October 5, 2020 • 49 mins
Blavatsky is an iconic figure. She was the founder of the theosophical movement, and lived a life of adventure that’s hard to believe. The impact of her work is undeniable whether you believe her to have been a genuine mystic or a total fraud.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy view Wilson. Tracy. It's
the best month of the year. I know it's your
absolute favorite. It is. I mean, I in my heart
(00:22):
it's October every day, but now we're actually in October,
which means Halloween. E content um. 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. Um.
It is Madame Blavatsky, who is said to have gone
(00:44):
simply by her initials of HPB. I have a hard
time saying that, so I'm going to stick to her
regular name. Well, it's like the name she was known
by in all of her work around the English speaking world.
We're not going to try to recreate her Russian name
in Russian because that's like not how she was known here, right.
(01:08):
And Blovotsky is a figure that is iconic in a
number of ways. She was the founder of the Theosophical movement.
She lived of a life of adventure that is hard,
very hard to believe. Frankly, Um, 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
(01:30):
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
(01:53):
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're tackling
Mata after many years of kind of looking at it
and then being like later later yeah. Well, And then also, um,
when we were we have each had a time away
(02:14):
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 out and not reachable. Uh, And you sent me
your list over and I was like, oh, I'm so
glad this is finally on there. Well, and it worked
out well because you know, um, this is a it's
(02:35):
a longer episode in part because there's a lot of
her story for her and her life is is in
some ways well documented, it in other ways very fuzzily documented. Um,
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
(02:56):
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
(03:16):
actual Yeah, I'm literally putting your quotes around actual fact
because you'll see it starts right from the beginning. The
life of Madame Blovotsky was just the tangle of intensity
right from her birth. She was born Elena Petrovna von
(03:37):
Han and what was at the time Russian Ukraine. She
was born August twelfth, thirty one, and she was born
prematurely in the middle of a cholera epidemic, so that's
already a lot. Helena's mother, Elena Andrea Navon Hahn, was
still a teenager, was sick with cholera when she gave birth,
(03:58):
and both of them were not acted to live. A
priest was brought in to baptize the baby quickly before
she was expected to die, and so then Elena's aunt
not Yat, who was also a child at the time,
accidentally set the priest robes on fire with a candle
that she was holding. This is so much in a
(04:19):
birth story, right, 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
child setting a priest on fire accidentally. Um, he actually
(04:40):
did not meet his daughter for six months to a year,
depending on the store you look at. Accounts swerve around
quite a bit on that point. So of course she
did not die. In infancy. Um. She was also descended
from royalty. Her grandmother was Princess Elena Pavlovna Delgakov, and
defied convention of the day. She educated herself and everything
(05:03):
from Greek language to botany. Helena's seventeen year old mother
also survived the delivery and became a novelist shortly after that.
Sometimes she's been called the Russian George Son because of
the similarity of the themes and her work to that
of our previous podcast subject, So Young. Elena grew up
(05:23):
in a household of women who really valued writing and learning. 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 short songs work um. But
though Elena was born into the aristocracy and had really
positive role models in terms of education for women, Elena's
(05:46):
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 older
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
(06:10):
mother and daughter were in fact quite close. 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 Hans were separated for a while during this period,
though she did take her two daughters on a thousand
(06:30):
mild journey with their grandfather to Ostrakon, which was at
the mouth of the Vulga 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. Yeah, I didn't dig into it here,
but most biographers make the point of like, her mother
(06:54):
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. She maybe
wanted a break. Yeah. By the time Elena was nine,
her parents were back together and the family was then
(07:16):
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, and he was actually the family's
(07:38):
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
Andreaevna survived the birth of her fourth child despite her illness,
but despite every treatment at the family's wealth and can
(08:00):
actions could arrange for her, she did not live a
whole lot longer. She died in eighteen forty two at
the age of just twenty eight, and in an apocryphal story,
her last words to her daughter where that she would
not live a life like other women, and that she
would suffer a great deal, so something that uh Blovotsky
would say throughout her life. Helena, her sister Vera, and
(08:20):
her brother Leonid were sent to live with their grandparents.
That sort of trophy 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
(08:41):
the one hand, she was really rebellious and stubborn and
like 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 this city of Saratov on
the Vulgar River. And this is also the point in
(09:04):
the timeline where the stories of her unusual paranormal abilities
are rooted. So according to family stories, which are of
course not verifiable, Helena 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
(09:26):
don't know what that was, um. There is literally nothing
that tries to explain what Solomon's wistows um. And of course,
the family lore around Helena mentions her fascination with the
dead from the time she was a child. Once the
children had relocated to Saratov and we're just not constantly
moving around to accommodate their father's career anymore, their education
(09:51):
settled into more consistent and formalized structures. But even so,
and in spite of coming from a pretty progressive family
into terms of women in education, this was largely about
preparing her to be an aristocratic life. So she was
learning French, studying art and music, but things like math
and science were not really part of the curriculum. Nope.
(10:13):
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. Uh.
And there are a lot of stories of the ways
in which Helena in her early years comes into contact
with the occult and the mystical, just before her own
(10:34):
deeper connection to that world is said to have manifested,
so she allegedly learned about be communication and plants that
had mystical uses from what is usually referred to as
a surf on the family property. His name is listed
as baron Ig Buyak. And while traveling with her grandparents,
she was again exposed to a number of other cultures
(10:55):
and ideas, and was once again completely fascinated with Tibetan
Buddhism in particular. 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 we said, well,
accidents that happened to her where she narrowly escaped serious injury,
(11:18):
and she attributed her lack of damage to the intervention
of this protector figure. 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
(11:40):
that makes it more alluring. And we don't ever find
out what the portrait is, but uh, 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 where it belonged.
(12:00):
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. There's
(12:22):
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 twelve or thirteen.
There's really no record of this trip. It's not corroborated
by her sister's diary at the time. So historians tend
(12:42):
to be of two views on this sort of strange
standout piece in the whole Madame Blovotsky puzzle. Either it
never happened, or it happened, but she recalled the timeline incorrectly,
and this trip really took place closer to eighteen fifty,
when she was seventeen or eighteen instead of twelve or thirteen.
There will be so many inconsistencies with where she is
(13:05):
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.
(13:27):
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. 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,
(13:51):
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 to Saint Germain,
(14:14):
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. 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.
