different in their character from the
original memoirs, and that errors and
mistakes were corrected, can easily be
explained. The old thoughts of Catherine
Romanovna were expounded and corrected
in the intellectual sphere of Madame B. The
manner and nature of the expression
would not cease to resemble that of the
author, and, in the astral light, the
original of the work, as conceived in the
brain of the historian, would
certainly be returned in preference to the
mutilated views of the censor; while
the brain of Madame B would supply the
rest.] [88] All such corrections and
additional matter given, fascinated us
deeply by their profundity, their wit and
humor, often, indeed, with the natural
pathos that was one of the prominent
features of this remarkable historical
character.
But I must return to my reminiscences of
that memorable night. Thus, among other
post-mortem visitors, we were entertained
on that evening by A. Poushkine.
The poet seemed to be in one of his
melancholy and dark moments; and to our
queries, what was the matter, what made him
suffer, and what we could do for
him, he obliged us with an extemporary
poem, which I preserved, although its
character and style are beneath criticism.
The substance of it — which is hardly worth
translation — was to the effect that
there was no reason for us to know his
secret sufferings. Why should we try to
know what he may be wishing for ? He had
but one desire: to rest on the bosom of
Death, instead of which he was suffering in
great darkness for his sins,
tortured by devils, and had lost all hope
of ever reaching the bliss of becoming
a winged cherub, etc etc..[ In the
recollection of Mme. Blavatsky, this was a
genuine spirit-manifestation, i.e. a clumsy
personification of the great poet by
passing shells and spooks, allowed to merge
into the circle for a few moments.
The rhymed complaint speaking of hell and
devils was the echo of the feelings
and thoughts of a pious governess present ;
most assuredly it was not any
reflection from Madame Blavatsky's brain,
nor would her admiring respect for the
memory of the greatest Russian poet have
ever allowed her to make such a
blasphemous joke under the cover of his
name.]
“Poor Alexander Sergeïtch!”
exclaimed Colonel Hahn, upon hearing this wretched
production read; and so saying he rose as
though in search of something. [
89] “ What are you looking for? ” we
asked. “My long pipe! I have had
enough of these cigars, and I cannot find
my pipe ; where can it be ? ”
“You have just smoked it, after supper,
father”. I replied.
“I did; and now Helen's spirits must have
walked off with it or hidden it
somewhere.”
“One, two, three! One, two, three! ”
affirmed triple raps around us, as
though mocking the old gentleman.
“Indeed! Well, this is a foolish joke.
Could not our friend Poushkine tell us
where he has hidden it ? Do let us know,
for life itself would be worthless on
this earth without my old and faithful
pipe.”
“One, two, three ! One, two, three ! ”
knocked the table.
“Is this you, Alexander Sergei'tch ? ”
we asked.
At this juncture my sister frowned angrily,
and the raps suddenly stopped.
“No”, she said, after a moment's pause,
“it is somebody else”. And
putting her hand upon the table she set the
raps going again.
“Who is it, then ? ”
“It is me; your old orderly, your honor:
Voronof.”
“Ah, Voronof! very glad to meet you
again, my good fellow. . . . Now, try to
remember old times: bring me my pipe.”
“I would be very happy to do so, your
honor, but I am not able; somebody holds
me fast. But you can take it yourself, your
honor. See, there it is swinging
over your head on the lamp.”
We all raised our heads. Verily, where a
minute before there was nothing at all,
there was now the huge Turkish pipe, placed
horizontally on the alabaster shade,
and balancing over it with its two ends
sticking [90] out at both sides of
the lamp which hung over the dining table.
This new physical demonstration filled with
astonishment even those of us who
had been accustomed to live in a world of
marvels for months. Hardly a year
before we would not have believed even in
the possibility of what we now
regarded as perfectly proved facts.
In the early part of the year 1859, as
above stated, soon after her return to
Russia, Mme. Blavatsky went to live with
her father and sister in a country
house of a village belonging to Mme.
Jelihowsky at Rougodevo.[In the district of
Novorgeff, in the Government of Pskoff -
about 200 versts from St Peterburg. It
was at that time a private property, a
village of several hundred serfs, but
soon after emancipation of the land passed
into other hands.]
It had been bought only a year before by my
deceased husband from parties
entirely unknown to us till then, and
through an agent; and therefore no one
knew anything of their antecedents, or even
who they really were. It was quite
unexpectedly that, owing to the sudden
death of M. Yahontoff, I decided to
settle in it for a time, with my two baby
sons, our father, and my two sisters,
H. P. Blavatsky and Lisa, the youngest, our
father's only daughter by another
wife.
I could therefore have no acquaintance with
our neighbors or the landed
proprietors of other villages, or with the
relatives of the late owner of my
property. All I knew was, that Rougodevo
had been bought from a person named
Statkovsky, the husband of the
granddaughter of its late owners — a family named
Shousherin. Who were those Shousherins, the
hereditary proprietors of those
picturesque hills and mountains, of the
dense pine forests, the lovely lakes,
our old park, and nearly as old a mansion,
from the top of which one could take
a [91] sweeping view of the country for 30
versts around, its present
proprietors could have no conception
whatever; least of all, H. P. B., who had
been out of Russia for over ten years, and
had just then returned.
It was on the second or third evening after
our arrival at Rougodevo. We were
two of us walking along the side of the
flower-beds, in front of the house.
The ground-floor windows looked right into
the flower-garden, while those of its
three other sides were surrounded with
large, old, shaded grounds.
We had settled on the first floor, which
consisted of nine or ten large rooms,
while our elderly father occupied a suite
of rooms on the ground floor, on the
right-hand side of the long entrance hall.
The rooms opposite to his, on the
left side, were uninhabited, and in the
expectation of future visitors, stood
empty, with their doors securely locked.
The rooms occupied by the servants were
at the back of the mansion, and could not
be seen from where we were. The
windows of the empty apartment came out in
bright relief, especially the room at
the left angle ; its windows, reflecting
the rays of the setting sun in full
glory, seemed illuminated through and
through with the effulgence of the bright
sunbeams.
We were slowly walking up and down the
gravel walk under the windows, and each
time that we approached the angle of the
house, my sister (H. P. B.) looked into
the windows with a strange searching
glance, and lingered on that spot, a
puzzling expression and smile settling upon
her face.
Remarking at last her furtive glances and
smiles, I wanted to know what it was
that so attracted her attention in the
empty room ?
“Shall I tell ? Well, if you promise not
to be frightened, then I may”, she
answered hesitatingly. [92]
“What reason have I to be frightened !
Thank heaven, I see nothing myself.
