Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891)

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Prelude to the Twentieth Century
Presentation 3 of 13

Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891)
Isis Unveiled. The Secret Doctrine. Theosophy as a World Pattern
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, July 19, 1984

Transcript:

Madame Blavatsky was born in 1831 in August, on the 12th of August. Her father was a military man and at the beginning of the nineteenth century a military man was still someone who had pride of purpose and discipline. They were not enlisted common individuals. They were usually aristocratic or semi-aristocratic officers. Her mother, who died very early – I think she was twenty-eight when she died – was a beautiful woman, and was descended for her part from a very aristocratic Russian family – the Dolgoruki. Rurik, one of the founders of the Russian aristocratic lineage, was in the family line. So from her maternal grandmother, who raised her from the age of twelve on, was an aristocratic Russian.

As a young child, Helena was a precocious type of an individual due partly to her own temperament and partly to the quality of experience to which she was susceptible. It’s difficult for us in this country, in this age, to appreciate the wide difference in human beings. We are so inured to the mayonnaise-type of personality that it’s difficult for us to envision the wide differences in human personalities. And so it’s difficult for us to appreciate what a real wildcard human being is like – someone for whom there are no stereotypes, someone for whom many of the closed doors of this universe are wide open and drafty. And as a youngster she was tuned in, as we would say, to the secret corridors. In fact, as usually happens with personalities of this type, they call forth from phenomenal reality conditions which meet their own interior qualities. We’re used to thinking that the exterior produces the interior and we have to give pause to ourselves somewhat when we run across individuals for whom the interior life is so powerful that it calls forth the choreography in time-space appropriate to the unfolding of the drama within. There are such beings. There are such types of people. They’ve existed by the hundreds throughout history. They are not so rare as we might think.

Her maiden name was Hahn and so little Helena Hahn found a capacity to charm her playmates with stories, and in fact she would make up stories that would become so captivating to them and so real to her that she would begin to enter into the tone of the dramatic unfoldment of the story to the point to where her blue eyes flashing and her features suddenly become stilled and her voice rising in shrill pitches approximating either rage or ecstatic discovery. She would call forth a quality of presence which the other people would feel, the children. She was exposed to the military life in the wilds of the east of Russia at the time. She was a pet, an army brat as we would say, from the Second World War. She was a pet part of the regiment and very often participated in situations that normally little girls do not see. And from this combining of her visionary capacity and this exposure to the military regimen of manly life, a peculiar sense of practical self-protection occurred to her, and from time to time whenever she was squeezed a little too hard in the wrong way psychologically she would retort vehemently.

The peasants recall a story where a young boy in early adolescence, probably thirteen or fourteen, who is pulling her perambulator – she was but four years old and she was walking with a nurse – had rubbed her the wrong way and she had turned to him and retorted to him that the Rusalkas will get you, these water nymphs, and had drawn her voice and her styling of presence to such a pitch that the young adolescent feeling the verging of what we would call metaphysical fright occurring to him took the path that the sense of death usually brings to human beings, the path of flight, and his body was recovered several days later – he had drowned. The physician said by accident, the peasants said that this little girl is dangerous.

These kinds of occurrences with a psychically gifted child, in a situation where the family life was clearly polarized. Her mother wrote nine novels that were bestsellers. She longed to escape to Saint Petersburg to the literary circles there. Her father, a military man, loved the frontier, loved the fighting. Her sister Vera was several years younger than her and her brother Leonid came very late, just a year or so before the mother died in 1842. So that Helena, as a young child, gained a very peculiar cast of characters in her appraisal of human capacity. And in fact when her mother died she was sent to live with her grandparents. At first her grandfather, who was in what we would call the political service of the Tsar, was in charge. He was a governor general in the forbidding city of Astrakhan where the Volga River fans out and its delta is several miles wide and it sluggishly slithers into the Caspian Sea. Bertrand Russell once, writing of Astrakhan, said “it is the last place on earth anyone would voluntarily go to.” But very soon the family, the grandparents, and young Helena, and her sister moved up the Volga to Saratoga. And there the Governor General’s mansion contained many rooms, servants’ quarters, family rooms, and rooms of state – an enormous spread of complications. But what drew Helena’s imagination and her adventurous spirit was the honeycombing underground of cellars and long corridors and secret passages. And it was there that she began to firm up for herself the strategy of her visionary capacity. As a 12-year old, 13-year old girl, she would often be found walking at night, sleepwalking, and they would search the grounds and search the house and she was not to be found. And then the trembling servants who would be given the task of going downstairs, underground, under the house where men lived, to look for the holy terror. And there she would be pacing the corridors, stopping every once in a while, whispering to herself long monologues of interior design. And they in great frightfulness would lead her upstairs and retire to talk about her.

This kind of an adolescence of course produces a very tough individual if one is to survive. First of all, there is the sense of the crassness of humanity. How can they talk of me in this way? How dare they look at me behind the rooms and the vegetation and behind the curtains of polite society and talk of me this way. And yet, at the same time, the dawning realization that the human personality is not a wall but a net. And if a net highly permeable to movements and currents that hardly belong to this world. This became the familiar intelligence of Helena Hahn. And all the time that her adolescence was rising to a shape of becoming a young woman– the age of sixteen she met a young army officer who was interested in the occult. And in fact it seemed for her that this was the appointed round in her life. And it was with great pain when she learned that he had left the vicinity and had gone to another portion of the Russian Empire. And this first love was shattered. And three weeks later, on the rebound, she married old Colonel, old General Blavatsky.

