December 21, 2024 • 46 mins
This 2020 episode covers the iconic figure of mysticism, Madame Blavatsky. She was the founder of the theosophical movement, and lived a life of adventure that's hard to believe.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. In our episode on Joaquin Torres Garcia this week,
we talked about Patam Blovotsky and how she just seems
to keep showing up in our episodes in unexpected moments.
So today our episode on her is our Saturday Classic.
This originally came out on October fifth, twenty twenty, so enjoy.
(00:25):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. 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 it's October
(00:47):
every day, but now we're actually in October, which means
Halloween e content. And for this October we're doing kind
of an on ramp topic because it's a subject that
I know you and I have both been kind of
mentally prowling around for a bit. It is Madame Blavatsky,
who is said to have gone simply by her initials
(01:09):
of HPB. I have a hard time saying that, so
I'm going to stick to her regular name. Yeah. Well,
and it's also like the name she was known by
in all of her work around the English speaking world.
We're not going to try to like recreate her Russian
name in Russian because that's not how she was known here, right,
(01:32):
And Blavatsky 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, 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
(01:55):
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
(02:18):
is that the impact of her work is still felt
in the world, whether you believe her to have been
a genuine mystic or a total fraud. So we are
tackling Madam Blovotsky after many years of kind of looking
at it and then being like later, later, yeah, well,
And then also when we were we have each had
time away from the office recently, and it was like
(02:39):
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, 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, this is a it's
(02:59):
a longer episode, in part because there's a lot of
her story for her and her life is in some
ways well documented in other ways very fuzzily documented. Picking
it apart is quite tricky. But I also wanted to
try to read as many different sources and biographies as
I could, because, as we know, and we've talked about before,
(03:22):
some will be favorable to a subject, some will not,
some will fall in the middle, and you kind of
have to develop a sense of pattern recognition to see
like what is consistent biography to biography and what seems
like biographer bias, and so in her case, that's a
really big part of the research is just kind of
trying to suss out the bias versus the actual Yeah,
(03:43):
I'm literally putting your quotes around actual facts because you'll
see it starts right from the beginning. The life of
Madame Blovotsky was just a tangle of intensity right from
her birth. She was born Elena Petrovna von Hahn in
what was at the time Russian Ukraine. She was born
(04:06):
August twelfth, eighteen thirty one, and she was born prematurely
in the middle of a cholera epidemic, so that's already
a lot. Elena's mother, Elena andreaev navon Hahn, was still
a teenager, was sick with cholera when she gave birth,
and both of them were not expected to live. A
priest was brought in to baptize the baby quickly before
(04:30):
she was expected to die, and so then Elena's aunt Nadya,
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 birth story, right,
There's just a lot going on. Elena's German father, Peter
(04:50):
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, he actually did not meet his daughter
for six months to a year, depending on the source
you look at. Accounts swerve around quite a bit on
(05:11):
that point. So of course she did not die in infancy.
She was also descended from royalty. Her grandmother was Princess
Elena Pavlovna Delgerikov, and defied convention of the day. She
educated herself in everything from Greek language to botany. Helena's
seventeen year old mother also survived the delivery and became
(05:34):
a novelist shortly after that. Sometimes she's been called the
Russian Jorge Sound because of the similarity of the themes
in her work to that of our previous podcast subject.
So young Elena grew up in a household of women
who really valued writing and learning. Yeah, her mother's novels
are largely about women who are in marriages that do
(05:56):
not hold enough romance or happiness for them. Much a
lot of Shorge sounds work. But though Elena was born
into the aristocracy and had really positive role models, in
terms of education for women. Elena's life as a child
was not really what you would call idyllic. Her father's
military career meant that they moved frequently, and there are
(06:18):
wildly different assessments of what her relationship with her mother
was like. Some indicate that the elder Elena was generally
unhappy with her life and the constant moving, and would
have been very pleased to just break free of her
family obligations entirely. Other accounts suggest that mother and daughter
were in fact quite close. At one point, Peter's orders
(06:38):
took the family to Saint 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 mile journey
with their grandfather to Ostrakhan, which was at the mouth
(06:58):
of the Vulgar 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 was so happy
(07:19):
to be in a city and in Saint Petersburg that
she refused to move with her father. But then she
took her kids out of Saint 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 to
break Yeah. By the time Elena was nine, her parents
were back together and the family was then living in Odessa.
(07:43):
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 ga
eighteen forty, and he was actually the family's second son.
(08:03):
They had had a boy named Sasha, who had died
in infancy several years earlier. And you may 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 Andreevna survived the birth
of her fourth child despite her illness, but despite every
treatment that the family's wealth and connections could arrange for her,
(08:25):
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 were that she would not live a life like
other women and that she would suffer a great deal,
so something that Blovotsky would say throughout her life. Helena,
her sister Vera, and her brother Leonid were sent to
(08:46):
live with their grandparents. That sort of tropy sentiment that
Helena was not like other girls was something that was
really part of the way the family described her from
her youth. Her sister Vera described her as being singularly strange,
and most descriptions talk about her having a duality to
her personality. On the one hand, she was really rebellious
(09:08):
and stubborn and liked to play unkind pranks and kind
of talk back to adults, and on the other she
was bookish, deeply interested in the metaphysical, and really obsessed
with hiding in the many tunnels and other strange hideaways
that were part of their grandparents' house in the city
of Saratov on the Vulgar River, and this is also
(09:28):
the point in the timeline where the stories of her
unusual paranormal abilities are rooted. So, according to family stories,
which are of course not verifiable, Helena would play with
what seemed to be ghosts, and she would sleep walk
into the unused passages of the house and developed the
ability to put birds to sleep using something that she
(09:48):
called Solomon's wisdom. We don't know what that was. There
is literally nothing that tries to explain what Solomon's wisdom was,
and of course the fa lore around Helena mentions her
fascination with the dead from the time she was a child.
Once the children had relocated to Saratov and were just
(10:09):
not constantly moving around to accommodate their father's career anymore,
their education settled into more consistent and formalized structures. But
even so, and in spite of coming from a pretty
progressive family in terms of women in education, this was
largely about preparing her to be an aristocratic wife. So
(10:30):
she was learning French, studying art and music, but things
like math and science were not really part of the curriculum. Nope,
she was supposed to learn how to be very pretty
and quiet and to be able to entertain her husband
with talks of culture, but not really anything else. And
there are a lot of stories of the ways in
(10:52):
which Helena in her early years comes into contact with
the occult and the mystical, just before her own deeper
connection to that world world is said to have manifested.
So she allegedly learned about b communication and plants that
had mystical uses from what is usually referred to as
a surf on the family property. His name is listed
(11:13):
as baronig Buyak, and while traveling with her grandparents, she
was again exposed to a number of other cultures and
ideas and was once again completely fascinated with Tibetan Buddhism
in particular. 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,
(11:35):
as a tall man from India. There were several accidents
that happened to her where she narrowly escaped serious injury,
and she attributed her lack of damage to the intervention
of this protector figure 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
(11:56):
the wall of her grandparents home. There's a whole layer
to this story where the portrait is covered with a
curtain and nobody wants anybody to see it, and so
that makes it more alluring, and we don't ever find
out what the portrait is. But when she peeked behind
it to the forbidden painting, whatever it was was either
so shocking or startling that she passed out and fell
(12:19):
from this giant stack of furniture. And she claimed that
when she came to everything was back where it belonged.