(14:35):
We're going to delve into that after we first pause
for a sponsor break. When Helena was fifteen, her life
shifted once again. Her grandfather's appointment as governor of Saratov ended,
and at that point Helena, Vera and Leon had first
spent a year with an aunt before joining their grandparents
(14:57):
in the Georgian capital of Tibilisi, which was called if
List at the time. As she turned sixteen, 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 Goliatson who was similarly interested in the mystical and
(15:18):
had traveled the world seeking out experts and practitioners of
various occult and magical activities. Gol Jetson is said to
have encouraged Lena'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. When Elena was seventeen,
there was once again a sudden change in her circumstance,
(15:40):
but this time in the form of a marriage. Seemingly
out of nowhere. She wed Nikop Blovotsky, a man in
his forties who was vice governor of the Arab and
Province of Armenia. How this match happened is another place
in Helena's life where the stories differ really significantly. Uh.
There are some theories that she may have just run
(16:01):
off and gotten married as an act of rebellion against
her father or her governess, who she was having some
conflict with h 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 Helena to her home in some way,
but in later years. She herself also said that Nickophore,
(16:24):
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. 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
(16:46):
there were rumors that she had met up with Glitson,
but she returned from wherever she had gone in time
for the wedding. That wedding took place on July seven, nine,
and she said to have refused to do the vow
of honoring a banying her new husband, but otherwise the
ceremony did go as planned. According to Helena, though this
marriage was never consummated, and we'll come back to this.
(17:09):
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 Nikopore lived in the
palace of Sardar and 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
(17:30):
in Tifflis, and at that point the decision was made
to ship her off to her father and see if
that might help. 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. Then she gave them the slip. Similarly,
(17:53):
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. Bus
(18:15):
Soon she was gone, and this was the start of
just a wild decade. The next nine years of Elena
Blovotsky'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
(18:38):
dagger nature of her travels, plenty of unlikely stories about
just what she was up to during those years of
travel abound. Blovotsky'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 place that Madame Blovotsky explored was Constantinople. Later,
(19:03):
she shared that it was here that she met opera
singer a Guardi Metrovitch. After finding him stabbed and left
for dead in the street, Lavotsky stood watch over him
with a pistol to ward off anybody who had ill intent,
while waiting for somebody to help her, arranged for him
to get help. She did find some non nefarious help eventually,
(19:24):
and Metrovitch was treated and recovered. The two of them
remained friends for the remaining two decades of the singer's life.
Helena is also said to have made the acquaintance of
the Countess Sofia Kisslv 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.
(19:45):
Metrovich and Helena then turned up together somewhere in Europe.
Metrovitch wrote to Helena's grandfather to tell him that the
two were married. This is all very blurry. We don't
know if this was like a i'm your friend, I'm
gonna tell your and parents that, like we're together now
and explain this to your husband, or if he really
(20:06):
thought they were getting married. It's again everything marky, marky, markeys.
But we do know that by the early eighteen fifties,
Blovotsky 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.
(20:30):
She said that this man, who she called Master Maria
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
(20:52):
was that she ran into him at the Great Exhibition,
and also that she met him in the seaside town
of Ramsgate. By 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 make a path to Tibet. Though she headed to Canada.
(21:13):
She was inspired by the writing of James Finnimore Cooper
to seek out First Nations people's 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. There
are so many layers. And she's very problematic when it
(21:34):
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. Um it's very problematic. But
after this time in Canada, she has said to have
(21:56):
moved south to New Orleans and then into text Us
before leaving North America for India. And she made it
to India. She stayed in Bombay first for two years,
and it 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 Tibets. That was tricky
(22:20):
at this time. Uh, Europeans not so much welcome. Tibet
was very closed off. At this point, she decided to
head back to England. When she got there, she had
quite the tail 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 twenty one survivors.
(22:42):
After allegedly meeting with the Master again and the home
of someone she says she didn't know, Elena Blovotsky made
her way to North America again. Yeah, this is the
point in her story where I was like, she's lost
all sense of even grounding her tails in any sort
of reality, like this whole Oh, I took a ship
from India and it was shipwrecked. Twenty one of us survived.
(23:06):
There's no account of how she got back to Europe
from that point. Um, yeah, it's a little bit a
little bit KOOKI 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
(23:27):
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 eighteen fifty six. At last,
the timeline of her travels was written up and published
by Blovotsky in the Moscow Chronicle under the pen name
rata By From Tibet, she was eventually ordered by the
(23:47):
mysterious Master to travel back to Europe. All of this
is disputed. It's entirely possible that she was just hanging
out in Europe this whole time, of Holly said earlier,
Tibet was pretty closed off to Europeans. She might have
managed to gain access to to Bet if she was
traveling with one of the people that she name checked
(24:09):
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. But while
the years from eighteen forty nine to eighteen fifty eight
are really only known by what Blovotsky said she did.
We do know that she was back in Russia with
her family on Christmas eighteen fifty eight. Once again, the
(24:33):
family noted the strange phenomena that seemed to always surround her.
Elena went back to her husband Nicko four in eighteen
sixty two, but a Guardi Metrovich then showed up in
Tifflis 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
(24:56):
Yuri with Nick for the couple didn't stay to get
other Urie died at the age of five and was
buried as Uri Metrovich. Your's actual parentage is also a
matter of debate. Madame Blovotsky said that this was the
out of wedlock son of her sister in law and
Baron Meyendorff. Rumors arose and continued that he was actually
(25:21):
the child of Helena and Metrovich. Yeah, it's a big
it's a big cluster and 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 end up um. In eighteen sixty four, Blovotsky
(25:41):
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. We're about to get to the
(26:05):
phase of Blovotsky'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. In the seventies, Blovotsky
(26:25):
became involved with the spiritualist movement. If you are a
long time 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 previous host Sarah and Bablina did a whole episode
on their story, so By the time Helena Blovotsky became
(26:46):
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
Blovotsky became connected to spiritualism, she was ideologically not a
hundred percent aligned with it. The idea of spiritualism involved
(27:09):
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 souls. She did really love a seance, though,
oh she certainly did, because that was part of her
fully actualized paranormal abilities after she came out of that como,
(27:34):
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 Blovotsky had made her way
back to North America by eighteen seventy three. She was
living in New York City at the time, and she
was actually kind of struggling to get by. She was
(27:56):
working in a sweatshop making artificial flowers to support herself,
and then she met Henry Steele Olcott at a seance
in Vermont. 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
(28:19):
working on fraud cases, and by the time he met Blovotsky,
he was working as an investigative journalist. He found himself
at Bolovotsky'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 Charlatan's. Alcott had already
written a number of articles about spiritualism and was becoming
(28:42):
more and more fascinated by it. 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 and and do these
I want to call them performance is. But these, uh,
these events but even before the seance began, Olcott could
(29:05):
not help but notice Helena, 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 Cotswald you, and the fact
that he overheard her speaking French to a friend all
(29:26):
drew the journalist in. He was completely fascinated. Here's how
he wrote of her later quote, This lady, my dam
Helen P. Blovotsky, has a lot of 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
(29:51):
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. And
the whole course of my experience I never met so
interesting and, if I may say, without offense, eccentric a
(30:12):
character all Kot's endorsement went a really long way in
terms of validating Bulovatsky'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 deceive the public. She was like
all in he believed everything she said without fact checking.