Someone had taunted her about the jilt and had said she was actually not very beautiful. She was very weird. She was precocious. She read occult books all the time. No man would be interested in her. Not even old General Blavatsky who was about forty years old at the time. And so the young girl, still sixteen, in just a few days brought about the enticement and the marriage – which lasted three months. She couldn’t stand it. It was an impossible situation. He was very much like her father, a military man rising up, and she was a flower of infinite depth unfolding petal by petal. And there was no room to grow. There was nowhere for her to be. And so she left her husband after three months and returned back to her grandfather’s house estate. And there the incomprehensibility of the old grandparents: How could she leave her husband? What kind of a troublesome little girl is this anyway? And so a message was sent to her father who was at that time at a distant post in Russia to quickly come and take his daughter back. Nothing could be done with such a girl who knows what she could do next.

There was no railroad line directly leading there and so a bevy of servants was garnered to escort young Helena Blavatsky to a port where there would be a ship that would take her around to another port from whence she could get a train and then be reestablished in her father’s care. She never reached her father. We don’t know exactly how she meant it, but the choreography ran something like this. She managed to secure for herself an escape aboard a smaller ship captained by an Englishman that was eventually headed towards Constantinople. And at the age of seventeen she slipped out of the entire world that she had been raised in and threw herself completely upon the entire wide world. And for the next twenty-five years she roamed the world not as an adventuress but as someone for whom the interior flowering had to open up in the largest amphitheater that she could give herself. And that was the enormous entirety of the planet. We have some indications that when she reached Constantinople that she teamed up with a Countess Keswick who was there, but none of the information is sound. There just is simply no way of telling exactly what was her itinerary.

We know that she probably spent a little time in Egypt after reaching Constantinople. In fact there are accounts from various individuals of having met her in various places. In Egypt we have this kind of a story. This is from Mary Neff’s Personal Memoirs of H. P.

Blavatsky.

She talks in here about traveling “In Upper Egypt, [and] whenever our caravan stopped, a young traveler who believed he excelled on the flute amused the company by playing. The camel-drivers and other Arabs invariably checked him, having been several times annoyed by the unexpected appearance of various families of the reptile tribe, which generally shirk an encounter with men. Finally our caravan met with a party, among whom were professional snake charmers, and the virtuoso was then invited, for experiment’s sake, to display his skill.”

And so all of these snake charmers got their flutes going and pretty soon all the snakes of the place had gathered around and one enormous spotted character had raised itself and was dancing high on its tail coming closer and closer to the flute player who finally lifted himself up and fled like everyone had to the backs of the camels. But one old snake charmer reached into his pouch and brought out a dead looking plant and waved this at the snake that refused to be charmed. And it too very soon just in time fell under the spell. All of their heads were cut off and they were all thrown into a well.

These kinds of stories abound when one is trying to find, what did she do in those twenty-five years? The tone of the stories is that she led the most melodramatic life that she could find. Not an adventuress though. She was exploding inside and she had to find some tapestry against which to allow the shrapnel of this psychic explosion to project itself, to occur, if only to save herself. The most important clue to Madame Blavatsky’s life is the hypnotic color of her eyes, the azure blue of her eyes, which was captivating in the extreme. Almost all of the jaded reporters, critics of her, who record having met her in person, all allude to the incredible sense of presence in those eyes, infinite pools of life, something alive in this woman of indefinite extent.

So we know that she moved to Constantinople. She moved down into Egypt. It’s most probable that she crossed back over through Greece on her way to England. We have some indication that very early on in the 1850s, perhaps in 1850 or 1851, that she crossed over to Canada and then made her way down through the United States, through Texas down to Mexico. We know that she was in Peru probably sometime – 1851 or late 1850 – and all the time traveling, never going to a destination. And that’s perhaps the key of it all. Always moving in a kind of a freelance fashion, following some interior guidance, some sense of becoming acquainted with the elements of a composition. Her itinerary was not geographical. It was, as we would say today, psychical. She was attempting to simply acquaint herself physically with the locations, the people, the sights. She had as a youngster read voluminously in all of the occult sciences. Now she had put the books aside because she realized that what was unfolding in her was not the mind. It was not an intellectual assessment. It was some deep experiential opening. And for this only actual experience, only the sense and quality of personal presence would do. And so she had given up educating herself in the traditional way through the mind and had gone in the primitive quest to simply expose herself graphically and immediately on a worldwide scale to whatever mysteries actually occurred in the quality of the ruins left, in the quality of the descendants of the people left, in the qualities of the actual presence that could be evoked by her being there. And so for a quarter of a century she tutored her inner self. She exposed her inner self to the qualities of the planet. And in roving she made her way several times through Asia. She records, in fact, in 1856 that she was in India and got out of India just before the mutiny of 1887. The quality of her descriptions of India are very interesting. We have some examples from the volume. I think the best readable introduction to Madame Blavatsky, her book called, From the Caves and Jungles of Hindustan. Here’s an example:

“It is a remarkable coincidence that almost all the cave temples of India are dug from conical cliffs and mountains as though the ancient builders looked for such natural pyramids purposely. I have already noted this peculiar and unusual shape in describing our trip to Karli,” – one of the large cave complexes in India, southern India – “... and do not remember seeing it anywhere but in India. Is it a mere coincidence, or is it one of the rules of the religious architecture of those remote times? And who are the imitators – the builders of the Egyptian pyramids, or the unknown architects of the underground temples of India? In pyramids as well as in cave temples everything seems to be calculated with geometrical exactitude. And just as in the case of pyramids the entrances into the cave temples are not at the foot but at a certain distance from the base of the hill.”