All of the furniture had been put back in its
proper place, and the only evidence of her clandestine climb
was a handprint that she had left high on the
wall on a dusty surface. And then on another occasion,
she was thrown from a horse, and she said that
(12:40):
her protector had appeared and saved her by holding her
head so it did not impact on the ground. There's
also a sort of incongruous piece of travel information that
comes up around the same time that she started seeing
this protector. Later in life, she mentioned having gone to
England with her father when she was twelve or thirteen.
(13:00):
There's really no record of this trip. It's not corroborated
by her sister's diary at the time. So historians tend
to be of two views on this sort of strange
standout piece in the whole Madame 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
(13:23):
when she was seventeen or eighteen instead of twelve or thirteen.
There will be so many inconsistencies with where she is
and when accepting all of these stories, of course, requires
a bit of faith, because there isn't a way to
corroborate the appearance of a spirit that only appears to
one person, or even to verify simple events that are
part of family history but have no actual record. Right,
(13:45):
we don't know if she was thrown from a horse,
no one would have recorded that in any way. We
don't know if she climbed this tableful of things and
was somehow protected and cleaned up after by a friendly spirit,
because like, there's not like anybody files her report on that.
When it came to this protector, Helena also didn't seem
(14:09):
content to just use the idea as a means of
explaining the unexplainable. As a teenager, she became really fixated
on studying what exactly was it 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
(14:33):
these volumes there was even a book by the previous
podcast subject to San Germaine, 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 teenageyers were a time full of significant change, as
(14:55):
is pretty normal for a teenager, although hers is not
always that normal. Uh, we're gonna delve into that after
we first pause for a sponsor break. When Elena was fifteen,
her life shifted once again. Her grandfather's appointment as governor
(15:17):
of Saratov ended, and at that point Helena Vera and
Leonad first spent a year with an aunt before joining
their grandparents in the Georgian capital of Tibilisi, which was
called Tiflis 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
(15:40):
of Prince Alexander Golitzen, who was similarly interested in the
mystical and had traveled the world seeking out experts and
practitioners of various occult and magical activities. Goliitsen is said
to have encouraged Helena's interest in this secondary spiritual life,
and specifically advised her to travel the same way that
(16:00):
he had to learn more about the unknown. When Elena
was seventeen, there was once again a sudden change in
her circumstance, but this time in the form of a marriage.
Seemingly out of nowhere. She wed Nikophor Blovotsky, a man
in his forties who was vice governor of the Aravn
Province of Armenia. How this match happened is another place
(16:22):
in Helena's life where the stories differ really significantly. There's
some theories that she may have just run off and
gotten married as an act of rebellion against her father
or her governess, who she was having some conflict with,
and again that depends on the source you read. It
also might have been a hastily arranged marriage made by
the family in the hopes of tethering the increasingly restless
(16:46):
Helena to her home in some way, But in later
years she herself also said that Nikophor, 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 cultures that
might interest her as she studied such matters. This was
not a good match, though. Helena got cold feet before
(17:07):
the wedding even happened, and she tried to back out.
She vanished for several days, and there were rumors that
she had met up with Golitsin, but she returned from
wherever she had gone in time for the wedding. That
wedding took place on July seventh, eighteen forty nine, and
she said to have refused to do the vow of
honoring and obeying her new husband, but otherwise the ceremony
(17:29):
did go as planned. According to Helena, though this marriage
was never consummated, and we'll come back to this. 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 Nikophore lived in the palace
of Sardar in Araven, and she spent a great deal
of time, it seems, evading guards who wished she would
(17:51):
just stay put. Eventually, she did manage to get past
the guards and she ran back to her family in Tiflis,
and at that point the decision was 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 Kerch. She traveled
with two members of her family's household staff and assured
(18:13):
them that she was still planning to rendezvous with her father.
Then she gave them the slip. Similarly, after some issues
with the captain of the English ship the Commodore, which
was the captain she had bribed, she ran away again.
The captain's boat was boarded by harbor police who were
looking for this runaway aristocrat, and while she managed to
(18:35):
evade capture by dressing as a cabin boy. The captain
probably did not like all of this. Bus 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
(18:55):
them where she was, so she didn't. With the possible
exception of her father, who might have occasionally been sending
her money, and because of the cloak and dagger nature
of her travels, plenty of unlikely stories about just what
she was up to during those years of travel abound.
Blovotsky's own accounts of this period of her life shifted
(19:16):
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
she shared that it was here that she met opera
singer Agardi Metrovitch. After finding him stabbed and left for
dead in the street, Blavotsky stood watch over him with
(19:40):
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,
and Metrovich 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
(20:00):
the Countess Sophia Kislev in Constantinople, who she traveled with
for several months, often disguised as a young man. They
went to Egypt and Greece together before heading to Eastern Europe.
Metrovich and Helena then turned up together somewhere in Europe.
Metrovich wrote to Helena's grandfather to tell him that the
two were married. Yeah, this is all very blurry. We
(20:22):
don't know if this was like a i'm your friend,
I'm gonna tell your grandparents that, like we're together now
and explain this to your husband, or if he really
thought they were getting married. It's again everything murky, murky marquis.
But we do know that by the early eighteen fifties,
Blovotsky was first in Paris and then in London and
(20:45):
in England, she had what she claimed was a significant
spiritual experience. She met a man from India who she
claimed to already know remember that protector from her childhood.
She said that this man, who she called Master Mooria
sometimes she'll just call him the Master, was one and
the same, and the specifics around exactly when and where
(21:06):
she met him shifted in her own accounts. She told
different people that she had seen him in a crowd
first and recognized him, others that she had met him
at Waterloo Bridge when she was considering suicide. Another version
was that she ran into him at the Great Exhibition,
and also that she met him in the seaside town
of Ramsgate. But all of these versions, even though they
(21:28):
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,
she was inspired by the writing of James Finnemore Cooper
to seek out First Nations peoples. She found these encounters disappointing, though,
(21:48):
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
comes to her interactions with people of other cultures because
she does that thing where she simultaneously fetishizes them and
(22:13):
criticizes the heck out of them as not being what
she wanted them to be. It's very problematic. But after
this time in Canada, she has said to have moved
south to New Orleans and then into Texas before leaving
North America for India. And she made it to India.
She stayed in Bombay first for two years, and it
(22:33):
said that during this time masters of ancient wisdom also
told her to go to Tibet to learn about the
integration of science, religion and philosophy. But she couldn't really
make her way into Tibet. That was tricky at this time,
Europeans not so much welcome. Tibet was very closed off.
(22:53):
At this point, she decided to head back to England.
