SYMHC Classics: Madame Blavatsky

Summary

Stuff You Missed in History Class Episode Summary: SYMHC Classics – Madame Blavatsky Release Date: December 21, 2024
Hosts: Holly Fry and Tracy V. Wilson
Produced by: iHeartPodcasts

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Introduction to Madame Blavatsky

In this classic episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class, hosts Holly Fry and Tracy V. Wilson delve into the enigmatic life of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a founder of the Theosophical movement and a pioneering figure in the Western occult tradition. Blavatsky remains a polarizing figure, admired by followers for her spiritual insights and criticized by skeptics for alleged fraudulence. This comprehensive exploration uncovers the layers of her personal history, spiritual quests, and lasting impact.

Early Life and Family Background

Helena Blavatsky was born Elena Petrovna von Hahn on August 12, 1831, in what is now Ukraine. Her birth was fraught with peril during a cholera epidemic, with both she and her mother, Elena Andrea Navon Hahn, initially not expected to survive. A dramatic family anecdote recounts how Helena’s aunt Nadia accidentally set priest robes on fire while attempting to baptize the newborn prematurely (07:38).

Helena hailed from an aristocratic lineage; her grandmother was Princess Elena Pavlovna Dolgorokov, and her mother became a novelist, earning comparisons to the French writer George Sand. Despite her noble background, Helena's childhood was marked by frequent relocations due to her father's military career, leading to a complex relationship with her mother and a restless upbringing (08:05).

Adventures and Mysterious Travels

Helena's early years were characterized by a blend of rebelliousness and deep intellectual curiosity. Described by her sister Vera as "singularly strange," Helena exhibited early interests in the metaphysical, exploring tunnels in her grandparents' Saratov home and claiming paranormal abilities such as sleepwalking and controlling birds through an enigmatic force called "Solomon's Wisdom" (12:20).

At fifteen, Helena’s life took another dramatic turn when her grandfather became governor of Saratov, prompting further travels and exposure to Tibetan Buddhism—a spiritual influence that would shape her later endeavors (24:35). Her tumultuous engagements, including a controversial and unconsummated marriage to Nikifor Blavatsky, set the stage for her extensive and often unverified travels across Europe, North America, and Asia (25:18).

Involvement with Spiritualism and Meeting Henry Steele Olcott

By the 1870s, Blavatsky became deeply involved in the spiritualist movement, which sought communication with the spirits of the deceased. Despite her skepticism about the authenticity of seances, she embraced their potential for reaching other realms. It was during a seance in Vermont that Helena met Henry Steele Olcott, an investigative journalist with a burgeoning interest in spiritualism. Olcott was captivated by Helena’s exotic appearance and adventurous tales, as he later described her life as "the most romantic stories ever told by a biographer" (39:45).

Founding the Theosophical Society

Together, Blavatsky and Olcott formalized their spiritual gatherings into the Theosophical Society, an organization dedicated to studying mystical and spiritual subjects beyond orthodox religious and scientific paradigms. In 1877, Blavatsky published Isis Unveiled, a seminal work that critiqued established religions and sciences while promoting Theosophy as a unified path to enlightenment (43:14). Their efforts extended to India, where they sought to align the society with the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement, and engaged in public spiritualist activities that initially garnered media attention (46:14).

Publications and Philosophies

Blavatsky’s writings, including Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, aimed to synthesize science, religion, and philosophy. She advocated for the unity of all religions and introduced Western audiences to Eastern spiritual concepts, albeit through a Eurocentric lens. The Secret Doctrine, published in 1888, sought to reveal "the fundamental unity from which all religions spring" and emphasized the occult aspects of nature as overlooked by modern science (52:24).

Controversies and Accusations of Fraud

Blavatsky’s prominence attracted significant controversy. In the early 1880s, Emma Colomb, a medium associated with the Theosophical Society, exposed fraudulent seance practices, implicating Blavatsky in theatrical trickery. This led to the Society for Psychical Research's investigation, culminating in Richard Hodgson’s 1885 report declaring Blavatsky a fraud (50:01). The fallout devastated her reputation and strained her partnership with Olcott, who chose to distance himself rather than support her legal battle.

Despite these accusations, Blavatsky continued to defend her work, leading to a retraction of Hodgson’s report by the Society for Psychical Research in 1986, albeit without resolving many of the lingering doubts about her legitimacy (55:11).

Later Life and Legacy

In her later years, Blavatsky returned to Europe, establishing the Blavatsky Lodge in London and continuing to write influential Theosophical texts. Her death on May 8, 1891, during an influenza epidemic, was commemorated by Theosophists as White Lotus Day. Blavatsky’s legacy endures through the continued popularity of her writings and the ongoing activities of the Theosophical Society, which remains a testament to her enduring influence on Western esotericism and spiritual thought (54:02).

Conclusion

Helena Blavatsky’s life was a tapestry of adventure, spiritual exploration, and controversy. While her contributions to theosophy and the introduction of Eastern spiritual concepts to the West are undeniable, the persistent questions surrounding her personal integrity and the veracity of her claims ensure that she remains a subject of fascination and debate. Holly Fry and Tracy V. Wilson present a balanced view, acknowledging both her profound impact and the complexities that obscure her true legacy.