Note the quality here of exposing herself primordially to the experiences whatever they are, wherever they are, let them occur but always with the imposition, like a montage in a film, of a template of understanding that somewhere here is a structure, is an order, and all that we have to go on are the kinds of parallel arcs of discovery which are available to us. Why not go to the books? Because of the conviction that human beings, given as we are, are gullible and easily duped. One could tell any amount of stories and sway any number of people. She was peculiarly and almost ironically aware of this flaw in this form, so she constantly guarded herself against having her own self fall into this kind of a trap. And in order to do this, like a masterful juggler, she was always keeping in practice with others, always keeping the sense of liveliness of possibilities of renditions and versions alive. And this is why those twenty-five years, why that quarter of a century, is impossible to find a an itinerary which one could set down which one could log or map because she was learning exactly how to juggle the reality behind itineraries, to acclimate herself to a flow of pattern which is based on an experience of unity and not upon portioned out sequencing. She was tuning herself to a grand chord rather than learning to hum notes that might lead one to understand chords.

So she was circumnavigating the world to get a shortcut to interior development. Again, From the Caves and Jungles of Hindustan, just the quality of– of her writing now:

“Daily we wandered across rivers and jungles, passing villages and ruins of ancient fortresses, over local country roads between Nassik and Jubblepore, traveling by day in bullock cars, sometimes on elephants, or on horseback, and at times being carried in palanquins. And at nightfall frequently pitching our tent wherever we might be. These days offered us an opportunity to convince ourselves of the fact that man is able to surmount dangerous and almost fatal conditions of climate by mere force of habit, almost unconsciously.”

Indications again of a grand interior design. One last reading from this. While she was exposing herself to this kind of a development, one develops the sense almost like someone who has traveled with the circus for a very long time, or has traveled with any kind of a road show, one develops the ability to become a raconteur of life par excellence. So here she is:

“A Persian inscription on the base of a white marble octagon reveals that it cost one hundred thousand rupees. By day, bathed in the hot rays of the sun, its tall minaret-like outline stands out like a pyramid of ice against the cloudless azure of the sky. By night, in that peculiar phosphorescent moonlight proper to India, which has enthused all travelers and artists, it is still more dazzling and poetical. Its summit looks as if it were covered with light freshly fallen snow. Raising its slender profile above the dark green background of the shrubbery, it suggests some pure midnight apparition, soaring over the silent abode of destruction and death, lamenting the past that will never return.”

Captivating stories. The ability to have on-call thousands of vignettes of actual experience at the same time that these actual vignettes of experience have risen within a fertile ground of some strategic glance maintained with varying constancy over the twenty-five year period. And as she matured at this, she realized that there was some guiding light within her that allowed her to do this. She was not swayed by the swirl of life. There was something inside of her that gave it shape and form. There was in fact the sense, increasingly, of guidance, the sense of someone being there. And of course having come from the background that she did, she was very ready to believe that it might not be herself at all.

We haven’t time to go into the doctrine of icons, which forms a very strong part of the Greek Orthodox Russian mind. Simply to say that there is an indelible belief handed down through the Byzantine Empire still penetrating the Russian mind and still very much alive in the Eastern Orthodox Church, that there are portions of our phenomenal world that become charged and transubstantiated, and become transparent as it were to the spiritual force behind all things. It began to occur to Helena Blavatsky by the time she was in her twenties that she herself might become an icon for these forces in the person of some masterful presence expressing itself through her. And so she began to record more and more the sense that she was given direction by the master– the master, who later became known as Morya. And in fact as this began to occur to her, through the 1850s, by the time 1856 came around she was convinced that in her motion around the world she had found traces everywhere. She had found traces in Peru and South America; that the Red men had come from an ancient Atlantean civilization. She found traces in Egypt that somehow the builders of the pyramids had been related and that all of this relation pointed toward some area still vibrant upon the planet to where she had not carried herself. And that mysterious geographical location was Tibet. And more and more it loomed to her as the final secret, the talisman for her. She must go to Tibet.

She brought herself in 1856 to the very verge of the Tibetan frontier. She went north from Kashmir and up into Leh – L-E-H – in the Ladakh area, then known as Little Tibet. And this was a very forbidding terrain, perhaps the most difficult entrance into the Tibetan region would be from the Ladakh region. Later on, about fifty years as a matter of fact, after Madame Blavatsky tried to enter into Tibet through Ladakh, on one of his return journeys. Sir Aurel Stein coming back from Central Asia made his way down through those passes several hundreds of miles of steep passes and remarked that this was probably not the most used trail. That one would much rather go all the way around by Afghanistan up through the Pamirs and come down through Kashgar and Yarkand and that region rather than cut across what seems like a shortcut on the map.