(30:35):
It seemed the seance that Oldcott 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
(30:59):
by making upping noises and in one instance is said
to have audibly uttered the word. A journalist writing for
The Smithsonian, Edward Howard, described Alcott as having one of
the most dramatic midlife crises in history and his relationship
with Blovotsky. Some takes on their relationship suggests that Madame
(31:20):
Blovotsky 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. Even so,
(31:40):
while Blovotsky 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
(32:02):
a way that today might be categorized as a sexual.
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 uh, so they were close.
But her characterization as a mistress who lured him away
(32:23):
from his wife really doesn't quite track Oldcott, by the way,
was known to have had mistresses. He sounds like something
of a ladies man. But it doesn't appear that Bolovotsky
was one of them. Olcott was a major boon to
Madame Blovotsky's public persona through his writing as well as
a source of financial support. Their shared apartment became an
(32:44):
epicenter for spiritualist gatherings, and they routinely hosted seances and
discussions at the paranormal. There, Bolovotsky would invite journalists to
visit so they would see that she was no trickster,
just merely a woman who was in touch with other realms.
And it was in this haven for discussion of the
paranormal and occult that Colonel Henry Olcott suggested that they
(33:06):
formalized 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. One of the numerous
(33:28):
reasons that Blovotsky was and remains a figure of controversy
is really clear in her writing from this period. She
published her book Isis Unveiled in eighteen seventy seven. Alcott
edited it, and she leveled a lot of criticism at
both organized religion and the scientific community. She thought that
(33:49):
both groups were missing the real path to enlightenment and insight. Theosophy,
according to Helena Blovotsky, was the answer, and it was,
to quote her quote, the s phasis of science, religion,
and philosophy. It was a way to bring those three
disciplines together. This book was both praised and panned, and
(34:09):
Blovotsky put all of the reviews into a scrap book.
Isis Unveiled is something of a hodgepodge. It borrows from
religions all over the world, pulling in ideas which Blovotsky
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.
(34:33):
But she incorporated so many varied ideas because she envisioned
theosophy as something that could unite the world's varied systems
of beliefs. Although Madame Blovotsky had managed to amass the
following in the United States, it didn't really sustain itself.
And as her influence and the members of the Theosophical
(34:54):
Society fizzled out, she and Alcott decided to move on
and supporting Blovotsky and houting 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. Yeah, he kind of tanked his career
um to prepare to leave with an eye towards India.
(35:15):
Elena Blovotsky 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 seventeenth, eighteen
seventy eight, they left the US for India. More specifically
than simply going to India, though, all Caught and Blovotsky
(35:38):
intended for the Theosophical Society to join up with the
Aria Samage, which was a Hindu reform movement that had
started in eighteen seventy five. All Caught and Blovotsky were
novelties in Bombay. They openly criticized colonialism, and they embraced
Eastern religious ideas, and in doing so that kind of
became media darlings for a time. Through a spiritualist named
(36:02):
Alfred Percy Sinnett, 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. Uh.
These seances featured all kinds of paranormal happenings. When Sinnett's wife,
(36:24):
for example, mentioned a lost brooch that she longed to find,
Blovotsky told her it had re materialized in her flower beds.
Those flower beds were dug up and lo the brooch.
She has also said to have produced a spray of
roses in mid air which fell on the heads of
people in the room. When a visitor said that she
could not produce a miracle, all caught and Blovotsky set
(36:46):
up their Theosophical Society headquarters in Bombay in eighteen seventy nine.
Madam Blovotsky became the editor of their periodical The Theosophist,
which was a role she would have for the next
nine years. All Kott toured the Indian subcontinent giving lectures.
He spoke against British efforts to convert Buddhists to Christianity,
(37:07):
and on a trip to Sri Lanka, which was of
course still called Ceylon at the time, he and Madame
Bolovotsky 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
(37:30):
believed that magnetism had curative properties and that he could
manipulate it to administer to all manner of ailments. While
the beginning of Blovotsky's and Alcott'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
(37:52):
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 Blovotsky became embroiled in a dispute when a woman
that they had taken under their wing as a medium
named Emma Colombe started to hold obviously fake seances to
(38:13):
make easy money. Next, the head of the Arias Homage
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 Bolovotsky and Olcott as untrustworthy. Yeah,
he had pamphlets written up talking about how he had
changed his mind and believed that they were Charlatan's um
(38:36):
and things only got worse from there. Alfred Percy Sinnett,
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 Madam Blovotsky knew. But
one of them was obviously plagiarized from an American periodical,
and someone recognized it, and so the press, which had
(38:57):
initially welcomed that Theosophists, turned on Blovotsky. 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 Oldcott moved their headquarters from
Bombay to Madras in eight two to get away from
the controversy. That worked for a while, but within a
few years there was another, much bigger controversy. Emma Colombe,
(39:22):
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 Blovotsky. They clearly instructed her
to create fake, miraculous and paranormal events to support their
various stories. Bolovotsky and Alcott dismissed these letters as fakes,
(39:42):
but they found themselves viewed with just a whole new
level of suspicion. Yeah, there's a really fun story in
there about making a life size doll that they kind
of like, we're puppeteering in like darkness to try to
convince people they were being visited by the masters the
Blogotsky often referenced, um, there's some very fun and kookie
(40:05):
theatricality to it. And that is how the London Society
for Psychical Research came to open an investigation into Bolovotsky
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
(40:29):
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 Blovotsky's treachery were indeed written by Blovotsky. We
have talked on the show before about some of the
(40:49):
problems with handwriting analysis, but this was very damning at
the time. In eight five, Paras psychologist Richard Hodgson filed
his report which concluded the Bolovotsk he was a fraud.