Notable Quotes:

• Tracy V. Wilson at [39:45]:
  "This lady, Madame Helen P. Blavatsky, has led a very eventful life, traveling in most of the lands of the Orient, searching for antiquities at the base of the pyramids, witnessing the mysteries of Hindu temples..."

• Holly Fry at [43:41]:
  "Isis Unveiled is something of a hodgepodge. It borrows from religions all over the world... because she envisioned theosophy as something that could unite the world's varied systems of beliefs."

• Holly Fry at [44:27]:
  "Her deepest roots are in Helena's versions of Buddhism and Hinduism. But she incorporated so many varied ideas because she envisioned theosophy as something that could unite the world's varied systems of beliefs."

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Transcript

[Holly Fry]

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[Savannah Guthrie]

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[Holly Fry]

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[Savannah Guthrie]

Prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. Botox is not approved for adults with migraine who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine treatment.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Botox is a prescription medicine injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions including als, Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome and medications including botulinum toxins as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

[Holly Fry]

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[Holly Fry]

Happy Saturday. In our episode on Joaquin Torres Garcia this week, we talked about Madame Blavatsky and how she just seems to keep showing up in our episodes in unexpected moments. So today, our episode on her is our Saturday classic.

[Hoda Kotb]

This originally came out on October 5, 2020, so enjoy.

[Holly Fry]

Welcome to Stuff youf Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry.

[Hoda Kotb]

And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

[Holly Fry]

Tracy, it's the best month of the year.

[Hoda Kotb]

I know it's your absolute favorite.

[Holly Fry]

It is. I mean, in my heart it's October every day. But now we're actually in October, which means Halloweeny content. And for this October, we're doing kind of an on ramp topic because it's a subject that I know you and I have both been kind of mentally prowling around for a bit. It is Madame Blavatsky who is said to have gone simply by her initials of hpb. I have a hard time saying that, so I'm gonna stick to her regular name.

[Hoda Kotb]

Yeah, well, and it's also like the name she was known by in all of her work around the English speaking world. We're not gonna try to like recreate her Russian name in Russian because that's like not how she was known here.

[Holly Fry]

Right. And Blavatsky is a figure that is iconic in a number of ways. She was the founder of the theosophical movement. She lived a life of adventure that is hard, very hard to believe, frankly. We'll talk a little bit about the likely embellishment of some of her life story, and you could also make the case that she in many ways set the image that persists to this day in pop culture of the fortune teller. Clad in flowing garments and fringe, she tended to play up her otherness as she traveled through the world to make a name for herself and to make a living. She is a polarizing figure to this day. There are still people that are scholars of her work and still people that are very vested in disproving her work. But the important thing is that the impact of her work is still felt in the world whether you believe her to have been a genuine mystic or a total fraud. So we are tackling Madame Blavatsky after many years of kind of looking at it and then being like, later. Later.

[Hoda Kotb]

Yeah, well. And then also when we were. We have each had time away from the office recently, and it was like we were trying to get a handle on what was coming up on the show. So one of us didn't do the same thing as the other one while the other one was and not reachable. And you sent me your list over, and I was like, oh, I'm so glad this is finally on there.

[Holly Fry]

Well, and it worked out well because, you know, this is a. It's a longer episode in part because there's a lot of her story for her, and her life is in some ways well documented and in other ways, very fuzzily documented. Picking it apart is quite tricky. But I also wanted to try to read as many different sources and biographies as I could, because as we know and we've talked about before, some will be favorable to a subject, some will not, some will fall in the middle. And you kind of have to develop a sense of pattern recognition to see, like, what is consistent biography to biography and what seems like biographer bias. And so in her case, that's a really big part of the research, is just kind of trying to suss out the bias versus the actual. Yeah, I'm literally putting your quotes around actual facts, because you'll see it starts right from the beginning.

[Hoda Kotb]

The life of Madame Blavatsky was just a tangle of intensity right from her birth. She was born Elena Petrovna von Hahn in what was at the time Russian Ukraine. She was born August 12, 1831. And she was born. Born prematurely in the middle of a cholera epidemic. So that's already a lot. Elena's mother, Elena Andrea Navon Hahn, was still a teenager, was sick with cholera when she gave birth, and both of them were not expected to live. A priest was brought in to baptize the baby quickly before she was expected to die. And so then Elena's aunt Nadia, who was also a child at the time, accidentally set the priest robes on fire with a candle that she was holding. There's just so much in a birth story, right?

[Holly Fry]

There's just a lot going on. Elena's German father, Peter von Hahn, was a captain in the Royal Horse Artillery. He was in Poland when all of this happened. So he missed all of the, you know, sort of grave happenings, but also the wackiness with the the child setting a priest on fire accidentally. He actually did not meet his daughter for six months to a year, depending on the source you look at. Accounts swerve around quite a bit on that point.

[Hoda Kotb]

So of course she did not die in infancy. She was also descended from royalty. Her grandmother was Princess Elena Pavlovna Dolgorokov and defied convention of the day. She educated herself in everything from Greek language to botany. Helena's 17 year old mother also survived the delivery and became a novelist shortly after that. Since sometimes she's been called the Russian George sand because of the similarity of the themes in her work to that of our previous podcast subject. So young Elena grew up in a household of women who really valued writing and learning.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah. Her mother's novels are largely about women who are in marriages that do not hold enough romance or happiness for them, much like a lot of George Sand's work. But though Elena was born into the aristocracy and had really positive role models in terms of education for women, Elena's life as a child was not really what you would call idyllic. Her father's military career meant that they moved frequently. And there are wildly different assessments of what her relationship with her mother was like. Some indicate that the elder Elena was generally unhappy with her life and the constant moving and would have been very pleased to just break free of her family obligations entirely. Other accounts suggest that mother and daughter were in fact quite close.