Once she got there, she had quite the tale of
her journey. She claimed that the ship she was on
had wrecked near the Cape of Good Hope and that
she was one of twenty one survivors. After allegedly meeting
with the Master again in the home of someone she
says she didn't know, Elena Blovotsky made her way to
(23:16):
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. Just no
account of how she got back to Europe from that point. Yeah,
(23:40):
it's a little bit, a little bit kooky. But she
landed in New York and then she headed west, first
to Chicago and then to Salt Lake City, and from
there she moved on to San Francisco, where she boarded
a steamer to Japan. From there it was onto India,
and this time with the help of a guide and
disguised herself. She claimed to have entered Tibet in eighteen
(24:02):
fifty six. At last, the timeline of her travels was
written up and published by Blovotsky in the Moscow Chronicle
under the pen name Rada Bye. From Tibet, she was
eventually ordered by the mysterious Master to travel back to Europe.
All of this is disputed. It's entirely possible that she
(24:22):
was just hanging out in Europe this whole time. As
Holly said earlier, Tibet was pretty closed off to Europeans.
She might have managed to gain access to Tibet if
she was traveling with one of the people that she
name checked as a spiritual master from the surrounding area.
But I mean, these are kind of long odds on this.
(24:42):
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,
again the family noted the strange phenomena that seemed to
(25:03):
always surround her. Elena went back to her husband Nikophore
in eighteen sixty two, but Agardi Metrovich then showed up
in Tiflis not long after, claiming his own rights as
her husband. This whole thing is really messy and unclear.
And then to confuse the situation further, she adopted a
boy named Yuri with Nikophor. The couple didn't stay together.
(25:27):
Yuri died at the age of five and was buried
as Yuri Metrovich. Yuri'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 a
baron Mayandorf. Rumors arose and continued that he was actually
(25:48):
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 a past stee shift confusing details about
her life that no one could untangle them and be like, wait,
this doesn't end up. In eighteen sixty four, Blovotsky had
(26:08):
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
(26:29):
again all unsubstantiated. We're about to get to the phase
of Glovotsky'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 eighteen seventies, Blovotsky
(26:54):
became involved with the spiritualist movement. If you are a
longtime listener to the podcast, you may recall that the
modern spiritualist movement is usually cited as beginning with the
Fox Sisters and their claims of communication with spirits. In
eighteen forty eight. Previous hosts Sarah and Deblina did a
whole episode on their story. So by the time Helena
Blovotsky became connected to it, spiritualism had been getting attention,
(27:17):
particularly in the United States, for a couple of decades,
and had grown very popular, even though it also had
plenty of doubters right from the beginning. And although Madame
Blovotsky became connected to spiritualism, she was ideologically not one
hundred percent aligned with it. The idea of spiritualism involved
(27:38):
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
(28:02):
como 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. Madam Blovotsky had made her
way back to North America by eighteen seventy three. She
was living in New York City at the time, and
(28:22):
she was actually kind of struggling to get by. She
was working in a sweatshop making artificial flowers to support herself,
and then she met Henry Steele Olcott at a seance
in Vermont. Olcott was, in a lot of ways the
last person you would expect to have responded positively to spiritualism.
He had served in the US Army during the American
(28:45):
Civil War, He had a career as a lawyer working
on fraud cases, and by the time he met Blovotsky
he was working as an investigative journalist. He found himself
at Blovotsky'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 Olcott had already
(29:07):
written a number of articles about spiritualism and was becoming
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 in and do these
I want to call them performances. But these these events.
(29:31):
But even before the seance began, Olcott could 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 ew and the fact that he
(29:52):
overheard her speaking French to a friend all drew the
journalist in. He was completely fascinated. Here's how he read
her later quote. This lady, Madame Helen p. Blovatsky, has
a lot, a very eventful life, traveling in most of
the lands of the Orient, searching for antiquities at the
(30:12):
base of the pyramids, witnessing the mysteries of Hindu temples,
and pushing with an armed escort far into the interior
of Africa. The adventures she has encountered, the strange people
she has seen, the perils by sea and land she
has passed through, would make one of the most romantic
stories ever told by a biographer. And the whole course
(30:35):
of my experience I never met so interesting and, if
I may say, without offense, eccentric a character. All Kat's
endorsement went a really long way in terms of validating
Blovatski'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
(30:58):
to deceive the public. He was like all in he
believed everything she said without fact checking. It seemed the
seance that Olcott witnessed sounds a little more like a
stage show. Various spirits made appearances, as in showing up
on stage a Native American woman, a man from the
(31:18):
country of Georgia, the spirit of a German Man, and
the French Canadian father of one of the attendees, who
gave responses to questions posed in French by making rapping noises.
And in one instance is said to have audibly uttered
the word way. A journalist writing for The Smithsonian, Edward Hower,
described Alcott as having one of the most dramatic midlife
(31:41):
crises in history and his relationship with Blovotsky. Some takes
on their relationship suggest that Madame 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
(32:04):
part because he moved in with her when they both
got back to New York. Even so, 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
(32:25):
relationship with anyone. She generally described herself in a way
that today might be categorized as asexual. She once said quote,
I had a volcano in constant eruption in my brain
and a glacier at the foot of the mountain, but
she and Olcott tended to refer to one another as chum,
(32:47):
so they were close. But her characterization as a mistress
who lured him away from his wife really doesn't quite track. Olcott,
by the way, was known to have had mistresses. He
sounds like something of a ladies man, but it doesn't
appear that Blovotsky was one of them. Olcott was a
major boon to Madame Blovotsky's public persona through his writing,
(33:08):
as well as a source of financial support. Their shared
apartment became an epicenter for spiritualist gatherings, and they routinely
hosted seances and discussions of the paranormal there. Blovotsky 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
(33:29):
for discussion of the paranormal and occult that Colonel Henry
Olcott suggested that they formalize their gatherings under an official
organization that could study all of the mystical and spiritual
subjects that they were all interested in. And this marks
the beginning of the Theosophical Society, which sought to create
an identity for itself that was separate from the spiritualist movement,
(33:51):
and to help shape that identity, Elena began writing. One
of the numerous reasons that Blavotsky was and remains the
figure of controversy is really clear in her writing from
this period. She published her book Isis Unveiled in eighteen
seventy seven. All Caught edited it, and she leveled a
(34:12):
lot of criticism at both organized religion and the scientific community.
She thought that both groups were missing the real path
to enlightenment and insight. Theosophy, according to Helena Blovotsky, was
the answer, and it was, to quote her quote, the
synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy. It was a way
(34:32):
to bring those three disciplines together. This book was both
praised and panned, and Blovotsky put all of the reviews
into a scrapbook. 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
(34:55):
ancient and secret knowledge. Its deepest roots are in Helena's
verse versions of Buddhism and Hinduism, but she incorporated so
many varied ideas because she envisioned theosophy as something that
could unite the world's varied systems of beliefs. Although Madame
Blovotsky had managed to amass a following in the United States,
(35:16):
it didn't really sustain itself, and as her influence and
the members of the Theosophical Society fizzled out, she and
Alcott decided to move on and supporting Blovotsky and touting
her gifts. He had really squandered his good name among
his fellow journalists in the United States, who had really
just taken to mocking him openly about it. Yeah, he
(35:38):
kind of tanked his career to prepare to leave with
an eye towards India. Elena Blovotsky became a US 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,
(35:58):
eighteen seventy eight, they left the US for India. More
specifically than simply going to India, though, all Kott and
Blovotsky intended for the Theosophical Society to join up with
the Ariya Samaje, which was a Hindu reform movement that
had started in eighteen seventy five. All Kott and Blovotsky
were novelties in Bombay. They openly criticized colonialism, and they
(36:23):
embraced Eastern religious ideas, and in doing so they kind
of became media darlings for a time. Through a spiritualist
named 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,
(36:45):
if that meant it led to paying gigs for them.