Alcott was found you merely have been incredibly gullible. After
the Hodgson report, Blovotsky left India, although she continued to
(41:10):
edit the theosophyst The damage of this report was far reaching,
in addition to discrediting Blovotsky in a very public way,
and also sewed some conflict between her and Alcott. When
Helena Blovotsky filed a slander suit against Richard Hodgson and
the Society for Psychical Research. Alcott did not support that.
(41:32):
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. Madame Blovotsky, 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.
(41:55):
After spending some time in Belgium, she established the Bolovotsky
Lodge of London. In eight seven, 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.
While she was writing this book, she had shifted focus
away from the paranormal and wrote more extensively about philosophy.
(42:17):
The book's subhead is there is no religion higher than truth,
and the introduction in Bologotsky makes her goal clear. Quote.
The aim of this work maybe thus stated to show
that nature is not a fortuitous concurrence of atoms and
to a science a man his rightful place in the
scheme of the universe. To rescue from degradation the archaic
(42:38):
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. In eighty
nine she published two more books. The Voice of Silence
has the subtitle translated from the Book of the Golden Precepts,
(43:01):
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. Her other book to
come out that year was Key to Theosophy, being a
(43:21):
clear exposition in the form of question answer of the ethics,
science and philosophy for the study of which the Theosophical
Society has been founded. Even though these were very popular
and they continued to actually be printed, they were her
really final achievements. Madame Blovotsky died on May eight at
(43:41):
the tail end of an influenza epidemic, and that date
of her death is now celebrated annually by Theosophists as
White Lotus Day. Long after her death, starting in nineteen
fifty but Am Blovotsky's collected writings were published. The full
publication spanned fifteen volumes and it came out over the
course of forty years. Blovotsky is often credited with bringing
(44:03):
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 European lens. We also don't
know really what the depths of her exposure was to
these things before she started talking about them as though
she were an expert. Uh And since the study of
(44:24):
these belief systems on the part of Blovotsky 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 salts. We do
have to note, though, that the Theosophical Society persists despite
these bumpy times during Blovatski's life. Her books continue to
(44:46):
be pretty popular. Additionally, the Blovotsky Lodge in London is
still there, although it has changed locations from where it
was when Madame Blovotski initially established it. And as for
that damning report of a ten D five that declared
Madame Blovotsky a fraud in the Society for Psychical Research,
(45:06):
retracted it due to a review that found that Hodgson
had set out to discredit Blovotsky 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, uh, some people will say
this is vindication of Madame Blovotsky, and others are like, no, no,
(45:29):
they're just pointing out that the research was bad, not
weighing in really on whether that conclusion would have been
reached other one. Right. Um, Like I said, she continues
to be very polarizing. I find her utterly fascinating. Um,
But I don't have a strong opinion. I have some opinions,
(45:49):
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 it's like, I don't know, I don't I
don't know anything. So do you have some listener mail
for us? I do have a piece of listener mail.
It's from our listener Josie, who did the magic thing
and sent us pictures of kiddies but also the lovely
(46:09):
thing that ties in to uh, the spooky season, as
she calls it. She writes, Greetings, lovely people, It's getting
close to spooky season, and that always reminds me of
the very first episode of your podcast I heard, which
was The Solder Family Mystery. I actually believe it was
the first podcast I ever heard in my life, and
I was so entrenched that I binged all your mystery
episodes and then all of your other episodes. You guys
(46:32):
are always my go to favorite podcasts, and every October
I look back fondly on that feeling of excitement being
swept up in your history mysteries. You guys do such
a fantastic job. You're graceful, professional, and always a delight.
I appreciate you both so much. I was actually going
to name my cats after you guys, what but she
went with Nelly and Bessie instead because of their horse
(46:52):
and cow like personalities respectively. Uh, my cat Bessie has
Pika and we'll eat metal. I remember one of you
mentioning that cow was eat metal. Also my love of
Bessie Smith, and your podcast has hosted quite a few
adventurous Nellie's. Hey, I had a cat that had pika.
It's not fun. So my my hat is off to
(47:13):
you because you have to manage it in crazy ways.
That is why I stopped using pins when I sew um,
because I had a cat that would eat them, or
would try. He never successfully did because I always caught him.
But oh that was stressful times, she goes on. Some
of your podcasts have been so enchanting. I've listened to
them multiple times, specifically the Fort Shaw Indian School basketball Team,
(47:34):
Theodosia Austin Burr. When I recently watched Hamilton's, I was
just waiting around for them to mention her, the Memphis
Sanitation Strike, Catalina, the Lieutenant Nun, Halifax Explosion, Maria tal Chiefs,
the Ballerina, and so many more. My boyfriend loved the
Klondike Bigines Land promotion episode, and I'm especially fond of
your super Ancient History episodes as well. You cover such
(47:54):
an array of topics and make them also interesting. Being
a female carpenter, I always appreciate your episode about female pioneers.
Being Canadian, I'm always thrilled to see Canadian history episodes.
I always love to hear more history about Canada and
the Canadian American relationship and past wars and feuds and
the indigenous people of this continent. You've taught me so much,
really valuable, as Canadian schools don't teach us as much
(48:16):
as they should. That's not just in Canada, by the way. Uh.
And now finally my podcast suggestion, which is the Toronto
Circus Riot of eighteen fifty five. Um. She goes on
to tell us that before she was a carpenter, I
used to fiddle around as an actor and performer, and
my old director Angola put on this show. Uh. She
shares some information about it. She also loves any history
(48:37):
about Sicily because she's Sicilian Canadian and always looking to
reconnect to her roots. And then she apologizes for it
being long, don't It's delightful, So that is Josie, Thank you,
thank you, thank you, Josie. Those cats are cute. I
don't even know what I would do with the information
that someone had named a cat after me. So it's
probably safest that you did not show up at your
house and be like, show me the kiddie. Uh, nobody
(48:59):
wants that. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History Podcast at i heeart
radio dot com. You can also find us everywhere on
social media as missed in History, and you are welcome
and encouraged to subscribe to the podcast. You can do
that on the I heart radio app, at Apple Podcasts,
or wherever it is you listen. Stuff you Missed in
(49:21):
History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For
more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy view Wilson. Tracy. It's
the best month of the year. I know it's your
absolute favorite. It is. I mean, I in my heart
(00:22):
it's October every day, but now we're actually in October,
which means Halloween. E content um. 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. Um.