[Hoda Kotb]

At one point, Peter's orders took the family to St. Petersburg and the elder Elena was finally happy. So much so that when the orders came to leave, she refused to go. The von Hahns were separated for a while during this period, though she did take her two daughters on a thousand mile journey with their grandfather to Astrakhan, which was at the mouth of the Volga River. The family patriarch was traveling for work and the young Helena was exposed to Tibetan Buddhism there for the first time. Later in life she would describe this as having made a really lasting impression on her.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah, I didn't dig into it here, but most biographers make the point of like, her mother was so happy to be in a city and in St. Petersburg that she refused to move with her father. But then she took her kids out of St. Petersburg and went on what was actually a very long, arduous journey. So it kind of points to the fact that maybe she just didn't want to be with Peter.

[Hoda Kotb]

She just maybe wanted a break.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah. By the time Elena was nine, her parents were back together and the family was then living in Odessa. But at this Point, the elder Helena, who had never really enjoyed robust health, was sick and she was getting worse. When she was finally diagnosed with tuberculosis during a pregnancy, a doctor moved in with the family full time. And that baby, a son named Leonid, was born in June 1840. And he was actually the family's second son. They had had a boy named Sasha, who had died in infancy several years earlier. And you may have have noticed that we referenced two daughters a little bit ago. And that's because at that point there was already a second daughter. Her name was Vera. And Helena Andreyevna survived the birth of her fourth child despite her illness. But despite every treatment that the family's wealth and connections could arrange for her, she did not live a whole lot longer. She died in 18 at the age of just 28. And in an apocryphal story, her last words to her daughter were that she would not live a life like other women and that she would suffer a great deal. This is something that Blavatsky would say throughout her life. Helena, her sister Vera, and her brother Leonid were sent to live with their grandparents.

[Hoda Kotb]

That sort of tropey sentiment that Helena was not like other girls was something that was really part of the way the family described her from her youth. Her sister Vera described her as being singularly strange. And most descriptions talk about her having a duality to her personality. On the one hand, she was really rebellious and stubborn and liked to play unkind pranks and kind of talk back to adults. And on the other, she was bookish, deeply interested in the metaphysical, and really obsessed with hiding in the many tunnels and other strange hideaways that were part of their grandparents house in the city of Saratov on the Volga River.

[Holly Fry]

And this is also the point in the timeline where the stories of her unusual paranormal abilities are rooted. So according to family stories, which are of course not verifiable, Helaena would play with what seemed to be ghosts, and she would sleepwalk into the unused passages of the house and developed the ability to put birds to sleep using something that she called Solomon's Wisdom. We don't know what that was. There is literally nothing that tries to explain what Solomon's Wisdom was. And of course, the family lore around Helaena mentions her fascination with the dead from the time she was a child.

[Hoda Kotb]

Once the children had relocated to Saratov and were just not constantly moving around to accommodate their father's career anymore, their education settled into more consistent and formalized structures. But even so, and in spite of coming from a pretty progressive family, in terms of women in education. This was largely about preparing her to be an aristocratic wife. So she was learning French, studying art and music, but things like math and science were not really part of the curriculum.

[Holly Fry]

Nope. She was supposed to learn how to be very pretty and quiet and to be able to entertain her husband with talks of culture, but not really anything else. And there are a lot of stories of the ways in which Helaena, in her early years, comes into contact with the occult and the mystical just before her own deeper connection to that world is said to have manifested. So she allegedly learned about bee communication and plants that had mystical uses from what is usually referred to as a serf. On the family property, his name is listed as Berenig Booyak. And while traveling with her grandparents, she was again exposed to a number of other cultures and ideas and was once again completely fascinated with Tibetan Buddhism in particular.

[Hoda Kotb]

She also started to mention a protector that she saw in her dreams during her late childhood. And she described this protector, which was her name for him, as a tall man from India. There were several accidents that happened to her where she narrowly escaped serious injury, and she attributed her lack of damage to the intervention of this protector figure.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah, in one instance, she had stacked a table with other furniture and climbed it to get a look at a portrait that was high on the wall of her grandparents home. There's a whole layer to this story where the portrait is covered with a curtain and nobody wants anybody to see it. And so that makes it more alluring. And we don't ever find out what the portrait is. But when she peeked behind it to the forbidden painting, whatever it was, was either so shocking or startling that she passed out and fell from this giant stack of furniture. And she claimed that when she came to, everything was back where it belonged, all of the furniture had been put back in its proper place. And the only evidence of her clandestine climb was a handprint that she had left high on the wall and on a dusty surface. And then on another occasion, she was thrown from a horse. And she said that her protector had appeared and saved her by holding her head so it did not impact on the ground.