Well, and what do you see? Is it, as usual,
visitors from the other world ? ”
“I could not tell you now, Vera, for I do
not know them. But if my conjectures
are right, they do seem, if not quite the
dwellers themselves, at least the
shadows of such dwellers from another, but
certainly not from our, world. I
recognize this by certain signs.”
“What signs ? Are their faces those of
dead men ? ” I asked, very nervously,
I confess.
“Oh, no! ” she said; “for in such a
case I should see them as dead people
in their beds, or in their coffins. Such
sights I am familiar with. But these
men are walking about, and look just as if
alive. They have no mortal reason to
remind me of their death, since I do not
know who they are, and never knew them
alive. But they do look so very antiquated.
Their dresses are such as we see
only on old family portraits. One, however,
is an exception.”
“How does he look ? ”
“ Well, this one looks as though he were
a German student or an artist. He
wears a black velvet blouse, with a wide
leather sash. . . . Long hair hanging
in heavy waves down his back and shoulders.
This one is quite a young man. ...
He stands apart, and seems to look quite in
a different direction from where the
others are.”
We had now again approached the angle of
the house, and halting, were both
looking into the empty room through the
bright window panes. It was brilliantly
lit up by the sunbeams of the setting sun,
but the room was empty evidently, but
only for one of us. For my sister it was
full of the images probably of its
long-departed late inmates.[93]
Mme. Blavatsky went on looking
thoughtfully, and describing what she saw.
“There, there, he looks in our direction.
See ! ” she muttered, “ he looks
as though he is startled at seeing us! Now
he is there no longer. How strange!
he seems to have melted away in that sunbeam
! ”
“Let us call them out to-night, and ask
them who they are”, I suggested.
“We may, but what of that ? Can any one
of them be relied upon or believed ? I
would pay any price to be able to command
and control as they, . . . some
personages I might name, do; but I cannot.
I must fail for years to come”, she
added, regretfully.
“Who are they ? Whom do you mean ? ”
“Those who know and can — not mediums”,
she contemptuously added. “But
look, look, what a sight! Oh, see what an
ugly monster! Who can it be ? ”
“Now, what's the use in your telling me '
look, look' and see ? How can I look
when I see nothing, not being a clairvoyant
as you are. . . . Tell me, how does
that other figure appear ? Only if it is
something too dreadful, then you had
better stop”, I added, feeling a cold
chill creeping over me. And, seeing she
was going to speak, I cried out, “Now,
pray do not say anything more if it is
too dreadful”.
Don't be afraid, there is nothing dreadful
in it, it only seemed to me so. They
are there now — one, however, I can see
very hazily; it is a woman, and she
seems to be always merging into and again
emerging from that shadow in the
corner. Oh, there's an old, old lady
standing there and looking at me, as though
she were alive. What a nice, kind, fat old
thing she must have been. She has a
white frilled cap on her head, a white
kerchief crossed over her shoulders, a
short grey narrow dress, and a checked
apron.” [94]
“Why, you are painting some fancy
portrait of the Flemish school”, laughed
I. “Now, look here, I am really afraid
that you are mystifying me.”
“I swear I am not. But I am so sorry that
you cannot see.”
“Thanks; but I am not at all sorry. Peace
be upon all those ghosts ! How
horrible ! ”
“Not at all horrible. They are all quite
nice and natural, with the exception,
maybe, of that old man.”
“Gracious ! what old man ? ”
“A very, very funny old man. Tall, gaunt,
and with such a suffering look upon
his worn-out face. And then it is his
nails, that puzzle me. What terrible long
nails he has, or claws rather; why, they
must be over an inch long!”
“Heaven help us! ” I could not help
shrieking out. “Whom are you
describing? Surely it must be” — I was
going to say, “the devil himself”,
but stopped short, overcome by a shudder.
Unable to control my terror, I hastily left
the place under the window and stood
at a safe distance.
The sun had gone down, but the gold and
crimson flush of its departing rays
lingered still, tinting everything with
gold — the house, the old trees of the
garden, and the pond in the background.
The colors of the flowers seemed doubly
attractive in this brilliant light; and
only the angle of the old house, which cut
the golden hue in two, seemed to cast
a gloomy shadow on the glorious scene. H.
P. Blavatsky remained alone behind
that obscure angle, overshadowed by the
thick foliage of an oak, while I sought
a safe refuge in the glow of the large open
space near the flower-beds, and kept
urging her to come out of her nook and
enjoy instead the lovely panorama, and
look at the [95] far-off wooded hills, with
their tops still glowing in the
golden hue, on the quiet smooth ponds and
the large dormant lake, reflecting in
its mirror-like waters the green chaotic
confusion of its banks, and the ancient
chapel slumbering in its nest of birch.
My sister came out at last, pale and
thoughtful. She was determined, she said,
to learn who it was whom she had just seen.
She felt sure the shadowy figures
were the lingering reflections of people
who had inhabited at some time those
empty rooms. “I am puzzled to know who
the old man can be”, she kept saying.
“Why should he have allowed his nails to
grow to such an extraordinary Chinese
length ? And then another peculiarity, he
wears a most strange-looking black
cap, very high, and something similar to
the klobouk of our monks.” [The round
tiara, covered with a long black veil, worn
by the orthodox Greek monks.]
“Do let these horrid phantoms alone. Do
not think of them! ”
“Why ? It is very interesting, the more
so since I now see them so rarely. I
wish I were still a real medium, as the
latter, I am told, are constantly
surrounded by a host of ghosts, and that I
see them now but occasionally, not as
I used to years ago, when a child. . . .
Last night, however, I saw in Lisa's
room a tall gentleman with long whiskers.”
“What! in the nursery room near the
children ? Oh, please, drive him away from
there, at least. I do hope the ghost has
only followed you there, and has not
made a permanent abode of that place. How
you can keep so cool, and feel no fear
when you see, is something I could never
understand ! ”
“And why should I fear them ? They are
harmless in most cases, unless
encouraged. Then I am too [96] accustomed
to such sights to experience even
a passing uneasiness. If anything, I feel
disgust, and a contemptuous pity for
the poor spooks! In fact, I feel convinced
that all of us mortals are constantly
surrounded by millions of such shadows, the
last mortal image left of themselves
by their ex-proprietors.”
“Then you think that these ghosts are all
of them the reflection of the dead ?
”
“I am convinced of it — in fact, / know
it ! ”
“ Why, then, in such a case, are we not
constantly surrounded by those who
were so near and dear to us, by our loved
relatives and friends ? Why are we
allowed to be pestered only by a host of
strangers, to suffer the uninvited
presence of the ghosts of people whom we
never knew, nor do we care for them ?