It is Madame Blavatsky, who is said to have gone
(00:44):
simply by her initials of HPB. I have a hard
time saying that, so I'm going to stick to her
regular name. Well, it's like the name she was known
by in all of her work around the English speaking world.
We're not going to try to recreate her Russian name
in Russian because that's like not how she was known here, right.
(01:08):
And Blovotsky is a figure that is iconic in a
number of ways. She was the founder of the Theosophical movement.
She lived of a life of adventure that is hard,
very hard to believe. Frankly, Um, 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
(01:30):
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
(01:53):
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're tackling
Mata after many years of kind of looking at it
and then being like later later yeah. Well, And then also, um,
when we were we have each had a time away
(02:14):
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 out and not reachable. Uh, And you sent me
your list over and I was like, oh, I'm so
glad this is finally on there. Well, and it worked
out well because you know, um, this is a it's
(02:35):
a longer episode in part because there's a lot of
her story for her and her life is is in
some ways well documented, it in other ways very fuzzily documented. Um,
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
(02:56):
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
(03:16):
actual Yeah, I'm literally putting your quotes around actual fact
because you'll see it starts right from the beginning. The
life of Madame Blovotsky was just the tangle of intensity
right from her birth. She was born Elena Petrovna von
(03:37):
Han and what was at the time Russian Ukraine. She
was born August twelfth, thirty one, and she was born
prematurely in the middle of a cholera epidemic, so that's
already a lot. Helena's mother, Elena Andrea Navon Hahn, was
still a teenager, was sick with cholera when she gave birth,
(03:58):
and both of them were not acted to live. A
priest was brought in to baptize the baby quickly before
she was expected to die, and so then Elena's aunt
not Yat, who was also a child at the time,
accidentally set the priest robes on fire with a candle
that she was holding. This is so much in a
(04:19):
birth story, right, 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
child setting a priest on fire accidentally. Um, he actually
(04:40):
did not meet his daughter for six months to a year,
depending on the store you look at. Accounts swerve around
quite a bit on that point. So of course she
did not die. In infancy. Um. She was also descended
from royalty. Her grandmother was Princess Elena Pavlovna Delgakov, and
defied convention of the day. She educated herself and everything
(05:03):
from Greek language to botany. Helena's seventeen year old mother
also survived the delivery and became a novelist shortly after that.
Sometimes she's been called the Russian George Son because of
the similarity of the themes and her work to that
of our previous podcast subject, So Young. Elena grew up
(05:23):
in a household of women who really valued writing and learning. 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 short songs work um. But
though Elena was born into the aristocracy and had really
positive role models in terms of education for women, Elena's
(05:46):
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 older
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
(06:10):
mother and daughter were in fact quite close. 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 Hans were separated for a while during this period,
though she did take her two daughters on a thousand
(06:30):
mild journey with their grandfather to Ostrakon, which was at
the mouth of the Vulga 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. Yeah, I didn't dig into it here,
but most biographers make the point of like, her mother
(06:54):
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. She maybe
wanted a break. Yeah. By the time Elena was nine,
her parents were back together and the family was then
(07:16):
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, and he was actually the family's
(07:38):
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
Andreaevna survived the birth of her fourth child despite her illness,
but despite every treatment at the family's wealth and can
(08:00):
actions could arrange for her, she did not live a
whole lot longer. She died in eighteen forty two at
the age of just twenty eight, and in an apocryphal story,
her last words to her daughter where that she would
not live a life like other women, and that she
would suffer a great deal, so something that uh Blovotsky
would say throughout her life. Helena, her sister Vera, and
(08:20):
her brother Leonid were sent to live with their grandparents.
That sort of trophy 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
(08:41):
the one hand, she was really rebellious and stubborn and
like 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 this city of Saratov on
the Vulgar River. And this is also the point in
(09:04):
the timeline where the stories of her unusual paranormal abilities
are rooted. So according to family stories, which are of
course not verifiable, Helena 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
(09:26):
don't know what that was, um. There is literally nothing
that tries to explain what Solomon's wistows um. And of course,
the family lore around Helena mentions her fascination with the
dead from the time she was a child. Once the
children had relocated to Saratov and we're just not constantly
moving around to accommodate their father's career anymore, their education
(09:51):
settled into more consistent and formalized structures. But even so,
and in spite of coming from a pretty progressive family
into terms of women in education, this was largely about
preparing her to be an aristocratic life. So she was
learning French, studying art and music, but things like math
and science were not really part of the curriculum. Nope.
(10:13):
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. Uh.
And there are a lot of stories of the ways
in which Helena in her early years comes into contact
with the occult and the mystical, just before her own
(10:34):
deeper connection to that world is said to have manifested,
so she allegedly learned about be communication and plants that
had mystical uses from what is usually referred to as
a surf on the family property. His name is listed
as baron Ig Buyak. And while traveling with her grandparents,
she was again exposed to a number of other cultures
(10:55):
and ideas, and was once again completely fascinated with Tibetan
Buddhism in particular. 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 we said, well,
accidents that happened to her where she narrowly escaped serious injury,
(11:18):
and she attributed her lack of damage to the intervention
of this protector figure. 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
(11:40):
that makes it more alluring. And we don't ever find
out what the portrait is, but uh, 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 where it belonged.
(12:00):
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. There's
(12:22):
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 twelve or thirteen.
There's really no record of this trip. It's not corroborated
by her sister's diary at the time. So historians tend
(12:42):
to be of two views on this sort of strange
standout piece in the whole Madame Blovotsky puzzle. Either it
never happened, or it happened, but she recalled the timeline incorrectly,
and this trip really took place closer to eighteen fifty,
when she was seventeen or eighteen instead of twelve or thirteen.
There will be so many inconsistencies with where she is
(13:05):
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.
(13:27):
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. 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,
(13:51):
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 to Saint Germain,
(14:14):
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. 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.