These seances featured all kinds of paranormal happenings. When Sennett's wife,
for example, mentioned a lost brooch that she longed to find,
Blovotsky told her it had rematerialized in her flower bed heads.
Those flower beds were dug up and lo the brooch.
She is also said to have produced a spray of
(37:06):
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. Olcott and Blovotsky set up
their Theosophical Society headquarters in Bombay in eighteen seventy nine.
Madame Blovotsky became the editor of their periodical, The Theosophist,
which was the role she would have for the next
nine years. Olcott toured the Indian subcontinent giving lectures. He
(37:31):
spoke against British efforts to convert Buddhists to Christianity, and
on a trip to Sri Lanka, which was of course
still called Ceylon at the time, he and Madame Blovotsky
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
(37:51):
texts to designing a flag which is still in use today.
He also started working as a healer. He believed that
magnetism had curative properties and that he could manipulate it
to administer to all manner of ailments. While the beginning
of Glovotsky's and Olcott's time in Bombay and Ceylon was joyous,
(38:12):
the tides eventually turned. The members of the Theosophical Society
asked Olcott to stop healing people. The public version of
this story was that they felt like it was depleting
his energy, but there was also likely some kind of
version about it being problematic. Then, Olcott and Blovotsky became
embroiled in a dispute when a woman that they had
(38:33):
taken under their wing as a medium named Emma Colombe
started to hold obviously fake seances to make easy money. Next,
the head of the Arias Image 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
(38:54):
view Blovotsky 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 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
(39:15):
Masters that Madame Blovotsky knew, but one of them was
obviously plagiarized from an American periodical, and someone recognized it,
and so the press, which had initially welcomed the Theosophists,
turned on 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
(39:37):
and Olcott moved their headquarters from Bombay to Madras in
eighteen eighty two to get away from the controversy. That
worked for a while, but within a few years there
was another, much bigger controversy. Emma Colomb, who had been
doing those fake seances, published a series of letters in
a Madras periodical. She said they were written to her
(39:58):
by Helena Blovotz. They clearly instructed her to create fake,
miraculous and paranormal events to support their various stories. Bolovotsky
and Alcott dismissed these letters as fakes, 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
(40:19):
life size doll that they were puppeteering in like darkness
to try to convince people they were being visited by
the masters of Blovotsky often referenced there's some very fun
and kooky theatricality to it, and that is how the
London Society for Psychical Research came to open an investigation
(40:40):
into Blovotsky in the Theosophical Society. That investigation, which was
conducted by Richard Hodgson, was aided by none other than
Emma Koolohm, who showed how, among other things, the miracle
of things like letters dropping into visitors laps seemingly from
thin air was actually achieved through a bit of theatrical trickery.
There was a thread and hook system in the ceiling.
(41:03):
A handwriting expert was also called upon to weigh in
on whether the letters that Kolombe had provided as evidence
of Madam Blovotsky's treachery were indeed written by Blovotsky. We
have talked on the show before about some of the
problems with handwriting analysis, but this was very damning at
the time. In eighteen eighty five, parapsychologist Richard Hodgson filed
(41:26):
his report which concluded that Blovotsky was a fraud. Olcott
was found to merely have been incredibly gullible. After the
Hodgson Report, Blovotsky left India, although she continued to edit
The Theosophist. The damage of this report was far reaching,
in addition to discrediting Blovotsky in a very public way,
(41:48):
and also sowed 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.
He instead wanted to just let things died down the
way they had in the past. To Helena, this really
felt like a betrayal. It essentially ended their partnership and
(42:10):
their friendship. Madame Lavotsky, who was quite ill at the
time due to a problem with her liver, took a
steamer to Europe, and despite the apparent seriousness of her
health when she left India, she did make a recovery
after spending some time in Belgium. She established the Blovotsky
Lodge of London in eighteen eighty seven, and in eighteen
eighty eight she released the work that she's probably most
(42:32):
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. The book's subhead
is there is no religion higher than Truth, and the
introduction in Blovotsky makes her goal clear quote. The aim
(42:53):
of this work may be thus stated, to show that
nature is not a fortuitous concurrence of Adams, and to
aid Si to man his rightful place in the scheme
of the universe. To rescue from degradation the archaic truths
which are the basis of all religions. To uncover, to
some extent, the fundamental unity from which they all spring. Finally,
(43:15):
to show that the occult side of nature has never
been approached by the science of modern civilization. In eighteen
eighty nine she published two more books. The Voice of
Silence has the subtitle translated from the Book of the
Golden Precepts, which shares a common origin with the Secret Doctrine.
The rules and ethics presented here contrasts the two paths
(43:35):
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 clear exposition in the form of question and answer
of the ethics, science and philosophy for the study of
(43:56):
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. Madam Blovotski died on
May eighth, eighteen ninety one, at the tail end of
an influenza epidemic, and that date of her death is
now celebrated annually by Theosophists as White Lotus Day. Long
(44:18):
after her death, starting in nineteen fifty, but A. Blovotska'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 Buddhism and Hinduism to
the Western audience, and this is a little bit tricky
to celebrate, of course, since these ideas were being channeled
(44:39):
through a European lens. We also don't know really what
the depth of her exposure was to these things before
she started talking about them. As though she were an expert,
and since the study of these belief systems on the
part of Blovotsky is difficult to corroborate in any level,
particularly in her earlier years. I just want people to
(45:02):
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 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.
(45:25):
And as for that damning report of eighteen eighty five
that declared Madame Blovotsky a fraud, in nineteen eighty six
the Society for Psychical Research 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
(45:46):
that Hodgson raised that remain unanswered, this is one of
those things you'll sometimes find argued about on the Internet
that some people will say this is vindication of Madame
Blovotski and others are like, no, no, they're just pointing
out that the research was bad, not weighing in really
on whether that conclusion would have been reached otherwise. Right.
(46:08):
Like I said, she continues to be very polarizing. I
find her utterly fascinating, but I don't have a strong opinion.
I have some opinions, but they're not strong, and they're
kind of cloudy for me anyway, which is unusual, just
because there's always part of me that's like, I don't know,
I don't know anything. So thanks so much for joining
(46:35):
us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us
a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com,
and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. In our episode on Joaquin Torres Garcia this week,
we talked about Patam Blovotsky and how she just seems
to keep showing up in our episodes in unexpected moments.