So this young woman, twenty-four years old, twenty-five years old, exposed herself to one of the most difficult terrains in the world – not as an adventuress but as someone for whom there was an increasing sacred responsibility to unfold that whatever it was had to come out and had to come out in terms of the actual quality of the world. And the actual quality of the world then became more and more transparent to her, and a kind of a cosmic history began to unfold itself in the penetrating gaze that she began to notice in herself looking through time, looking through conditions, beginning to sense their incredible integrity. How the origins are still there. How all the processes of forming are still there. How some gifted medium who might touch an object would record the psychic history of that object through some timeflow or through some space plane. And she began to acclimate herself to realizing that perhaps the entire world was becoming a crystal ball for her through which she could see all things in all times. There was no time really for others. There were friends that she kept in correspondence with, but it was a lonely journey and by 1860 she found herself back in Russia, but in the southernmost part, the Caucasian Georgian area of Russia the city of Tiflis. One of the large cities just south of the Caucasus range. She’d been there several times as a youngster and so she stayed in Tiflis for a while trying to reconnoiter herself. Thinking to herself that there must be some way in which to pattern this event. The event being the unfolding of a world self through her.

It occurred to her in Tiflis that life for her had become something utterly different than it was to anyone else that she was able to meet. We find here, in Mary Neff’s Personal Memoirs of Madame Blavatsky:

“General P. S. Nikolaeff describes the Tiflis home of the Fadeefs” – who are the grandparents of Helena – “in his Reminiscences of Prince A. T. Bariatinsky, as follows: ’They were living in those years in the ancient mansion of Prince Tchavtchavadze, the great building itself carrying the imprint of something weird or peculiar about it. … A long, lofty and gloomy hall was hung with the family portraits of the Fadeefs and the Princes Dolgorouky. Farther on was a drawing-room, its walls covered with Gobelin tapestry, a present from the Empress Catherine; and near at hand was the apartment of Mademoiselle N. A. Fadeef – in itself one of the most remarkable of private museums. There were brought together arms and weapons from all the countries of the world; ancient crockery, cups and goblets, archaic utensils, Chinese and Japanese idols, mosaics and images of the Byzantine epoch, Persian and Turkish carpets, and fabrics worked with gold and silver, statues, pictures, paintings, petrified fossils, and finally a very rare and most precious library.”

And in fact her maternal grandmother was very famous as a botanist in the nineteenth century and had a collection of exotic plants from all over the world. So that the home that she went to in Tiflis was like a collection, a skimming of the cream of history and of the world in its vegetative aspect and in its cultural aspect. In the fossilized mineral aspect. All of the worlds were brought together. And the house itself was an attraction. There were no museums of natural history at this time, anywhere in the world really.

So she found herself in Tiflis in this kind of a home just when she was beginning to realize that the opening up of the interior flower had made the entire world in its history transparent to her. And it was then that the call of the master came strongest and she realized that she would have to penetrate into Tibet. She would have to find where he was. That there was an ashram somewhere in Tibet where he actually existed, physically existed, as a presence which she could experience. And so she moved herself again on her travels.

By 1864 Madame Blavatsky finally penetrated into Tibet. There were not many Europeans who had ever gone into Tibet at that time. The old Vajrayana tradition guarded itself very strongly against interlopers, against any incursions. In fact up until the 1930s there were just a handful of individuals that were actually welcomed by the Tibetan theocracy. We have some wonderful accounts. [S. C. Das?], in the eighteen, late 1890s, went in disguise to Lhasa. And his book, still in print, in a reprint, gives the sense of the eeriness of Tibet even in the late 1890s for an experienced man of the world. Das was a diplomat and a soldier of fortune and a great scholar. Even in the World War One period, when Francis Younghusband and Sir Charles Bell managed to go into Tibet and later on when Evans-Wentz managed to get into Tibet. The sense all the way through is of the eeriness, the strangeness of the place, the forbiddeness. Even when Anagarika Govinda went in the Second World War era there was the sense that this was almost untrodden.

So you can imagine in 1864 someone peculiarly grown and changed and evolved and visionary like Helena Blavatsky penetrating into Tibet with the conviction that there was the center of the galactic flower unfolding in her. And she found him. There are stories that she spent seven years in the ashram, which she denied several times later on. She would always in her writings try to keep a balance between the overall strategical ethical impetus behind her life as a purpose, as a plan, and a tactical sense of keeping off guard all peoples who would try to dupe her or become interlopers or become critics. And so, in this balance the stories would come out and be denied and changed and reoccur in different versions until almost nothing could be determined. She writes,

“ ’I did [not] come back from India in one of those early steamers.’ ’November, 1869? Well, maybe for all I know or remember. We did not land. All I know is, that it was the year of the opening of the Canal.’ ” – By this she means the opening of the Suez Canal which was in November of 1869. “ ’All I know is, that it was the year of the opening of the Canal, soon after and when the Empress of France was there. Whether she had been there some months before or was there then – I could not tell. But my remembrances hang on the fuss made about it on board, and constant conversations, and that either our steamer or one going with it was the third that crossed it.’ ”

The hidden quality here– the hidden quality is that of someone whose inner psychic memory has been trained. The old classic art of memory was, in Cicero, Ad Herennium, is “loci et foci”, that a place and a focus needs to be structured within a context and as long as one builds an architectonic series of conditions, contextual conditions, one can literally expand the memory indefinitely. There is no final finite range to man’s memory.

