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- [00:01]
Carter Roy
Most of what we know about Helena Blavatsky's life seems improbable. In her 59 years on Earth, she lived as a young Russian aristocrat, a Parisian circus performer, a concert pianist in England, a clairvoyant, a medium, a telepath, an author, a missionary, a descendant of a Rosicrucian Freemason, and some would say a chain smoking degenerate liar. Accounts suggest she almost died quite a few times. She spent months in a coma after being thrown from a horse. A leg infection almost killed her in West Philadelphia. She was left for dead while fighting in a war. But each near death experience supposedly only gave her greater control over her mystical powers. And at a time when society viewed a woman's place as by their husband's side, she abandoned hers to travel the world, often in disguise. She's said to have visited cities all over Europe, the Americas, Asia and more. In life, she rubbed elbows with both Thomas Edison and Gandhi. In death, her ideas are said to have inspired the likes of Albert Einstein, Adolf Hitler, and some would say Gwyneth Paltrow. Three names you probably never thought would be strung together in the same sentence. So given all that, I want you to imagine the amount of conspiracy theories that are about this woman. A lot. And that's what we're talking about today. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. You can watch our episodes and more on our new YouTube channel on conspiracy Theories Podcast and check us out on instagram @the conspiracypod and we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. This episode contains brief discussions of suicide. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. To get help on mental health issues, visit Spotify.com resources stay with us.
- [02:23]
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- [03:20]
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- [03:40]
Carter Roy
Was Helena Blavatsky a mystic, a scientist, an early Nazi, a serial killer, a fraud, mentally ill, or a sage? Well, that depends on who you ask. Let's start with her mystical powers, which by the end of her life allegedly included levitation, clairvoyance and telepathy, to name a few. Accounts suggest her powers date back to her childhood as a young aristocrat in Russia in the mid 19th century. One of the serfs who works her family's land is apparently a holy man and a healer. Some think he's also a magician who can read the future and teaches Blavatsky some of what he knows. As she gets older, Blavatsky claims mysterious figures visit her in her dreams. By 16, she says, she starts living a double life, inhabiting her physical body during the day and escaping into the astral plane at night, which, along with her propensity to sleepwalk, makes it difficult to distinguish between reality and dreams. Blavatsky doesn't tell her family much about her experiences. They already consider her a strange kid and she worries that they might think she's insane or that she sold her soul to Satan. So she keeps all of these mysterious happenings hidden for the time being. At 17, Blavatsky marries a 40 something year old Russian vice governor. Their marriage is unconventional, to say the least. On her wedding day, when the priest talks about honoring and obeying her husband, she she apparently mutters, I surely shall not. And she hatches a plan to escape her marriage that same day. It doesn't work, but shortly after she convinces her husband to let her go travel the world before they even consummate anything. They apparently never have sex, and later in life she even produces a gynecological report to prove as much as but the one thing she does take from her husband is his last name. She was actually born Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, though, is arguably more influential, so she keeps it for the rest of her life. By some accounts, she even manages to get her husband to fund some of the travels that take her away from him, all while telling other people that she would rather die than. Than return to him. Kind of like her already. After leaving Russia for the first time, Blavatsky says she travels all over the world, visiting multiple continents, sometimes more than once. Eastern Europe, Western Europe, North America, South America, Asia. She spends quite a bit of time in India, and she tries to cross the border into Tibet three times. And she's supposedly successful on one of those occasions. Now, a lot happens while Blavatsky is away. Accounts of her travels read like an adventure novel. She crosses the Rocky Mountains in a covered wagon, stops in New Orleans to study voodoo, survives a deadly shipwreck. On her way out to England from India, she discovers a. A lost