So today our episode on her is our Saturday Classic.
This originally came out on October fifth, twenty twenty, so enjoy.
(00:25):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. 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 it's October
(00:47):
every day, but now we're actually in October, which means
Halloween e content. And for this October we're doing kind
of an on ramp topic because it's a subject that
I know you and I have both been kind of
mentally prowling around for a bit. It is Madame Blavatsky,
who is said to have gone simply by her initials
(01:09):
of HPB. I have a hard time saying that, so
I'm going to stick to her regular name. Yeah. Well,
and it's also like the name she was known by
in all of her work around the English speaking world.
We're not going to try to like recreate her Russian
name in Russian because that's not how she was known here, right,
(01:32):
And Blavatsky 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, 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
(01:55):
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
(02:18):
is that the impact of her work is still felt
in the world, whether you believe her to have been
a genuine mystic or a total fraud. So we are
tackling Madam Blovotsky after many years of kind of looking
at it and then being like later, later, yeah, well,
And then also when we were we have each had
time away from the office recently, and it was like
(02:39):
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, 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, this is a it's
(02:59):
a longer episode, in part because there's a lot of
her story for her and her life is in some
ways well documented in other ways very fuzzily documented. Picking
it apart is quite tricky. But I also wanted to
try to read as many different sources and biographies as
I could, because, as we know, and we've talked about before,
(03:22):
some will be favorable to a subject, some will not,
some will fall in the middle, and you kind of
have to develop a sense of pattern recognition to see
like what is consistent biography to biography and what seems
like biographer bias, and so in her case, that's a
really big part of the research is just kind of
trying to suss out the bias versus the actual Yeah,
(03:43):
I'm literally putting your quotes around actual facts because you'll
see it starts right from the beginning. The life of
Madame Blovotsky was just a tangle of intensity right from
her birth. She was born Elena Petrovna von Hahn in
what was at the time Russian Ukraine. She was born
(04:06):
August twelfth, eighteen thirty one, and she was born prematurely
in the middle of a cholera epidemic, so that's already
a lot. Elena's mother, Elena andreaev navon Hahn, was still
a teenager, was sick with cholera when she gave birth,
and both of them were not expected to live. A
priest was brought in to baptize the baby quickly before
(04:30):
she was expected to die, and so then Elena's aunt Nadya,
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 birth story, right,
There's just a lot going on. Elena's German father, Peter
(04:50):
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, he actually did not meet his daughter
for six months to a year, depending on the source
you look at. Accounts swerve around quite a bit on
(05:11):
that point. So of course she did not die in infancy.
She was also descended from royalty. Her grandmother was Princess
Elena Pavlovna Delgerikov, and defied convention of the day. She
educated herself in everything from Greek language to botany. Helena's
seventeen year old mother also survived the delivery and became
(05:34):
a novelist shortly after that. Sometimes she's been called the
Russian Jorge Sound because of the similarity of the themes
in her work to that of our previous podcast subject.
So young Elena grew up in a household of women
who really valued writing and learning. Yeah, her mother's novels
are largely about women who are in marriages that do
(05:56):
not hold enough romance or happiness for them. Much a
lot of Shorge sounds work. But though Elena was born
into the aristocracy and had really positive role models, in
terms of education for women. Elena's life as a child
was not really what you would call idyllic. Her father's
military career meant that they moved frequently, and there are
(06:18):
wildly different assessments of what her relationship with her mother
was like. Some indicate that the elder Elena was generally
unhappy with her life and the constant moving, and would
have been very pleased to just break free of her
family obligations entirely. Other accounts suggest that mother and daughter
were in fact quite close. At one point, Peter's orders
(06:38):
took the family to Saint 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 mile journey
with their grandfather to Ostrakhan, which was at the mouth
(06:58):
of the Vulgar 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 was so happy
(07:19):
to be in a city and in Saint Petersburg that
she refused to move with her father. But then she
took her kids out of Saint 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 to
break Yeah. By the time Elena was nine, her parents
were back together and the family was then living in Odessa.
(07:43):
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 ga
eighteen forty, and he was actually the family's second son.
(08:03):
They had had a boy named Sasha, who had died
in infancy several years earlier. And you may 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 Andreevna survived the birth
of her fourth child despite her illness, but despite every
treatment that the family's wealth and connections could arrange for her,
(08:25):
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 were that she would not live a life like
other women and that she would suffer a great deal,
so something that Blovotsky would say throughout her life. Helena,
her sister Vera, and her brother Leonid were sent to
(08:46):
live with their grandparents. That sort of tropy sentiment that
Helena was not like other girls was something that was
really part of the way the family described her from
her youth. Her sister Vera described her as being singularly strange,
and most descriptions talk about her having a duality to
her personality. On the one hand, she was really rebellious
(09:08):
and stubborn and liked to play unkind pranks and kind
of talk back to adults, and on the other she
was bookish, deeply interested in the metaphysical, and really obsessed
with hiding in the many tunnels and other strange hideaways
that were part of their grandparents' house in the city
of Saratov on the Vulgar River, and this is also
(09:28):
the point in the timeline where the stories of her
unusual paranormal abilities are rooted. So, according to family stories,
which are of course not verifiable, Helena would play with
what seemed to be ghosts, and she would sleep walk
into the unused passages of the house and developed the
ability to put birds to sleep using something that she
(09:48):
called Solomon's wisdom. We don't know what that was. There
is literally nothing that tries to explain what Solomon's wisdom was,
and of course the fa lore around Helena mentions her
fascination with the dead from the time she was a child.
Once the children had relocated to Saratov and were just
(10:09):
not constantly moving around to accommodate their father's career anymore,
their education settled into more consistent and formalized structures. But
even so, and in spite of coming from a pretty
progressive family in terms of women in education, this was
largely about preparing her to be an aristocratic wife. So
(10:30):
she was learning French, studying art and music, but things
like math and science were not really part of the curriculum. Nope,
she was supposed to learn how to be very pretty
and quiet and to be able to entertain her husband
with talks of culture, but not really anything else. And
there are a lot of stories of the ways in
(10:52):
which Helena in her early years comes into contact with
the occult and the mystical, just before her own deeper
connection to that world world is said to have manifested.
So she allegedly learned about b communication and plants that
had mystical uses from what is usually referred to as
a surf on the family property. His name is listed
(11:13):
as baronig Buyak, and while traveling with her grandparents, she
was again exposed to a number of other cultures and
ideas and was once again completely fascinated with Tibetan Buddhism
in particular. 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,
(11:35):
as a tall man from India. There were several accidents
that happened to her where she narrowly escaped serious injury,
and she attributed her lack of damage to the intervention
of this protector figure 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
(11:56):
the wall of her grandparents home. There's a whole layer
to this story where the portrait is covered with a
curtain and nobody wants anybody to see it, and so
that makes it more alluring, and we don't ever find
out what the portrait is. But when she peeked behind
it to the forbidden painting, whatever it was was either
so shocking or startling that she passed out and fell
(12:19):
from this giant stack of furniture. And she claimed that
when she came to everything was back where it belonged.