She recalls, in classic art of memory style, a poignant feeling toned event which keyed and thus cued in this mnemonic structure. That’s what’s being given here. So by 1869, by the end of 1869, she had in fact been highly trained. This is not something that someone just develops and runs across. This in fact is a condition which is taught one. Now in the India, in the Tibet, of the late 19th century, very often when in the traditions one would be teaching a neophyte memory training along with developing the set of matrixes, one would also present to them a number of objects which would be quickly taken away and one would then be called upon to recount what was there. And so this game, this exercise, of parading objects very very quickly and then taking them away forcing the individual then to develop what we call today, naively, the photographic memory, simply what it is is allowing the occurrence of that time space to occur just as it is. And if one has a memory matrix training built up it records indelibly. It also opens up the capacities of the resonance of the senses which then integrate on a transcendental level and allow for an almost infinitesimal, microscopic, or telescopic analyzing of the moment. One can learn how a single moment, a single grain of dust, could entail– entertain infinity.

This capacity is evidently in place in Madame Blavatsky by the turn of 1870. And in fact we find her going back, going back with an idea finally of setting up some kind of a society. And in fact the first place that she tried was in Cairo, in Egypt, and she was there for several years. And it wouldn’t take, it wouldn’t happen, it wouldn’t grow. By this time she was sure of herself. She was sure of her capacities; sure of the mission given to her. It had to be in Cairo across from the Great Pyramids, where else in history would it be? And yet it was not there. And it became apparent to her that she needed to open herself up more for guidance. Where was the new power? Where was the new center? Where the pyramids of energy and the planet were coming together?

In 1874 she finally decided upon New York City, that this was the place of upcoming energy in the world where the focus would be its strongest. And so she took herself to New York City and found herself, for the first time in her life, probably, completely cut off, poor, and penniless. She lived in a little room and there is in fact a number of recalls of her life at this time, various people.

“At this time Madame was greatly troubled about money;” writes Mary Neff, “the income which she had received regularly from her father in Russia had stopped, and she was almost penniless.”

The condition incidentally was that her father had died and the estate was in a kind of a probationary period and so there were no funds coming to her.

“She had some idea that this condition was caused by the machinations of some person or persons in touch with their father, and she expressed herself about these persons with customary vigor. [Still] Some of the more conservative people in our house suggested that she was, after all, an adventuress, and the want of money was only what [one might have] expected; but my friend, Miss Parker, whom she took with her to the Russian Consul, assured me that she [really was] a Russian Countess, that the Consul knew of her family, and had promised to do all he could to get in touch with them and find out what was the difficulty. … The owner of our house was a Mr. Rinaldo, who personally collected his rents, and so became acquainted with our people. Like everyone else, he became interested in H. P. B. and introduced two young friends of his to her. They came very often to see her, and were of practical aid to her, in suggesting and giving her work. They [let] her design picture advertising-cards for themselves and others.”

She did many ’odd jobs’ as we would say. She once had a factory for making artificial flowers in Tiflis and at one time in New York she actually went into street hawking of little artificial flowers just to carry her through and tied herself through. She was tough. She was a survivor. She’s somebody who– she had been through the most difficult terrains in the planet, in the most difficult psychological way to go through them. And so she was tough. She was a campaigner.

But then it occurred to her that there was a point of destiny that does occur in lives and in history. And she found herself drawn to Vermont to a meeting at the Eddy House. The two Eddy brothers – not Mary Baker Eddy. And it was there in one fell swoop in a series of seances that Madame Blavatsky penetrated the historical phenomenal world and became the high priestess of the occult as one writer said, almost overnight.

And we’ll get to that after our break. Take a break now.

Forgive me if I leave out favorite parts or favorite stories but I actually always have four or five times more information than I have time for. And I don’t– I don’t write out notes and I don’t write out lectures anymore. I realize the ethical responsibility of creating here and now what is being said because that’s the only way that it’s real. I have too trained in intelligence and I know too many different traditions where I can organize something that would pass beautifully into your minds and not be real. So we have to have something that’s nutritious, something which has its flaws and its unraveling ends so that you can pick away at it and not be baffled by it but take it and use it in your own way. I don’t know what anybody does with these talks – they’ve been going on now for four years and we’ve been tracing the history of man in a strange way. We’ve been doing it person by person because that’s the only way to keep ourselves off the hot plate of ideational constructions which are grand and great for people that don’t have them. But for people like ourselves that have too many of them we’ve got to steer clear of them for a while. So I’m trying to present spontaneously whatever seems appropriate in a shape that can be heard in an hour and a half. So if I leave out some things it’s because all of these individuals that we’re talking about are too fabulous for words. You can’t in an hour and a half capture them. There’s no way. You can’t even present them. So I’m just trying to give some sort of a glimpse and hope that for yourselves that you’re led or driven or charmed back to these people back to their works. These people actually existed. They are real. What other people have made out of them is what is fictive. We have to have a diet of actual experience before we can have any real sense of what we are about.