treasure. While in South America, exploring ancient Incan ruins, she saves the life of an Italian Hungarian opera singer who'd been stabbed and left for dead by a Jesuit gang. She meets the Mevlevi dervishes in Constantinople, who supposedly induce clairvoyance in her so she can locate a lost dog. That would be helpful. A few different times, her life is mysteriously saved during her travels. Once, after she falls from a horse and her foot gets caught in her stirrup, an unseen power intervenes, acting like an invisible cushion and preventing her head from smashing into the ground. Another time, a sage like man appears and supposedly talks her out of jumping into the Thames to end her life. But when it comes to Blavatsky really using her powers and showing them to the world, that starts when she returns to Russia after nearly a decade away. After cutting off contact with pretty much everyone in her life, she shows up one Christmas evening and crashes a family wedding party. She doesn't tell anyone she's coming, with the exception of one of her aunts. And pretty soon, life gets a lot weirder for her family. They start hearing raps on their windows, walls and floors. Furniture begins moving on its own. Chandeliers seem to come alive. Eventually, Blavatsky comes clean about it all. She tells her family, hey, all that stuff, that's me. I'm causing it with my powers. Blavatsky says she only has so much control over things. If she tries really hard, she can make things happen at will, but it's not like she can put on a show at the drop of a hat. But often that's what ends up being asked of her. Now, Blavatsky's father and brother are both skeptical, understandably. So she ends up having to win them over. And sometimes they're friends as well. This one time she uses her mind to make a small table so heavy that her able bodied brother can no longer lift it. Another time she makes a piano with its cover closed play on its own. She asks strangers to write down the answer to a question on paper and and then seems to pull the answers out of thin air with her mysterious wraps. Before long, Blavatsky has a lot of people convinced of her abilities, including some influential figures in Russia. But her powers really come to life after she has some near death experiences. The first involves an infected wound under her heart that causes convulsions. She enters a deathlike trance for a few days before coming out the other side more in tune with the universe. Then in 1864, she gets thrown from another horse, fractures her spine and enters a months long coma. When she finally comes out of that, she claims to have even greater control over her powers. Something similar happens after she's supposedly wounded while fighting against the French and papal armies on behalf of the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi. A sword almost severs her arm and two musket balls embed themselves in her leg and shoulder. She's left for dead in a ditch, but ultimately survives. And once again she gains even greater control over her powers. Her origin story is amazing. You can see it building up. By 1873, Blavatsky arrives in New York City at a time when a new religious movement has really taken off in America known as spiritualism. Now, that's in large part due to three young phenoms known as the Fox Sisters, who who gain notoriety for their alleged ability to communicate with the dead. In New York, Blavatsky strikes up a friendship with author and journalist Henry Steele Alcott. They actually become roommates, sharing an apartment described as a bohemian paradise, complete with crystal balls, ornate knickknacks from China and Japan and a stuffed baboon dressed in a dinner jacket. They host elaborate gatherings with high society figures, mostly those who have an interest in the occult. Sign me up. I want to be at those parties. And it's during this time that Blavatsky really makes a name for herself as a spiritual thinker. Her reputation for seemingly miraculous acts skyrockets. Her powers include levitation, clairvoyance and telepathy. She says she reads people's thoughts that appear over their heads in images like wisps of smoke. She summons spirits at seances, makes items appear from thin air. Together with Olcott and others, Blavatsky founds the Theosophical Society, a group that describes itself as a universal human brotherhood dedicated to investigating the unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in man. The Theosophical Society sees factions pop up around the globe. It leads to a pseudo religion called Theosophy, and at some point scientific minds like Thomas Edison join the ranks, which may come as a surprise when you hear what they believe, but Thomas Edison is just the beginning of Blavatsky's influence.