(14:35):
We're going to delve into that after we first pause
for a sponsor break. When Helena was fifteen, her life
shifted once again. Her grandfather's appointment as governor of Saratov ended,
and at that point Helena, Vera and Leon had first
spent a year with an aunt before joining their grandparents
(14:57):
in the Georgian capital of Tibilisi, which was called if
List at the time. As she turned sixteen, 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 Goliatson who was similarly interested in the mystical and
(15:18):
had traveled the world seeking out experts and practitioners of
various occult and magical activities. Gol Jetson is said to
have encouraged Lena'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. When Elena was seventeen,
there was once again a sudden change in her circumstance,
(15:40):
but this time in the form of a marriage. Seemingly
out of nowhere. She wed Nikop Blovotsky, a man in
his forties who was vice governor of the Arab and
Province of Armenia. How this match happened is another place
in Helena's life where the stories differ really significantly. Uh.
There are some theories that she may have just run
(16:01):
off and gotten married as an act of rebellion against
her father or her governess, who she was having some
conflict with h 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 Helena to her home in some way,
but in later years. She herself also said that Nickophore,
(16:24):
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. 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
(16:46):
there were rumors that she had met up with Glitson,
but she returned from wherever she had gone in time
for the wedding. That wedding took place on July seven, nine,
and she said to have refused to do the vow
of honoring a banying her new husband, but otherwise the
ceremony did go as planned. According to Helena, though this
marriage was never consummated, and we'll come back to this.
(17:09):
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 Nikopore lived in the
palace of Sardar and 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
(17:30):
in Tifflis, and at that point the decision was made
to ship her off to her father and see if
that might help. 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. Then she gave them the slip. Similarly,
(17:53):
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. Bus
(18:15):
Soon she was gone, and this was the start of
just a wild decade. The next nine years of Elena
Blovotsky'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
(18:38):
dagger nature of her travels, plenty of unlikely stories about
just what she was up to during those years of
travel abound. Blovotsky'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 place that Madame Blovotsky explored was Constantinople. Later,
(19:03):
she shared that it was here that she met opera
singer a Guardi Metrovitch. After finding him stabbed and left
for dead in the street, Lavotsky stood watch over him
with a pistol to ward off anybody who had ill intent,
while waiting for somebody to help her, arranged for him
to get help. She did find some non nefarious help eventually,
(19:24):
and Metrovitch was treated and recovered. The two of them
remained friends for the remaining two decades of the singer's life.
Helena is also said to have made the acquaintance of
the Countess Sofia Kisslv 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.
(19:45):
Metrovich and Helena then turned up together somewhere in Europe.
Metrovitch wrote to Helena's grandfather to tell him that the
two were married. This is all very blurry. We don't
know if this was like a i'm your friend, I'm
gonna tell your and parents that, like we're together now
and explain this to your husband, or if he really
(20:06):
thought they were getting married. It's again everything marky, marky, markeys.
But we do know that by the early eighteen fifties,
Blovotsky 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.
(20:30):
She said that this man, who she called Master Maria
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
(20:52):
was that she ran into him at the Great Exhibition,
and also that she met him in the seaside town
of Ramsgate. By 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 make a path to Tibet. Though she headed to Canada.
(21:13):
She was inspired by the writing of James Finnimore Cooper
to seek out First Nations people's 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. There
are so many layers. And she's very problematic when it
(21:34):
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. Um it's very problematic. But
after this time in Canada, she has said to have
(21:56):
moved south to New Orleans and then into text Us
before leaving North America for India. And she made it
to India. She stayed in Bombay first for two years,
and it 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 Tibets. That was tricky
(22:20):
at this time. Uh, Europeans not so much welcome. Tibet
was very closed off. At this point, she decided to
head back to England. When she got there, she had
quite the tail 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 twenty one survivors.
(22:42):
After allegedly meeting with the Master again and the home
of someone she says she didn't know, Elena Blovotsky made
her way to North America again. Yeah, this is the
point in her story where I was like, she's lost
all sense of even grounding her tails in any sort
of reality, like this whole Oh, I took a ship
from India and it was shipwrecked. Twenty one of us survived.
(23:06):
There's no account of how she got back to Europe
from that point. Um, yeah, it's a little bit a
little bit KOOKI 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
(23:27):
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 eighteen fifty six. At last,
the timeline of her travels was written up and published
by Blovotsky in the Moscow Chronicle under the pen name
rata By From Tibet, she was eventually ordered by the
(23:47):
mysterious Master to travel back to Europe. All of this
is disputed. It's entirely possible that she was just hanging
out in Europe this whole time, of Holly said earlier,
Tibet was pretty closed off to Europeans. She might have
managed to gain access to to Bet if she was
traveling with one of the people that she name checked
(24:09):
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. But while
the years from eighteen forty nine to eighteen fifty eight
are really only known by what Blovotsky said she did.
We do know that she was back in Russia with
her family on Christmas eighteen fifty eight. Once again, the
(24:33):
family noted the strange phenomena that seemed to always surround her.
Elena went back to her husband Nicko four in eighteen
sixty two, but a Guardi Metrovich then showed up in
Tifflis 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
(24:56):
Yuri with Nick for the couple didn't stay to get
other Urie died at the age of five and was
buried as Uri Metrovich. Your's actual parentage is also a
matter of debate. Madame Blovotsky said that this was the
out of wedlock son of her sister in law and
Baron Meyendorff. Rumors arose and continued that he was actually
(25:21):
the child of Helena and Metrovich. Yeah, it's a big
it's a big cluster and 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 end up um. In eighteen sixty four, Blovotsky
(25:41):
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. We're about to get to the
(26:05):
phase of Blovotsky'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. In the seventies, Blovotsky
(26:25):
became involved with the spiritualist movement. If you are a
long time 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 previous host Sarah and Bablina did a whole episode
on their story, so By the time Helena Blovotsky became
(26:46):
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
Blovotsky became connected to spiritualism, she was ideologically not a
hundred percent aligned with it. The idea of spiritualism involved
(27:09):
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 souls. She did really love a seance, though,
oh she certainly did, because that was part of her
fully actualized paranormal abilities after she came out of that como,
(27:34):
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 Blovotsky had made her way
back to North America by eighteen seventy three. She was
living in New York City at the time, and she
was actually kind of struggling to get by. She was
(27:56):
working in a sweatshop making artificial flowers to support herself,
and then she met Henry Steele Olcott at a seance
in Vermont. 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
(28:19):
working on fraud cases, and by the time he met Blovotsky,
he was working as an investigative journalist. He found himself
at Bolovotsky'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 Charlatan's. Alcott had already
written a number of articles about spiritualism and was becoming
(28:42):
more and more fascinated by it. 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 and and do these
I want to call them performance is. But these, uh,
these events but even before the seance began, Olcott could
(29:05):
not help but notice Helena, 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 Cotswald you, and the fact
that he overheard her speaking French to a friend all
(29:26):
drew the journalist in. He was completely fascinated. Here's how
he wrote of her later quote, This lady, my dam
Helen P. Blovotsky, has a lot of 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
(29:51):
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. And
the whole course of my experience I never met so
interesting and, if I may say, without offense, eccentric a
(30:12):
character all Kot's endorsement went a really long way in
terms of validating Bulovatsky'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 deceive the public. She was like
all in he believed everything she said without fact checking.