All of the furniture had been put back in its
proper place, and the only evidence of her clandestine climb
was a handprint that she had left high on the
wall on a dusty surface. And then on another occasion,
she was thrown from a horse, and she said that
(12:40):
her protector had appeared and saved her by holding her
head so it did not impact on the ground. There's
also a sort of incongruous piece of travel information that
comes up around the same time that she started seeing
this protector. Later in life, she mentioned having gone to
England with her father when she was twelve or thirteen.
(13:00):
There's really no record of this trip. It's not corroborated
by her sister's diary at the time. So historians tend
to be of two views on this sort of strange
standout piece in the whole Madame 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
(13:23):
when she was seventeen or eighteen instead of twelve or thirteen.
There will be so many inconsistencies with where she is
and when accepting all of these stories, of course, requires
a bit of faith, because there isn't a way to
corroborate the appearance of a spirit that only appears to
one person, or even to verify simple events that are
part of family history but have no actual record. Right,
(13:45):
we don't know if she was thrown from a horse,
no one would have recorded that in any way. We
don't know if she climbed this tableful of things and
was somehow protected and cleaned up after by a friendly spirit,
because like, there's not like anybody files her report on that.
When it came to this protector, Helena also didn't seem
(14:09):
content to just use the idea as a means of
explaining the unexplainable. As a teenager, she became really fixated
on studying what exactly was it 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
(14:33):
these volumes there was even a book by the previous
podcast subject to San Germaine, 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 teenageyers were a time full of significant change, as
(14:55):
is pretty normal for a teenager, although hers is not
always that normal. Uh, we're gonna delve into that after
we first pause for a sponsor break. When Elena was fifteen,
her life shifted once again. Her grandfather's appointment as governor
(15:17):
of Saratov ended, and at that point Helena Vera and
Leonad first spent a year with an aunt before joining
their grandparents in the Georgian capital of Tibilisi, which was
called Tiflis 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
(15:40):
of Prince Alexander Golitzen, who was similarly interested in the
mystical and had traveled the world seeking out experts and
practitioners of various occult and magical activities. Goliitsen is said
to have encouraged Helena's interest in this secondary spiritual life,
and specifically advised her to travel the same way that
(16:00):
he had to learn more about the unknown. When Elena
was seventeen, there was once again a sudden change in
her circumstance, but this time in the form of a marriage.
Seemingly out of nowhere. She wed Nikophor Blovotsky, a man
in his forties who was vice governor of the Aravn
Province of Armenia. How this match happened is another place
(16:22):
in Helena's life where the stories differ really significantly. There's
some theories that she may have just run off and
gotten married as an act of rebellion against her father
or her governess, who she was having some conflict with,
and again that depends on the source you read. It
also might have been a hastily arranged marriage made by
the family in the hopes of tethering the increasingly restless
(16:46):
Helena to her home in some way, But in later
years she herself also said that Nikophor, 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 cultures that
might interest her as she studied such matters. This was
not a good match, though. Helena got cold feet before
(17:07):
the wedding even happened, and she tried to back out.
She vanished for several days, and there were rumors that
she had met up with Golitsin, but she returned from
wherever she had gone in time for the wedding. That
wedding took place on July seventh, eighteen forty nine, and
she said to have refused to do the vow of
honoring and obeying her new husband, but otherwise the ceremony
(17:29):
did go as planned. According to Helena, though this marriage
was never consummated, and we'll come back to this. 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 Nikophore lived in the palace
of Sardar in Araven, and she spent a great deal
of time, it seems, evading guards who wished she would
(17:51):
just stay put. Eventually, she did manage to get past
the guards and she ran back to her family in Tiflis,
and at that point the decision was 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 Kerch. She traveled
with two members of her family's household staff and assured
(18:13):
them that she was still planning to rendezvous with her father.
Then she gave them the slip. Similarly, after some issues
with the captain of the English ship the Commodore, which
was the captain she had bribed, she ran away again.
The captain's boat was boarded by harbor police who were
looking for this runaway aristocrat, and while she managed to
(18:35):
evade capture by dressing as a cabin boy. The captain
probably did not like all of this. Bus 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
(18:55):
them where she was, so she didn't. With the possible
exception of her father, who might have occasionally been sending
her money, and because of the cloak and dagger nature
of her travels, plenty of unlikely stories about just what
she was up to during those years of travel abound.
Blovotsky's own accounts of this period of her life shifted
(19:16):
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
she shared that it was here that she met opera
singer Agardi Metrovitch. After finding him stabbed and left for
dead in the street, Blavotsky stood watch over him with
(19:40):
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,
and Metrovich 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
(20:00):
the Countess Sophia Kislev in Constantinople, who she traveled with
for several months, often disguised as a young man. They
went to Egypt and Greece together before heading to Eastern Europe.
Metrovich and Helena then turned up together somewhere in Europe.
Metrovich wrote to Helena's grandfather to tell him that the
two were married. Yeah, this is all very blurry. We
(20:22):
don't know if this was like a i'm your friend,
I'm gonna tell your grandparents that, like we're together now
and explain this to your husband, or if he really
thought they were getting married. It's again everything murky, murky marquis.
But we do know that by the early eighteen fifties,
Blovotsky was first in Paris and then in London and
(20:45):
in England, she had what she claimed was a significant
spiritual experience. She met a man from India who she
claimed to already know remember that protector from her childhood.
She said that this man, who she called Master Mooria
sometimes she'll just call him the Master, was one and
the same, and the specifics around exactly when and where
(21:06):
she met him shifted in her own accounts. She told
different people that she had seen him in a crowd
first and recognized him, others that she had met him
at Waterloo Bridge when she was considering suicide. Another version
was that she ran into him at the Great Exhibition,
and also that she met him in the seaside town
of Ramsgate. But all of these versions, even though they
(21:28):
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,
she was inspired by the writing of James Finnemore Cooper
to seek out First Nations peoples. She found these encounters disappointing, though,
(21:48):
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
comes to her interactions with people of other cultures because
she does that thing where she simultaneously fetishizes them and
(22:13):
criticizes the heck out of them as not being what
she wanted them to be. It's very problematic. But after
this time in Canada, she has said to have moved
south to New Orleans and then into Texas before leaving
North America for India. And she made it to India.
She stayed in Bombay first for two years, and it
(22:33):
said that during this time masters of ancient wisdom also
told her to go to Tibet to learn about the
integration of science, religion and philosophy. But she couldn't really
make her way into Tibet. That was tricky at this time,
Europeans not so much welcome. Tibet was very closed off.
(22:53):
At this point, she decided to head back to England.
Once she got there, she had quite the tale of
her journey. She claimed that the ship she was on
had wrecked near the Cape of Good Hope and that
she was one of twenty one survivors. After allegedly meeting
with the Master again in the home of someone she
says she didn't know, Elena Blovotsky made her way to
(23:16):
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. Just no
account of how she got back to Europe from that point. Yeah,
(23:40):
it's a little bit, a little bit kooky. But she
landed in New York and then she headed west, first
to Chicago and then to Salt Lake City, and from
there she moved on to San Francisco, where she boarded
a steamer to Japan. From there it was onto India,
and this time with the help of a guide and
disguised herself. She claimed to have entered Tibet in eighteen
(24:02):
fifty six. At last, the timeline of her travels was
written up and published by Blovotsky in the Moscow Chronicle
under the pen name Rada Bye. From Tibet, she was
eventually ordered by the mysterious Master to travel back to Europe.