So 1874, meeting Colonel Olcott. I had hoped to have some slides – I don’t– still don’t have slides. We think of Colonel Olcott as the old white-bearded man. He was actually very handsome, American army officer, very forthright looking individual kind of individual that builds something that lasts. Some monks from Sri Lanka told me that the only statue of an American in Asia in a public place in a major city is of Colonel Olcott – Colombo, right in downtown Colombo. He revised the educational system of Sri Lanka. He made it possible for those people to recover their own heritage. We think that the treasures of Asia have always been there. They’ve just come back in our own time. The Anagarika Dharmapala had to take a broom when he went to Bodh Gaya to sweep out the dust of centuries. The place of the Buddha’s enlightenment was in total neglect for centuries. It was filthy. It’s only in our own time that all the treasures have been brought back out and it’s our task to polish them up, set them out in the sun again. You know the Western tradition began with the sacredness of holding rites of purification in the pure air – whether it’s the groves of the ancient Celts, or the groves of the ancient Greeks, the pure air. And that’s what we’re– we’re doing here is we’re just opening ourselves up to the roofless temple of personal experience.

When Madame Blavatsky got together, finally, with Colonel Olcott who was a newspaperman also at this time she realized that he was the right man to not just to be a front man to advertise it to give P. R. but somebody who had integrity. He did and still stands for integrity. And so she began to collect around her very very quickly a number of talented individuals. And they got together and they formed The Theosophical Society – it’s what she always wanted, what she always wanted to do. And as soon as that society was formed and in place, she, like an artist, sensed that the canvas was there and that’s when she produced her first really great extended work, Isis Unveiled. She painted this picture on the tapestry of The Theosophical Society, 1875 to 1877. It’s called Isis Unveiled.

In a world of materialistic masculinity she was saying the truth of life is something you’ve never seen. She’s been veiled for you and if you’d like to see life naked, well the entrance to her temple is through a kind of a self-purification. A recollecting of the own– of your own fragmented life. And in this recollecting of oneself, one’s Osiric disembodiment, having been chopped up by false experience, now re-collected into that new birth symbolized by the eye of Horus, the eye that sees transparently into the sun the quality of presence that one is. This individual may see Isis unveiled. That individual is then self initiated into this temple. And when we open Isis Unveiled we find tremendous imagery afoot everywhere. It’s true that if you look with a scholarly eye, or a learned eye today, that you could crumple a lot of the pages up and throw them away in terms of factual meat. But that’s not what’s going on here. What’s going on here is a very courageous woman balancing herself on a planet which has become completely transparent to all time and space, like an acrobat trying to present the exfoliation of that life-pattern. Not energy as some dead continuum existing as force, but some goddess whose veils can be drawn aside in life herself can be seen.

There’s a poignant image at the end of page 110 about the Virgin Mary. She writes, “To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries ‘were not aware’ from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbé Dubois – certainly a learned and competent authority – ‘conducted the images of the Virgin and Savior on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church.’ Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the ‘wicked heathen’ convey the lingham of Siva. To have used this car to carry in its turn the Romish representative of the female principle in nature, is to show discrimination and a thorough knowledge of the oldest mythological conceptions.”

Isis Unveiled contains a lot of tough talk, a lot of hard language, because Madame Blavatsky, like many of the seers of the nineteenth century, saw the storm coming. The twentieth century is such an abnormal event that it was perceptible years, decades, centuries before it occurred. She fought in Italy with the forces for Garibaldi. She knew how to use a gun. She recounts several stories where certain shopkeepers were thinking of taking advantage of this nice woman who’s alone and suddenly looked up from their designs to see the cool blue eyes and the steadily pointed gun. She was not troubled very much in her travels, not because she was some mythical survivor, because she knew, as they say in Hollywood, how to put your toe on the instep of your opponent before he realizes what you’re about.

In Isis Unveiled we find all of this imagery coming together. She takes us on a grand tour of what the world looks like when it’s esoteric history is viewed all at once. And Isis Unveiled is this. And in one of the chapters, “Secret Ciphers Exposed,” she brings out a number of secret writing capacities which were probably never before this time revealed. In another part of Isis Unveiled, she talks about “An Adept’s Soul in an Infant Body,” about how some priest who had scoffed about these heathens talking about reincarnation and especially about the Lamas who were in search of small children or babies who were the reincarnation of personages that they had known and how this one scoffer had finally been brought to a juncture where he was going to interrogate a baby in a perambulator, I think it was, and bent down to look into the eyes of the baby and found someone looking at him and speaking out of the baby’s mouth and telling him certain aspects of the situation. And the man rising, trembling, and then looking back and seeing that the baby was crying for a change of its diapers, all within a minute of time. She’s saying this world is peculiar. It’s kaleidoscopic. It doesn’t occur as some drab sequence of mental logic. It actually occurs all at once like the phantasmagoria that it is. And it is in fact only because we filter it out that we think we plan what we see. How foolish.