[Hoda Kotb]

There's also a sort of incongruous piece of travel information that comes up around the same time that she started seeing this protector. Later in life. She mentioned having gone to England with her father when she was 12 or 13. There's really no record of this trip. It's not corroborated by her sister's diary at the time. So historians tend to be of two views on this sort of strange standout piece in the whole Madame Blavatsky puzzle. Either it never happened or it happened, but she recalled the timeline incorrectly. And this trip really took place closer to 1850, when she was 17 or 18 instead of 12 or 13.

[Holly Fry]

There will be so many inconsistencies with where she is and when. Accepting all of these stories, of course, requires a bit of faith, because there isn't a way to corroborate the appearance of a spirit that only appears to one person, or even to verify simple events that are part of family history but have no actual record. Right. We don't know if she was thrown from a horse. No one would have, like, recorded that in any way. We don't know if she climbed this table full of things and was somehow protected and cleaned up after by a friendly spirit because, like, there's not like, anybody files a report on that.

[Hoda Kotb]

When it came to this protector, Helena also didn't seem content to just use the idea as a means of explaining the unexplainable. As a teenager, she became really fixated on studying what exactly was at work when strange events happened around her. So she read, according to her own account, books on alchemy, magic and the occult. These had been part of her great grandfather's royal library, and included in these volumes there was even a book by the previous podcast subject, San Germain. If that account is actually true, reading the work of other explorers of the unknown gave her this base of knowledge that she then used as her jumping off point with her own mystical and philosophical explorations.

[Holly Fry]

Helena's teenage years were a time full of significant change, as is pretty normal for a teenager, although hers is not always that normal. We're gonna delve into that after we first pause for a sponsor break.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

The.

[Unknown]

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[Savannah Guthrie]

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[Holly Fry]

That's right, nobody does the holidays quite.

[Savannah Guthrie]

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[Holly Fry]

Toxin a help if I have chronic migraine 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting 4 hours or more?

[Savannah Guthrie]

Botox prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. Botox is not approved for adults with migraine who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine treatment.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Botox is a prescription medicine injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions including als, Lou Gehrig's disease, Myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome and medications including Botulinum toxins as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

[Holly Fry]

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[Holly Fry]

When Elena was 15, her life shifted once again. Her grandfather's appointment as governor of Saratov ended, and at that point, Helena, Vera and Leonid first spent a year with an aunt before joining their grandparents in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, which was called Tiflis at the time.

[Hoda Kotb]

As she turned 16, Helena had started to speak about a double life that she was leading. One was her normal, everyday life, and the other was her astral life. She also made the acquaintance of Prince Alexander Golitsyn, who was similarly interested in the mystical and had traveled the world seeking out experts and practitioners of various occult and magical activities. Golitsyn is said to have encouraged Helena's interest in this secondary spiritual life and specifically advised her to travel the same way that he had to learn more about the unknown.

[Holly Fry]

When Elena was 17, there was once again a sudden change in her circumstance, but this time in the form of a marriage. Seemingly out of nowhere. She wed Nikifor Blavatsky, a man in his 40s who was vice governor of the Aravan province of Armenia. How this match happened is another place in Helena's life where the stories differ really significantly. There are some theories that she may have just run off and gotten married as an act of rebellion against her father or her governess, who she was having some conflict with. And again, that depends on the source you read. It also might have been a hastily arranged marriage made by the family in the hopes of tethering the increasingly restless Helaena to her home in some way. But in later years, she herself also said that Nikifor, unlike a lot of the men closer to her age, never mocked her interest in the mystical and would talk to her about things that he had learned in other places and cultures that might interest her as she studied such matters.

[Hoda Kotb]

This was not a good match, though. Helena got cold feet before the wedding even happened, and she tried to back out. She vanished for several days, and there were rumors that she had met up with Guljitsyn, but she returned from wherever she had gone in time for the wedding. That wedding took place on July 7, 1849, and she's said to have refused to do the vow of honoring and obeying her new husband. But otherwise the ceremony did go as planned. Planned. According to Helaena, though, this marriage was never consummated. And we'll come back to this.

[Holly Fry]

No sooner was this wedding over than Helena began a series of attempts to run away from her new husband and her new life. She and Nikifor lived in the palace of Sardar in Aravan, and she spent a great deal of time, it seems, evading guards who wished she would just stay put. Eventually she did manage to get past the guards and she ran back to her family in Tiflis. And at that point the decision was made to ship her off to her father and see if that might help.

[Hoda Kotb]

But she purposely missed the boat and then bribed a different boat captain to take her to Kirch. She traveled with two members of her family's household staff and assured them that she was still planning to rendezvous with her father, but then she gave them the slip. Similarly, after some issues with the captain of the English ship the Commodore, which was the captain she had bribed, she ran away again. The captain's boat was boarded by harbor police who were looking for this runaway aristocrat, and while she managed to evade capture by dressing as a cabin boy, the captain probably did not like all of this fuss. Soon she was gone, and this was the start of just a wild decade.

[Holly Fry]

The next nine years of Elena Blavatsky's life are very murky. She did not trust her family not to send her back to her husband if she told them where she was, so she didn't. With the possible exception of her father, who might have occasionally been sending her money. And because of the cloak and dagger nature of her travels, plenty of unlikely stories about just what she was up to during those years of travel abound. Blavatsky's own accounts of this period of her life shifted and changed over the years, sometimes in ways that contradicted one another or created impossibilities. In terms of the timeline, the first.

