An excerpt from Into the Mystic, the amazing true story of how Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott brought ancient Eastern wisdom to the West and created the foundation for the modern New Age Movement
By Greg Guma
In her first 43 years Helena Blavatsky had been around the world, often on her own, and had studied the ancient spiritual traditions of Egypt, India and Tibet. She left Russia in 1848, at age 17, in a bold escape from marriage to a 40-year-old husband.
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After serving in Garibaldi’s army in the Battle of Mentana, where she was wounded and left for dead, plus a brief second marriage in Russia, she left her homeland for good. Eventually landing in New York in 1873, at the instruction of her spiritual “masters,” she spent a year drawing together a circle of admirers and following the progress of the spiritualist craze until she read one of Henry Olcott’s news accounts about the Chittenden mediums, It was karma, she thought. Olcott was to be her partner in the “great work.” Interest in these phenomena could be used to lead people to the esoteric teachings beyond them.
It all sounded a bit melodramatic. But when HPB, or Jack as she was sometimes called, arrived in Vermont the materializations took an unexpected turn.
On October 14, 1874, with Helena in the Circle Room, the phenomena now included a Russian boy who spoke a Georgian dialect and played a Circassian dance on his guitar, a merchant from Tiflis, a Kurdish warrior who had once been her bodyguard, an old Russian woman, and Helena’s own uncle. Where the Eddys or anyone else might have obtained the elaborate costumes no one will ever know.
The spirits of the dead rarely return to Earth, she explained years later. Instead, such materializations are “usually the astral body or double of the medium or someone present.” The medium is usually a passive participant whose terrestrial mind is attracted by the “astral light” while the physical body is in a trance.
Sitting down to develop contacts with the dead “only opens the door to a swarm of ‘spooks,’ good, bad, and indifferent, to which the medium becomes a slave for life,” she warned. Whether conscious or unconscious, such experiments amount to necromancy, and might even interfere with the evolution of souls into higher states.
“While some of the so-called ‘spirits’ do not know what they are talking about, repeating merely — like poll-parrots — what they find in the medium’s and other people’s brains, others are most dangerous, and can only lead one to evil,” she wrote in The Key to Theosophy.
In Chittenden, Blavatsky declined to explain much of what had happened. She was determined, instead, to defend spiritualism against attacks by materialistic scientists
Within a year of her Chittenden visit Blavatsky and Olcott had founded the Theosophical Society, which developed chapters worldwide over the next quarter century and deeply influenced spiritual leaders like Annie Besant and Jiddi Krishmamurti; philosopher Rudolf Steiner; poets W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens; inventor Thomas Edison; transformative leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Augusto Sandino; and artists Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian.
She gradually initiated Olcott into the secret doctrine, as her two-volume masterwork was titled. After a tumultuous and controversial career she died in London in 1891. She was also the first Russian (actually born in Ukraine) ever to become a naturalized American citizen.
She once described what had happened this way: “I was sent to America on purpose. There I found Olcott in love with spirits, as he became in love with the Masters later on. I was ordered to let him know that spiritual phenomena without the philosophy of occultism were dangerous and misleading. I proved to him that all that mediums could do through spirits, others could do without any spirits at all.”
Henry led the Theosophical Society after Helena’s death, and was succeeded in 1907 by Annie Besant, a British socialist, activist and writer who had advocated for birth control. In 1891, to the consternation of friends like George Bernard Shaw, she became a Theosophist. For the rest of her life she translated sacred texts, started schools, crusaded for Indian independence, and even served as president of the Indian National Congress.
Theosophy had at least 45,000 members worldwide by the 1920s, and about 7,000 in the US. But its influence was greater than the numbers suggest. Books, periodicals, and lectures by foreign celebrities all spread the word. Theosophical beliefs influenced related movements like Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophical Society and Waldorf School.
Over time it drew less public attention, navigating quietly through the New Age movement. But Theosophy survived, through its society, local lodges and study groups like the Krotona School, as well as Quest Books, which preserved its founders’ works and created new ones.
As Philip Goldberg explains in American Veda: How Indian Spirituality Changed the West, “If nothing else, its place in history is secured by its formative impact on the New Thought movement, which is still going strong, and by its influence on two Indian superstars whose influence on the West has been immeasurable.”
He is talking about Mahatma Gandhi, the young Indian barrister who met two Theosophists while living in London in 1889. As an Indian, they asked him to guide them through the Sanskrit of the Bhagavad Gita. Gandhi was embarrassed to admit that he had never read the classic — in any language. But he suggested that they read it together.
He also means Krishnamurti, the handsome 13-year-old discovered by Theosophists on a South Indian beach. His fame peaked in the 1960s, when thousands attended his annual talks in Ojai, California. As Christopher Chapple put it, he asked people “to examine their presuppositions and take responsibility for the social constructs they agree to participate in.”
Krishnamurti’s enthralling dialogues with biologist Rupert Sheldrake and quantum physicist David Bohm became prime examples of East-West synthesis. Influenced by Indian philosophy, Western Theosophists had succeeded in launching a brilliant young Indian who became an independent thinker. His theosophy-influenced merging of Vedanta and Western philosophy in time also found common ground with system and quantum theories.
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