All of this is disputed. It's entirely possible that she
(24:22):
was just hanging out in Europe this whole time. As
Holly said earlier, Tibet was pretty closed off to Europeans.
She might have managed to gain access to Tibet if
she was traveling with one of the people that she
name checked as a spiritual master from the surrounding area.
But I mean, these are kind of long odds on this.
(24:42):
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,
again the family noted the strange phenomena that seemed to
(25:03):
always surround her. Elena went back to her husband Nikophore
in eighteen sixty two, but Agardi Metrovich then showed up
in Tiflis not long after, claiming his own rights as
her husband. This whole thing is really messy and unclear.
And then to confuse the situation further, she adopted a
boy named Yuri with Nikophor. The couple didn't stay together.
(25:27):
Yuri died at the age of five and was buried
as Yuri Metrovich. Yuri'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 a
baron Mayandorf. Rumors arose and continued that he was actually
(25:48):
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 a past stee shift confusing details about
her life that no one could untangle them and be like, wait,
this doesn't end up. In eighteen sixty four, Blovotsky had
(26:08):
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
(26:29):
again all unsubstantiated. We're about to get to the phase
of Glovotsky'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 eighteen seventies, Blovotsky
(26:54):
became involved with the spiritualist movement. If you are a
longtime listener to the podcast, you may recall that the
modern spiritualist movement is usually cited as beginning with the
Fox Sisters and their claims of communication with spirits. In
eighteen forty eight. Previous hosts Sarah and Deblina did a
whole episode on their story. So by the time Helena
Blovotsky became connected to it, spiritualism had been getting attention,
(27:17):
particularly in the United States, for a couple of decades,
and had grown very popular, even though it also had
plenty of doubters right from the beginning. And although Madame
Blovotsky became connected to spiritualism, she was ideologically not one
hundred percent aligned with it. The idea of spiritualism involved
(27:38):
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
(28:02):
como 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. Madam Blovotsky had made her
way back to North America by eighteen seventy three. She
was living in New York City at the time, and
(28:22):
she was actually kind of struggling to get by. She
was working in a sweatshop making artificial flowers to support herself,
and then she met Henry Steele Olcott at a seance
in Vermont. Olcott was, in a lot of ways the
last person you would expect to have responded positively to spiritualism.
He had served in the US Army during the American
(28:45):
Civil War, He had a career as a lawyer working
on fraud cases, and by the time he met Blovotsky
he was working as an investigative journalist. He found himself
at Blovotsky'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 Olcott had already
(29:07):
written a number of articles about spiritualism and was becoming
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 in and do these
I want to call them performances. But these these events.
(29:31):
But even before the seance began, Olcott could 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 ew and the fact that he
(29:52):
overheard her speaking French to a friend all drew the
journalist in. He was completely fascinated. Here's how he read
her later quote. This lady, Madame Helen p. Blovatsky, has
a lot, a very eventful life, traveling in most of
the lands of the Orient, searching for antiquities at the
(30:12):
base of the pyramids, witnessing the mysteries of Hindu temples,
and pushing with an armed escort far into the interior
of Africa. The adventures she has encountered, the strange people
she has seen, the perils by sea and land she
has passed through, would make one of the most romantic
stories ever told by a biographer. And the whole course
(30:35):
of my experience I never met so interesting and, if
I may say, without offense, eccentric a character. All Kat's
endorsement went a really long way in terms of validating
Blovatski'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
(30:58):
to deceive the public. He was like all in he
believed everything she said without fact checking. It seemed the
seance that Olcott witnessed sounds a little more like a
stage show. Various spirits made appearances, as in showing up
on stage a Native American woman, a man from the
(31:18):
country of Georgia, the spirit of a German Man, and
the French Canadian father of one of the attendees, who
gave responses to questions posed in French by making rapping noises.
And in one instance is said to have audibly uttered
the word way. A journalist writing for The Smithsonian, Edward Hower,
described Alcott as having one of the most dramatic midlife
(31:41):
crises in history and his relationship with Blovotsky. Some takes
on their relationship suggest that Madame 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
(32:04):
part because he moved in with her when they both
got back to New York. Even so, 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
(32:25):
relationship with anyone. She generally described herself in a way
that today might be categorized as asexual. She once said quote,
I had a volcano in constant eruption in my brain
and a glacier at the foot of the mountain, but
she and Olcott tended to refer to one another as chum,
(32:47):
so they were close. But her characterization as a mistress
who lured him away from his wife really doesn't quite track. Olcott,
by the way, was known to have had mistresses. He
sounds like something of a ladies man, but it doesn't
appear that Blovotsky was one of them. Olcott was a
major boon to Madame Blovotsky's public persona through his writing,
(33:08):
as well as a source of financial support. Their shared
apartment became an epicenter for spiritualist gatherings, and they routinely
hosted seances and discussions of the paranormal there. Blovotsky 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
(33:29):
for discussion of the paranormal and occult that Colonel Henry
Olcott suggested that they formalize their gatherings under an official
organization that could study all of the mystical and spiritual
subjects that they were all interested in. And this marks
the beginning of the Theosophical Society, which sought to create
an identity for itself that was separate from the spiritualist movement,
(33:51):
and to help shape that identity, Elena began writing. One
of the numerous reasons that Blavotsky was and remains the
figure of controversy is really clear in her writing from
this period. She published her book Isis Unveiled in eighteen
seventy seven. All Caught edited it, and she leveled a
(34:12):
lot of criticism at both organized religion and the scientific community.
She thought that both groups were missing the real path
to enlightenment and insight. Theosophy, according to Helena Blovotsky, was
the answer, and it was, to quote her quote, the
synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy. It was a way
(34:32):
to bring those three disciplines together. This book was both
praised and panned, and Blovotsky put all of the reviews
into a scrapbook. 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
(34:55):
ancient and secret knowledge. Its deepest roots are in Helena's
verse versions of Buddhism and Hinduism, but she incorporated so
many varied ideas because she envisioned theosophy as something that
could unite the world's varied systems of beliefs. Although Madame
Blovotsky had managed to amass a following in the United States,
(35:16):
it didn't really sustain itself, and as her influence and
the members of the Theosophical Society fizzled out, she and
Alcott decided to move on and supporting Blovotsky and touting
her gifts. He had really squandered his good name among
his fellow journalists in the United States, who had really
just taken to mocking him openly about it. Yeah, he
(35:38):
kind of tanked his career to prepare to leave with
an eye towards India. Elena Blovotsky became a US 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,
(35:58):
eighteen seventy eight, they left the US for India. More
specifically than simply going to India, though, all Kott and
Blovotsky intended for the Theosophical Society to join up with
the Ariya Samaje, which was a Hindu reform movement that
had started in eighteen seventy five. All Kott and Blovotsky
were novelties in Bombay. They openly criticized colonialism, and they
(36:23):
embraced Eastern religious ideas, and in doing so they kind
of became media darlings for a time. Through a spiritualist
named 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,
(36:45):
if that meant it led to paying gigs for them.