”
“A difficult query to answer! How often,
how earnestly, have I tried to see
and recognize among the shadows that
haunted me some one of our dear relatives,
or even a friend! . . . Stray
acquaintances, and distant relatives, for whom I
care little, I have occasionally
recognized, but they never seemed to pay any
attention to me, and whenever I saw them it
was always unexpected and
independently of my will. How I longed from
the bottom of my soul, how I have
tried — all in vain ! As much as I can make
out of it, it is not the living who
attract the dead, but rather the localities
they have inhabited, those places
where they have lived and suffered, and
where their personalities and outward
forms have been most impressed on the
surrounding atmosphere. Say, shall we call
some of your old servants, those who have
been born and lived in this place all
their lives ? I feel sure that, if we
describe to them some of the forms I have
just seen, that they will recognize in them
people they knew, and who have died
here.” [97]
The suggestion was good, and it was
immediately put to the test; we took our
seats on the steps of the entrance door,
and sent a servant to inquire who were
the oldest serfs in the compound. An
ancient tailor, named Timothy, who lived
for years exempt from any obligatory work
on account of his services and old
age, and the chief gardener, Oulyan, a man
about sixty, soon made their
appearance. I felt at first a little
embarrassed, and put some commonplace
questions, asking who it was who built one
of the outhouses near by. Then I put
the direct query, whether there had ever
lived in the house an old man, very
strange to look at, with a high black
head-gear, terribly long nails, wearing
habitually a long grey coat, etc., etc.
No sooner had I given this description than
the two old peasants, interrupting
each other, and with great volubility,
exclaimed affirmatively that they “Knew
well who it was whom the young mistress
described.”
“Don't we know him ? of course we do —
why, it is our late barrin (master)!
Just as he used to be — our deceased master
Nikolay Mihaylovitch ! ”
“Statkowsky ? ”
“No, no, mistress. Statkowsky was the
young master, and he is not dead; he was
our nominal master only, owing to his
marriage with Natalya Nikolavna — our late
master's, Nikolay Mihaylovitch Shousherin's
granddaughter. And, as you have
described him, it is him, for sure — our
late master, Shousherin.”
My sister and I interchanged a furtive
glance. “We have heard of him”, said
I, unwilling to take the servants into our
confidence, ” but did not feel sure
it was he. But why was he wearing such a
strange-looking cap, and, as it seemed,
never cut his nails ? ”
“This was owing to a disease, mistress —
an incurable [98] disease, as we
were told, that the late master caught
while in Lithuania, where he had resided
for years. It is called the Koltoun,[The
“plica polonica”, a terrible skin
complaint, very common in Lithuania, and
contracted only in its climate. The
hair, as is well known, is grievously
diseased, nor can nails on the fingers and
toes be touched, their cutting leading to a
bleeding to death] if you have heard
of it. He could neither cut his hair nor
pare his nails, and had to cover
constantly his head with a tall velvet cap,
like a priest's cap.”
“Well, and how did your mistress, Mrs
Shousherin, look ? ”
The tailor gave a description in no way
resembling the Dutch-looking old lady
seen by Mme. Blavatsky. Further
cross-examination elicited, however, that the
woman, in her semi-Flemish costume, was
Mina Ivanovna, a German housekeeper, who
had resided in the house for over twenty
years; and the young man, who looked
like a German student in his velvet blouse,
was really such a student who had
come from Göttingen. He was the
youngest brother of Mr Statkowsky, who had died
in Rougodevo, of consumption, about three
years before our arrival. This was not
all, moreover. We found out that the corner
room in which H. P. B. had seen on
that evening, as she has later on, on many
other occasions, the phantoms of all
these deceased personages of Rougodevo, had
been made to serve for every one of
them, either as a death-chamber when they
had breathed their last, or had been
converted for their benefit into a
mortuary-chamber when they had been laid out
awaiting burial. It was from this suite of
apartments, in which their bodies had
invariably passed from three to five days,
that they had been [99] carried
away into yonder old chapel, on the other
side of the lake, that was so well
seen, and had been examined by us from the
windows of our sitting-room.
Since that day, not only H. P. B., but even
her little sister, Lisa, a child of
nine years old, saw more than once strange
forms gliding noiselessly along the
corridors of the old house, so full of
lingering events of the past, and of the
images of those who had passed away from
it. The child, strange to say, feared
the restless ghosts no more than her elder
sister; the former taking them
innocently for living persons, and
concerned but with the interesting problem,
“where they had come from, who they were,
and why no one except her ' old'
sister and herself ever consented to notice
them.”
She thought this very rude — the little
lady. Luckily for the child, and owing
perhaps to the efforts of her sister, Mme.
Blavatsky, the faculty left her very
soon, never to return during her subsequent
life.[The young lady is now over
thirty, and was saying but last year how
lucky it was for her that she no longer
saw these trans-terrestrial visitors.] As
for Helena Petrovna, it never left her
from her very childhood. So strong is this
weird faculty in her that it is a
rare case when she has to learn of the
death of a relative, a friend, or even an
old servant of the family from a letter. We
have given up advising her of any
such sad events, the dead invariably
precede the news, and tell her themselves
of their demise; and we receive a letter in
which she describes the way she saw
this or that departed person, at the same
time, and often before the post
carrying our notification could have
reached her, as it will be shown further
on.
[The pamphlet already referred to, Personal
and Family Reminiscences, by Mme.
Jelihowsky, may here [100] be laid under
contribution in reference to
incidents taking place at the period we are
now dealing with.]
Having settled in our property at
Rougodevo, we found ourselves as though
suddenly transplanted into an enchanted
world, in which we got gradually so
accustomed to see self-moving furniture,
things transferred from one place to
another, in the most inexplicable way, and
to the strong interference with, and
presence in, our matter-of-fact daily life
of some unknown to us, yet
intelligent power, that we all ended by
paying very little attention to it,
though the phenomenal facts struck everyone
else as being simply miraculous.
Verily, habit becomes second nature with
men! Our father, who had premised by
saying that he gave permission to everyone
to incarcerate him in a lunatic
asylum on that day that he would believe
that a table could move, fly, or become
rooted to the spot at the desire of those
present, now passed his days and parts
of his nights talking with “Helen's
spirits”, as he called it. They informed
him of numerous events and details
pertaining to the lives of his ancestors, the
Counts Hahn von Rottenstern Hahn; offered
to get back for him certain
title-deeds, and told us such interesting
legends and witty anecdotes, that
unbelievers as well as believers could
hardly help feeling interested. It often
happened that my sister, being occupied
with her reading, we — our father, the
governess, and myself — unwilling to
disturb her, communicated with the
invisible power, mentally and in silence,
simply thinking out our questions, and
writing down the letters rapped out either
on the walls or the table near us.