(30:35):
It seemed the seance that Oldcott 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
(30:59):
by making upping noises and in one instance is said
to have audibly uttered the word. A journalist writing for
The Smithsonian, Edward Howard, described Alcott as having one of
the most dramatic midlife crises in history and his relationship
with Blovotsky. Some takes on their relationship suggests that Madame
(31:20):
Blovotsky 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. Even so,
(31:40):
while Blovotsky 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
(32:02):
a way that today might be categorized as a sexual.
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 uh, so they were close.
But her characterization as a mistress who lured him away
(32:23):
from his wife really doesn't quite track Oldcott, by the way,
was known to have had mistresses. He sounds like something
of a ladies man. But it doesn't appear that Bolovotsky
was one of them. Olcott was a major boon to
Madame Blovotsky's public persona through his writing as well as
a source of financial support. Their shared apartment became an
(32:44):
epicenter for spiritualist gatherings, and they routinely hosted seances and
discussions at the paranormal. There, Bolovotsky would invite journalists to
visit so they would see that she was no trickster,
just merely a woman who was in touch with other realms.
And it was in this haven for discussion of the
paranormal and occult that Colonel Henry Olcott suggested that they
(33:06):
formalized 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. One of the numerous
(33:28):
reasons that Blovotsky was and remains a figure of controversy
is really clear in her writing from this period. She
published her book Isis Unveiled in eighteen seventy seven. Alcott
edited it, and she leveled a lot of criticism at
both organized religion and the scientific community. She thought that
(33:49):
both groups were missing the real path to enlightenment and insight. Theosophy,
according to Helena Blovotsky, was the answer, and it was,
to quote her quote, the s phasis of science, religion,
and philosophy. It was a way to bring those three
disciplines together. This book was both praised and panned, and
(34:09):
Blovotsky put all of the reviews into a scrap book.
Isis Unveiled is something of a hodgepodge. It borrows from
religions all over the world, pulling in ideas which Blovotsky
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.
(34:33):
But she incorporated so many varied ideas because she envisioned
theosophy as something that could unite the world's varied systems
of beliefs. Although Madame Blovotsky had managed to amass the
following in the United States, it didn't really sustain itself.
And as her influence and the members of the Theosophical
(34:54):
Society fizzled out, she and Alcott decided to move on
and supporting Blovotsky and houting 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. Yeah, he kind of tanked his career
um to prepare to leave with an eye towards India.
(35:15):
Elena Blovotsky 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 seventeenth, eighteen
seventy eight, they left the US for India. More specifically
than simply going to India, though, all Caught and Blovotsky
(35:38):
intended for the Theosophical Society to join up with the
Aria Samage, which was a Hindu reform movement that had
started in eighteen seventy five. All Caught and Blovotsky were
novelties in Bombay. They openly criticized colonialism, and they embraced
Eastern religious ideas, and in doing so that kind of
became media darlings for a time. Through a spiritualist named
(36:02):
Alfred Percy Sinnett, 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. Uh.
These seances featured all kinds of paranormal happenings. When Sinnett's wife,
(36:24):
for example, mentioned a lost brooch that she longed to find,
Blovotsky told her it had re materialized in her flower beds.
Those flower beds were dug up and lo the brooch.
She has also said to have produced a spray of
roses in mid air which fell on the heads of
people in the room. When a visitor said that she
could not produce a miracle, all caught and Blovotsky set
(36:46):
up their Theosophical Society headquarters in Bombay in eighteen seventy nine.
Madam Blovotsky became the editor of their periodical The Theosophist,
which was a role she would have for the next
nine years. All Kott toured the Indian subcontinent giving lectures.
He spoke against British efforts to convert Buddhists to Christianity,
(37:07):
and on a trip to Sri Lanka, which was of
course still called Ceylon at the time, he and Madame
Bolovotsky 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
(37:30):
believed that magnetism had curative properties and that he could
manipulate it to administer to all manner of ailments. While
the beginning of Blovotsky's and Alcott'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
(37:52):
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 Blovotsky became embroiled in a dispute when a woman
that they had taken under their wing as a medium
named Emma Colombe started to hold obviously fake seances to
(38:13):
make easy money. Next, the head of the Arias Homage
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 Bolovotsky and Olcott as untrustworthy. Yeah,
he had pamphlets written up talking about how he had
changed his mind and believed that they were Charlatan's um
(38:36):
and things only got worse from there. Alfred Percy Sinnett,
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 Madam Blovotsky knew. But
one of them was obviously plagiarized from an American periodical,
and someone recognized it, and so the press, which had
(38:57):
initially welcomed that Theosophists, turned on Blovotsky. 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 Oldcott moved their headquarters from
Bombay to Madras in eight two to get away from
the controversy. That worked for a while, but within a
few years there was another, much bigger controversy. Emma Colombe,
(39:22):
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 Blovotsky. They clearly instructed her
to create fake, miraculous and paranormal events to support their
various stories. Bolovotsky and Alcott dismissed these letters as fakes,
(39:42):
but they found themselves viewed with just a whole new
level of suspicion. Yeah, there's a really fun story in
there about making a life size doll that they kind
of like, we're puppeteering in like darkness to try to
convince people they were being visited by the masters the
Blogotsky often referenced, um, there's some very fun and kookie
(40:05):
theatricality to it. And that is how the London Society
for Psychical Research came to open an investigation into Bolovotsky
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
(40:29):
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 Blovotsky's treachery were indeed written by Blovotsky. We
have talked on the show before about some of the
(40:49):
problems with handwriting analysis, but this was very damning at
the time. In eight five, Paras psychologist Richard Hodgson filed
his report which concluded the Bolovotsk he was a fraud.