- [13:43]
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- [14:13]
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- [14:44]
Carter Roy
Let's talk about Blavatsky's ideas. They're the foundation of theosophy and were first documented in her two most famous pieces of ISIS Unveiled and the Secret Doctrine. The gist is there's a universal ancient wisdom that governs all of existence. The universe is a singular, boundless plane, sort of like a giant cosmic ocean. Everything is one and everything has consciousness. When souls break off, they they go through a cyclical process of evolution and reincarnation across multiple planes of reality. The cycle ends with a return to the cosmic oneness, or what Blavatsky describes as a reunion into the original one condition. Notably, there is no anthropomorphized creator God. Generally speaking, the ideas share a lot in common with Eastern religions like Hinduism, Brahmanism, and Tibetan Buddhism. Karma, for example, is said to be one of the primary laws that govern all of existence. The ideas get stranger, though. In the Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky makes a proposal that totally flies in the face of Darwin's theory of evolution. She said that humanity and has and will continue to evolve through seven distinct stages that she called root races. The first were basically invisible amoeba like creatures that lived millions and millions of years ago, reproduced through fission, and lived on an imperishable sacred land at the center of the cosmos. The second were astral beings called Hyperboreans. The third were three eyed egg laying creatures called the Lemurians, who built cities out of stone and lava. And the Lemurians gave way to the Atlanteans who lived on Atlantis. You've probably heard of that one before. And the Atlanteans gave way to us, humanity, or what Blavatsky called the Aryan race. Yeah, okay. Well, more on that later. According to the secret doctrine, the seven root races all have seven distinct sub races. These sub races really came into play by the time the Atlanteans rolled around and infighting started. An evil Atlantean subrace ended up destroying their entire civilization through sorcery. That's how we arrived at our current fifth stage, which Blavatsky says is in the midst of a dark age. As for the sixth and seventh root races, those haven't happened yet. The transition into the 6th will happen when the ascended masters of our universe essentially partake in eugenics and selectively breed the best among us. The ascended Masters are important to Theosophy. They're basically wise sages who act as the keepers of ancient esoteric knowledge, the secrets of our universe. And according to theology, these masters guide people like Blue Blavatsky on their spiritual journey toward the truth, sometimes in a very literal way. For example, Blavatsky said that she met two of the masters in the flesh during her lifetime. She eventually learns that they're the mysterious figures who appeared to her in dreams and also saved her life those times we already talked about. She also claimed that her writing and all of its ideas came directly from them. They were the authors. She was more or less just a vehicle. Oh, and importantly, the masters were said to live on Earth in the country of Tibet. Now, as we mentioned earlier, Blavatsky said she spent time in Tibet. She was supposedly sent there on a mission and handed to her by the masters. Okay, so that's the basic idea of Theosophy. After Blavatsky and Olcott formed the Theosophical Society in New York, they eventually moved to India, where they are quite successful in spreading Theosophy's beliefs. They even established the international headquarters there at some point. Then Blavatsky's health declines and she travels back to Europe. There she authors a bunch more texts, including the Secret Doctrine, and eventually settles down in London. That's where she spends her final years. It's also where, go figure, she ends up meeting Gandhi. Yeah, he's in London at the time to study law, but. But he ends up taking a serious interest in Theosophy. And through Theosophy's ideas, Blavatsky actually convinces Gandhi to get back in touch with his native religion, Hinduism. Remember, she had a real appreciation for Eastern religions. A few historians have even accused her of stealing their ideas, though it's possible she's just exploring them. But Gandhi doesn't seem to view things that way, that she stole them. He later cites Blavatsky as an important catalyst for his ideas. Some even draw a straight line from Theosophy's principles to Gandhi's famous there is no God higher than truth. And it is not just Gandhi. Blavatsky has been cited as the inspiration for some of the most notorious