[Hoda Kotb]

Place that Madame Blavatsky explored was Constantinople. Later, she shared that it was here that she met opera singer Agarty Metrovich. After finding him stabbed and left for dead in the street, Blavatsky stood watch over him with a pistol to ward off anybody who had ill intent while waiting for somebody to help her arrange for him to get help. She did find some non nefarious help eventually, and Metrovich was treated and recovered. The two of them remained friends for the remaining 22 decades of the singer's life.

[Holly Fry]

Helena is also said to have made the acquaintance of the Countess Sofia Kislev in Constantinople, who she traveled with for several months, often disguised as a young man. They went to Egypt and Greece together before heading to Eastern Europe.

[Hoda Kotb]

Metrovich and Helena then turned up together somewhere in Europe. Metrovich wrote to Helena's grandfather to tell him that the two were married.

[Holly Fry]

Now this is all very blurry. We don't know if this was like a, I'm your friend. I'm gonna tell your grandparents that, like, we're together now, and explain this to your husband, or if he really thought they were getting married. It's again, everything murky, murky, murky. But we do know that by the early 1850s, Blavatsky was first in Paris and then in London and in England. She had what she claimed was a significant spiritual experience. She met a man from India who she claimed to already know. Remember that protector from her childhood? She said that this man who she called Master Moria, sometimes she'll just call him the Master was one and the same. And the specifics around exactly when and where she met him shifted in her own accounts. She told different people that she had seen him in a crowd first and recognized him others that she had met him at Waterloo Bridge when she was considering suicide. Another version was that she ran into him at the Great Exhibition, and also that she met him in the seaside town of Ramsgate. But all of these versions, even though they are different, include his seeking her out. To tell her that she must spend several years in Tibet before trying to.

[Hoda Kotb]

Make a path to Tibet, though, she headed to Canada. She was inspired by the writing of James Fenimore Cooper to seek out first nations peoples. She found these encounters disappointing, though, and she attributed this disappointment to the indigenous population having been exposed to Christian missionaries. There's some layers here.

[Holly Fry]

There are so many layers. And she's very problematic when it comes to her interactions with people of other cultures, because she does that thing where she simultaneously fetishizes them and criticizes the heck out of them as not being what she wanted them to be. It's very problematic. But after this time in Canada, she is said to have moved south to New Orleans and then into Texas before leaving North America for India. And she made it to India. She stayed in Bombay first for two years. And it's said that during this time, masters of ancient wisdom also told her to go to Tibet to learn about the integration of science, religion and philosophy. But she couldn't really make her way into Tibet. That was tricky at this time. Europeans, not so much welcome. Tibet was very closed off at this point.

[Hoda Kotb]

She decided to head back to England. Once she got there, she had quite the tale of her journey. She claimed that the ship she was on had wrecked near the Cape of Good Hope and that she was one of 21 survivors after allegedly meeting with the Master again in the home of someone she says she didn't know. Elena Blavatsky made her way to North America again.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah, this is the point in her story where I was like, she's lost all sense of even grounding her tales in any sort of reality. Like this whole, oh, I took a ship from India and It was shipwrecked. 21 of us survived. There's no account of how she got back to Europe from that point. Yeah, it's a little bit. A little bit kooky. But she landed in New York and then she headed west, first to Chicago and then to Salt Lake City. And from there she moved on to San Francisco, where she boarded a steamer to Japan. From there it was on to India, and this time with the help of a guide and disguised herself. She claimed to have entered Tibet in 1856. At last, the timeline of her travels was written up and published by Blavatsky in the Moscow Chronicle under the pen name Radha Bai. From Tibet, she was eventually ordered by the mysterious master to travel back to Europe.

[Hoda Kotb]

All of this is disputed. It's entirely possible that she was just hanging out in Europe this whole time. As Holly said earlier, Tibet was pretty closed off to Europeans. She might have managed to gain access to Tibet if she was traveling with one of the people that she name checked as a spiritual master from the surrounding area. But, I mean, these are kind of long odds on this. There's just never been any corroborating information for these claims.

[Holly Fry]

But while the years from 1849 to 1858 are really only known by what Blavatsky said she did, we do know that she was back in Russia with her family on Christmas 1858. Once again, the family noted the strange phenomena that seemed to always surround her.

[Hoda Kotb]

Elena went back to her husband Nikifor in 1862. But Agarty Metrovic then showed up in Tiflis not long after claiming his own rights as her husband. This whole thing is really messy and unclear. And then to confuse the situation further, she adopted a boy named Yuri with Nikifor. The couple didn't stay together. Yuri died at the age of five and was buried as Yuri Metrovich. Yuri's actual parentage is also a matter of debate. Madame Blavatsky said that this was the out of wedlock son of her sister in law and Baron Meyendorf. Rumors arose and continued that he was actually the child of Helena and Metrovich.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah, it's a big. It's a big cluster in mystery. We don't know. There's so many. I feel like she was so good at creating such a pastiche of confusing details about her life that no one could untangle them and be like, wait, this doesn't add up. In 1864, Blavatsky had a horse riding accident that actually left her in a coma for several months, and she said that when she came out of that coma, her paranormal abilities had been fully actualized. After this, she was once again on the move throughout Europe before once again receiving instructions from the master to go to Constantinople, then India and into Tibet. Again, all unsubstantiated.