These seances featured all kinds of paranormal happenings. When Sennett's wife,
for example, mentioned a lost brooch that she longed to find,
Blovotsky told her it had rematerialized in her flower bed heads.
Those flower beds were dug up and lo the brooch.
She is also said to have produced a spray of
(37:06):
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. Olcott and Blovotsky set up
their Theosophical Society headquarters in Bombay in eighteen seventy nine.
Madame Blovotsky became the editor of their periodical, The Theosophist,
which was the role she would have for the next
nine years. Olcott toured the Indian subcontinent giving lectures. He
(37:31):
spoke against British efforts to convert Buddhists to Christianity, and
on a trip to Sri Lanka, which was of course
still called Ceylon at the time, he and Madame Blovotsky
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
(37:51):
texts to designing a flag which is still in use today.
He also started working as a healer. He believed that
magnetism had curative properties and that he could manipulate it
to administer to all manner of ailments. While the beginning
of Glovotsky's and Olcott's time in Bombay and Ceylon was joyous,
(38:12):
the tides eventually turned. The members of the Theosophical Society
asked Olcott to stop healing people. The public version of
this story was that they felt like it was depleting
his energy, but there was also likely some kind of
version about it being problematic. Then, Olcott and Blovotsky became
embroiled in a dispute when a woman that they had
(38:33):
taken under their wing as a medium named Emma Colombe
started to hold obviously fake seances to make easy money. Next,
the head of the Arias Image 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
(38:54):
view Blovotsky 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 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
(39:15):
Masters that Madame Blovotsky knew, but one of them was
obviously plagiarized from an American periodical, and someone recognized it,
and so the press, which had initially welcomed the Theosophists,
turned on 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
(39:37):
and Olcott moved their headquarters from Bombay to Madras in
eighteen eighty two to get away from the controversy. That
worked for a while, but within a few years there
was another, much bigger controversy. Emma Colomb, who had been
doing those fake seances, published a series of letters in
a Madras periodical. She said they were written to her
(39:58):
by Helena Blovotz. They clearly instructed her to create fake,
miraculous and paranormal events to support their various stories. Bolovotsky
and Alcott dismissed these letters as fakes, 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
(40:19):
life size doll that they were puppeteering in like darkness
to try to convince people they were being visited by
the masters of Blovotsky often referenced there's some very fun
and kooky theatricality to it, and that is how the
London Society for Psychical Research came to open an investigation
(40:40):
into Blovotsky in the Theosophical Society. That investigation, which was
conducted by Richard Hodgson, was aided by none other than
Emma Koolohm, who showed how, among other things, the miracle
of things like letters dropping into visitors laps seemingly from
thin air was actually achieved through a bit of theatrical trickery.
There was a thread and hook system in the ceiling.
(41:03):
A handwriting expert was also called upon to weigh in
on whether the letters that Kolombe had provided as evidence
of Madam Blovotsky's treachery were indeed written by Blovotsky. We
have talked on the show before about some of the
problems with handwriting analysis, but this was very damning at
the time. In eighteen eighty five, parapsychologist Richard Hodgson filed
(41:26):
his report which concluded that Blovotsky was a fraud. Olcott
was found to merely have been incredibly gullible. After the
Hodgson Report, Blovotsky left India, although she continued to edit
The Theosophist. The damage of this report was far reaching,
in addition to discrediting Blovotsky in a very public way,
(41:48):
and also sowed 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.
He instead wanted to just let things died down the
way they had in the past. To Helena, this really
felt like a betrayal. It essentially ended their partnership and
(42:10):
their friendship. Madame Lavotsky, who was quite ill at the
time due to a problem with her liver, took a
steamer to Europe, and despite the apparent seriousness of her
health when she left India, she did make a recovery
after spending some time in Belgium. She established the Blovotsky
Lodge of London in eighteen eighty seven, and in eighteen
eighty eight she released the work that she's probably most
(42:32):
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. The book's subhead
is there is no religion higher than Truth, and the
introduction in Blovotsky makes her goal clear quote. The aim
(42:53):
of this work may be thus stated, to show that
nature is not a fortuitous concurrence of Adams, and to
aid Si to man his rightful place in the scheme
of the universe. To rescue from degradation the archaic truths
which are the basis of all religions. To uncover, to
some extent, the fundamental unity from which they all spring. Finally,
(43:15):
to show that the occult side of nature has never
been approached by the science of modern civilization. In eighteen
eighty nine she published two more books. The Voice of
Silence has the subtitle translated from the Book of the
Golden Precepts, which shares a common origin with the Secret Doctrine.
The rules and ethics presented here contrasts the two paths
(43:35):
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 clear exposition in the form of question and answer
of the ethics, science and philosophy for the study of
(43:56):
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. Madam Blovotski died on
May eighth, eighteen ninety one, at the tail end of
an influenza epidemic, and that date of her death is
now celebrated annually by Theosophists as White Lotus Day. Long
(44:18):
after her death, starting in nineteen fifty, but A. Blovotska'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 Buddhism and Hinduism to
the Western audience, and this is a little bit tricky
to celebrate, of course, since these ideas were being channeled
(44:39):
through a European lens. We also don't know really what
the depth of her exposure was to these things before
she started talking about them. As though she were an expert,
and since the study of these belief systems on the
part of Blovotsky is difficult to corroborate in any level,
particularly in her earlier years. I just want people to
(45:02):
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 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.
(45:25):
And as for that damning report of eighteen eighty five
that declared Madame Blovotsky a fraud, in nineteen eighty six
the Society for Psychical Research 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
(45:46):
that Hodgson raised that remain unanswered, this is one of
those things you'll sometimes find argued about on the Internet
that some people will say this is vindication of Madame
Blovotski and others are like, no, no, they're just pointing
out that the research was bad, not weighing in really
on whether that conclusion would have been reached otherwise. Right.
(46:08):
Like I said, she continues to be very polarizing. I
find her utterly fascinating, but I don't have a strong opinion.
I have some opinions, but they're not strong, and they're
kind of cloudy for me anyway, which is unusual, just
because there's always part of me that's like, I don't know,
I don't know anything. So thanks so much for joining
(46:35):
us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us
a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com,
and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio 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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'Monster: BTK', the newest installment in the 'Monster' franchise, reveals the true story of the Wichita, Kansas serial killer who murdered at least 10 people between 1974 and 1991. Known by the moniker, BTK – Bind Torture Kill, his notoriety was bolstered by the taunting letters he sent to police, and the chilling phone calls he made to media outlets. BTK's identity was finally revealed in 2005 to the shock of his family, his community, and the world. He was the serial killer next door. From Tenderfoot TV & iHeartPodcasts, this is 'Monster: BTK'.
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