names of the 20th century, most famously Adolf Hitler. That may not come as a surprise, given Blavatsky's thoughts on evolution. Her use of the term Aryan race and her allusion to a divine form of eugenics sounds very Hitlery. Blavatsky also pointedly criticized Judaism and its concept of a singular supreme God, along with many other organized religions. And her writing went on to influence the Thule Society in Germany, a precursor to the Nazi Party. The Thule Society then distorted her ideas before they were ultimately filtered through the lens of Hitler and the Nazi Party. So how connected are the two? Well, there's been plenty of debate among historians over how much blame can be placed at Blavatsky's feet for Nazi ideology, in part because there's no real consensus around what she meant by Aryan race, whether it was more of a spiritual classification or a racial one. And the fact that it's difficult to reconcile all the problematic underpinnings of her writing with this other overarching belief she has, that all humans are one interconnected soul, that there's a brotherhood of man that's pretty much the opposite of Nazi ideology. I mean, what are we supposed to make of the fact that both Gandhi and Hitler were inspired by Blavatsky? Those are two people who exist at, I think we can agree, opposite ends of the same spectrum. And things get even more complicated and more conspiratorial when you introduce a third figure into the mix. The man whose name has become synonymous with genius, Albert Einstein. When you think of Einstein, you probably think of the equation E mc2 and the crazy hair. Now, that equation is a consequence of Einstein's theory of relativity. Okay, wish me luck as I try to explain what that is. And remember, after organic chemistry, my sophomore year, I took a year off of college. Okay. So, for most of human history, people generally thought of time as ticking along the same for everyone, and that space was basically just a big empty box we all moved around in. But Einstein suggested it's not that simple. Since the speed of light seems to be a constant, no matter where it's measured in the universe, like an unbreakable cosmic law, everything else should be variable. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that time can stretch, space can shrink, and mass can get heavier. That's what Einstein labeled special relativity. Then there's what's known as general relativity, which relates to gravity. Okay, so before Einstein came along, gravity was mostly thought of as a mysterious force that, for reasons unknown, acted on objects that pulled on them. But Einstein proposed that gravity wasn't so much a force as it was a reaction. A reaction to spacetime bending to objects, mass. Imagine a taut piece of fabric. That fabric is spacetime. If you put a marble on it, it's going to create a dent. The size of that dent is how much gravity is created. If you put a giant boulder on that fabric, the dent is going to be a lot bigger. If you're having a hard time following, what you really need to know is these two theories, general and special relativity, made Einstein really famous, and they've continued to make him famous because they've withstood the test of time. They've been proven correct over and over. But according to some theorists, he stole the idea from Helena Blavatsky. Did Helena Blavatsky invent the theory of relativity before Einstein? Okay, here's what we can say. Like Hitler and Gandhi, Einstein can apparently be counted among Blavatsky's admirers. He reportedly kept a copy of her most famous book, the Secret Doctrine, on his desk at all times. And so there's reason to believe he found her ideas compelling by some pretty questionable accounts. He was even impressed by how well some of her ideas held up to his understanding of the laws of physics, which is a pretty good understanding, if you ask me. And as we've mentioned, Blavatsky did write a lot about the cosmos. She talked about the universe as a singular plane and the possibility of multiple dimensions. Could her work have maybe inspired some questions in Einstein while he was reading them? Possibly, though it still seems like a stretch, given that he was more likely building off the work of prominent scientists who came before him, like Albert Michelson, Hendrik Lorentz and Henri Poincare. Any similarities between Blavatsky's esoteric musings and Einstein's scientific discoveries are most likely due to vague correlations made in retrospect, usually by some of her most ardent supporters. But as far as wild theories go, Blavatsky inventing the theory of relativity is just the tip of the iceberg. Others claim she was one of the most cold blooded murderers of all time. And not just any killer. Jack the Ripper.