[Hoda Kotb]

We're about to get to the phase of Blavatsky's life where she became associated with spiritualism. Before we get into that, let's take a quick break and hear from some of the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going.

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[Savannah Guthrie]

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[Holly Fry]

1870S, Blavatsky became involved with the spiritualist movement. If you are a longtime listener to the podcast, you may recall that the modern spiritualist movement is usually cited as beginning with the Fox sisters and their claims of communication with spirits. In 1848, previous hosts Sarah and Deblina did a whole episode on their story.

[Hoda Kotb]

So by the time Helena Blavatsky became connected to it, spiritualism had been getting attention, particularly in the United States for a couple of decades, and had grown very popular. Even though it had. It also had plenty of doubters right from the beginning. And although Madame Blavatsky became connected to spiritualism, she was ideologically not a hundred percent aligned with it. The idea of spiritualism involved communication with the souls of the deceased. She didn't believe that events like seances were making contact with the dead, but instead that the entities being reached were elementals or shells, not actual soul. She did really love a seance, though.

[Holly Fry]

Oh, she certainly did, because that was part of her fully actualized paranormal abilities after she came out of that coma was that she could contact other realms through seances. And it is through her work conducting seances that she met the man who would become one of her greatest admirers and most enthusiastic Collaborators. Madame Blavatsky had made her way back to North America by 1873. She was living in New York City at the time, and she was actually kind of struggling to get by. She was working in a sweatshop making artificial flowers to support herself. And then she met Henry Steele Olcott at a seance in Vermont.

[Hoda Kotb]

Olcott was, in a lot of ways the last person you would expect to have responded positively to spiritualism. He had served in the U.S. army during the American Civil War. He had a career as a lawyer working on free fraud cases. And by the time he met Blavatsky, he was working as an investigative journalist. He found himself at Blavatsky's seance because he was conducting investigative research into what a lot of people suspected were not spiritual experiences at all, but the work of charlatans. Olcott had already written a number of articles about spiritualism and was becoming more and more fascinated by it.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah, there's a whole story about the farm that they're at, which was run by these people that were having seances and making money off of it, like they were, you know, charging entry fees and booking spiritualists to come in and do these, I want to call them, performances, but these. These events. But even before the seance began, Olcott could not help but notice Helaena, who stood out in the farming town of Chittenden, Vermont. Her manner of dress, including a bright red tunic and a fur tobacco pouch, her many rings, her blonde curly hair, which Olcott described as like the fleece of a Cotswold ewe, and the fact that he overheard her speaking French to a friend, all drew the journalist in. He was completely fascinated.

[Hoda Kotb]

Here's how he wrote of her later quote, this lady, Madame Helen P. Blavatsky, has led a very eventful life, traveling in most of the lands of the Orient, searching for antiquities at the base of the pyramids, witnessing the mysteries of Hindu temples, and pushing with an armed escort far into the interior of Africa. The adventures she has encountered, the strange people she has seen, the perils by sea and land she has passed through, would make one of the most romantic stories ever told by a biographer. In the whole course of my experience, I never met so interesting and, if I may say without offense, eccentric a character. Olcott's endorsement went a really long way in terms of validating Blavatsky's personal story. And he also called her, quote, a lady of such social position as to be incapable of entering into a vulgar conspiracy with any pair of tricksters to.

[Holly Fry]

Deceive the Public, he was like all in. He believed everything she said without fact checking. It seemed the seance that Olcott witnessed sounds a little more like a stage show. Various spirits made appearances, as in showing up on stage a Native American woman, a man from the country of Georgia, the spirit of a German man, and the French Canadian father of one of the attendees, who gave responses to questions posed in French by making rapping noises, and in one instance is said to have audibly uttered the word we.

[Hoda Kotb]

A journalist writing for the Smithsonian, Edward Hauer, described Alcott as having one of the most dramatic midlife crises in history and his relationship with Blavatsky. Some takes on their relationship suggest that Madame Blavatsky was a home wrecker who caused Alcott's divorce. He was actually already estranged from his wife, and in the legal proceedings to end that marriage before the two of them met, rumors of an affair between the two of them persisted, though in part because he moved in with her when they both got back to New York.

[Holly Fry]

Even so, while Blavatsky and Olcott may have been emotionally very intimate, it really does seem unlikely that they had a romantic relationship. At least not one that manifested physically. We mentioned that Helena always said her first marriage was never consummated, and she claimed later in life that she had never had a sexual relationship with anyone. She generally described herself in a way that today might be categorized as asexual. She once said, quote, I had a volcano in constant eruption in my brain and a glacier at the foot of the mountain. But she and Olcott tended to refer to one another as chum. So they were close. But her characterization as a mistress who lured him away from his wife really doesn't quite track. Olcott, by the way, was known to have had mistresses. He sounds like something of a ladies man, but it doesn't appear that Blavatsky was one of them.

[Hoda Kotb]

Olcott was a major boon to Madame Blavatsky's public Persona through his writing as well as a source of financial support. Their shared apartment became an epicenter for spiritualist gatherings, and they routinely hosted seances and discussions of the paranormal there. Blavatsky would invite journalists to visit so they would see that she was no trickster, just merely a woman who is in touch with other realms.