Alcott was found you merely have been incredibly gullible. After
the Hodgson report, Blovotsky left India, although she continued to
(41:10):
edit the theosophyst The damage of this report was far reaching,
in addition to discrediting Blovotsky in a very public way,
and also sewed some conflict between her and Alcott. When
Helena Blovotsky filed a slander suit against Richard Hodgson and
the Society for Psychical Research. Alcott did not support that.
(41:32):
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. Madame Blovotsky, 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.
(41:55):
After spending some time in Belgium, she established the Bolovotsky
Lodge of London. In eight seven, 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.
While she was writing this book, she had shifted focus
away from the paranormal and wrote more extensively about philosophy.
(42:17):
The book's subhead is there is no religion higher than truth,
and the introduction in Bologotsky makes her goal clear. Quote.
The aim of this work maybe thus stated to show
that nature is not a fortuitous concurrence of atoms and
to a science a man his rightful place in the
scheme of the universe. To rescue from degradation the archaic
(42:38):
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. In eighty
nine she published two more books. The Voice of Silence
has the subtitle translated from the Book of the Golden Precepts,
(43:01):
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. Her other book to
come out that year was Key to Theosophy, being a
(43:21):
clear exposition in the form of question answer of the ethics,
science and philosophy for the study of which the Theosophical
Society has been founded. Even though these were very popular
and they continued to actually be printed, they were her
really final achievements. Madame Blovotsky died on May eight at
(43:41):
the tail end of an influenza epidemic, and that date
of her death is now celebrated annually by Theosophists as
White Lotus Day. Long after her death, starting in nineteen
fifty but Am Blovotsky's collected writings were published. The full
publication spanned fifteen volumes and it came out over the
course of forty years. Blovotsky is often credited with bringing
(44:03):
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 European lens. We also don't
know really what the depths of her exposure was to
these things before she started talking about them as though
she were an expert. Uh And since the study of
(44:24):
these belief systems on the part of Blovotsky 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 salts. We do
have to note, though, that the Theosophical Society persists despite
these bumpy times during Blovatski's life. Her books continue to
(44:46):
be pretty popular. Additionally, the Blovotsky Lodge in London is
still there, although it has changed locations from where it
was when Madame Blovotski initially established it. And as for
that damning report of a ten D five that declared
Madame Blovotsky a fraud in the Society for Psychical Research,
(45:06):
retracted it due to a review that found that Hodgson
had set out to discredit Blovotsky 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, uh, some people will say
this is vindication of Madame Blovotsky, and others are like, no, no,
(45:29):
they're just pointing out that the research was bad, not
weighing in really on whether that conclusion would have been
reached other one. Right. Um, Like I said, she continues
to be very polarizing. I find her utterly fascinating. Um,
But I don't have a strong opinion. I have some opinions,
(45:49):
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 it's like, I don't know, I don't I
don't know anything. So do you have some listener mail
for us? I do have a piece of listener mail.
It's from our listener Josie, who did the magic thing
and sent us pictures of kiddies but also the lovely
(46:09):
thing that ties in to uh, the spooky season, as
she calls it. She writes, Greetings, lovely people, It's getting
close to spooky season, and that always reminds me of
the very first episode of your podcast I heard, which
was The Solder Family Mystery. I actually believe it was
the first podcast I ever heard in my life, and
I was so entrenched that I binged all your mystery
episodes and then all of your other episodes. You guys
(46:32):
are always my go to favorite podcasts, and every October
I look back fondly on that feeling of excitement being
swept up in your history mysteries. You guys do such
a fantastic job. You're graceful, professional, and always a delight.
I appreciate you both so much. I was actually going
to name my cats after you guys, what but she
went with Nelly and Bessie instead because of their horse
(46:52):
and cow like personalities respectively. Uh, my cat Bessie has
Pika and we'll eat metal. I remember one of you
mentioning that cow was eat metal. Also my love of
Bessie Smith, and your podcast has hosted quite a few
adventurous Nellie's. Hey, I had a cat that had pika.
It's not fun. So my my hat is off to
(47:13):
you because you have to manage it in crazy ways.
That is why I stopped using pins when I sew um,
because I had a cat that would eat them, or
would try. He never successfully did because I always caught him.
But oh that was stressful times, she goes on. Some
of your podcasts have been so enchanting. I've listened to
them multiple times, specifically the Fort Shaw Indian School basketball Team,
(47:34):
Theodosia Austin Burr. When I recently watched Hamilton's, I was
just waiting around for them to mention her, the Memphis
Sanitation Strike, Catalina, the Lieutenant Nun, Halifax Explosion, Maria tal Chiefs,
the Ballerina, and so many more. My boyfriend loved the
Klondike Bigines Land promotion episode, and I'm especially fond of
your super Ancient History episodes as well. You cover such
(47:54):
an array of topics and make them also interesting. Being
a female carpenter, I always appreciate your episode about female pioneers.
Being Canadian, I'm always thrilled to see Canadian history episodes.
I always love to hear more history about Canada and
the Canadian American relationship and past wars and feuds and
the indigenous people of this continent. You've taught me so much,
really valuable, as Canadian schools don't teach us as much
(48:16):
as they should. That's not just in Canada, by the way. Uh.
And now finally my podcast suggestion, which is the Toronto
Circus Riot of eighteen fifty five. Um. She goes on
to tell us that before she was a carpenter, I
used to fiddle around as an actor and performer, and
my old director Angola put on this show. Uh. She
shares some information about it. She also loves any history
(48:37):
about Sicily because she's Sicilian Canadian and always looking to
reconnect to her roots. And then she apologizes for it
being long, don't It's delightful, So that is Josie, Thank you,
thank you, thank you, Josie. Those cats are cute. I
don't even know what I would do with the information
that someone had named a cat after me. So it's
probably safest that you did not show up at your
house and be like, show me the kiddie. Uh, nobody
(48:59):
wants that. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History Podcast at i heeart
radio dot com. You can also find us everywhere on
social media as missed in History, and you are welcome
and encouraged to subscribe to the podcast. You can do
that on the I heart radio app, at Apple Podcasts,
or wherever it is you listen. Stuff you Missed in
(49:21):
History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For
more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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