... I remember having had a remarkable
phenomenon of this kind, at a station in
the Swyatee Goree (Holy Mountains), where
the poet A. Poushkine is buried, and
when my sister was fast [101] asleep.
Things were told to me, of which
positively no one in this world could know
anything, I alone being the
depositary of these secrets, together with
an old gentleman living for years on
his far-away property. I had not seen him
for six years; my sister had never
heard of him, as I had made his
acquaintance two years after she had left
Russia. During that mental conversation,
names, dates, and the appellation of
his property were given to me. I had
thought and asked, Where is he who loved me
more than anyone on this earth ? Easy to
know that I had my late husband in my
mind. Instead of that, I received in answer
a name I had long forgotten. First I
felt perplexed, then indignant, and finally
the idea became so comical that I
burst out in a fit of laughter, that awoke
my sister. How can you prove to me
that you do not lie ? I asked my invisible
companions. Remember the second
volume of Byron's poetry, was the answer I
received. I became cold with horror !
No one had ever been told of it, and I
myself had forgotten for years that
circumstance which was now told to me in
all its details, namely, that being in
the habit of sending books, and a series of
English classics for me to read,
that gentleman, old enough to be my
grandfather, had thought of offering
marriage to me, and found no better means
for it than by inserting in Volume II.
of Byron's works a letter to that effect.
... Of course my “informers”,
whoever they were, played upon me a wicked
trick by reminding me of these facts,
yet their omniscience had been brilliantly
proven to me by them in this case.
It is most extraordinary that our silent
conversations with that intelligent
force that had ever manifested itself in my
sister's presence were found by us
the most successful during her sleep, or
when she was very ill. [102] Once
a young physician, who visited us for the
first time, got so terribly frightened
at the noises, and the moving about of
things in her room when she was on her
bed lying cold and senseless, that he
nearly fainted himself. Such tragi-comical
scenes happened very often in our house,
but the most remarkable of all such
have already been told in the pages of the
Rebus, in 1883, as having taken place
during her two years' stay with us. As an
eye-witness, I can only once more
testify to all the facts described, without
entering upon the question of the
agency that produced them, or the nature of
the agents. But I may recall some
additional inexplicable phenomena that
occurred at that time, testified to by
other members of our family, though some of
them I have not witnessed myself.
All the persons living on the premises,
with the household members, saw
constantly, often in full noonday, vague
human shadows walking about the rooms,
appearing in the garden, in the flower-beds
in front of the house, and near the
old chapel. My father (once the greatest
sceptic), Mademoiselle Leontine, the
governess of our younger sister, told me
many a time, that they had just met and
seen such figures quite plainly. Moreover,
Leontine found very often in her
locked drawers, and her trunks, some very
mysterious letters, containing family
secrets known to her alone, over which she
wept, reading them incessantly during
whole weeks; and I am forced to confess
that once or twice the events foretold
in them came to pass as they had been
prophesied to us.
[Some comments on various parts of the
foregoing narrative, furnished by Mme.
Blavatsky herself, will here be read with
interest. She says she has tried with
the most famous mediums to evoke and
communicate with those dearest to her, and
whose loss she had deplored, but could
never succeed.“Communications and
messages” [103] she certainly did
receive, and got their signatures, and
on two occasions their materialized forms,
but the communications were couched
in a vague and gushing language quite
unlike the style she knew so well. Their
signatures, as she has ascertained, were
obtained from her own brain; and on no
occasion, when the presence of a relation
was announced and the form described
by the medium, who was ignorant of the fact
that Mme. Blavatsky could see as
well as any of them, has she recognized the
“spirit” of the alleged relative
in the host of spooks and elementaries that
surrounded them (when the medium was
a genuine one of course). Quite the
reverse. For she often saw, to her disgust,
how her own recollections and brain-images
were drawn from her memory and
disfigured in the confused amalgamation
that took place between their reflection
in the medium's brain, which instantly sent
them out, and the shells which
sucked them in like a sponge and
objectivised them — “a hideous shape with a
mask on in my sight”, she tells us.
“Even the materialized form of my uncle
at the Eddys' was the picture; it was I who
sent it out from my own mind, as I
had come out to make experiments without
telling it to anyone. It was like an
empty outer envelope of my uncle that I
seemed to throw on the medium's astral
body. I saw and followed the process, I
knew Will Eddy was a genuine medium, and
the phenomenon as real as it could be, and
therefore, when days of trouble came
for him, I defended him in the papers. In
short, for all the years of experience
in America, I never succeeded in
identifying, in one single instance, those I
wanted to see. It is only in my dreams and
personal visions that I was brought
in direct contact with my own blood
relatives and friends, those between whom
and myself there had been a strong mutual
spiritual love”. Her conviction
[104] therefore, based as much on her
personal experience as on that of the
teachings of the occult doctrine, is as
follows: — “For certain
psycho-magnetic reasons, too long to be
explained here, the shells of those
spirits who loved us best will not, with a
very few exceptions, approach us.
They have no need of it since, unless they
were irretrievably wicked, they have
us with them in Devachan, that state of
bliss in which the monads are surrounded
with all those, and that, which they have
loved — objects of spiritual
aspirations as well as human entities. '
Shells ' once separated from their
higher principles have nought in common
with the latter. They are not drawn to
their relatives and friends, but rather to
those with whom their terrestrial,
sensuous affinities are the strongest. Thus
the shell of a drunkard will be
drawn to one who is either a drunkard
already or has a germ of this passion in
him, in which case they will develop it by
using his organs to satisfy their
craving; one who died full of sexual
passion for a still living partner will
have its shell drawn to him or her, etc..
We Theosophists, and especially
occultists, must never lose sight of the
profound axiom of the Esoteric Doctrine
which teaches us that it is we, the living,
who are drawn towards the spirits —
but that the latter can never, even though
they would, descend to us, or rather
into our sphere.”] [105]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
CHAPTER 6
MM. DE JELIHOWSKY'S NARRATIVE - (CONTINUED)
THE quiet life of the sisters at Rougodevo
was brought to an end by a terrible
illness which befell Mme. Blavatsky. Years
before, perhaps during her solitary
travels in the steppes of Asia, she had
received a remarkable wound. We could
never learn how she had met with it.