- [27:12]
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- [28:13]
Carter Roy
The theory that Helena Blavatsky might be the killer behind the famous Jack the Ripper murders was proposed by another and arguably even more controversial figure in the occult world named Alistair Crowley. He was born later than Blavatsky, but much like her, he had an incredibly colorful past. For starters, he practiced sex magic, was a proponent of hard drugs, ran a secret society, once tried to make his wife have intercourse with a goat, summited Kunchungjunga, one of the most dangerous mountains in the world, and inspired enough rock and counterculture that his face appears on the COVID of the Beatles sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In his lifetime, Crowley claimed to know the identity of Jack the Ripper and once threw out Blavatsky's name as a suspect. Whether he had any evidence to support that theory, no one really knows. Crowley, like Blavatsky, claimed to receive divine messages. His allegedly came from a being that called itself Aiwas and was a messenger from the forces ruling this earth. At present, maybe Aiwas told him about Blavatsky's murderous campaign, or maybe he was just blowing smoke or joking around. Either would have been in character for him. But we can say that by Blavatsky's own travel accounts. She was in London from August to November 1888 during the Jack the Ripper murders. So was she one of history's most notorious serial killers? Well, there are certainly more compelling suspects. Blavatsky wasn't in great health at the time and she was busy writing the secret doctrine and establishing the Theosophy lodge that Gandhi visited. But less flattering depictions of Blavatsky paint a very different picture of her than the philosophical mystic who charmed her way to the top. Some accounts suggest she was a cantankerous, blustery, foul mouthed hedonist with a tobacco addiction and a short temper. So stranger things have been proven true. The list of conspiracy theories related to Blavatsky is truly endless. Christians especially had a really hard time with her because she was one of the first people to reframe the Fall of Man myth from the Book of Genesis. She argued that when Satan offered Eve the apple from the tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, he freed mankind from ignorance and ushered in the age of free will and enlightenment. Satan in her eyes, was more or less a hero. That has led to claims that Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society were part of a satanic conspiracy to undermine Christianity and promote a secret agenda, possibly a new world order. Some tie bizarre theories about nefarious lizard people to Blavatsky's depiction of an Atlantean subrace she described as basically dragon men from a lost continent. Then there are the more historical rumors that she might have been gay or that she may have secretly had a child out of wedlock. But easily the most popular theory about Blavatsky is that she was a total fraud. Let's revisit her travels now. Some scholars believe she made almost everything up. That's why her accounts seem so fanciful. And admittedly, when I first heard about these different continents, treasure hunting, shipwrecks, wars, I found myself thinking, is that possible? And also my God, it sounds amazing. I hope it is true. But. But Blavatsky's harshest critics accuse her of spending all those years that she claimed to be out traveling the vast world and soaking up ancient wisdoms, wandering around European capitals, living a destitute and sin filled life. That's mostly because there is not a whole lot of evidence to support her accounts of that period of her life. To buy in, you mostly need to take her at her word. There's no one to corroborate her most far fetched stories, like how she fought in a war or almost jumped off a bridge in London. There are no known witnesses that can place her at the Incan ruins in South America or visiting the indigenous people of Canada. But Blavatsky's stories aren't without some proof. For example, there's evidence to suggest she did visit the Middle east and Egypt at some point. And there are people she met along her travels that can place her in different parts of the world. Like artist and scholar Albert Rawson, who she met in Cairo and then again in New York during her first trip to America. Rawson later wrote an account that corroborated Blavatsky's version of of events. Then there's well known spiritualist Victor McCall, who she met in Paris, and the Italian Hungarian opera singer Agarty Metrovic, whose life she saved in Constantinople. Those two became close enough friends over their travels. Some believe they may have secretly gotten married at some point. And Blavatsky really did meet Gandhi. And that's the thing. Even some of the most unbelievable stories have elements that make you go, wait a minute, could she have been telling the truth? Like how she almost died and was left for dead on a battlefield in Europe? I mean, she claimed two musket balls embedded themselves in her shoulder and leg and that a sword almost cut off her arm. That is a wild story, even if she wasn't a heavyset Russian woman living in the 19th century. But she apparently later showed the wounds to her friend and co founder of the Theosophical