She talks about “An Evocation of the Souls of Flowers.” “ ‘Why carry about this bunch of dead plants?’ inquired one of the Bikshuni,” – that’s a female Bhikkhu – “an emaciated, tall and elderly woman, pointing to a large nosegay of beautiful, fresh, and fragrant flowers in the writer’s hands. ‘Dead?’ we asked inquiringly. ‘Why they have just been gathered in the garden?’ ‘And yet, they are dead,’ she gravely answered. ‘To be born in this world, is this not death? See, how these herbs look when alive in the world of eternal light, in the gardens of the blessed’ ”

Throughout all of this what comes to the surface again and again is that there is a single universal truth. There is in fact a truth which expresses itself in the very phantasmagoria of the world. And throughout writing Isis Unveiled, again and again, we find Madame Blavatsky writing to the effect because men do not perfectly imagine and believe the result is that the arts are uncertain when they might be perfectly certain that it’s a question of our watery belief our incapacity to believe and recognize that this flower of existence is but from one sap, one flow, one tone. We chop it up and we think in the chopping of it that there must then be some reality in our minds which eventually the world will conform to. But the invisible structure in Isis Unveiled becomes more and more visible until finally with the publication of it we find her completely misunderstood. The charges of charlatanism, the charges of being a con-person raged incessantly. For years The Theosophical Society struggled and grew. Branches were founded all over the world and then it began to occur to her by 1884 that she had not really delivered the message. She had delivered the phantasmagoria of the world. She’d delivered the kind of full force experience that the world seen transparently would be delivered in Isis Unveiled, but she did not feel confident that she had delivered the invisible pattern behind it. And that was now what she felt incumbent upon herself. Not simply to show the carnival but to show the agenda behind it that this is some movement with purpose.

And so she began to move to herself redoing completely Isis Unveiled. By taking it apart and by adding to every aspect of it, to branch out a completely new work with excerpts throughout it from Isis Unveiled. And so it was advertised, and this new work was to be called The Secret Doctrine. There was a special notice, and in fact the notice, the announcement of the oncoming publication of the Secret Doctrine was printed in January of 1884. The supplement to The Theosophist [May 1884]:

“A new version of ‘Isis Unveiled’.” It read, “Numerous and urgent requests have come from all parts of India, to adopt some plan for bringing the matter contained in ‘Isis Unveiled,’ within the reach of those who could not afford to purchase so expensive a work at one time. On the other hand, many, finding the outlines of the doctrine given too hazy, clamored for ‘more light,’ and necessarily misunderstanding the teaching, have erroneously supposed it to be contradictory to later revelations, which in not a few cases, have been entirely misconceived.”

Very often when Isis is unveiled, to keep in the metaphorical colloquial, it’s misunderstood in just the way in which the designation pantheism for a sense of reality is a misappropriation of intelligence. What would pantheism be? All is theism. There is nothing profane. What is the perception of that? That the universe is a single jewel of sacredness, scintillating, moving that we reflections in its facets of light? What else could it be? But the profane perversion is to consider that this just must be one more theory or one more cult or one more philosophy. And so it’s misappropriated. And this is what galled Madame Blavatsky; what called forth her sense of redoing it, of amending and changing the focus from the external from the evidence that is there in ruins and monuments, from the evidence that is there in religions and philosophies and science for all time to implode all of that information into the structure to talk about what this is from an inner, esoteric standpoint. The inner circle, the Pythagorean Mathematici. And in this concern The Secret Doctrine started to be mooted.

Issue after issue, throughout 1884, of The Theosophist advertised the imminent publication of The Secret Doctrine. And it didn’t come out. It didn’t come out. And then the society for Psychical Research in London launched a massive investigation into Madame Blavatsky and after several grueling trying months came to the conclusion that she was the most interesting charlatan in history. And she couldn’t write. And the advertisements went on making excuses. She was ill, she was busy, she was traveling. She couldn’t find the location, and so characteristic to a world class seer like this – who has learned the art of moving in hermetic patterns – began to move herself to find that location on the planet where she could write. And she found it in that place in Germany which the old Hermetic tradition still needs to raise a little monument to the good abbot who made it sacred. It was the site, in fact, of the first Christian church in Europe. That’s where the old Celtic missionaries went from Ireland in the early years of the seventh century, made it holy. Then about nine hundred years later it was reconsecrated by that great father, C. R.

And so Madame Blavatsky went to Würzburg in Germany, and sat there in a very peculiar situation, began to open herself up, and The Secret Doctrine began to come out massively. The first three weeks she wrote two hundred pages. She set herself down to a regimen. And in fact it’s very peculiar because there are some individuals who were in contact with her there. There was a Countess Wachtmeister who was present during much of the time. There was also a friend of hers, a German friend named Doctor Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden, Schleiden. In fact he used to sleep in the study on a couch next to the desk where she wrote. And when he would go to sleep at night there would be the manuscript there from the day’s writing. And in the morning when he would wake the manuscript would be covered with blue pencil writing, annotating and correcting what she had done the day before. He claimed he was a light sleeper. How did it happen? How did it happen?

The Secret Doctrine when it came out, came out from a genius who balanced herself between this personality in this phenomenal time-space and an inner personality for whom time-space was just so much chiffon and papier maché. And balancing a day and night regimen, The Secret Doctrine came out full. That mystical interior, it’s not just a pen moving automatically by itself. It’s not just a sleep walking woman taking up a pen and correcting what she had done during the day. All of this is gross. It’s a misunderstanding of the process of what a full hermetic process actually is when it occurs. It draws forth the conditionals and the energies from the phenomenal realm that it needs to affect its manifestation and it does it as a unity. It doesn’t parcel itself out, portion itself out.