Suffice to say that the profound wound
reopened occasionally, and during that time
she suffered intense agony, often
bringing on convulsions and a death-like
trance. The sickness used to last from
three to four days, and then the wound
would heal as suddenly as it had
reopened, as though an invisible hand had
closed it, and there would remain no
trace of her illness. But the affrighted
family was ignorant at first of this
strange peculiarity, and their despair and
fear were great indeed. A physician
was sent for to the neighboring town; but
he proved of little use, not so much
indeed through his ignorance of surgery, as
owing to a remarkable phenomenon
which left him almost powerless to act
through sheer terror at what he had
witnessed. He had hardly examined the wound
of the patient prostrated before him
in complete unconsciousness, when suddenly
he saw a large, dark hand between his
own and the wound he was going to anoint.
The gaping wound was near the heart,
and the hand kept slowly moving at several
intervals [106] from the neck
down to the waist. To make his terror
worse, there began suddenly in the room
such a terrific noise, such a chaos of
noises and sounds from the ceiling, the
floor, window-panes, and every bit of
furniture in the apartment, that he begged
he might not be left alone in the room with
the insensible patient.
In the spring of 1860 both sisters left
Rougodevo for the Caucasus, on a visit
to their grandparents, whom they had not
seen for long years.
During the three weeks' journey from Moscow
to Tiflis, performed in a coach with
post horses, there occurred many a strange
manifestation.
At Zadonsk — the territory of the Cossack
army of the Don, a place of pilgrimage
in Russia, where the holy relics of St
Tihon are preserved — we halted for rest,
and I prevailed upon my lazy sister to
accompany me to the church to hear the
mass. We had learned that on that day
church service would be conducted near the
said relics by the then Metropolitan [One
of the three “Popes” of Russia, so to
say, the highest of the ecclesiastical
hierarchy of the Orthodox Greek Church]
of Kiew (at present, in 1884, the
Metropolitan of St Petersburg), the famous and
learned Isidore, [Now a man past ninety
years of age] whom both of us had well
known in our childhood and youth at Tiflis,
where he was for so many years the
Exarch [The spiritual chief of all the
archbishops, and the head of the Church
in Georgia] of Georgia (Caucasus). He had
been a friend of our family for years,
and had often visited us. During service
the venerable old man recognized us,
and immediately dispatched a monk after us,
with an invitation to visit him at
the Lord Archbishop's house. He received us
with great kindness. But hardly had
we taken our seats in the drawing-room of
the Holy [107] Metropolitan than
a terrible hubbub, noises, and loud raps in
every conceivable direction burst
suddenly upon us with a force to which even
we were hardly accustomed; every bit
of furniture in the big audience room
cracked and thumped — from the huge
chandelier under the ceiling, every one of
whose crystal drops seemed to become
endowed with self-motion, down to the
table, and under the very elbows of his
holiness who was leaning on it.
Useless to say how confused and embarrassed
we looked — though truth compels me
to say that my irreverent sister's
embarrassment was tempered with a greater
expression of fun than I would have wished
for. The Metropolitan Isidore saw at
a glance our confusion, and understood,
with his habitual sagacity, the true
cause of it. He had read a good deal about
the so-called “spiritual”
manifestations, and on seeing a huge
armchair gliding toward him, laughed, and
felt a good deal interested in this
phenomenon. He inquired which of us two
sisters had such a strange power, and wanted
to know when and how it had begun
to manifest itself. We explained to him all
the particulars as well as we could,
and after listening very attentively, he
suddenly asked Mme. Blavatsky if she
would permit him to offer her
“invisible” a mental question. Of course, his
holiness was welcome to it, she answered.
We do not feel at liberty to publish
what the question was. But when his very
serious query had received an immediate
answer — precise and to the very point he
wanted it to be — his holiness was so
struck with amazement, and felt so anxious
and interested in the phenomenon,
that he would not let us go, and detained
us with him for over three hours. He
had even forgotten his dinner. Giving
orders not to be interrupted, the
venerable gentleman continued to hold
conversation with [108] his unseen
visitors, expressing all the while his
profound astonishment at their
“all-knowledge”. [Vseznaïstvo
- the word used can hardly be translated by
the term omniscience; it is an attribute of
a less absolute character, and
refers to the things of the earth.]
When bidding good-bye to us, the venerable
old man blessed the travelers, and,
turning to Mme. Blavatsky, addressed to her
these parting words: —
“As for you, let not your heart be
troubled by the gift you are possessed of,
nor let it become a source of misery to you
hereafter, 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.”
These are the authentic words of His
Holiness, Isidore, the Metropolitan of our
Orthodox Greek Church of Russia, addressed
by him in my presence to my sister
Mme. Blavatsky. [The Russian Censor has not
allowed this letter to appear in the
Rebus in the original.]
At one of the stations where we had to
change horses, the station-master told us
very brutally that there were no fresh
horses for us, and that we had to wait.
The sun had not yet gone down, it was full
moon, the roads were good, and with
all this, we were made to lose several
hours ! This was provoking. Nevertheless
there was nothing to be done, the more so
as the station-master, who was too
drunk to be reasoned with, had found fit to
disappear, and refused to come and
talk with us. We had to take the little
unpleasantness as easily as we could,
and settle ourselves as best we knew how
for the night; but even here we found
an impediment. The small station-house had
but one room for the travelers [
109] near a hot and dirty kitchen, and even
that one was locked and bolted, and
no one would open the door for us without
special orders. Mme. Blavatsky was
beginning to lose patience.
“Well, this is fine ! ” she went on.
“We are refused horses, and even the
room we are entitled to is shut for us !
Why is it shut ? Now, I want to know
and insist upon it”. But there was no one
to tell us the reason why, for the
station-house seemed utterly empty, and
there was not a soul to be seen about.
H. P. B. approached the little low windows
of the locked room, and flattened her
face against the window panes. “A-ha!”
she suddenly exclaimed; “that's
what it is ! Very well, then, and now I can
force the drunken brute to give us
horses in five minutes.”
And she started off in search of the
station-master. Curious to know what secret
there was in the mysterious room, I
approached the window in my turn, and tried
to fathom its unknown regions. But although
the inside of the room was perfectly
visible through the window, yet my
uninitiated eyes could see nothing in it save
the ordinary furniture of a dirty
station-house, dirty as they all are.
Nevertheless, to my delight and surprise,
ten minutes had not passed when three
excellent and strong post-horses were
brought out, under the supervision of the
station-master himself, who, pale and
confused, had become, as though by magic,
polite and full of obsequiousness. In a few
minutes our carriage was ready, and
we continued our journey.
To my question what sorcery had helped her
to achieve such change in the drunken
station-master, who but a moment before
would pay no attention to us, Mme.