[Holly Fry]

And it was in this haven for discussion of the paranormal and occult that Colonel Henry Olcott suggested that they formalize their gatherings under an official organization that could study all of the mystical and spiritual subjects that they were all interested in. And this marks the beginning of the theosophical society, which sought to create an identity for itself that was separate from the spiritualist movement. And to help shape that identity, Elena began writing.

[Hoda Kotb]

One of the numerous reasons that Blavatsky was and remains a figure of controversy is really clear in her writing from this period. She published her book isis unveiled in 1877. Olcott edited it, and she leveled a lot of criticism at both organized religion and the scientific community. She thought that both groups were missing the real path to enlightenment and insight. Theosophy, according to Helena Blavatsky, was the answer. And it was, to quote her quote, the synthesis of science, religion and philosophy. It was a way to bring those three disciplines together. This book was both praised and panned, and Blavatsky put all of the reviews into a scrapbook.

[Holly Fry]

Isis Unveiled is something of a hodgepodge. It borrows from religions all over the world, pulling in ideas, which Blavatsky adapted from memory, although she claimed that it was largely dictated to her telepathically by masters of ancient and secret knowledge. Its deepest roots are in Helena's versions of Buddhism and Hinduism. But she incorporated so many varied ideas because she envisioned theosophy as something that could unite the world's varied systems of beliefs.

[Hoda Kotb]

Although Madame Blavatsky had managed to amass a following in the United States States, it didn't really sustain itself. And as her influence and the members of the Theosophical Society fizzled out, she and Alcott decided to move on. And supporting Blavatsky and touting her gifts, he had really squandered his good name among his fellow journalists in the United States, who had really just taken to mocking him openly about it.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah, he kind of tanked his career to prepare to leave. With an eye towards India, Elena Blavatsky became a U.S. citizen. And the thinking here was that if things went badly overseas, she would have the protection of the consulate in India. She and the colonel also sold off all of their belongings. They cleared out their cool apartment, and on December 17, 1878, they left the US for India.

[Hoda Kotb]

More specifically than simply going to India, though, Olcott and Blavatsky intended for the Theosophical Society to join up with the Arya Samaj, which was a Hindu reform movement that had started in 1875. Olcott and Blavatsky were novelties in Bombay. They openly criticized colonialism, and they embraced Eastern religious ideas. And in doing so, they kind of became media darlings for a time.

[Holly Fry]

Through a spiritualist named Alfred Percy Sennett, who edited a British newspaper that published In India, the founders of the Theosophical Society were booked at seances throughout British society that lived in Bombay at the time. Colonialism seemed to be a little more palatable if that meant it led to paying gigs for them. These seances featured all kinds of paranormal happenings. When Sinnet's wife, for example, mentioned a lost brooch that she longed to find, Blavatsky told her it had rematerialized in her flower beds. Those flower beds were dug up, and lo, the brooch. She is also said to have produced a spray of roses in midair which fell on the heads of people in the room when a visitor said that she could not produce a miracle.

[Hoda Kotb]

Olcott and Blavatsky set up their Theosophical Society headquarters in Bombay. In 1879. Madame Blavatsky became the editor of their periodical, the Theosophist, which was a role she would have for the next nine years.

[Holly Fry]

Olcott toured the Indian subcontinent giving lectures. He spoke against British efforts to convert Buddhists to Christianity. And on a trip to Sri Lanka, which was of course still called Ceylon at the time, he and Madame Blavatsky publicly took Buddhist vows. Olcott took a deep interest in Ceylon and contributed to the Buddhist community there in a variety of ways, from opening schools to writing religious study texts to designing a flag, which is still in use today. He also started working as a healer. He believed that magnetism had curative properties and that he could manipulate it to administer to all manner of ailments.

[Hoda Kotb]

While the beginning of Blavatsky's and Olcott's time in Bombay and Ceylon was joyous, the tides eventually turned. The members of the Theosophical Society asked Olcott to stop healing people. The public version of this story was that they felt like it was depleting his energy, but there was also likely some kind of version about it being problematic. Then Olcott and Blavatsky became embroiled in a dispute when a woman that they had taken under their wing as a medium named Emma Colomb started to hold obviously fake seances to make easy money. Next, the head of the Aria Samaj denounced Theosophy very publicly, as he believed the incorporation of all faiths was not in line with his group's ideology. He had come to view Blavatsky and Olcott as untrustworthy.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah, he had pamphlets written up talking about how he had changed his mind and believed that they were charlatans and things only got worse from there. Alfred Percy Sennett, who he mentioned just a little while ago, had published a book of letters. And these letters were alleged to have come from the masters that Madame Blavatsky knew. But one of them was obviously plagiarized from an American periodical and someone recognized it. And so the press which had initially welcomed the Theosophists turned on Blavatsky. They first started to question her legitimacy as a psychic and soon she was just flat out accused of being a fraud in all the papers. She and Olcott moved their headquarters from Bombay to Madras in 1882 to get away from the controversy.