And so The Secret Doctrine has a peculiar flavor to it that Isis Unveiled does not have. Isis Unveiled is a flamboyant tour de force of the exterior world of man and all of its esoteric complications. But The Secret Doctrine is like one of those mandalic rosettes from an inner mathematici standpoint, designing out the radiant rods of mating. Assuming that one’s experience will flesh out the circumference of this work.

It turned out that most of the beginnings of The Secret Doctrine, probably the first volume and a half, were written in Würzburg. There were difficulties to overcome of course, and by October of 1886 one of the closest associates with Madame Blavatsky, an Indian named T. Subba Row was becoming a little uneasy. He read the hundreds of pages that were coming out in this process and he began to feel a little skittish. These were really secret revelations. Perhaps they shouldn’t be made public. Not only that, they were coming from a woman, and a European woman no less. All of these concerns began to rise. This beautiful little booklet by Boris De Zhirkov, The Rebirth of the Occult Tradition, records:

“The attitude of T. Subba Row was becoming very unfavorable. He was rather moody at times, and [with] his Brahmanical upbringing was influencing [all of his skittishness] to a considerable extent. He was [finally] against the disclosure of any higher [teachings that should be esoteric]; his distrust of Occidentals [became] acute, he never fully accepted the fact that occult teachings could be given out so freely [and] by a ‘woman’.” But these were the peculiarities. And so Madame Blavatsky worked with a lot of high tension energy in this time.

She finally ended up in London and most of The Secret Doctrine was completed there - at least the two volumes that are out. We have testimony, a friend of hers Doctor Archibald Knightley in London, and he writes this:

“Very soon after arriving I was handed a part of the manuscript with a request to emendate, excise, alter the English, punctuate, in fact to treat it as my own, a privilege I naturally did not avail myself of. The manuscript was then in detached sections similar to those included under the heads of symbolism and appendices in the published volumes. What I saw was a mass of manuscripts with no definite arrangement, much of which had been patiently industriously copied by the Countess Wachtmeister. The idea then was to keep one copy in Europe while the other was sent to India for correction by various native collaborators. The greater part did go at a later date but some cause prevented the collaboration. What struck me most, in the part I was able to read during my short stay, was the enormous number of quotations from various authors. I knew that there was no library to consult and could see that H. P. B. own books did not amount to more than 30 in all of which several were dictionaries.”

In the writing of The Secret Doctrine she opened herself wide to a structural inner tone which culled forth not only what she had learned exoterically in her wanderings and in her life, but the correlatives in the production on an interior level. All the way through this there seemed to be the sense to her that she was given guidance from without, or from within without. That there must be in fact not only her Master Morya and the great Mahatma Koot Hoomi working through her, but she recorded in a letter that, “even if this were never to be proved then she herself would accept the responsibility of being the Mahatma.”

She had planned in fact all along to make four volumes. Only the first two volumes were ever published. What became of volumes three and four is problematical. Three especially is a problem because there is testimony that volume three had even reached the position of being set in type. A position which was argued by James Morgan Price and a number of other individuals later on. Price incidentally was the founder of the Gnostic Society here in Los Angeles. A certain old individual had said that he himself had seen the volume three in typeface but that it had been ordered destroyed by Madame Blavatsky just a few months before she died.

She passed away on May 8th, 1891. It’s celebrated, I believe, as White Lotus Day even till this date. But the important almost larger than life aspect of The Secret Doctrine, which I was hoping to get through in some measure for you. What is presented here is a geometrical experiential level that is extendable if someone personally enters into it. It’s a sense of the terrain as it were. Enough so that if one were– were to acclimate oneself to this terrain you could then discover and uncover for yourself the rest of it. There is really no need for volume three or volume four to The Secret Doctrine. There is only really the need for a holding in comparative harmony. What is presented in Isis Unveiled, in its exterior quality, and what is presented in The Secret Doctrine it’s an interior architectural quality, and between the two you have enough of the line of development that one could complete – even in a Euclidean universe – the geometry of understanding that is there.

Madame Blavatsky is one of the great figures of the nineteenth century. She presents in fact a marked contrast to those figures that we’ve had so far – Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and even the last lecture from the nineteenth century series on Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer is mentioned very prominently in The Secret Doctrine. There are great passages in there where she acclaims Schopenhauer’s view of the universe and his doctrine of inner revelation, his use of the Upanishads. And in a way Madame Blavatsky is a step up and beyond Schopenhauer in her criticism of the way in which existing institutions deaden man’s spirit. She’s even a step up beyond Kierkegaard. She has somewhat of Nietzsche’s iconoclastic breaking of all forms and molds in order to disclose a sense of unity which cannot be doled out or portioned out but must be taken in its wholesome total.

Next week we’ll see a fellow Russian who lived about the same time that she did. Born in 1828, died in 1910, who was one of the real grandfathers of the twentieth century. Count Leo Tolstoy will discover for himself almost the obverse of what Madame Blavatsky discovered. He will write very early in his life the great works and then discover that he has to make an inner journey, that even being the world’s greatest novelist is not even sufficient to begin to write a single page of truth about reality. So, we’ll discover that next week with Tolstoy.