Blavatsky only laughed. [110]
“Profit, and ask no questions!” she
said. “Why should you be so
inquisitive ? ” It was but on the
following day that she condescended to tell
me that the wretched station-master must
have most certainly taken her for a
witch. It appears that upon finding him in
a back-yard, she had shouted to him
that the person whose body had been just
standing in a coffin in the
“travelers' room” was there again, and
asked him not to detain us, for we
would otherwise insist upon our right to
enter into the room, and would disturb
her spirit thereby. And when the man upon
hearing this opened his eyes, without
appearing to understand what she was
referring to, Mme. Blavatsky hastened then
to tell him that she was speaking of his
deceased wife, whom he had just buried,
and who was there, and would be there, in
that room until we had gone away. She
then proceeded to describe the ghost in
such a minute way that the unfortunate
widower became as pale as death itself, and
hurried away to order fresh horses !
Some interesting details concerning Mme.
Blavatsky's family home at Tiflis have
been published quite lately in a Russian
memoir, “Reminiscences of Prince A.
T. Bariatinsky”, by General P. S.
Nikolaeff, formerly his aide-de-camp at
Tiflis. This memoir appears in the
Historical Vyestnick (Messenger], a Russian
magazine of high repute, dedicated, as its
name shows, to historical Notes,
Memoirs, and Biographies. Referring to the
family of the Fadeefs, General
Nikolaeff, writing of a period coincident
with that of Mme. Blavatsky's visit to
Tiflis, says: —
“They were living in those years in the
ancient mansion of the Princes
Tchavtchavadze, the great building itself
carrying the imprint of something
weird or peculiar about it — something that
carried one back to the epoch of
Catherine the Great. A long, lofty, and
[111] gloomy hall was hung with the
family portraits of the Fadeefs and the
Princes Dolgorouky. Further on was a
drawing-room, its walls covered with
Gobelin tapestry, a present from the
Empress Catherine, and near at hand was the
apartment of Mademoiselle N. A.
Fadeef — in itself one of the most
remarkable of private museums. The collection
gathered into this museum attracted
attention by their great variety. There were
brought together the arms and weapons from
all the countries of the world;
ancient crockery, cups, and goblets,
archaic house utensils, Chinese and
Japanese idols, mosaics and images of the
Byzantine epoch, Persian and Turkish
carpets, and fabrics worked with gold and
silver, statues, pictures, paintings,
petrified fossils, and, finally, a very
rare and most precious library.
“The emancipation of the serfs had
altered in no way the daily life of the
Fadeefs. The whole enormous host of their
valetaille (ex-serfs), [Forty men and
women; and this for twenty-two years in
Tiflis, where old General Fadeef was one
of the three Imperial Councillors on the
council under the Viceroys from Prince
Porontzoff to the Grand Duke Michael]
having remained with the family as before
their freedom, only now receiving wages ;
and all went on as before with the
members of that family — that is to say,
luxuriously and plentifully (it means
in their usual hospitable and open way of
living). I loved to pass my evenings
in that home. At precisely a quarter to
eleven o'clock, the old general,
brushing along the parquets with his warmly
muffled-up feet, retired to his
apartments. At that same moment, hurriedly
and in silence, the supper was
brought in on trays, and served in the
interior rooms; and immediately after
this the drawing-room doors would be
closely shut, and an animated conversation
take place on every topic. Modern
literature was reviewed and criticized,
contemporary social questions from Russian
life discussed; at one time it was
the narratives of some visitor, a foreign
traveler, or an account given of a
recent skirmish by one of its heroes, some
sunburnt officer just returned from
the battlefield (in the Caucasian
Mountains), would be [112] eagerly
listened to; at another time the antiquated
old Spanish-mason (then an officer
in the Russian army), Quartano, would drop
in and give us thrilling stories from
the wars of Napoleon the Great. Or, again,
'Radda Bay' — H. P. Blavatsky, the
granddaughter of General A. M. Fadeef —
would put in an appearance, and was made
to call forth from her past some stormy
episode of her American life and travels
; when the conversation would be sure to
turn suddenly upon the mystic subjects,
and she herself commence to ' evoke
spirits.' And then the tall candles would
begin to burn low, hardly flickering toward
the end, the human figures on the
Gobelin tapestry would seem to awaken and
move, and each of us feel queer from
an involuntary creeping sensation; and this
generally lasted until the eastern
portion of the sky began itself to pale, on
the dark face of the southern
night.”
Mme. Blavatsky resided at Tiflis less than
two years, and not more than three in
the Caucasus. The last year she passed
roaming about in Imeretia, Georgia, and
Mingrelia. Throughout the Trans-Caucasian
country, and all along the coasts of
the Black Sea, the various peoples,
notwithstanding that their Christian
persuasion dates from the fourth century
A.D., are as superstitious as any
Pagan, especially the half-savage, warlike
Apkhasians, the Imeretenes, and the
Mingrelians — the descendants, perhaps, of
those ancient Greeks who came with
Jason in search of the Golden Fleece; for,
according to historical legend, it is
the site of the archaic Colchide, and the
river Rion (Pharsis) rolled once upon
a time its rapid waves upon golden sand and
ore instead of the modern gravel and
stones. Therefore it was but natural that
the princes and the landed
“noblemen”, who live in their
“castles” scattered through, and stuck
like nests in thick foliage, in the dense
woods and forests of Mingrelia and
Imeretia, and who, hardly half a century
back, were nearly all [113]
half-brigands when not full-blown
highwaymen, who are fanatical as Neapolitan
monks, and ignorant as Italian noblemen —
that they should, we say, have viewed
such a character as was then Mme. Blavatsky
in the light of a witch, when not in
that of a beneficent magician. As, later in
life, wherever she went, her friends
in those days were many, but her enemies
still more numerous. If she cured and
helped those who believed themselves
sincerely bewitched, it was only to make
herself cruel enemies of those who were
supposed to have bewitched and spoiled
the victims. Refusing the presents and
“thanks” of those she relieved of the
“evil eye” — she rejected, at the same
time, with equal contempt, the bribes
offered by their enemies. No one, at any
rate, and whatever her other faults may
be, has succeeded in showing her a
mercenary character, or one bent upon
money-making for any motive. Thus, while
people of the class of the Princes
Gouriel, and of the Princes Dadiani and
Abashedsé, were ranked among her best
friends, some others — all those who had a
family hatred for the above named —
were, of course, her sworn enemies. In
those days, we believe even now, these
countries — especially Mingrelia and
Imeretia — were regular hot-beds of titled
paupers; of princes, descendants of deposed
and conquered sovereigns, and feud
raged among them as during the Middle Ages.
These were and have remained her
enemies., Some years later, to these were
added all the bigots, church-goers,
missionaries, to say nothing of American
and English spiritualists, French
spiritists, and their host of mediums.