[Hoda Kotb]

That worked for a while, but within a few years there was another much bigger controversy. Emma Colomb, who had been doing those fake seances, published a series of letters in a Madras periodical. She said they were written to her by Helena Blavatsky. They clearly instructed her to create fake, miraculous and paranormal events to support their various stories. Blavatsky and Olcott dismissed these letters as fakes, but they found themselves viewed with just a whole new level of suspicion.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah, there's a really fun story in there about making a life size doll that they kind of like were puppeteering in like darkness to try to convince people they were being visited by the. The masters that Blavatsky often referenced. There's some very fun and kooky theatricality to it. And that is how the London Society for Psychical Research came to open an investigation into Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society. That investigation, which was conducted by Richard Hodgson, was aided by none other than Emma Coulomb, who showed how, among other things, the miracle of things like letters dropping into visitors laps seemingly from thin air, was actually achieved through a bit of theatrical trickery. There was a thread and hook system in the ceiling. A handwriting expert was also called upon to weigh in on whether the letters that Coulomb had provided as as evidence of Madame Blavatsky's treachery were indeed written by Blavatsky. We have talked on the show before about some of the problems with handwriting analysis, but this was very damning at the time.

[Hoda Kotb]

In 1885, parapsychologist Richard Hodgson filed his report which concluded that Blavatsky was a fraud. Olcott was found to merely have been incredibly gullible. After the Hodgson report, Blavatsky left India. Although she continued to edit the Theosophist, the damage of this report was far reaching. In addition to discrediting Blavatsky in a very public way, it also sowed some conflict between her and Olcott. When Helena Blavatsky filed a slander suit against Richard Hodgson and the Society for Psychical Research. Alcott did not support that. He instead wanted to just let things die down the way they had in the past. To Helena, this really felt like a betrayal. It essentially ended their partnership and their friendship.

[Holly Fry]

Madame Blavatsky, who was quite ill at the time due to a problem with her liver, took a steamer to Europe. And despite the apparent seriousness of her health when she left India, she did make a recovery. After spending some time in Belgium, she established the Blavatsky Lodge of London in 1887. And in 1888, she released the work that she's probably most well known for, which is called the Secret Doctrine. And that was a comprehensive look at theosophy.

[Hoda Kotb]

While she was writing this book, she had shifted focus away from the paranormal and wrote more extensively about philosophy. The book's subhead is There Is no Religion Higher than Truth. In the introduction, Blavatsky makes her goal clear. The aim of this work may be thus stated. To show that nature is not a fortuitous concurrence of atoms, and to assign to man his rightful place in the scheme of the universe, to rescue from degradation the archaic truths which are the basis of all religions, to uncover, to some extent, the fundamental unity from which they all spring. Finally, to show that the occult side of nature has never been approached by the science of modern civilization.

[Holly Fry]

In 1889, she published two more books. The Voice of Silence has the subtitle translated from the Book of the Golden Precepts, which shares a common origin with the Secret Doctrine. The rules and ethics presented here contrast the two paths of spiritual attainment. The one pursued by those seeking knowledge for their own enlightenment, the other chosen by those whose aspirations are prompted by compassion for all.

[Hoda Kotb]

Her other book to come out that year was key to Theosophy, being a clear exposition in the form of question and answer of the ethics, science and philosophy for the study of which the Theosophical Society has been founded.

[Holly Fry]

Even though these were very popular and they continued to actually be printed, they were her really final achievements. Madame Blavatsky died on May 8, 1891, at the Tail end of an influenza epidemic, and that date of her death is now celebrated annually by Theosophists as.

[Hoda Kotb]

White Lotus Day, long after her death, starting in 1950. But a.m. blavatsky's collected writings were published. The full publication spanned 15 volumes, and it came out over the course of 40 years.

[Holly Fry]

Blavatsky is often credited with bringing Buddhism and Hinduism to the Western audience, and this is a little bit tricky to celebrate, of course, since these ideas were being channeled through a European lens. We also don't know really what the depth of her exposure was to these things before she started talking about them as though she were an expert. And since the study of these belief systems on the part of Blavatsky is difficult to corroborate in any level, particularly in her earlier years, I just want people to recognize that that has to all be taken with a grain of salt.

[Hoda Kotb]

We do have to note, though, that the Theosophical Society persists despite these bumpy times during Blavatsky's life. Her books continue to be pretty popular. Additionally, the Blavatsky Lodge in London is still there, although it has changed locations from where it was when Madame Blavatsky initially established it.

[Holly Fry]

And as for that damning report of 1885 that declared Madame Blavatsky a fraud, in 1986, the Society for Psychical Research retracted it due to a review that found that Hodgson had set out to discredit Blavatsky and that his research and his methods were biased toward that. Although there are a lot of the issues that Hodgson raised that remain unanswered, this is one of those things you'll sometimes find argued about on the Internet that some people will say this is vindication of Madame Blavatsky, and others are like, no, no, they're just pointing out that the research was bad, not weighing in really on whether that conclusion would have been reached otherwise. Like I said, she continues to be very polarizing. I find her utterly fascinating, but I don't have a strong opinion. I have some opinions, but they're not strong and they're kind of cloudy for me anyway, which is unusual just because there's always part of me that's like, I don't know. I don't know anything. So.

[Hoda Kotb]

Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is historypodcastheartradio.com and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show. Here's to the season. From hanging ornaments and matching pajamas to building gingerbread houses with extra icing and staying up late to wrap gifts and watch movies, these traditions make the holidays truly special, and through it all, the Chinette brand is there to share in the joy. With the Chinette Crystal Collection, holiday tables are perfectly coordinated, allowing for excellence with less cleanup, so everyone can focus on what really matters. Here's to the traditions that bring everyone together year after year. Here's to us, all of us. Find a local [e-mail] the flavor, the.

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