Society, Henry Steele Alcott. And that's the thing about her stories. As fantastic as they seem, as unbelievable as they might seem, some of them have some truth to them. So then it makes you wonder, wait, if they're a little bit true, might they be all true? Then there's Blavatsky's claim that she visited Tibet in her lifetime. For some, that's a hard pill to swallow, simply because Tibet's borders at the time were closed to all Europeans. But proponents of Blavatsky argue that there is still a possibility. She made it in as a kid. She met Tibetan desert nomads in a flatland area called the Kyrgyz Steppe that connects Russia and Tibet. So she had previous interactions with the culture. And even Blavatsky said she got turned away from Tibet on more than one occasion. One of her biographers, Gary Lochman, points to an account by two British officers who heard of a white woman traveling alone in the Tibetan Mountains in 1854 and 1867. Two dates that align with Blavatsky's attempts. The woman apparently said she was doing research for a book, and there's some hearsay about a man who saw a white woman in Tibet the year Blavatsky claimed to be there. And though Tibet had its borders closed to Europeans, they did allow traders and pilgrims from neighboring countries. And some have argued that Blavatsky had features that could allow her to pass as Mongolian. Of course, it's not just Blavatsky's travels that people have taken issue with in her lifetime. Two travelers who met Blavatsky in Egypt, Emma and Alexis Cullum, accused her of deception. They claim to have built secret doors inside the Theosophical Society in order for her to pull off her her magic tricks. They provided letters. Blavatsky had written them as evidence. Those got published in a report that many would argue exposed Blavatsky as a fraud. Those claims were later echoed and expanded by the Society for Psychical Research in Cambridge, who conducted their own investigation. There's one story about how Blavatsky may have admitted to deceiving people. She allegedly said, what is one to do when in order to rule men, it is necessary to deceive them? Fair enough. Publicly, Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society denied all allegations. They framed the whole ordeal as a conspiracy to undermine their legitimate authority, conducted by those threatened by Blavatsky's ideas. And as we mentioned, Blavatsky did have enemies accusing her of Satanism. But if we're accepting that there was some truth to the report and that Blavatsky lied about even a fraction of her life, there's another explanation for why she might have done so. While some say she was mentally unwell, but then again, others say it was. It was all a ruse to hide the fact that she was actually a Russian spy. The late 19th century was a period of intense geopolitical rivalries, particularly between the British Empire and the Russian Empire, known as the Great Game in Central Asia. Some suspect Blavatsky might have been feeding information back to her homeland throughout her travels. And her Persona as a mystic was all a smokescreen. Maybe that's why she traveled and spread Theosophy so much in India, which was under British rule at the time. And we know the Crown likely didn't appreciate her undermining their attempts at spreading Christianity. What's true and what's not? Well, when it comes to Blavatsky, nothing is cut and dry, and that's probably on purpose. Many suspect she intentionally mythologized her past to build her own lore, but sprinkled in elements of truth in her stories to keep people guessing. So who knows, maybe she made everything up, or maybe it was all true. Either way, we're still feeling her impact. Impact? The Theosophical Society is still around and for better or worse, her ideas continue to inspire imaginations the world over. And there is something to be said for that. Even the Society for Psychical Research, which accused Blavatsky of being a fraud, couldn't help but admire as well they wrote in their report. For our part, we regard her as neither the mouth nor piece of hidden sears, nor is a mere vulgar adventuress. We think that she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious and interesting impostors in history. As for what you walk away from this episode believing about Helena Blavatsky that like everything else about her life is up for interpretation. It just comes down to how you want to read the tea leaves she left behind. Personally, I would like to read them at a party with a stuffed baboon and a dinner jacket. Thank you for watching Conspiracy Theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram, he conspiracypod and if you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts. For more information on Helena Blavatsky. Amongst the many sources we used, we found the book Madame Blavatsky the Mother of Modern Spirituality by Gary Lachman. Extremely helpful to our research. Until next time, remember, the truth is isn't always the best story and the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written and researched by Connor Sampson. Edited by Miki Taylor Fact checked by Sophie Kemp Engineered, video, edited and sound designed by Alex Button Special thanks to Nick Johnson, Paige Ransberry, Andrew Byrne and and Jonathan Ratliff. I'm your host Carter Roy.