Stories after stories were invented of
her, circulated and accepted by all, except
those who knew her well — as facts.
Calumny was rife, and her enemies now
hesitate at no falsehood that can injure
her character.[114]
She defied them all, and would submit to no
restraint; would stoop to adopt no
worldly method of propitiating public
opinion. She avoided society, showing her
scorn of its idols, and was therefore
treated as a dangerous iconoclast. All her
sympathies went toward, and with, that
tabooed portion of humanity which society
pretends to ignore and avoid, while
secretly running after its more or less
renowned members — the necromancers, the
obsessed, the possessed, and such like
mysterious personages. The native Koodiani
(magicians, sorcerers), Persian
thaumaturgists, and old Armenian hags —
healers and fortune-tellers — were the
first she generally sought out and took
under her protection. Finally public
opinion became furious, and society — that
mysterious somebody in general, and
nobody in particular — made an open levee
of arms against one of its own members
who dared to defy its time-hallowed laws,
and act as no respectable person would
— namely, roaming in the forests alone, on
horseback, and preferring smoky huts
and their dirty inmates to brilliant
drawing-rooms and their frivolous denizens.
Her occult powers all this while, instead
of weakening, became every day
stronger, and she seemed finally to subject
to her direct will every kind of
manifestation. The whole country was
talking of her. The superstitious Gooriel
and Mingrelian nobility began very soon to
regard her as a magician, and people
came from afar off to consult her about
their private affairs. She had long
since given up communication through raps,
and preferred — what was a far more
rapid and satisfactory method — to answer
people either verbally or by means of
direct writing. [This was done always in
full consciousness, and simply, as she
explained, watching people's thoughts as
they evolved out of their head in
spiral luminous smoke, sometimes in jets of
what might be taken for some radiant
material, and settled in distinct pictures
and images around them. Often such
thoughts and answers to them would find
themselves impressed in her own brain,
couched in words and sentences in the same
way as original thoughts do. But, so
far as we are all able to understand, the
former visions are always more
trustworthy, as they are independent and
distinct from the seer’s own
impressions, belonging to pure
clairvoyance, not “thought transference”, which
is a process always liable to get mixed up
with one’s own more vivid mental
impressions.] At times, during such process,
Mme [115] Blavatsky seemed to
fall into a kind of coma, or magnetic
sleep, with eyes wide open, though even
then her hand never ceased to move, and
continued its writing.[“Very naturally”,
she explains, “since it was neither
magnetic sleep", nor coma, but simply a
state of intense concentration, an
attention only too necessary during such
concentration, when the least distraction
leads to a mistake. People knowing but
of mediumistic clairvoyance, and not of our
philosophy and mode of operation,
often fall into such error”.] When thus
answering mental questions, the answers
were rarely unsatisfactory. Generally they
astonished the querists — friends and
enemies.
Meanwhile sporadic phenomena were gradually
dying away in her presence. They
still occurred, but very rarely, though
they were always very remarkable. We
give one.
It must, however, be explained that, some
months previous to that event, Mme.
Blavatsky was taken very ill. From the
verbal statements of her relatives,
recorded under their dictation, we learn
that no doctor could understand her
illness. It was one of those mysterious
nervous diseases that baffle science,
and elude the grasp of everyone but a very
expert psychologist. Soon after the
commencement of that illness, she began —
as she repeatedly told her friends —
“to lead a double life”. What she meant
by it, no one of [116] the good
people of Mingrelia could understand, of
course. But this is how she herself
describes that state: —
“Whenever I was called by name, I opened
my eyes upon hearing it, and was
myself, my own personality in every
particular. As soon as I was left alone,
however, I relapsed into my usual,
half-dreamy condition, and became somebody
else (who, namely, Madame. B. will not
tell). I had simply a mild fever that
consumed me slowly but surely, day after
day, with entire loss of appetite, and
finally of hunger, as I would feel none for
days, and often went a week without
touching any food whatever, except a little
water, so that in four months I was
reduced to a living skeleton. In cases when
I was interrupted, when in my other
self, by the sound of my present name being
pronounced, and while I was
conversing in my dream life — say at half a
sentence either spoken by me or
those who were with my second me at the
time — and opened my eyes to answer the
call, I used to answer very rationally, and
understood all, for I was never
delirious. But no sooner had I closed my
eyes again than the sentence which had
been interrupted was completed by my other
self, continued from the word, or
even half the word, it had stopped at. When
awake, and myself, I remembered well
who I was in my second capacity, and what I
had been and was doing. When
somebody else, i.e. the personage I had
become, I know I had no idea of who was
H. P. Blavatsky! I was in another far-off
country, a totally different
individuality from myself, and had no
connection at all with my actual life.”
Such is Mme. Blavatsky's analysis of her
state at that time. She was residing
then at Ozoorgetty, a military settlement
in Mingrelia, where she had bought a
house. It is a little town, lost among the
old forests and woods, which, in
those days, had neither roads nor
conveyances, save of the most primitive kind,
and [117] which, to the very time of the
last Russo-Turkish war, was
unknown outside of Caucasus. The only
physician of the place, the army surgeon,
could make nothing of her symptoms; but as
she was visibly and rapidly
declining, he packed her off to Tiflis to
her friends. Unable to go on
horseback, owing to her great weakness, and
a journey in a cart being deemed
dangerous, she was sent off in a large
native boat along the river — a journey
of four days to Kutais — with four native
servants only to take care of her.
What took place during that journey we are
unable to state precisely; nor is
Mme. Blavatsky herself certain of it, since
her weakness was so great that she
lay like one apparently dead until her
arrival. In that solitary boat, on a
narrow river, hedged on both sides by
centenarian forests, her position must
have been precarious.
The little stream they were sailing along
was, though navigable, rarely, if
ever, used as a means of transit, at any
rate not before the war. Hence the
information we have got came solely from
her servants and was very confused. It
appears, however, that as they were gliding
slowly along the narrow stream,
cutting its way between two steep and woody
banks, the servants were several
times during three consecutive nights
frightened out of their senses by seeing,
what they swore was their mistress, gliding
off from the boat, and across the
water in the direction of the forests,
while the body of that same mistress was
lying prostrate on her bed at the bottom of
the boat. Twice the man who towed
the canoe, upon seeing the “form”, ran
away shrieking, and in great terror.
Had it not been for a faithful old servant
who was taking care of her, the boat
and the patient would have been abandoned
[118] in the middle of the
stream. On the last evening, the servant
swore he saw two figures, while the
third — his mistress, in flesh and bone —
was sleeping before his eyes. No
sooner had they arrived at KoutaĂŻs, where
Mme. Blavatsky had a distant relative
residing, than all the servants, with the
exception of the old butler, left her,
and returned no more.
It was with great difficulty that she was
transported to Tiflis. A carriage and
a friend of the family were sent to meet
her; and she was brought into the house
of her friends apparently dying.
She never talked upon that subject with
anyone. But, as soon as she was restored
to life and health, she left the Caucasus,
and went to Italy. Yet it was before
her departure from the country in 1863 that
the nature of her powers seems to
have entirely changed.
One afternoon, very weak and delicate
still, after the illness just described,
Mme. Blavatsky came in to her aunt's, N. A.
Fadeef's, room. After a few words of
conversation, remarking that she felt tired
and sleepy, she was offered to rest
upon a sofa. Hardly had her head touched
her cushion when she fell into a
profound sleep. Her aunt had quietly
resumed some writing she had interrupted to
talk with her niece, when suddenly soft but
quite audible steps in the room
behind her chair made her rapidly turn her
head to see who was the intruder, as
she was anxious that Mme. Blavatsky should
not be disturbed. The room was empty!
there was no other living person in it but
herself and her sleeping niece, yet
the steps continued audibly, as though of a
heavy person treading softly, the
floor creaking all the while. They approached
the sofa, and suddenly ceased.
Then she heard stronger sounds, as though
someone was whispering near Mme.
Blavatsky, and [119] presently a book
placed on a table near the sofa was
seen by N. A. Padeef to open, and its pages
kept turning to and fro, as if an
invisible hand were busy at it. Another
book was snatched from the library
shelves, and flew in that same direction.
More astonished than frightened — for
everyone in the house had been trained in
and become quite familiar with such
manifestations — N. A. Fadeef arose from her
arm-chair to awaken her niece, hoping
thereby to put a stop to the phenomena;
but at the same moment a heavy arm-chair
moved at the other end of the room, and
rattling on the floor, glided toward the
sofa. The noise it made awoke Mme.
Blavatsky, who, upon opening her eyes,
inquired of the invisible presence what
was the matter. A few more whisperings, and
all relapsed into quietness and
silence, and there was nothing more of the
sort during the rest of the evening.
At the date at which we write, every
phenomenon independent of her will, except
such as the one described, and that Mme.
Blavatsky attributes to quite a
different cause than spiritual
manifestations, has for more than twenty years
entirely ceased. At what time this complete
change in her occult powers was
wrought we are unable to say, as she was
far away from our observation, and
spoke of it but rarely — never unless
distinctly asked in our correspondence to
answer the question. From her letters we
learnt that she was always traveling,
rarely settling for any length of time in
one place. And we believe her
statements with regard to her powers to
have been entirely true when she wrote
to tell us, “Now (in 1866) I shall never
be subjected to external
influences.” It is not H. P. B. who was
from that time forth victim to “
influences” which would have without
doubt triumphed over a less strong nature
than was hers; [120] but, on the contrary,
it is she who subjected these
influences — whatever they may be — to her
will.
“The last vestige of my psycho-physical
weakness is gone, to return no
more”, writes Mme. Blavatsky in a letter
to a relation. “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”. “I believe in this
statement”, said, in a conversation in May
1884 at Paris, her sister, Mme. Jelihowsky,
“ the more so as for nearly five
years we had a personal opportunity of
following the various and gradual phases
in the transformations of that force. At
Pskoff and Rougodevo it happened very
often that she could not control, nor even
stop, its manifestations. After that
she appeared to master it more fully every
day, until after her extraordinary
and protracted illness at Tiflis she seemed
to defy and subject it entirely to
her will. This was proved by her stopping
any such phenomena at her will, and by
previous arrangement for days and weeks at
a time. Then, when the term was over,
she could produce them at her command, and
leaving the choice of what should
happen to those present. In short, as
already said, 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 has ever refused the
name of “spirits” and souls — to her
own control. Let it be clearly
understood, however, that H. P. B. has
never pretended to be able to control
real spirits, i.e. the spiritual monads,
but only Elementals; as also to be able
to keep at bay the shells of the dead.”]
[121]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
CHAPTER 7
FROM APPRENTICESHIP TO DUTY
PROBABLY the years 1867 to 1870, if the
story of these could be properly told,
would be found by far the most interesting
of Mme. Blavatsky's eventful life,
but it is impossible for me to do more at
present than indicate that they were
associated with great progress in the
expansion of her occult knowledge, and
passed in the East. The two or three years
intervening between her residence at
Tiflis and the period I have named were
spent indeed in European travel, and
there would be no necessity for holding
back any information concerning these —
the latest of her relatively aimless
wanderings — of which I might have gained
possession, but no watchful relatives were
with her to record what passed, and
her own recollections give us none but bare
outlines of her adventures.
In 1870 she came back from the East by a
steamer via the then newly-opened Suez
Canal, and after spending a short time in
Piraeus took passage for Spezzia on
board a Greek vessel, which met with a
terrible catastrophe, and was blown up by
an explosion of gunpowder and fireworks
forming part of the cargo. Mme.
Blavatsky was one of a very small number of
passengers whose lives were saved.
The castaways were rescued with no more
than the clothes they wore when picked
out of the [122] water, and were
momentarily provided for by the Greek
Government, who forwarded them to various
destinations. Mme. Blavatsky went to
Alexandria and to Cairo, where, amid much
temporary inconvenience, she waited
till supplies of money reached her from
Russia. I have headed this chapter
“From Apprenticeship to Duty”, because
that is the great transition marked
by the date of Mme. Blavatsky's return to
Europe in 1870. Till that period her
life had altogether been spent in the
passionate search for occult knowledge, on
which her inborn instincts impelled her
from her earliest youth. This had now
come upon her in ample measure. The
natural-born faculties of mediumship which
had surrounded her earlier years with a
coruscation of wonders had given place
now to attributes for which Western
students of psychic mysteries at that date
had no name. The time had not come for even
the partial revelations concerning
the great system of occult initiation as
practised in the East, which has been
embodied in books published within the last
few years. Mme. Blavatsky already
knew that she had a task before her — the
task of introducing some knowledge
concerning these mysteries to the world, —
but she was sorely puzzled to decide
how she should begin it. She had to do the
best she could in making the world
acquainted with the idea that the latent
potentialities in human nature — in
connection with which psychic phenomena of
various kinds were already attracting
the attention of large classes in both
hemispheres — were of a kind which,
properly directed, would lead to the
infinite spiritual exaltation of their
possessors, while wrongly directed they
were capable of leading downward towards
disastrous results of almost commensurate
extent. She alone, at the period I
refer to, appreciated the magnitude of her
mission, and if she [123] did